Transcript of Rising Cancer Rates, the Globalist Agenda, and the Big Business Land Grab Making You Poor New

You're running for governor of Iowa, and we can get in the whole politics of that maybe later, but I'm interested in why.

I think the primary catalyst for me doing this was, I believe we are losing our culture and our heritages of people. That's my honest belief. I believe it's not just in Iowa, it's across the country. But when I look around and see people that were running office, it was all about policy. It was all about, here's this tax rate or this regulation needs to be changed. I just thought, no one is standing up to say we have to get the culture right first. We have to step in and say, what does it mean to be an American? What does it mean What does it mean to be an Iowa? And are the traditions and the heritage and the value of our ancestors important to us? That's in the deepest part of my heart, what motivates me in something like this. I actually don't want to be a politician. I bet. I've not had interest in it. I spent a lot of my life in the private sector and building schools, and I have a pretty good life. I have a great family and a wife who loves me and supports me. But in 1850, my family came over from Germany, and great, great grandpa built our farmhouse.

We had that same house on this piece of land in Iowa until 2005. My great grandmother passed away. I can still remember my grandma called me and she said, Zack, you wouldn't want anything to this old farm house, would you? I had graduated from high school in Iowa. I was off in college. I said, no, there's something better out here. I'm off to get something, to find something better. Then a number of years later, I was driving by to see my other great grandmother, who lived to be 103. I drove by the old farm and I just drove up. I said, Hey, could I take a look around? They said, Yeah. I said, My great great grandpa built this. He was a third class passenger on the SS Weiland coming from Hamburg, Germany as a 14-year-old. He was in this stoage. That's where he traveled over to America. He became a carpenter and then earned enough money to buy the farm and build it with his uncle. I said, Hey, if you ever think about selling it, please let me know. I just didn't think anything come at that time. But a couple of years later, they called me and said, Hey, we're going to sell this farm.

Would you want to? I'm like, Yes. I don't know how I'm going to do it, but I ended up scraping together enough money to get an FHA loan, a down payment, and I bought the farm. Then since that time in 2014, I've been working to rebuild it and restore it.

Is the house still there?

House is still there. When I bought it, it was covered in vinyls. It had been completely changed on the outside.

Yeah, 150 years is a long time.

Yeah, and it's been completely changed the outside. But I went to my dad's cousin, Peter, and he just had the repository of great grandma's photos. I got this palette of boxes of photos. I spent, I'm not kidding, hundreds of hours going through photos. I was looking for every photo I could find of this old farmhouse. I'll tell you, to anybody who wants to be radicalized on what we've lost as a culture, spend that much time going through your great grandmother's photos, and you'll realize the community, the traditions, the pride.

I've done it.

A lot of it's gone.

It's unrecognizable.

Unrecognizable. I did that, and I found every single picture I could find, and I put the house back together board by board, counted every single piece of siding, make sure it matched. Now we live in the home that was built by my great great grandfather. I tell people, I didn't do that so I could run for governor. I started doing this over 10 years ago. I did it because wanted my children to understand their story and their heritage and their culture, what built them. The man who built this house, who I bet hoped someday my kids would live in it, but knew he would never meet them, that story matters deeply. That's what really got me into this. I was not looking to run for this seat. As I was talking to my wife about this, the current governor of Iowa, who, by the way, has done a very good job. I mean, we're likely, other than Florida, maybe one of the most conservative states, and she's done a great job at that.

You're a nice person.

When We were looking at this, my wife said, The seat hasn't been open in 20 years. There are issues in our state that are not dealing with taxes, that are not dealing with regulations, that are systemic deep issues that are really causing our people to be hurt. I talk about them all the time. It was from her, this moment of, Hey, put up or stop talking about it because this is an opportunity to go make real change. That's why I'm running.

You said there are systemic issues that are not included in the normal palate of politician concerns, which would be taxes and regulation. Just in order of importance, can you go through a few of them?

Well, I think I've spent my life in large part as an entrepreneur, and in businesses or organization I've run or started, I have key metrics that I'm tracking to know the health of my companies or the health of an organization. I think on that list for a state is the physical climate of it. That's no doubt. That's part of it. Can people afford to live here? Yes. That's a big part, of course. But there's other deeper issues that I think are more long term in focus that we, because this constant news cycle of what's happening right now that we all have to respond to, which, thank God, I'm not running for a federal office because it's never-ending and always changing. But because of that, often we're distracted or our eyes are taken off the ball purposely from the big issues. A couple of them are this. Iowa's number four in the nation for net out migration of our kids, 25 to 29. How can you build a state if your people are leaving?

Important. To support new people.

Yes, we can talk about that. Another one would be 25% of our farmlands now are owned by out-of-state investors in funds that don't live in our state. Our farmers who have had this ancestral connection to the land are now becoming tenants again, something we left Germany in large part for. Just take a side quest here for a second. I remember When I was doing all that research on my family, to understand a lot about the history and what drove them to leave this homeland of theirs. Because I always made up 35, 40% German immigrants came over. Very industrious people, very family-oriented people, people that had pride in the work that they do.

Objectively, some of the best people ever.

I would say that.

I'm not one of them, but I just have noticed.

They're big on tradition and big on family and a lot of pride in where they came from. What would motivate people to leave? I think the common answer we always heard was, well, it's religious persecution. I started to get interested in this just to understand more what were the real conditions. I actually found out that my family, a lot of Germans came over around 1850. Well, in 1848 in Germany, there was an attempted revolution across Across Europe. Across Europe, yes. It was called the Forty-Eighters. What did they want? Well, they wanted to be able to own the ground under their feet. They wanted free speech. They didn't like slave-free. They had a lot of these now what we call Western ideals.

It was the end of futalism, right?

Yes, right. What happened to them? They were defeated. In Germany, when they were defeated, many of them got exiled, and then many others just left. Well, what state came online in 1846 was Iowa. It was also very agrarian, just like where they came from. Many of these people came over. I like to talk about this. One of the key points in Iowa's history that I'm most proud of is how Iowians responded during the Civil War. We had the Missouri Compromise. We had the Kansas-Nebraska Act. With that decision of they get to decide whether or not they're going to be free or slave. There was a lot of wealthy landowning elites that were rushing to the Midwest to try to lobby to create slave States.

Of course. Plantations on the Prairie.

Right. And I was not a part of this. But one of my favorite stories, in 1861, the governor of Iowa, his name was Governor Samuel Kirkwood. He was on his plow in his field, when a messenger from the Department of War brought a message on horseback to him. Then the President said he needed to put together a company of 750 troops to be ready in two weeks. Mind you, this is 15 years after I became a state. We were in our infancy. He said, 750 troops in two weeks, how can that be done? Two weeks later, 10,000 Iowians had signed up. By the At the end of the Civil War, more islands fought in the Civil War than any other state per capita. Why was that? I believe, and there's some evidence, of course, I read deeply in this, that they had just left a country that they saw oppression in, and they fled that, left everything, and they were saying, This isn't going to happen here. I think when you talk about land, and you talk about now 25% of our land is now owned by people that don't live in our state, they're not contributing to our communities They don't go to the football games.

They're not shopping on Main Street. It's a real generational issue. I go to these auctions. I've been against many of these people.

Land auctions. Oh, yeah.

