Firebrand: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the MAGA Revolution

by Matt Gaetz

  “Write that down. Write me three paragraphs. It can be longer. But say it just like that.”

  As I write, I’m certain that President Trump, in his willingness to fight, will also pardon Roger Stone—as well he should. I still talk to Roger on the phone. He’s a bullshit artist and a dirty trickster, but no criminal. Our political operatives shouldn’t end up in jail while some of the other team’s still work at the Department of Justice and FBI.

  “Happy birthday, my sweet mother!” Having the Air Force One operator connect us was a nice touch. I was about to watch Elon Musk bring humankind one step closer to multiplanetary species status. Here on Earth, though, my mother is the hero of my life. She no longer takes any steps. She has built businesses and wealth, has been married to my father for nearly four decades, and inspires everyone she meets, while treating people with empathy and love. My father got the highest vote margins, my sister Erin is the smartest and funniest, and I hold the highest office. But everyone in Northwest Florida knows my saint of a mother is the most popular Gaetz. She’s also the strongest, and usually the prettiest.

  My mother has been confined to a wheelchair for thirty-five years. A blood clot burst in her spinal column when she was pregnant with my brilliant sister. She was advised she could terminate her pregnancy and improve her own health odds. Many days she has pain she never mentions. She has no time for complaints. She is a woman always on the move. She won’t allow anyone to push her—even sometimes up hills. She drives where she wants, maintaining the strength to sling her wheelchair over her body into the passenger seat like a gladiator. She won’t let anyone else, including my father, drive her—but who could keep up with her anyway? She manages construction projects, participates in local animal welfare organizations, and serves as the CEO of the Gaetz Family.

  In every campaign I’ve had, my mother’s phone calls to potential voters have been noted by my opponents as my strongest weapon—and we’ve never lost an election. Watching her grind through call sheets during my first campaign for public office in 2010, my Catholic friend Mike Fischer observed, “If Jesus had run for state representative, I don’t know if Mary would have made more voter contacts than Vicky Gaetz.”

  During my 2016 congressional campaign, a Republican primary opponent criticized me for self-designating as a “momma’s boy.” I learned to assemble a wheelchair when I was six years old. When my mother was ill, I slept in her hospital room against the rules to bring her comfort. I’m a serviceable cook today because I was her helper in the kitchen growing up. I’m a momma’s boy with pride!

  Calling my mother from Air Force One on her birthday was one of the best perks so far of my two terms in Congress. I’d love to tell you which birthday she was celebrating, but I’m still afraid of her.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  A Green Real Deal

  America is neither an idea nor a constitution. It is our home—and we must keep our home clean and splendid from sea to shining sea. America will only be great if she is beautiful. Littering is a crime against nature. If we don’t protect the small things, we certainly won’t have the focus to protect what really matters. No, we cannot be “America First” if we allow her to be filthy. She deserves better. We cannot be a great nation strewn with trash. Our beauty is why so many come from far away to enjoy our shores, rivers, mountains, valleys, lakes, and beaches. While immigration romantics love citing that poem—“give us your poor…yearning to breathe free”—they rarely note that those huddled masses are not only breathing free but are breathing clean air. Can’t say the same in Shanghai, Mexico City, Cairo, or even Rome.

  Conservative, Inc.—bought off as always—would have you believe it’s in your best interest for chemical plants to pollute our rivers, agribusiness to clog our estuaries with their runoff, and coal plants to darken our skies. This pollution even shows up in the human body. Atrazine and other industrial waste products turn us into fat, weak husks of humans. One of the few remaining advantages we have over China is that we love our country enough not to let her fall into squalid decay. We do need to get much better at it, though.

  Washington bureaucrats fail us. They’ve been too dumb or too corrupt or too dishonest. Stewardship requires foresight and rewards planning that goes well beyond the quarterly reports, election cycles, or lobbying contract term lengths. The people engaged in the old conservative welfare scheme that converts corporate cash into D.C. sinecures seem to forget that we conserve nothing if we don’t conserve our homes, our lands. We don’t tolerate someone coming into our individual home, trashing the place, and then leaving. So why do we tolerate it in our cherished American environment?

  Energy use correlates well with a higher standard of living, but we still have to make sure our world is livable. I reject the Leftist notion that environmental policy should be centered around conspicuous, pious, superficial, Instagrammable acts of individual sacrifice or virtue signaling. In caring for our planet, the Left prefers genteel hypocrisy. Lots of talk, no action. Green New Deal, but no compromise or execution. In other words, the exact opposite of the can-do American spirit.

  My Catholic friends often talk about subsidiarity, an organizing principle that says matters ought to be handled by the smallest, lowest, or least centralized competent authority. The emphasis here is on competence. It sounds a lot like federalism. Few of our governmental institutions are at all effective, especially at the federal level. The Catholics start where Aristotle did—with the family, still the strongest institution in American society despite weird efforts to redefine it. Fathers must teach sons reverence for Creation and teach their sons to be gentlemen: gentle and careful with the natural world.

