Puppeteers: The People Who Control The People Who Control Washington 48:50

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This is sort of a special one to me because I took more than a year to write a book with somebody you probably don't know, but in Jennifer Scott. And it's just come out. It's doing exceptionally well. And we're going to talk a little bit about the puppeteers, who controls puppeteers.

Who Controls America? And I'm really excited about it. And I hope you've, maybe some of you have had a chance to read it, but it just came out. So anyway, The Puppeteers, Who Controls America? We're going to talk about that. We're going to talk a little bit about the news. We're going to highlight the stupid because, you know, there's always somebody doing something stupid somewhere. So let's get after it. And I want to start with what's in the news. Obviously, the news, the big one was getting past Trump.

The debt limit negotiations. Now, there are cases to be made for it and there's cases to be made against it. Personally, I serve in Congress. I'm not in Congress anymore. Personally, I would have voted against it. There are some problems with what happened there.

And I guess what I'm really concerned about is here, 18 months from now, they're projecting that the debt ceiling or the debt will increase by roughly $4 trillion. So the idea that this bill actually saved money only in Washington, D.C., Financial Responsibility Act is what it was called, only in Washington, D.C. Can they call that financial responsibility when we're going to be

$36 trillion in debt. If you spend a million dollars a day, every day, it would take you almost 3000 years to get to 1 trillion. And we're going to be $36 trillion in debt. And oh, by the way,

we're adding $4 trillion in the next 18 months. That, to me, does not sound like financial responsibility. And as Senator Mike Lee and some others have pointed out, if you go to page 59 of the bill, it says, the director may waive the requirements of Section 263 if the director concludes that the waiver... Anyway, it's these simple little two little thresholds it has to cross.

The point that a lot of people made about regulatory reform, just not true. Because when a director of the Office of Management and Budget can simply waive it by issuing a letter, it's really not crystal clear. I heard James Langford, the senator out of Oklahoma, he was voting against it. And he said, you know, we really need to understand what decisions Congress is going to make and what decisions we're just going to continue to punt over to the White House.

So I just, anyway, it's passed. It's not there. The other thing I would highlight that I don't think is good public policy is the idea of making it date certain. We will extend the limit as much as you want to spend up until January 1st of 2025. That's bad policy. It's always been a number. It forces the discussion. It forces the country to think about and realize how much debt we really have.

Personally, I believe that we should be pursuing a balanced budget amendment, one with teeth. And until you do that, I think this situation is going to continue to get worse and worse. But a further discussion for another time. All right, let's move on to the stupid because there's always somebody doing something stupid somewhere.

All right, this time you're going to go to somebody in the tech world. Now, I thought this was a pretty sleepy company. Company that's doing really well. Company that provides a good service, a good product. I don't happen to use it, but lots of people do. It's LinkedIn. LinkedIn was supposed to be, you know, hey, put up your resume and make contacts and get linked together with other people. And, you know, it provides a lot of good.

Until Vivek Ramaswamy, who's running for president of the United States on the Republican side of the aisle, LinkedIn decided all of a sudden, because Vivek's making quite the waves in talking about conservative principles and policies, he got censored by LinkedIn.

And the excuse that they gave Vivek was he had posted misinformation and hate speech. Hate speech. That's what they dinged him for. And if you look at what he actually said, here are the quotes of which they highlighted was hate speech. The CCP, meaning China, is playing the Biden administration like a Chinese mandolin. Boy, that was a rough one.

If the climate religion was really about climate change, then they'd be worried about, say, shifting oil production from the U.S. to places like Russia and China. Oh, that was another hateful speech right there. And the last one. The climate agenda is a lie. Fossil fuels are a requirement for human prosperity. Again, they labeled that misinformation and hate speech. Now,

When Vivek got on some of the programs and social media and started talking about how LinkedIn had shut him down, LinkedIn finally came back and said, oh, well, we made a mistake. Isn't it funny how the mistakes always go against conservatives? Always go against conservatives. You've got a liberal one where they shut him down and then said, whoops, it was a mistake. Show it to me. That I would love to see. But come on, LinkedIn.