Very often, It's a farm management company. The actual owner, we don't know who they are. We actually don't know who owns our land in Iowa. There's not human level disclosure that's required. You can own land in an LLC, and that LLC could be wholly owned by a trust, and all the state knows is that the LLC owns the land. That's it. We've gotten to this place where just common courtesy or this common tradition of knowing who your neighbors are is not there anymore.

It's impossible. If you can't find their names, it's hard to have a community.

It's buried.

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One of the things as governor that I want to do is require human level disclosure of land ownership, because I would bet that it's actually more than 25% of our lands. Of course it is. Owned by people. Then two other ones- By the way, if you don't have to bear the consequences of your your actions, then you're much more likely to exploit and degrade the community that you're taking money from.

Why do you care about long-term best practices? You don't. You're just extracting wealth.

This is the spiritual part of the discussion, I believe. My father was a 30-year conservationist and a pastor. I grew up learning to love and appreciate the place. I've said this before, but He legitimately made me believe that every sunset was made for me by God. Amen. We'd be driving and say, Look at what God made for you. I still think to those things to this day of just those little pieces that made me appreciate creation. One of my favorite clips from your show ever, ever, is when you were on with Bobby Kennedy, and he was having that discussion about how nature is, how we connect deeply with God.

Yeah, it makes me emotional thinking about it. I couldn't agree more.

I sent that to so many people, and especially my father, because it's true and it's language we don't use anymore. It brings you to a higher place and it helps you understand this is much deeper than just who owns a piece of land or what's happening. It's actually like we are connected to God through the land.

Through his creation. It's on every page of the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation. There's a lot of nature. What's the Garden of Eden filled with? Trees, rivers, animals.

Okay. All the parables that have to do that? Yeah, of course. That, of course, that's a systemic issue. Let me say that that's been going on for a long time and nobody's really talked about it. You go to a cafe, every farmer is talking about these things about How do you see that? We had a piece of land in Northwest Iowa recently go for $32,000 an acre, not development land.

Okay. I'm a land buyer. I'm interested in land. I'm interested in all that. How do you get to $32,000 an acre, even for famously productive farmland? What is that? What's the potential return on that? How did that happen?

Well, let's just say commonly, we'll go to $20,000 an acre. That's fairly common in Northwest Iowa. It's some of the best land in the world. That's bonkers. It is. Look, outside investors look at Iowa as a great investment because it's a solid asset.

Yes, it's a hedge against the dollar, of course.

And you get a dividend. You rent out the land. One of the things I complain or opined about a lot is that our land isn't an asset class. It actually was meant as the inheritance for the sons and daughters of our state to build their lives, their communities, and their families. When they're tenants on that land and they're paying high dollar rent, because the only way you can justify a high price like that is very high rent, you're stripping away a lot of, and I'll go back to say it's the spiritual aspect of this, and that land is best when it's owned and farmed by the same person. We know this. We know this from if you own rental properties, where it may be. There's a connection of stewardship that comes with that to know that I'm passing this piece of ground on to my grandkids and their kids and their kids. That's what it should be. But that is being actively taken away in our state. It's two other I think are big systemic issues that are on my scorecard, as I'd say. One is, our farmers are actively being exploited by big ag companies.

When I was growing up, born in Iowa, we had over 300 seed and input companies, fertilizer and agrochemical companies that were selling to our farmers. Today, that number is three. That control 85% of the market. Over 90% of seed technology is owned by two companies.

Monsanto.

Actually, it's Bayer and Corteva own 90% of the... Which owns Monsanto now. Seed technology. No, of course.

But I forgot that Monsanto doesn't actually exist anymore, does it? I don't think so. It changed the name. It was bought by Bair in Germany.

Yeah, they're sure mentioned a lot in court still, but they're not a company. If you look at the long term trend that anytime there's a rise in commodity prices, these input costs go up, even though there's not a direct correlating factor. There's a study out of the University of Illinois, and this study compared the cost of farming in Brazil to the cost of farming in Illinois, Iowa, basically. You have to understand that the three big companies in America that provide these inputs are also the same three big companies of Brazil, Bayer, Corteva, and Syngenta. That study said that for growing corn using the same application rate, that they're charging Brazilian farmers about $150 less per acre than they are Iowa farmers.

How?

Well, The real answer is because they're an unchecked monopoly and competition doesn't exist. There's tacit collusion. But here's how it actually works. They have what they call regional-based pricing. But what it really is, is this. When they look at their pricing, they base it on the yield that you're going to create. Let's say you have more productive land, even though you're using the same amount of product, they're going to take more. You have less productive land, even though you use the same amount of product, they're going to take more. It's wrong. I'll give credit tobrooke-Rollins and Donald Trump in the administration. They're talking about bringing antitrusts and investing in this for the Department of Justice. One of the There's a lot of things I've pledged to do that if I'm governor of Iowa, I'm going to lead the charge to bring antitrust suits against these companies that are exploiting our farmers because they're taking every dollar they possibly can, and we're already on life support. Most farms are operating at a loss right now. When you talk to farmers about this, you do not... I can't emphasize this enough, you do not hear them talk about Tariffs.

They're not. Matter of fact, the price of strawberries this year with the tariffs was higher than it was last year before the tariffs. The change came that the cost of growing went up. The cost of the input products that they're using went up. I tell people all the time, the Tariffs are not the issue. We have to get this unchecked monopoly in check and under control.

Obviously, inputs are essential to agriculture or to any and creating anything. One of them is diesel fuel. Not a lot of movement there. But then you have the products that you just mentioned, seeds and fertilizer. Taking out seeds, let's just focus on fertilizer. What are the products like?

Well, it just depends on the most common product for fertilizers in hydrocemonia. It's used in the fall. It's where a lot of the nitrogen comes from. But then you have other products that are products from Earth, potassium, potash, those things. But you look at the trend of the pricing in these. I think it was five years ago, or in the past five years, nitrogen fertilizers went up 150%, and the price of corn is down 2%. Farmers, they're really being, I would say, extorted in this process.

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So take advantage while you can. Visit brooklynbedding. Com, promo code, Tucker. Tell you something I was really surprised by, and I don't know much about it, but I was hunting on a farm in November, right before Thanksgiving, a big, big, big working farm. I was with the Ranch manager in a truck, and he said, This is the truck we used to spray Roundup. I said, People are using Roundup? I don't know. I'm not in the ag business. I thought Roundup was bad. Yeah. Again, I'm very ignorant, but I just thought I didn't realize that people were still spraying Roundup. He said, Oh, everyone sprays Roundup like everybody does, and we don't talk about it. I'm like, Hmm, I mean, is that... I'm not attacking Roundup specifically, but are we sure that these chemicals are all safe?

Well, Roundup is the most highly used herbicide in history of the country, the history of the world, luckily.

Because it's so effective. I mean, I've seen it.

It's losing its effectiveness greatly. Is that true? Oh, yeah. It has to be... You'll have different mixtures now that will go in because we're getting Roundup resistant glyphosate resistant weeds. Now There's a high percentage of weeds have glyphosate resistance. I think in some ways, the life cycle of Roundup is... It's going to be coming to an end on its own at some point.

It's limited by nature.