  To be out in nature is to love it and to be awestruck by it. We’re hardwired for it. We’re grateful for the careful attention of those before us who had the wisdom to leave us space for the national parks, which continue to inspire generations of Americans. You never forget the first time you see a buffalo or a bald eagle in the wild. I wouldn’t be the first American political populist to champion the greatness of America’s wild spaces. That would be the great Theodore Rex, Teddy Roosevelt. Maybe the natural successor to a Bull Moose is a Florida Man.

  From nature, we learn that there are duties that come with being our planet’s apex predator. We have been entrusted by our station to care for all those below us, in much the same way we care for the weak or the sick or the infirm. The hippies speak often of thinking globally and acting locally. Part of loving your neighbor as yourself is loving your neighborhood and protecting it. We have a neighborhood watch. Why not an environmental watch made up of passionate citizens? If each of us took care of a sector close to us, we’d make the world a better place, and more importantly, we’d have fun out of the house. Charity begins at home and so too does conservation.

  Unfortunately, we outsource our awesome responsibility to the trial lawyers and bureaucrats who run the Environmental Protection Agency, a bureaucracy that neither protects nor gives the public much agency to solve the environmental problems in their communities. The current EPA should be abolished and entirely reimagined.

  To solve a problem, you must first acknowledge its philosophical underpinnings and limitations. For example, one of the critiques of animal rights is that you can’t teach the cat to respect the rights of the dog. I prefer the term “humane” behavior to “rights-respecting” behavior. Humans shouldn’t treat animals poorly, not only because it’s bad for the animals but because it’s bad for humans, bad for our character. Our EPA, by contrast, is an antihuman bureaucracy. It must be abolished before it abolishes the environment itself. We are our best selves when we realize and care about what’s real.

  Climate change is real. I did not come to Congress to argue with thermometers, only windbags. There is a scientific consensus that the Earth is getting warmer. There is a moral consensus that we should do something about it. I want to avoid frivolous fights over obvious science, just as I wa
nt my neighbors fighting fewer frivolous wars. Serious people take on serious challenges. Climate change requires our attention and our best minds. Assemble the nerds and unleash them. Every one of us walks around with more computing power than we used to land on the moon. What if we brought it to bear building probes, trackers, and sensors to make sure our environments were healthy? We could use GPS to help us navigate to a cleaner, better future.

  Our environment is constantly spitting out data. We should analyze it for the public good. From our natural world, our nerds should take nothing but data and leave nothing but the lightest of footprints.

  What climate change doesn’t demand is a socialist takeover. Being smarter for our land and people doesn’t require surrender to AOC’s Green New Deal socialist Woketopia. I’ll prove it.

  Earlier this year, the secretary of the air force, the secretary of the army, and the chiefs of staff of both the army and the air force testified before the House Armed Services Committee that in real time, climate change is impacting the strategic decisions that our military makes regarding weapons testing, basing decisions, the global movement of people, and high-stakes territorial claims made by our geostrategic adversaries in the Arctic.

  Keep in mind, this dire message is coming not from a smelly vegan drum circle banged out on a shit-stained sidewalk in San Francisco or the nutty editorial staff of Mother Jones magazine. This warning is coming directly from the top brass of the United States military—the most lethal fighting force this world has known. Climate change is directly relevant to our national security, and it is relevant to our nation’s border security, too. If you think the situation at the border is wild now, imagine a not-too-distant future of millions of climate refugees putting additional pressure on our nation’s sovereignty—creating a global staging ground for terrorists and traffickers alike. Will we have the will to stop them? Or will we be among them? A failed environment could well be a precursor for a failed state. It usually is.

  The question of how we treat our environment is directly related to how we treat our people. It might come as a surprise to many, yet makes perfect sense, that many of the most prominent environmental organizations in the United States originally supported an immigration position similar to that of President Trump’s. Indeed, some of the most intense environmentalists were also the most serious immigration restrictionists. They knew that unchecked immigration and open borders would put unsustainable pressure on the nation’s environment—our precious treasure. To secure our environment is to preserve our liberty. That which is ours, we will defend, this we know. But how? National security is border security is environmental security. Republicans should care about securing all three.

  Republicans who ignore or dismiss climate change are therefore not only defying scientific consensus but sacrificing their real commitments and duties to preserve our union and its way of life.

  Climate change is a real problem. Real problems require realistic solutions, not fantasy wish lists, and that is where the Democrats have failed miserably.

  At present, the best-known Democrat proposal to tackle climate change is AOC’s Green New Deal. It’s not a viable action plan; it is a to-do list for things she and her colleagues want the government to control.

  Say goodbye to cars, cows, airplanes, and buildings, and hello to $93 trillion in new spending. If you like your hamburger, you can’t keep your hamburger.

  Of course, the Green New Deal was never intended to be a serious proposal. Even its own sponsors ultimately refused to vote for it. It does, however, embody the regulatory impulse that is typical of Democrat approaches to all such problems. They seek to control; we seek to liberate. Free-thinking innovators will solve this problem faster than a constrained citizenry ever could.