Way to get yourselves in the woke culture on a guy who really literally wrote the book called Woke Inc. And that is bringing on the stupid. All right. So let's now dial up Jennifer Scott and talk a little bit about the puppeteers. Hello.

Jennifer, it's Jason again. Jason. You know, it's funny. It's funny because everybody needs to know that I have been interacting with Jennifer Scott since I think 2006. And now, especially since I've left Congress, I still, I call Jennifer every day. Like I talked to her

When I'm at the drive-thru at Taco Bell, I call her late at night. I know you're late. I could order for you. Yes. She has talked to me while I'm eating cheeseburgers. Jennifer is a real gem that way. Well, what I love about Jennifer is she's a true conservative, and she's different than me. And I love that because as I'm chewing on policy and thinking about how to think things through and what's the right answer to a tough question, I

I just found there's nobody better than interacting with Jennifer. So when we got this contract to do a book, we didn't know what the title was going to be. I mean, we settled on the puppeteers, the people who control the people who control America. But when you start from scratch...

You know, it's a little bit more difficult than that. And you start playing and you go back and forth. And it took a long time to come up with this. And Jennifer played a role in all of it from, you know, did a lot of...

you know, research and writing and all kinds of stuff. And the collaboration back and forth was really, really quite good. So what we want to do is chat with Jennifer a little bit about the book, what it is and why, you know, we kind of came to the conclusion that we came to. So now that we've gone through the process and it's actually now for sale and you look back, what strikes you about why this book is so important?

you know i think the most terrifying thing that we began to realize is that it's just no longer enough to win elections you know i think we talked about this when you left congress it felt like if we could just influence elections if you could go on tv and sell the message that that would be enough we could get you know congressional

people elected who are constitution loving majorities and that would change things and i and that's still a powerful force but it's not going to be enough because what we've seen

is that there are forces inside the government and outside the government, frankly, that have put our government on autopilot in a way that is going to be hard to reverse, even if elections go our way. So there's more we have to do. And I think that was a bit of a frightening realization for us as we started to see in agency after agency and in our elections and in our financial sector and in our nonprofit sector, how much control they really had

Yeah, I don't think anybody looks at Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and say, yeah, those are the two masterminds pulling all the strings, making all the decisions, setting the vision and the course for America. I mean, there's... And so when you start to follow the money, and I'm talking by the hundreds of billions and literally trillions of dollars, it starts to scare you a bit because...

this sort of permanent bureaucratic class, the administrative state. There's lots of ways of saying it. And Jennifer's right. It's not just the bureaucrats and those that are actually in government, but these outside forces as well, these slush funds that are created within the federal government to leverage and

Yeah. Allow the Democratic agenda. Yeah. Allow the Democratic agenda to continue in perpetuity no matter who gets elected. Right. And we saw those slush funds, you know, back when you were chair of oversight during the Obama administration. We saw how they were being used and we thought, you know, when Trump got in, we thought, great, he's put a stop to it. But no, that was the first day back in office.

Joe Biden calls for a review, and that's one of the things he wants. On Inauguration Day, January 20, 2021, he wants to end that.

that prohibition that Jeff Sessions had put on on DOJ slush funds so what we were seeing is you'd get sued like in a financial somebody with deep pockets a financial institution usually would get sued by the federal government or charged by the federal government and then they're fine instead of putting it into the treasury where Congress has control of it they would tell them they could donate to a specific list of so-called charities NGOs

basically Democrat aligned charities that are out there pretending to do one thing. While we know from our second book from Power Grab that a lot of times what they're doing is get out the vote. They're working with Democratic constituencies, but it looks like they're Planned Parenthood or it looks like they're doing something else. That's right. So they would go after, say, Citigroup and part of the settlement would be, oh, well, you're going to put $25 million into Citigroup