It's limited by nature, and new products are coming out. But I will tell you this, When you talk about safety of products, well, let me back up and just talk a little bit about the companies. I mentioned the three big companies that are controlling the AG input market, Bayer, Corteva, and Syngenta. There's other ones, but Bayer is a German company.

Yes.

Corteva is an American company. Top shareholders are BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street of that company. But Syngenta is a wholly owned state enterprise of the Chinese government. Actually? 100%. So about somewhere on the end of 5 million acres in our state has chemicals and seed technology from a company that's a wholly owned company of the state of China. The country of China. I mentioned that to say this. If you talk to farmers about some of these products, and like glyphosate or Roundup is very ubiquitous to use, But if you talk to them about products even many of them won't use anymore, you'll get to products like Paraquat. Paraquat is actually was originally formulated by Syngenta.

Paraquat was used in anti-drug spraying in Latin America. It was very controversial for that.

It'll burn down plants in a matter of hours. But if you're exposed to Paraquat, your chance of Parkinson's doubles. Matter of fact-Actually? Oh, yes. Parkinson's? There's people if you- That's something you don't want to get. If you go on X and you type in and you just look at paraquod, you'll find stories of farmers who just will not use it anymore. They'll tell stories of spraying it and immediately getting, or that day, getting uncontrollable bloody noses. It's a very, very harsh product, and it's still... I think the best estimate is about 300,000 acres of land in Iowa to use this product. This product is actually used in research settings in mice and rodents to induce Parkinson's. Are you being serious? I'm 100% serious. Our EPA, and this is where the big issue lies, our EPA still allows it. If we're talking about, are these products harmful? We can get into that more, but yes, we know.

If it doubles your chance of Parkinson's, you're going to have to explain the upside to continue selling that product. My instinct is like, well, you'd ban that today.

I think that's what people- Parkinson's?

Come on now. That's true suffering.

Yeah, it's a sentence you don't want. No. But you can research this, your listeners can research this, it is used to induce Parkinson's in research settings. When I talk about these products, I think what farmers want is to understand the truth, to know that their government is telling them the truth about these products.

He was.

But as with many other things, the corporate capture is so heavy. When you talk about glyphosate or glyphosate-based herbicides, Roundup is one of them. There's many glyphosate-based herbicides. The EPA has studied this for years. We know way more than we've ever known about this. We also know that there are significant significant risks associated with its use. For example, one of the most known cases is the case of the groundskeeper in California, the first major lawsuit against Monsanto. This was a man who was... His job was to work for the school districts and spray glyphosate. The hose broke on his packer in his little cart, and it ended up showering him with this product. In a matter of months, he had lesions all over his body. He sends emails to Monsanto asking, What should I do here? I mean, they're very like, I need help. Not, I'm trying to blame you. He's like, What do I do to solve this problem? Well, if you fast forward in that trial, when they were in the discovery process, the judge agreed to make a large portion of the discovery confidential, meaning that it wasn't to be released. But the plaintiffs could challenge something or request the disclosure of it, and they could request to meet and confer to talk about them.

They requested it at one point, and the Monsanto attorneys, I think, literally said the words, Go away. We're not going to disclose anything else. But then there's- Do I get to do that next time I get sued?

Go away? Go away.

But there's a stipulation there said, if they didn't, if Monsanto didn't put in there another request to continue the confidentiality within 30 days, that the confidentiality was waived. They forgot to respond. Now we have millions of pages of documents called the Monsanto papers, millions. In those documents, it is an absolute master class in corporate capture. To the effect of that email that he sent to the company, they opened it, they read it, They forwarded around, what should we do here? And they just didn't respond to him.

I'm a man who's hurting, who's-Oh, the initial email, I'm covered in lesions from your product. What should I do?

What should I do? Basically, he was asking for help. They read it, forwarded around, What do we do with this? Nobody responded to him. He sent two of those emails. I believe it was two. But in there's also things like, there was a time and place where another governmental body was going to be doing a study on the safety of glyphosate or Roundup in this case. The EPA official that Monsanto was working with at the time got wind of this. In the email with the Monsanto official, he's recounting his conversation with this EPA official. In it, the official said to him on the phone, he quotes it in the email, If I can kill this, I should get a medal. He did. He this other governmental body from doing their own independent research on the safety and effectiveness of glyphosate, of Rauwda. Come on now. This is real. This is out there.

This is 2000- This is the regulator?

This is the regulator. Yes. This is out there. Other egregious examples of... I say this to say this, just say this. Very often I'm talking to farmers who I love, who are my friends and my neighbors and my family, and I am one of them. We actively farm our own land. I work with young farmers to help them have an opportunity to be on land. We share crop. But I'm in there. I'm doing this. The most common comment I get from people is, if it wasn't safe, they wouldn't let me use it. I'm just here to say, That's a lie. Just like they were captured during COVID and the medical establishment captured agencies, just like Bobby Kennedy is fighting right now and Donald Trump is fighting right now, these agencies have been captured for a long time, and they've been lying to the consumers about the safety and efficacy of their products. My whole goal here, I'm not here to sit and say we should ban X, Y, or Z. That's not what I'm talking about. I think there's certain things, like paraquat probably should not be used. I mean, not probably.

It shouldn't be used. If it doubles your risk of Parkinson's Hard no.

Hard no. It shouldn't be used. But what I want is good science so farmers can say, Do I want to use this product? We can say, Should this product be allowed? Also know, If I'm going to use this product, this is how it should be used. When you have commercials, we know how glyphosate enters the bloodstream. We know that if it's on your skin, about 30% enters your bloodstream. About 10% of that is through cardiac output, about 10% goes into your bone marrow. In bone marrow, glyphosate disrupts the replication of hematopoietic stem cells. They're differentiating from red to white. It's genotoxic. There's 50 studies that show this. We know how it happens, and yet there's commercials showing people using this products in flip flops and shorts, just saying, be cavalier about it. We have many products we use. You go into my shop at the farm, there's many products on the shelf that if they're used improperly, are bad for your health. They warn about that on the label. These do not, not in that same way. But in these papers were also examples like this. In 2000, there was a study called the Williams Study.

It's the most cited study on the safety of glyphosate, the most cited. 99. 9% of all papers that cite the safety of glyphosate cite this study. Last month, that study was retracted because it was found that Monsanto executives wrote it, wrote the study. But here's maybe even the worst part. We found that out in 2017 and it was retracted in 2025. The Monsanto executive actually said, when he's sending this back, he better not have any revisions. That's what he said. Look, I think oftentimes when you talk about this subject, especially in my home state, there's this desire to paint you as some liberal hippie that doesn't like farming. I'm the exact opposite of that. I can tell. I actually think that wokeism is mental disorder that's trying to destroy our country. Of course. And that we have got to fight to protect our culture, our people, and our heritage. But I also believe that our government has been captured in large part, and this is one of the most egregious examples.

It's really simple. Why do you love the country? One of the reasons you love it is because of its physical beauty, the landscape. I mean, America is great because it's got great people and because it's inherently great. Just beautiful. Anyone who's dispoiling nature as an enemy enemy of the country. Super simple. Anyone building ugly buildings, spraying poisonous chemicals, those are our enemies. Those are not our friends. I don't think it's complicated at all. That's not the liberal position. The liberals are the ones who are putting solar, bulldozing trees to build solar farms. Let's just be clear about what this is. It's an aggressive, coordinated effort to defile God's creation by people who hate God. Not hard. Abortion is directly Exactly related to building strip malls. Sorry. They're both destructions of beauty and of God's creation. That's what I think, and I'm not a liberal. Our new partner, Dose, is a way better option than Big Pharma. That's not damning with faint praise. Anything's a better option than Big Pharma. There's a much better option. Some things are just out of people's hands, and cholesterol is often one of them. Everyone gets blamed for getting bad cholesterol because they eat crappy food.