  When they are not calling for a major sector of the economy to be regulated into extinction, the Democrats are lecturing the American middle class about having too many children or, increasingly, telling us to eat insects for the good of the planet! You first, Alexandria! The regulatory approach favored by Democrats is not only unimaginative and unrealistic, but it is also counterproductive. Throwing more regulations at the problem simply ensures that we will outsource pollution-causing jobs overseas, to countries like China and India with substantially worse environmental protections than our own. I’m just not woke enough to export my pollution rather than solving it like a real American should.

  In other words, Democrats’ plans would not only destroy America’s economy, they would fail to reduce global emissions. The Green New Deal would probably increase global emissions since polluting industries would immediately outsource all their operations to other nations. If anything, we should institute a carbon tax on China, not America. Or are we really going to pretend that the greatest polluters in the world are in the West? Ten of the world’s rivers account for 90 percent of ocean plastics. Seven of them are in Asia.

  Power-hungry politicians and special interests in the United States will surely benefit from the displacement of our businesses overseas, but the American economy and the environment would suffer. Which, come to think of it, is precisely the point.

  The notion of fighting climate change by destroying our economy is so absurd and counterproductive that it is sometimes unclear whether these policies are written by naïve but well-meaning children or by Chinese lobbyists themselves! Who can tell?

  Instead of leaning on more regulation to address climate change, my Green Real Deal draws upon a precious natural resource that exists in happy abundance: the innovative spirit of the American people.

  It might come as a surprise to some, but the president has already laid the foundations of an effective approach to climate change in his serious approach to China, not only on trade but on combating intellectual property theft. For decades, special interests and the establishment in charge sat back idly while jobs, livelihoods, and entire industries were stolen by China.

  Apart from the tragic devastation these decisions wrought on so many American communities, the less-known tragedy is the devastating impact these de facto pro-China policies have had on the environment. Multinational industries—some polluting—outsourced to countries with no emissions standards, and the environment paid the price. The more we outsource, the less we can observe, and that’s by design too.

  Air knows no borders. Meanwhile, our one-sided trade relationship with China built up China’s economy and increased global pollution—both at the expense of America’s working people and industrial base. The garbage islands and the toxic clouds were made in China, too.

  What’s worse is that China’s systematic plunder of American intellectual property weakened entrepreneurial incentives to innovate—including those innovations directly necessary to solve our climate change crisis.

  America’s solar technology once led the world. Not so anymore. China stole this intellectual property, replicated our products, and undercut the American solar industry. They had decided that our know-how was essential to their state interests, so they stole it. Oh, China.

  Trump’s tough approach to China’s abusive trade practices rolls back our previous policy of subsidizing Chinese pollution while screwing American workers.

  Additionally, the president’s tough approach to China’s IP theft builds the healthy ecosystem of American innovation necessary for lasting clean energy solutions. It isn’t just China that has been holding us back from realistic solutions to climate change. As is so often the case, we are our own worst enemy.

  We have no excuse for ignoring our electric grid. We can and must upgrade and modernize it. The American Society of Civil Engineers graded our grid D+. Today’s grid can’t even handle our existing portfolio of renewable energies, much less the expanded use our future requires. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory says today’s renewable energy technology coupled with an updated grid could result in renewable energy meeting 80 percent of America’s energy needs by 2050. If
we can give oil companies tax write-offs for the costs associated with the pollution they cause, we can do more to encourage investment in the electric grid used by virtually every American.

  “Net metering” technology allows property owners, shopping centers, hospitals, and schools among others to sell the energy they create back to our grid. In so doing, these new energy innovators create incentives for corporations to maximize domestic renewable energy production while allowing homeowners to lower or eliminate energy costs by embracing renewable energy. Energy entrepreneurs tinkering in garages and spare bedrooms—what is more American than that?

  The Green Real Deal realizes that our electric grid ought to be a platform, not a bottleneck, to clean energy innovation and supremacy. We could also harness the 640 million acres of federally owned land. Why not extract more renewable energy from this repository and allow the bounties of our beautiful land to contribute to their own continued preservation? Reps. Paul Gosar and Raúl Grijalva have suggested as much, and it is a bipartisan no-brainer.

  I’ve often described the Green Real Deal as a love letter to the American innovator. And I am proud to say that the innovative approach favored by the Green Real Deal would drastically reduce one of the most environmentally unfriendly materials known to man—RED TAPE.

  Today’s cheapest, cleanest energy is hydropower. A pro-hydro agenda should cut through the red tape, reducing costs for consumers along with carbon emissions. No longer should local concerns override national interest. The hydropower belongs to all of us.

  The Green Real Deal would reduce the constraints on zero-emissions nuclear innovation, particularly where it can replace dirty coal. Currently, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission favors big, expensive light-water reactors that cost billions of dollars. Instead, the NRC ought to consider smaller, reliable modular reactors that can be built at a fraction of the cost, which would expand the availability of nuclear power to disadvantaged rural communities while using spent nuclear rods.