These NGOs stands for non-government organizations and because they're on the approved list by the Democrats. And so these fines would just and they're popping up in lots of other departments and agencies. We wish there was more clarity in this. So, for instance,

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. This one scares me a lot because when the Democrats had the House and Senate and the presidency and they created this and Elizabeth Warren was the first one to go in and lead this group. What's scary about the CFPB is they got more money than the Securities and Exchange Commission, but they didn't get it from Congress. There was no appropriation. It came from the Federal Reserve. They bypassed Congress.

they were responsible yeah intentionally they they did not have to be um listen to members of congress respond to their inquiries etc now the supreme court and other courts have had to rule along the way on the constitutionality of this but this is how the democrats are thinking

And again, the CFPB would go out and levy fines. Particularly, think about how leveraged they are with a publicly traded company. They don't want to have to...

put out to the public that they're being investigated or whatever. And so they get this thing hanging over their head. We don't know exactly how much money, but we did get some lists and showed that, wow, there's a lot of money that is being, I think, extorted out of these companies and then funneled to

the Democrats organizations of choice that bypass campaign finance, bypass the legislative process and have no visibility. Right. And CFPB is really scary because I think that that's just the beginning. They started this. This is how they want to fund things in the future. If they put it that one under Federal Reserve, but you'll see they want to put more and more things as part of the

the discretionary spending that we can't do anything about. So if they put it in the same bucket as the Social Security spending or the Medicare spending, then anytime Congress tries to touch it, they can just go out and fearmonger that they're cutting your Social Security spending.

But really, there's a lot of other stuff that falls into that category. And it's basically untouchable by Congress. And we're just seeing more and more federal programs that they want to stick into that category. So we detail this in the book and we tell, you know, illuminate it with with individual stories and whatnot. But to give you an idea, like the debt ceiling negotiations that just passed now, whether you're for them or against them. And I talked about them earlier in the podcast. I would have voted against it. But nevertheless, we're

Let's understand how the finances of the nation are working because it's so different than anything else. Roughly 75% of the total outlays by the federal government go to mandatory programmatic expenses.

funding. That is no matter what Congress does, it absolutely goes out the door. It's Medicaid, Medicare, social security. Those are the big ones, but there are literally hundreds of other programs that are on this autopilot that Congress never touches. So when speaker McCarthy goes up and says, we're talking about, um,

He's discretionary. He's eliminating the 75% of the budget where you and I have to pay for our taxes that they spend on. They also eliminated defense, and they don't even talk about interest on the debt. We're paying about $2 billion off.

a day. Just to give you an idea, I think in the fourth quarter of 2022, interest payments to service our national debt went up $61 billion. So when you get rid of defense and you get rid of the interest payments and you get rid of the mandatory programmatic spending, guess what? You're left with less than 10% of the budget to actually work on.

Democrats know this. And so part of the way these puppet masters work and get funded, and this is why the book, you know, I advocate that, hey, we've got to, you know, you got to starve the beast. Starve the beast. Yeah. Starve the beast. You're only talking, when Congress is really only talking about less than 10% of the budget, and you have to deal with it. So the way Democrats fund all this is through these other programs. So

Let's maybe talk a little bit, Jennifer, about what we found. There are other slush funds that were out there in the open that the, you know, it was really disgusting. And the Inflation Reduction Act, because they created two pools of money that are huge. Yeah. So about $374 million. No, no, no, no. Oh, billion. Billion.

I wish it was only $374 billion. Yeah. Yes, but billion. And they've tapped somebody to be in charge of distributing that. And it's not somebody who's a specialist on budgets. It's a political hack. It's John Podesta. He's going to decide who gets their projects funded. So it's going to be a bunch of crony projects. It'll look a lot like Solyndra.

where they send money to people who agree with their politics, who are loyal to the Democratic Party. And it's a way to make the money flow to their loyal constituency. Think about how much money that is.