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Exactly. Here's the thing. I think farmers agree with a lot of this. Of course they do. They're looking to say, look, number one, many of these guys would like to try different things, but when you're operating in razor-thin margins, The idea of trying a new method of farming is not that appealing because what if it doesn't work and I actually can't keep the farm next year? These are our people that enjoy hunting, enjoy fishing, enjoy nature, want to be This is our culture. That's what we like. You're right. We are the environmentalists. Obviously. We are the people that want to keep that and keep God's creation.

Do you think Bernie Sanders spends a lot of time outside? Do you think AOC can identify a tree species? I mean, these are people who are rejecting nature, rejecting beauty, rejecting anything that is natural and pure and trying to defile it. That's their program.

They've been completely captured by this, this religion of carbon.

But it's insane. And so carbon is not... I'm, by the way, emitting it right now. Carbon is not the problem. Carbon is the basis of life. The problem is manmade poisons. How's the health? Okay, so I was still primarily in Ag State, obviously.

Yeah, we are.

Absolutely. Well, you have Ag in all 99 counties, is that correct?

Yes. Ag is the largest industry. To come to the last point of that scorecard I mentioned to you. It's like, we have the fastest rate of new cancer of anywhere in the history of human civilization. What? Yes.

Can you repeat that?

We have the fastest rate of new cancer of anywhere in the history of human civilization.

Iowa?

Iowa. Matter of fact, if you live in one of the top counties for cancer in our state, they're all rural counties, your lifetime chance of getting cancer is one and two. If you take Iowa as a whole and you compare it to, say, a state like Nevada. Nevada actually has fairly low cancer rates.

In any given year- Nevada is the highest smoking rate out of 50 states, but one of the lowest cancer rates. Iowa has very low smoking rates, very low smoking rates, relative certainly to Nevada, and has a really high cancer rate. I'm just not a scientist. I'm just noticing.

I picked Nevada because I needed to pick a state that I was looking at.

That is the highest smoking rate in America. Look it up.

If you choose to live in Nevada over Iowa, in any given year, your chance of getting cancer is 40% less.

Why have I never heard this before?

40%. If you take the top county for cancer in our state and you compare it, 70% less. Actually? Actually.

It is the top county in Ag County?

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

It's not Des Moines.

No, no, no. Actually, there's rates of cancer. I mean, per capita, of course, in those places.

For real? In your population centers, they have lower cancer? Yeah.

The top 10 counties are all rural counties.

You can say that people who are spending the day outside getting physical exercise 12 months a year, when those people have higher cancer rates than someone working in a cube in Des Moines, then you start to think, maybe there are external factors we should be looking at.

As I brought this up, I find myself This is so interesting. I find myself with a genuine care because, like I said, I'm not trying to tell farmers how they have to farm. I'm not trying to tell everybody they have to farm like me. We run a regenerative farm. Lots of it's organic. My goal is to help Iowians live longer, healthier lives, help farmers make more money, and help kids stay on farms for longer.

That sounds like it's the farmers who are being abused here. They're the victims here. A hundred %. They're the ones getting cancer.

It's a hundred %. I'll talk to farmers this, or I'll talk to people that, you maybe are big in the egg community, and they hear these talking points. They'll say, applicators of these products have lower cancer rates. They're not wrong. That's actually an accurate statement. Meaning farmers, in general, as a whole, can have lower cancer rates. But when you hone in specifically on non-Hodgkins lymphoma, leukemia, they have much higher cancer rates. The lifestyle of the job is going to give you more exercise. It's going to put you in There are these things that lower it, but you hear these industry talking points about, actually, there's lower in total. It's like, yeah, but your chance of getting these specific cancers linked to these products is much higher. Even with the rate of cancer in our state, I'm in a governor's race right now. Even with the rate of cancer in our state, there's not one person talking about these things that I'm talking about right now with the likely causes of the cancer in our state. We hear things like- Do you fear you'll be attacked as a liberal for bringing this up? I fear most that...

It's not a fear, but most I think that the ag associations, especially the ones that are not member-driven, that are constituted by actual farmers that take large checks from the companies that I'm mentioning right now. I think the most likely scenario that everybody's warned me about is they're just going to come and try to destroy me. I'm literally here because I could get into tears thinking about the people that I know that have gotten cancer. My own father got it. He was a crop consultant. So his job was to go into fields, check for pests, weeds. I used to do this with him as a child. I had a lot of fun doing it. He'd write a report and he'd bring it back to the farmer. This was part of his job. He did it very well. This is just the norm. It's what you did. He'd recommend, This is what you should apply. He did that for over two decades. He was diagnosed with one of these exact types of cancer. That's what really, I think- How old was he? He was 60. Well, Tucker, this is maybe where- I'm sorry. Thank you. He's in remission now, thank the Lord.

But this is where I think this hits home, spiritually, too, is that I think Iowians, and myself included, about three and a half months ago, I went back to my hometown that I grew up in in Iowa, for the funeral of my best friend from high school for his father. He died of cancer, again, in the '60s. I tell people, I don't know how many more of these funerals of men and women in their '60s I can go to when their parents lived to be 80. We're losing the wisdom of an entire generation of people. That's for sure.

When life expectancy goes down, it's not progress.

I tell people, and this is more the political way to say it, Look, we We can have amazing... I'll say this. I often tell people, I'm not running for office because of policy, I'm running because of culture. They say, What does that mean? I'll say, Look, ask a Republican in Dearborn, Michigan, how much he cares about his tax rate. Or does he care that the Muslim call to prayers on the loudspeaker five times a day, and he doesn't know where he's waking up anymore and his culture is gone? We have to protect our culture. Our founders intended that to be the case. We have a huge amount of talk about founders, primarily when it comes to fiscal issues and things like this. We forget that... I think it was John Adams that said something along the lines of, public virtue is dependent on private virtue, and public virtue is the only foundation of a Republic. We hear these things, and this is a bit of a tangent here, Tucker, but I I've had to have a bit of a realization on this and to understand better what's going on, because I grew up in an era where libertarian thinking was very pervasive.

It was all over the place. I agreed with much of it, and there's still things I do agree with.

I was a fellow at the Cato Institute, so you don't need to apologize in my presence. No, I know what you mean. Well, it wasn't that long ago that many Americans thought they were inherently safe from the kinds of disasters you hear about all the time in third-world countries? A total power loss, for example, or people freezing to death in their own homes. That could never happen here. Obviously, it's America. People are recalculating, unfortunately, because they have no choice. The last few years have taught us that. Remember when the power grid in Texas failed in the dead of winter? Yeah, it happened, and it could happen again. So the government is not actually as reliable as you'd hope they would be. And the truth is, the future is unforeseeable, and things do seem to be getting a little squirly. So if the grid does go down, you need power you can trust. Last country's supply's newest product is designed for exactly that. The GridDoctor is a 3,300-watt battery backup system that will power full-size appliances, medical devices, and tools with clean, reliable power. It's even EMP protected. That means it's shielded from lightning, solar flares, or an actual electromagnetic pulse event.

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I think what that amounted to is there's so many people have subscribed to what I call this Religion of Economic Thinking, this idea of market fundamentalism that the market matters above all. I say that that's not what our ancestors believed. It's not what our founders believed. How has it worked? Exactly. I say about our ancestors, they didn't come here to become capitalists. They came here to own the ground under their feet, to build their churches and communities, and pass something on to the next generation. To their children, of course. But they didn't come here to do it at the detriment of their neighbors. They actually came here to do it helping their neighbors.

Well, you obviously are a Communist.

I have to tell you, The amount of arguments that I hear from this generation that has subscribed this religion of economic thinking, which, by the way, our founders did not support. They were in favor of tariffs. The states all had laws, but primarily all of them had laws to protect moral virtue. This was a part of what they did. They knew it, and they knew because the state has a role in that. We are a Christian nation with a Christian form of government. Our constitution could not have been created by any other religion. You're not endowed by a creator. You don't have any available rights. In Christianity, you do. The divinity of the individual is real. We're made in the image of God. I have these arguments with people where I'm saying, look, 25% of our land zone by us is investors. I'd like to raise their property taxes. I'd like to disincentivize this thing that's been happening in our state and create a new category of tax for investment land for people that are coming in and prospecting. This is socialism. This is communism. This is communism.

I'm just saying- Who says that?

This is what gets me.

Self defense is immoral now. That's basically what they're saying. Protecting You're not allowed to defend yourself.

Yeah, I would just say, Iowa is not an economic zone for the world or for the country.

It's not. You're upsetting me. Yes, I agree.

But when I say this, oftentimes it's people that were really affected by the economic thinking that came out of the Chicago School of Economics. When I trace much of this back, I look at what happened in the 1980s. I Ronald Reagan did a lot of great things. But there's also this market fundamentalism that really took over. Then you look at what's been the repercussions of that, this idea that unrestrained capitalism is what we worship.

Or that it even is capitalism.

That it even is capitalism because oftentimes it's corporatism.

Just oligarchical.

Exactly. Or that free trade is the ideal. It's like, even the fathers of modern economics, Adam Smith, even David Ricardo, who is a person that basically developed the idea of comparative advantage, which is a big thing. Yes, free trade is good if you protect your national interest first. For instance, the Silicon microchip was invented by a man from Iowa, Robert Noyce, who's with Intel. Then you look at what's happened now in our country from a product that was invented in our country, we produced 10% of them. Basically, all of the high tech versions of this, we can't produce, we don't have the technology. The ones that would be a military application are coming from somewhere else. There's this idea that the market matters overall. I'm saying, no, that's not. We don't worship the market. The most egregious example of this, I think, is when you look at happened through free trade in the Rust Belt and throughout the Midwest, where you had people that were told that their jobs were being shipped overseas, but they'd be replaced by high tech jobs that didn't need to be trained by, which, by the way, is a lie.

It didn't happen. Matter of fact, the biggest benefits that came from that were for the leaders of large companies that chose to do what Adam Smith said not to do, which was free trade was about one country doing something really well, another country doing another thing really well in the exchange. A comparative advantage in the market isn't exploitative labor conditions of a communist government. That's not included in the comparative advantage. It's not.

Adam Smith didn't foresee that.

No. When capital is mobile and you can move all of these factories to one place to get cheap labor, everything's going there. Then so who got rich off that? Well, large companies got rich, and then pharmaceutical companies got rich that preyed off purposeful, purposed white males who lost their work. Of course. In large part. The Sacklers.

Still billionaires, never went to jail.

As I say this, I get like a goosebumps because it's like, this is just wrong. Oh, yeah. I mean, the hundreds of thousands thousands of deaths that have come from this, when you take work and purpose away from people and you sell them a lie, then it's going to be replaced by these high tech jobs or high tech training for jobs, and it doesn't happen. Then you have these practices where people are like, Here's a new customer. We can get them addicted. There's a stat I read.

It's almost like it was on purpose.

In 2016, the World Economic Forum had that article that was published still online. I don't know why they still have it on today. But it talked about this idea that in the future, you'll own nothing and you'll be happy. I tell people like, that wasn't a joke. It wasn't a threat. It was a plan. Oh, of course. It's happening.

Oh, I know.

I think many people in our country just feel as if there's this large plan or effort that's being executed that we're not privy to. No. But we have these psyops that happen that come up and we're fed them through news or something like that to get on board with it. I think what we just talked about is probably a large part of that, this idea that we're going to take away meaningful manual labor with your hands, which, by the way, is maybe second to farming. That type of work is really gratifying because you're creating a product for-I do it in my spare time.

I can't wait to get off work and do it, not because I'm great at it or something, but because it's so rewarding. It's so refreshing. It feeds something. It feeds a real hunger, I think, in all men. And so, yes, no, it's my primary form of relaxation. I just love it. I think every man feels that way. I agree.

Man, you look at some of these channels on social media that have taken off. Oh, yeah. It's so much of this because it's They're addicting. It's like, I love watching. Gosh, even the Bushcraft videos of people making these houses, they're amazing.

Or how about Pakistani metalworking videos? You ever watch those? That's a whole genre. Those guys are amazing. I've never really liked Pakistan. Spent time in Pakistan. You watch those videos, you're like, I'm pretty pro-Pakistan. Just the ingenuity, the craftsmanship, which is not high, by the way, but it's just like, these are men making things out of raw materials, and it's just a drill to watch that.

Yeah, and they're proud of what they create.

100%, and they ought to be. They should. And they have my respect. Yeah.

And me as well. I would just say that I look at this from the standpoint of you'll own nothing, and I look at this large narrative that's happening in our country. I mean, you know this, but even in Iowa, Blackstone is buying single-family homes. There's another company in Council Bluffs that's doing as well, Multi-billion Dollar Realtor Investment Trust. It's buying up single-family homes.

In Council Bluffs? Council Bluffs. That's a tough town.

Yeah.

But across the river from Omaha.

Yeah, it wouldn't be your first choice. I mean, that's how ubiquitous this is, right? It's like it's Council Bluffs. Council Bluffs. Yeah. Then you look at our farmlands being bought by people that don't live here. Even when you get back into agriculture and you look at... Iowa is a top pork-producing state in the country. Yes. What most people don't know is, I think somewhere above 75% of the pork that's raised in Iowa, the farmers don't own the pigs.

Of course not.

On contract from one of the big four agriculture conglomerates, Cargill, Tyson, JBS, and National. We're having this pride in our work, this pride in our land, the health of our people. We're having these major issues come up.

Well, so can I ask you about... I mean, that does... So you own nothing and be happy is a very famous phrase, and thank you for reminding us that it was 10 years ago that it first emerged and that it was It was not a meme at that point. It was like a statement of intent. But I think that has obscured the even darker reality, which is not only you not own anything, you won't create anything. I personally, just speaking for myself as a middle-aged man, I would rather at this stage create than own. I like both. But the joy, the thing that proves that you are made in God's image is your ability to create because God is the creator. When When you create something, it's the whole purpose of being here, whether it's children or harmony or a pair of reading glasses. Creation, making something out of nothing is the main joy in life. When you take that away, no wonder people are on fentanyl. Yeah.