That is so huge. $374 billion. You know, they tried to push together and move the Green New Deal, right? This was like Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey, the Democrat from Massachusetts, AOC and those. They couldn't couple together votes to get that passed. Oh, so what did they do? Oh, let's go on change the name. It's the Inflation Reduction Act.

There is nothing in that bill that reduces inflation. In fact, it spends records amount of money, which is the cause of inflation. So then there's also this green. What was it called? The green. Well, there's a there's a green bank, a climate bank, green bank. Yes. Green Bank is like twenty seven billion dollars.

which they will use to make loans. That will be like Solyndra 2.0, right? They'll do loans and supposedly the taxpayers will be held harmless. We saw how that worked with Solyndra. You're listening to Jason in the House. We'll be back with more of my conversation with Jennifer Scott about the puppeteers right after this.

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And then they have another big fund that's that Podesta is in charge of distributing. So folks, when you want to see like where the money's flowing, how do they garner so much time or so much effort and power? It's because they've got hundreds of billions of dollars to hand out. Why do you think they like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris sitting up at the top? Because they, they, they'll sign these bills.

They won't balk at it at all. And they'll go out on the White House podium and say, this president has done more to reduce the annual deficit. And I'm like, wait, we're spending at pre-COVID levels. We're not spending at pre-level COVIDs. COVID was the excuse. Never let a crisis go to waste. That was one of my books.

You get it up there and now they've maintained it. That's what's so concerning. All right, let's move a little bit more though to some of the surreptitious things that are happening behind the scenes because the other huge, massive bucket of money is

we found was actually being controlled at the state level by state financial officers. Sometimes they're known as treasurers. Sometimes they're comptrollers. Different states call it different things. But essentially the

your financial officers in the States, tell them what we found there because it really was helpful to have the Utah treasurer, Marlo Oaks, give us a lot of good information. Yeah, we sat down with Marlo. He took over this role when our treasurer resigned. So he was a midterm replacement treasurer.

came in from the investment banking side and was really surprised what he found, which is that ours as a state of Utah here, we have all of this money that our government uses to build highways or whatever. We have our pension funds and they're invested with companies like BlackRock that manage these funds. And BlackRock is voting our shares for us. They have control of a lot of shares. We also use these proxy funds

advisory firms to decide how we will vote all of the shares that we own in different companies.

And so activists are out bringing very woke resolutions forward in these companies and they're passing with the help of our shares. Our shares may be voted that way. The shares of the money that Utah taxpayers should have, but that money is being controlled by someone else. So think about this, folks. So you may have a retirement fund. Maybe you're a state employee. Maybe you're a teacher. Maybe you just have a 401k. And

It's scary, but BlackRock, Main Street or State Street and Vanguard overwhelmingly control the majority of these types of funds and investments.

And the consequence is they're using proxy votes to go into these boards of director groups. And so we talk about DEI, diversity, equity and inclusion. When we talk about ESG, right, environment, social governance. Social governance, yeah. When you talk about these things and you hear these words, you're like, how do they implement this?

What the puppeteers do is they realize that they can leverage all of these trillions of dollars, and it is trillions of dollars, to change the boardroom without ever doing anything with Congress, without ever doing anything by elected officials. This is why I say that the whole premise of this book is, you know, are elections enough? I mean, the Democrats have really figured out a way to get around this. Let me give you an idea. If you take the S&P 500,

BlackRock owns at least 5% of more than 95% of the S&P companies. So when you have a shareholder that owns 5%, you get a lot of leverage in there. And they got a lot of these proxy votes because the individual, if you're a retiree in Texas, in say Lubbock, Texas, and you've got some money that you've put in over the course of decades.

guess what, the Black Rocks and Vanguard's and others of the world, or maybe it's your state treasurer or financial officer, they're turning it over to Black Rock or they are leveraging that. - Or to a proxy advisory firm that the state will hire to tell them how to vote. And that supposedly they're telling them how to do those votes based on what's in our best interest, what makes us money, what provides a return.

for the people who've put money in that fund. But that isn't necessarily happening. And that's what our state treasurer found. And this is why there's a lot of hope to be found in state treasurers.

Because our state treasurer can go to the proxy voting firms and say, you know, justify what you're doing, justify the votes that you're doing on our behalf. So the book is, yeah, the book Puppeteers is just, it really lays this out and explains it and what you can do about it. The other thing that through our research, we were able to find and we were surprised we could find it. I don't think anybody's seen this kind of out in the public, but

But the Democratic Association that they have for these financial officers for the Democrats, they are very bold. They have this document out there that's called the Corporate Benefits Package. And these companies, individual companies...

or individuals can go and pay somewhere between 50 and $100,000. And then you get to sit next to these state treasurers. There's four different meetings that they have, and you get to mingle with them individually and, and obviously get to make your case on what you think you should, they should be doing. And they tout that,

The Democrat states, the states where they have a Democratic controller or, again, a treasurer or chief financial officer, they control more than a trillion dollars worth of money. A trillion. And so that's where they can leverage. California alone is like $750 billion between the teachers fund and the state employee retirement funds alone.

It's like $750 billion just out of California. So again, how do these puppeteers get their way?

money folks they do it with money the other thing that we found jennifer as we kind of went along is uh you can't ignore unions you can't ignore the teachers and what they're doing and certainly randy weingarten is gosh she's a gem unto herself yeah when we started seeing her show up in ukraine and she's talking about pandemic policy wait wait let's just digest that wait a second let's just digest that for a second

She's the president of the American Federation of Teachers here in the United States. And she was in Ukraine. More than once. Yeah.

More than once. And then she's opining about our federal COVID policies and frankly having a lot of control over those policies from outside of the government. We even found through the research one of the stories in the book, and I'll let you, you know, if you go to the puppeteers, I'll let you read it yourself. But you have some people are associated with Hunter Biden at Rosemont Seneca, I think was the, there's so many different organizations that Hunter had under that Rosemont whatever organization.

who are obviously very close to Hunter, and then he somehow, Hunter Biden, and the American Federation of Teachers decides they hate Trump. I mean, they do. There was some great research done by the Government Accountability Institute. Cannot thank the research team there. This is the one that Peter Schweitzer's group, they were very helpful and instrumental in

doing core research that we tapped into, particularly on this. As you talk about the resolutions and how these teachers unions, where they've changed their focus, they're not out there fighting for benefit packages for teachers. They control about $300 million a year. They have upped their game in terms of donations directly to candidates, but they're a major get out the vote force.

And they inject themselves in all kinds of political things that have nothing to do with better teaching our kids in the classroom. And that information that's laid out in the book, they went out and spent something like I think it was three million dollars. Right, Jennifer? You know what? I'd have to look. I can't remember. But yeah, it was about that. Yeah.

Yeah, it was 1.2. They wanted to get this PPE, this personal protection equipment out of China. So, of course, they go to Hunter Biden and his friends and they get $3 million. People that used to work with him. Yeah. And the first time I think they bought from a Chinese company. And then the next round they had formed their own company so they could make the money on it.

And yeah, and it all ended up being counterfeit once it got here, but that's what they were spending union views on. It's just classic. This is where your union money's going. If you're paying it, if anybody on this end of this podcast is listening to, they went out and spent $3 million of teachers pay that people put into their fund and they bought bogus counterfeit N95 face masks or whatever. I don't know what it was, but it would not work.

actually protect you and it's just anyway the story is probably okay because their friends got enriched so yeah yeah that's the whole point that's the whole point what other stories or things pop out of your pop to the top of your brain when you think about what we kind of discovered along the way you know i i think it's also interesting how how the puppeteers within our government are criminalizing dissent

And we're seeing kind of some litmus tests that are being used in the military and in the federal workforce and with anyone who wants to do contract work with the federal government. You've got a sign that you agree with this DEI stuff that you're willing to promote, not based on merit, but based on gender or race or whatever. And this is one way that they ensure that everybody who

is doing business with the federal government is aligned with their politics. Or if you work in the federal government, you're aligned with one way of thinking. It's a way to protect themselves in case the voters ever rebel and try to put somebody in charge that isn't aligned with what they want.