Right? Well, also, I think maybe missing the biggest one of those is speech.

Well, exactly.

Of this right here, of what you're creating.

I like to believe that's a form of creation. It is. That's It's like, I spent my life talking.

Speech is that. That is that. This is where I believe that we get bogged down in the policy and the politics of this whole thing, and we forget about the grander story of who we are as a people that we're endowed by our creator, that we're here for a big purpose. I spent a number of years building schools. One of the things we'd say is that we believe believe every young person is a hero on their journey to find a calling and change the world. That was the inspirational line that we would say basically every day. That's who we are. That's why we're here. A lot of this creation is being taken away, as you mentioned. Ai is not the least of which. I tell my kids all the time, Look, use AI for research. Never let it write for you. Writing is how you organize your thoughts. It's how you can think something through to separate the wheat from the chaff, to understand how to think critically, to test your ideas, and then get in debate and things like that. You can't have a machine do that. This is a uniquely human thing is for us to come up with these ideas based on our unique life experiences.

It's stealing joy. It's like saying, eat a steak for me, have sex for me, wake up at dawn and watch the sunrise for me. No, I'll reserve those to myself because those are the greatest pleasures in life. Creating something is number one on that list of joy. Why would you ever outsource that to a machine? I don't understand that.

Did you see the commercial for the product that basically records your grandmother? You'll record them when they're alive. Then after they pass away, it creates basically an avatar of them.

But the actual-So you can steal my memories? And replace them with the creation of a machine? Yeah, I don't think so.

This is real, though. What? This is what I say. It's like, for the longest time, we accepted technology. Look, farming is a big... In this, too. It's like, look, it reduced the burden of labor. There's a certain point to that. That's probably good. Meaning like, hand plowing a field is a really difficult task. Using a tractor, okay, that's probably okay, right? It is okay. Obviously, I'm joking. But then when you start to see what it's being used for now to replace human beings, meaning you can continue to have conversations with this grandmother long after she's passed away and she'll give you her unique thoughts. Well, that's completely stripping away the divinity of humanity. This idea that we're creating God's image, that we each have something unique to share, and that humanity is something to be protected and is very special in the history of the universe. It's very special. Let me just say A lot of my campaign comes down to this question. I was reading an essay by Wendell Berry.

It's funny. As you were talking, I was just thinking of Wendell Berry, and I was going to say, apropos of nothing, I love Wendell Berry. I thought maybe he's never heard of Wendell Berry. I love that you read Wendell Berry.

I love Wendell Berry. A matter of fact- His essay on 9/11 was so radical.

I think it got taken off the internet, but it was so good.

I maybe shouldn't say this on here, but I drive a Tesla and it has an autopilot feature. There's a period of time when I'd be driving with my kids somewhere and I might pull out the Wendell Berry poem book and give them a... On the way to school- I was talking to my sister-in-law yesterday about Wendell poems poems, literally yesterday. I would actually have the kids take turns in the car reading a poem. No way. Because look, understanding these ideas, I don't know if there's... Other than faith, and they're tied in together, inextricably woven together the ideas that Wendell Berry puts forward in the ideas of our faith. You can't separate them because it's about creation. It's about protecting that and understanding that we were told to tend the garden. We're told to subdue, but not destroy, of course. I would have the kids read this because it's like, I want you guys to know, look, if I'm gone tomorrow and you knew two things about me, that I loved my savior and I loved the creation, I'd be very I'm happy, and I hope that... Me too. If that's the only two things you remember about me, and you just had to keep reflecting on those two things, great.

You're making me emotional again. Sorry.

But in this essay, it was actually in the Atlantic- If you're listening to Wendell Berry poems in the car with your kids.

Tell me where the fundraiser is because I'm going, because we need more of this in America.

He had this poem, this essay he wrote in The Atlantic, I think it was 1991. Somebody Some quote I read turned me on to that. I was like, I wonder what this is. I went and read the whole thing. In it, he talked about this idea. I think this summarizes so much what I'm talking about. When I say our farmland is being owned by people that don't live here. Our jobs are being shipped to other countries, our factories are being shipped to other countries. We have unchecked monopolies that are exploiting our farmers. We have the highest cancer rate, but we're not talking about it. Wendell Berry said that foundational question that the Amish ask before they make any big decision is, what will this change do to our community? I think I don't know anyone who would deny that our politicians and our leaders have not been asking that question for a very long time.

That is absolutely right. That is absolutely right. We don't ask ourselves enough, how will this change us and our relationships and our understanding of God in the world? I think that of labor-saving devices, I find myself I'm the product of America at its peak, and there's not enough labor, actually. I find myself trying to eliminate labor-saving devices from my life, merely so I will have the experience of labor. We hand-grind our coffee. Don't have to do that. Why do we do that? I always say to my befuddled and grumpy children, because we're not depending on electricity for everything. You can grind your own coffee. It's okay. I just feel like that, and obviously I'm insane, so that informs a lot of my decisions. It's my lunacy. But it also speaks to a need in all people to be involved in the production of something.

Yeah. Right?

Oh, absolutely. Doordash is... I'm not against DoorDash, but not that I've used it, but I don't know. You gain something, but you also lose something. That's all I'm saying.

When you feel the feeling of accomplishment, it's a liberating feeling. Yes. It's a feeling that brings pride. I would say this, it's a feeling that brings pride that also, if you understand your own history of your family and your story, that you can connect it to what's happened generation and generation and generation before. I think so much of where we've went wrong is that, I was at a funeral for a woman that I loved dearly. Her name was Becky Alder, and she was an agrarian from Kansas, and lived in Kansas for a while. She was somebody who started schools. She was an amazing woman. I mean, this could get me emotional, but I was at her funeral about a week ago. She was, I would call, a daughter of the Prairie. Like, loved creation, tended it, had their own farms, all these things. And her son was reading something about her, and he said, one of the most common sins is forgetting. Forgetting where we come from, forgetting our heritage, forgetting that these places really matter. And so when I'm in my community and I'm seeing the people I'm surrounded with, in large part, it's like many of these places feel forgotten, especially by our politicians who didn't ask these questions of what will these changes do to our community.

I have a defensive mechanism that comes up in me to say, I'm going to fight for you. I'm going to do it. I don't know what that is. I don't know where that came from, but I would just say that God put something on me to say, Look, maybe I win this governor's race? Maybe I don't. My whole life is going to be focused on these issues because they're issues of caring for your neighbor. It's the one of the two commands I've been given by Jesus. That's why we work with... We could do farming a different way, and I could make more money on that. I have a family that I love, that I want to work with, specifically because it's additive to the whole equation. When my great grandparents were living on the farm, I found all these documents, and I hear stories about them from the community. It's so interesting. It's like we talk about we don't know who owns our land. When I was growing up and I talk about these pieces of land, we've bought some of these pieces because the people have passed on, and oftentimes, they'll want to sell to us because they know where my heart is, and they don't want it to go into an auction, and they don't want it going to somebody from out of state or out of the country.

We don't know. We call the pieces of land by the last name of the people that lived there forever. Of course, always.

We do the same.