And it is stunning how big the federal government expenditures are. If you look at it again, I'm rounding by huge numbers here. But almost one out of every $4, it's between one out of every four and one out of every $5 spent in this country is spent by the federal government. So when you have these puppeteers who can get the right people in place, people like

Elizabeth Warren and Adam Schiff and Kamala Harris and Chuck Schumer and certainly Joe Biden. All they need is the opening because behind the scenes they can change the rules of the game. Now some of the worst offenders that we kind of highlight in the book are Brian Deese. Brian Deese was a head of the Economic Council. Under Donald Trump it was Larry Kudlow. I mean Larry Kudlow's

resume, his curriculum vitae on his economic prowess is amazing. Brian Deese, not so much. What did we find with Brian? He's a political hack. And Susan Rice was another one we talked about. I think that's probably one of the big stories in the book is what they're doing with elections.

Yeah, let's go back to Brian Deese just really quickly. Brian Deese worked for BlackRock. He's a climate activist. He worked for BlackRock. Yeah, he's a climate activist. And he's in charge of the Economic Council. He was in charge of the Iran nuclear deal back with Obama. I mean, he was involved in some of the Paris Climate Accords. I mean, pretty much a lot of the bad economic policies that were put in place under the Obama administration, his fingerprints are on them. Yeah.

And then you're right. Susan Rice was very quiet. She just left. I think May 26th was her last day off.

there in the Biden White House. But she was the former National Security Advisor to President Obama. People were a little surprised and said, wait a sec, she's going to be kind of the policy director there at the White House behind the scenes. You never really saw her out front in the cameras, but she's probably the most instrumental person behind the scenes leading the puppeteers in an effort that

everybody should be worried about. Tell it, tell everybody what we found there. March of 2021, just a few months after taking office, uh,

President Biden issued an executive order pretty much demanding that every federal agency, and they number, I think we numbered them above 600 of them, would submit a written plan of how they were going to help get out the vote in forthcoming elections. And it's interesting because it might sound, yeah, that's good. Everybody wants to get out the vote. But Biden was very explicit in which groups they should focus on. And surprise, surprise,

They're all Democratic voting blocs. He wants to get out more Native Americans. He wants to get out more felons. He wants to get out more federal employees, more people on welfare. He had whole groups. And so he's going to leverage the power of the federal government to get out Democratic voting blocs to vote. And that's a significant number of people. It's a significant amount of infrastructure. And when people started asking to see those plans, they had 200 days to submit them from March of 2021.

They have not produced them. It's in court. They're having to file lawsuits to even try to get that. What are they doing for the next election? What did they do in the 2022 election? Did it have anything to do with the results we saw in the midterms? We don't know. So it's Executive Order 14-019. You can look it up. The Foundation for Government Accountability. I'm not associated with them, but I just...

know them by reputation and I've talked to them every once in a while because they do great work. But this Foundation for Government Accountability filed the Freedom of Information Act. They said, please tell us, show us what is our federal government using in terms of personnel and physical facilities to get out the vote? Because the only ones that can tap into them are quote unquote, according to the executive order, approved non-government organizations.

So what does it take to be an approved NGO and to tap into that? Do you know how much money and resources? And again, none of this is showing up on campaign finance reforms or camp disclosures. None of this is this is behind the scenes and leveraging the number of people. I think 2.2 million federal employees, something like that.

Well, the White House did not produce the documents. They would not. So this Freedom of Information Act request went to court. And fortunately, the group is suing. But now it's taken a twist because a number of months ago, the Biden White House claimed executive privilege.

Now executive privilege is like going DEFCON 10 or whatever. It's like going nuclear on this. They do not want to cough up these documents.

And I think it would scare a lot of people to show the level to which under our taxpayer dollars, these are being used to get out the vote. And again, I just think most Republicans, most people are involved in politics in general, even Democrats too. They're going to be oblivious to this unless they really focus on how these puppeteers work.

So behind the scenes, yeah, this is a well-funded effort, and it was led by Susan Rice. Yeah. So to me, I think we've got to have – it's not enough for us to just vote in different people at the federal level. Everybody's so engaged in presidential races, and of course it's extremely helpful to win the presidential races. But boy, we've got to be looking at our state races first.

We need attorneys general who can bring lawsuits and challenge. I mean, states can challenge federal power. The Constitution gives them that power. And so there's a lot of power in states, and we really can't afford to ignore those elections. You're listening to Jason in the House. We'll be back with more of my conversation with Jennifer Scott about the puppeteers right after this. I think what you're going to find, the puppeteers, the people who control the people who control America, are

I think what you'll find is, oh my gosh, you're overwhelmed by the huge, massive amount of money, the apparatus, the behind the scenes. It feels like it's almost insurmountable, but I do maintain that you have to starve the beast and you have to understand and recognize what the problem is. And then you have to also recognize, as Jennifer was saying, the extent to which the levers of control and the ability to fight back are found there.

at the state level. We have to do it at the federal level. If you're a conservative and just concerned American about the future of your country and the massive debt and the craziness that seems to percolate out at any moment, Jennifer's right. State attorney generals, state treasurers or chief financial officers, whatever they're called, your governors,

We conclude the book with a great story, and I don't want to tell it in its whole, but what Governor Youngkin did, I think, was one of my... I was really... When we came across this, it really made me smile and give me hope. Do you want to tell that story about how he changed diversity, equity, and inclusion? Yeah. He took a different strategy. He didn't just cut DEI. Ralph Northam had invested heavily in it and put together a big...

And so Youngkin just came in and said, great, we'll continue. But they renamed it to diversity, opportunity and inclusion. And he said, we're going to protect in the academic world. We want diversity of thought. And so he's using DEI to ensure that there is some balance in their academic approach.

universities in the way that people think. And also the right to life issue. Democrats, their minds are blowing. They cannot believe they are off the chart. Using deep night to protect the most vulnerable of all, the unborn. So when he changes this and goes from equity to opportunity, it's a really hard argument to say, no, we're opposed to opportunity. Yeah.

You know, and it's, and when people digest those people, exactly. It's just, it was never really tailored to democratic voting blocks before. Yeah. And so he's really up the game and really kind of changed the way things work. And, and, and that's, that's exciting to me because yeah, I think there's a lot of good hope. There's a lot of,

opportunities that that that rest there so look we put more than a year this is the culmination of all years of just studying this and looking at this but then putting pen to paper and in telling the stories again the whole premise is how scary it is and it's one of those books that you'll read it's like oh my gosh you what are we gonna do this is so big

but we got to start because I worry that oftentimes we're fighting fights about things that they're not going to make a difference. These things will make a difference. And in a state treasurer's race, there's not that much money flowing to those races. You get a little bit of help on those races can make a huge difference. And paying attention to who you're actually electing. Again, I bet 99% of the people in your state, wherever you're listening, they can't name who this person is.

but they control so much money and so much, and they can totally change this. Moody's, for instance, not to belabor the point, but the credit rating agency, Utah is one of the best credit scores there is. I mean, we are just top of the heap. Nobody does better than Utah does. And our state treasurer, Marlo Oaks, came in and said, we're not going to play that game. The rating agency wanted to change an

And ask all these questions about DEI and ESG. And they said, no, we're not going to do that. We pay our bills. That's all you should be worried about. I think it was S&P that they pushed back against on the ratings and

And said, no, we're not providing the information. We don't want you to do a rating on the state of Utah that is based on ESG. We don't want an ESG rating. Yeah. Sorry. S&P, yes. But Moody's is playing in this space as well. They're all doing it. Yeah, they're all doing it. They're all doing it.