That's what we do. That's exactly right. It's honoring. I've I told my wife, I plan to put up plaques or signs saying, This is this farm. This is the history of this farm. That's exactly what we do.

That's exactly right. That's exactly the way to do it.

When I was talking early on about this idea of something lost, I remember hearing some of these stories, and one of the stories I really loved was that my great grandmother, my great grandpa, when they were on this farm, these Iowa communities used to be dotted with these small farmsteads all over. Many of them have just been bulldozed and farmed over because people are growing and growing and growing farm. Consolidation is happening everywhere. Of course. With the consolidation, every time a farm is consolidated, I say to people, life goes out of our community. We have to get our young people back on these farms. One of my biggest, biggest efforts I'm going to be undertaking is to do that. They were so tight knit in these communities that people would tell me, We used to come over to your house, this house. Coffee was on until 10: 00 PM at night. And your great grandma and your great grandpa were actually the counselors of our neighborhood. So they had these groups. And so if husband and wife were having an issue, they'd come over and they'd sit and talk this through. If they're having issues with kids, they'd sit and talk these things through.

And they cared for each other, and they're involved in each other's lives. We're experiencing, likely, the exact opposite of that trend happening. It's having a profound effect on our culture where we're becoming insular and othering. Just because you have a bumper sticker that somebody doesn't like, that they're not to be talked to. Just not at all. What defined us back then. No. Not at all.

We're not allowed to behave like that, anyway.

My dream for the state of Iowa is to see a long term rich agrarian society, like a long term rich agriculture heritage be restored. That's my dream. That's what I'm fighting for.

Boy, that's got to be one of the toughest battles you could fight.

But it's worth it. It's foundational, not just to the state, but to us as a people. I think it's something in our soul that working with our hands in the dirt, with animals, with family, with multiple generations. There's a book by a guy named Allan Carlson, I think it was. It's called The Natural Family and Where It Belongs. I had another Basically, radicalizing moment for me was reading this and realizing this man said so many things that I didn't know how to say. Just that that set up of farmstead and neighboring farmstead, they care for each other and that did a lot of life together was the most in tuned and connected. I think, spiritually, we could probably say we have been as a society or community. I would like to see that return.

I We met at an event a couple of months ago, a very crowded event, and had a three-minute... I'd never heard of you. We had a three-minute conversation. I was like, Whoa, I want to talk to that guy. I should just confirm to anyone who's still watching this an hour in that you talk this way in private, too, which I love. But what do people in official, organized Iowa politics think when you say stuff like this?

In longer form of discussions, I find that it's very, very good. But I think that politics has been so overtaken with this bumper sticker ideology. Which is like, I think somebody once said a bumper sticker is a substitute for thought or something like that. For sure. Also, I just think I'm not the typical person that would run for office.

That's putting it mildly.

I really like... I've really worked hard to be on our farm, to farm it, to have my kids understand that, to work in education, these types of things. I've really worked hard to do that. This was not something that I had just saying, you know what? Timing's like, I've been waiting for this forever. We're doing this. It was more that I thought, there's no termlements on the governor of Iowa. The longest serving governor in history of America is as Iowa's former governor, Terry Burns, said. In my head and in my heart, as I was talking to my wife about this, it's like, the next person who gets elected governor could be governor till I die.

Oh, yeah. Well, look at your senior senator. Emphasis on the senior. I like him. I'm not attacking him, but he served for a couple of hundred years, I think.

It's like that quote when Ronald Reagan said, I knew Abraham Lincoln, and you know Abraham Lincoln. I love that. But it's politics is not the place for long, form, deep, and spiritual discussion. I wish it was. Because I think if it was, you'd require people running for office to connect with you at a deeper level, to actually understand what you're going through and to know that they care about those issues. Because I don't care how low our taxes are. I'll say this, if our kids are leaving and our people are dying from cancer, we are not in what I'd call successful territory.

That's exactly right. The beauty of economics is it's supposedly a species of science, which means it can be tested. If you have an economic system in progress longitudinally over a period of time, then you can assess with the highest degree of accuracy whether it worked or not, because you look at the outcomes. By that measure, socialism, communism was the worst possible failure. Our current system is not anything like that, but it's not a win, it's a failure because look around. What we're doing isn't working. I don't care what they tell you at some think tank or what should happen. I've lived long enough to see what actually happened, and no. It doesn't work.

Look at some of these new ideas that are coming out, which, by the way, it's like the fact that these have to be stated is crazy, and then the fact that we get pushback on it. I'm somebody who firmly believes that the priorities of my government and my economy should be solely focused on making life better for the people that live in my state and my country. Like, not racist. Not for big business, not for foreign countries. I think so many people just thought that was the case. Meaning people that are not really paying attention, but it's like the politicians are all telling me, We're going to work on this low tax. We're going to work on this thing. It's like, But hold on. What? Just a day ago, 81 Republicans voted to keep $315 million of spending for the National Endowment for Democracy? What?

Yeah, not on your side.

Right? It's like after everything that Elon Musk went through, after all of what these people did, all of what they took in the news, all of the conflicts and in relationships that broke down of this, that one thing that we know is a front organization in large part, is now getting hundreds of millions of dollars from our government, and Republicans are voting yes on it?

Of course they are.

It's like, we're not learning I think. It's like the idea- Why am I laughing?

Because I don't know what else to do.

How could you ever deny the existence of the Uniparty at this point?

Oh, I know. Well, you have a very prominent Republican a senator and presidential candidate working with the ADL to suppress the speech of Americans. So it's like, maybe the current system isn't what they tell. But people know that it's fake. I guess the good news is we still have enough elbow room, enough freedom in the United States that reform is possible. If enough people are like, No, come on now, you have to serve our interests, or at least acknowledge them.

You would hope so. I think this vote, specifically, is quite the to that point. This all just happened.

Well, I could name eight other things that have happened in the last month, and you're like, This is so unbelievable. It's so outrageous. It can't continue. The eternal contradictions have reached the point of breaking and like, We're getting something new. Then it's just like, onto the next.

You're right. It'll be gone in a week. In a week?

It's gone now.

Yeah, exactly. But to that point, I think this is why this idea of running for governor is so appealing. It's like, maybe I'm wrong for saying this, but I've largely written off Washington, DC.

Oh, I think that's fair.

If the people that we've put in power... Now, granted, I will say there's some huge, huge shining stars. I think what Robert F. Kennedy is doing, unbelievable. The repercussions of this for the for positive health benefits of Americans will reverberate for generations if it can stay in place. Because he's going to help an entire generation of people become far more healthy, live better lives, meet their great grandkids, potentially. That's amazing.

And have clearer heads and pure spirits. Just start with, just the government should not officially endorse eating a thousand pounds of sugar a year. Just that right there. Flipping over the nutrition tables into something that more closely resembles reality. That's a huge step. Reducing the Vax schedule from a million vaccines for the newborn to a smaller number, you got to call that a win. That's a win.

It's also something that I think we believe, why are we even having to have this fight? Somebody asked me the other day, what do you think the most pressing issue facing America is? Taking out the spiritual... Because spirituality is intertwined, but taking that out, it said, I think it's that our government run by unelected people, and we don't know who they are. Yeah.

I was talking- Without our best interest at heart at all. Yes.

This idea of America first, of Iowa first, it's like, to many of us, this is just common sense. It's like, this is what the country is set up for.

What's the other form of government that's legitimate? I can't think of one. If this is a Democratic Republic and the government is acting in an interest that's not our interest, how is that legitimate? How is that not grounds for... Anyway, there's no other legitimate form of government but America first or Iowa first. That's the only option.

How we got away from that is unbelievable. I was talking to my dad about some of these things the other day, and Some things you can think and know, but not exactly know how to describe or put into words. I get that feeling when I think about the shift that our country clearly went through after the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

Well, that's it right there.

It seemed as if something spiritual happened at that point within our country, and it has to do with the complete disregard for truth, honesty, or the American public deserving to know what's happening. Then I read a tweet one day, I don't know who said it, maybe it's Russell Brand or somebody that said something along the lines of the future success of our country and the Kennedy's is intertwined in some way. It's true.

It is true. I never used to believe that. I would hear these baby boomers say that was the day everything changed. They were silly. They were not serious people, but they could feel something that was true. That was clearly true, that a lot did change everything changed when he was assassinated in a way that I did not appreciate till he was much older. But they were right. They were right in saying that. The fact that 63 years later, CIA still will not, this is a fact, will not divulge all the information that it has on his murder, despite a bunch of laws from Congress, despite a executive order from the President of the United States a year ago. They're still hiding it. Clearly, there were probably a lot of people involved, probably a foreign country clearly involved, our own government clearly involved. They're still lying about it. It's wild. But if the truth sets you free, then lies enslave you. The obverse is true. I think we are enslaved in some sense by these lies.

I think where I see this most is in the newest generation of people that are coming up, coming of age, so to speak. There's some very loud voices out there that they're all flocking to, one in particular that you've interviewed. People ask me all the time, Why do I think that is? I just say, Guys, look at the lies. Exactly. Look at what's happened. Look at the lack of justice, the lack of accountability. We don't... Where's Fauci? What about the Hunter Biden laptop? When are these people going to be arrested?

I said this about Trump 10 years ago. When I lived in Washington, I'm a product of Washington, obviously, and I wrote a piece, basically, Trump is popular because you failed. It wasn't an endorsement of everything Trump said, though. I like Trump and voted for him. But it's not about Trump. Trump wouldn't have existed if the system was working. The same is true of the person you're referring to, whose name shall not be named. But no, it's true. It's like we argue about, is he good or bad? Is he whatever? But the argument is not really about him. It's about the system that allowed someone like that to become popular, it's like, why do you think people are watching that? Because you failed. You betrayed your own voters.

Yes, that is right. Yes. Look, one of the biggest issues that's come up is about immigration. Yeah. It's all over. I think for a long time, we have been criticized, ostracized for noticing what's happening and calling it out to say, what's happening? There's this idea of replacement migration, this replacement theory. I don't ever talk about this, but it's like people talk about it and they're immediately just hammered down. Well, in 2000, the UN put out a document called replacement migration. Of course. 144 pages, multiple languages. But I read this and it's like, it's lining out exactly what's happening. It's saying, look, European nations are going to be losing population. America is going to be losing population. What's the answer? Well, traditionally throughout history, the answer is to promote having more children.

Make it easier for people to have kids, get married.

Yes, make life more affordable. Bring home the money that's being spent overseas and use... I mean, imagine, you just talk about Iraq and Afghanistan. Imagine what our country would be if we didn't spend $10 trillion on that. Yeah. Imagine what we could have done for our children and our communities. When you look at this and you're called this... I'm not called that because I don't ever talk about this, but people are called conspiracy theorists for bringing up this idea of replacement migration. They literally wrote a white paper on it. Of course. They describe what it's going to do. Then you look at these people that are feeling like, especially young white males, like they're being taken out of society. They're being told they don't matter. Matter of fact, they have this original sin of being who they are. It's unbelievable. Then you- Sounds like a dangerous conspiracy.

You ever look at the census numbers?

Oh, yeah.

Right. Again, we can just bring science to bear on this. Is the native population being replaced? I don't know. Let's check the census. Answer, yes. How about we do it by zip code? I'm 56, so let's go back to 1970. It's not the census of 1970. Just spend an afternoon reading that. Anyone who tells you you're a bigot or you're engaging in conspiracy, theorizing, is lying and probably lying in order to hurt you.

Well, and Tucker, why? It's like, why are we not allowed to have and appreciate and love our culture? And why are we also not allowed to let people in that want to be a part of that culture? That's the whole idea. People ask me how to pronounce my last name, and it's L-A-H-N, but it's pronounced Lane. Well, why is that? Well, my great, great grandpa, when he came over, he wanted to keep the German spelling, but he wanted to be a pronounced American, and they took on the American customs, and they became American. That's what it was. The idea that we're saying that this is-How did the family pronounce it in Germany? I was told it was pronounced Lerne. Lerne, it sounds right. That's what I was told someday, as you could probably imagine, I'm going to go over there and dig as deep as I can and all this stuff because it's... Some people get the bug for learning this about their family. I am that human. I love this. I love learning about my history and heritage. You know what? 150 years in America is a thing to be very proud of. Yes, I agree.

But also, they likely did not want to leave where they were at. They didn't want to go three weeks on a boat in the Stowage.

From Northern Germany?

Northern Germany. On my mom's side, actually, the family has been here since the Revolution. Actually, a great ancestor, direct great ancestor, died in the Revolutionary War.

Me too.

These voices of people who understand the culture that our ancestors created, and it's something to be so proud of. It's so inclusive. It reduces suffering. It is welcoming to people. But the idea that you can come in and try to put something else over top of that. Charlie Kirk said this beautifully. He said something on my butcher's words, and I'm sorry for that. I first met him in 2011, I think. We're supposed to be in the same event. I said something along the lines of the reason we're in a constitutional crisis is because we have a Christian form of government, but we have elected people that are not following that custom and religion.

They hate Christianity.

You're going to have a constitutional crisis. You're going to have fraud all over the place. You're going to... Your institutions will break down.

Because the system was a bespoke system. It was created for the people who lived under it. You've got different people, so you're going to get a different system.

Yeah, it was created.

Not a value judgment. It's just an observation.

Yeah, it was created.

Zack Lane, amazing conversation. I'm intentionally not going to ask you about the politics of it. You're going to have plenty of time to talk about that. But I think this gives... Anyone who has, again, watched to this point is either like, Oh, my gosh, I'm sending this man money, or Stop him. But I am interested. Really quick, last question, what is the process from here on out?

Our primary election is June second. Then if we win the primary, then the election is in November.

How How many people in the primary?

There's five people in the primary right now. I believe we have a really good shot at this. I believe our message, the time for the message that we're saying is now. There's been a I think there's been a void that's been there. People are wanting politicians and people running for office, because I've never ran for office. I'm not a politician. They're wanting people that will speak truth to them and that will talk about the big issues, even if the donors and the special interests say, I've told them, I don't want your money. I'm not looking for your money. I'm actually here to stop a lot of the practices that you're putting in place. I've said, I'm my own biggest donor to this campaign. I will not be bought. It won't happen.

Oh, boy, they're going to try and stop you. It's not radicalism that scares them. It's quiet, sincere determination. I Godspeed. Thank you. Thank you.