I have had the best of times interacting and getting to know through the years and really relying on Jennifer Scott. And we're not going to let her go without asking a couple of the questions that we usually ask of guests. So I hope you're ready, Jennifer. I hope I am, too. I don't know. You know, the big one is pineapple on pizza. Well, now, you know, I used to live in Hong Kong and they put everything from baby corn to smelly tofu in.

on their pizza. So I think it's a wimp that complains about pineapple. Oh, thanks. Thanks a lot. You can see why I like Jennifer. She's not afraid to kind of, you know, put me in my place. All right. Let me ask you this one person dead or alive that you would want to sit down and break bread with. If you and your husband, Rusty, I'm going to have somebody over. Who would you, who would you have come over?

You know, I think I'd really love to sit down with Ronald Reagan. I was too young to appreciate him when he was president, but...

I really appreciate some of the things he did. I know our politics, a lot of things have changed since those times, but it was a fascinating time. I'd love to hear from him. Yeah, I had the honor. The impact he had on you politically as well. Yeah, I had the pleasure of meeting and spending kind of two days in his shadow, if you will, and

And what an inspiration. He was really the inspirational person who kind of, I used to be a Democrat until I learned to read and write. And then Ronald Reagan came along. And anyway, he's very inspirational to me. He would be great. Okay, last question. No, two questions. What's the best advice you ever got? The best advice. Ah, you should have given me some notice on this. I'm not a fast thinker. But, you know, when I got married, somebody told me,

that I should make sure that I always have the most underwear because the person who has the most underwear never has to do the laundry. And I have found that to be true. Wow. That's, that's, that, that is sage advice right there, folks. You can see why I get a lot of good advice from Jennifer Scott. Yeah.

Jennifer, I appreciate the friendship and the help and you're pouring your heart into this book with me. And I hope it's a good success. I'm sure it will be. I think people, if they really want to illuminate the challenges and see how Biden and Kamala Harris, who's really pulling the strings, making things happen, the puppeteers is amazing.

a book unlike anything else that's out there and very timely and it was through a lot of your good work to make that happen. So my last question is, who's your favorite former oversight chairman from Utah's third congressional district? Oh, what's that guy's name? Yeah. It's amazing how many times I ask this question and I usually get, well, I'm undecided. It's that guy that took all the portraits down in the oversight committee room. What was his name? Yeah.

Yeah, that was a fun... Yeah, I became chairman and usually there are portraits of former members or former chairman all in the room and I took them all down and I got so much heat. Got a lot of flack for that. I got a lot of flack, like why? I'm not inspired by previous chairman of the oversight committee. Let's put up the people we work for. So I put up people around America for postal workers to...

I had all these different shots around the room. Are they still there? Well, no. So the moment I left and then the next chair came in.

And then Elijah Cummings became the chairman of the Democrat. He put up all the portraits again. Oh, did he? Yes. Anyway, Jennifer Scott, thanks for joining us on the Jason in the House podcast. And thanks for all the great work on puppeteers and whatnot. And I can't thank you enough. Thank you, Jason. All right. I want to thank Jennifer Scott. She is just a gem. She works hard. She works smart. She's different than me. That's what I like about her. And I hope you enjoyed this discussion. Please subscribe.

Would love it if you got the book. Would love it if you would rate this podcast, subscribe to it. We'll have another interesting guest next week. I want to remind people that they can listen ad-free with a Fox News podcast plus subscription on Apple Podcasts. And Amazon Prime members can listen to this show ad-free on the Amazon Music app.

You can find more at the Fox News Podcast Network over at foxnewspodcast.com. And we'll be back next week with a fascinating interview. Again, thanks for allowing us to spend part of your day with you. And I hope you enjoy The Puppeteers. I'm Jason Chaffetz. This has been Jason in the House.

From the Fox News Podcast Network. I'm Ben Domenech, Fox News contributor and editor of the Transom.com daily newsletter. And I'm inviting you to join a conversation every week. It's the Ben Domenech Podcast. Subscribe and listen now by going to FoxNewsPodcast.com.