Firebrand: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the MAGA Revolution

by Matt Gaetz

  Given how desperate people become for an authoritarian hand during a crisis, he probably could have nationalized businesses—and then insisted that you check in with a host of new bureaucracies in Washington if you want to work, eat, get closer than six feet to your friends or family, or make a doctor’s appointment. But on this occasion, as in the Graham-Cassidy bill that Trump helped craft to repeal and replace Obamacare, his instincts were far removed from those of a dictator or strongman. His first impulse is to get Washington out of the way, devolving power to the states and local communities.

  The Trump approach to immigration and trade negotiation, which to liberals and libertarians alike might look like exercises of pure power, are better thought of as motivated by something akin to team spirit. If you don’t want Washington harassing and controlling your people, even less do you want foreign governments and corporations deciding our destiny.

  When I visit the wall the president is resolutely building on our porous southern border, when I see the rampant crime—drugs, beheadings, human trafficking—that increasingly spills across the border, I don’t find myself thinking the efforts of the wall-builders and the Border Patrol are aimed at harming another team. Their efforts are aimed, like the president’s, at doing right by the home team.

  As well-intentioned as police in Mexico or corporate executives in China may seem to some, they’re not giving their all to make sure our team comes out on top. They naturally have other priorities. We have our own, and if you call them nationalist, you’re not describing something terribly strange, dangerous, or alien. You’re describing the same natural impulse that animates and bonds a typical sports team. Maybe that’s why, to the horror of America’s liberal intellectuals and journalists, nationalism and patriotism come as naturally as watching the Super Bowl to vast swaths of Middle America.

  The nineteenth-century Scottish anthropologist John Ferg-uson McLennan argued that even as societies progress from more primitive to more complex forms, they retain rituals that have “totemic” power because they connote the very formation of the society itself: its people. The people cannot and should not try to replicate the exact conditions of their founding. No going back to living in caves or, in the case of the United States, in cabins without floors or running water. But it is natural to revel in the ceremonies, the victories, the informal quasi-religion that reminds us we are still one people.

  Newcomers are not always to be shunned, but they will have to prove themselves, like new teammates on a top-tier sports team. Don’t tell me that’s hard to understand, that it doesn’t jibe with some of your most basic intuitions. Don’t tell me that it’s hateful. It’s respect for that which has been built over long years by tacit partnership among a very large and dynamic team of collaborators. It is normal to want that team of some 330 million to thrive and perfectly normal to be peeved at those who insult it, tear it down, or don’t really want to be a working part of it at all.

  No team is perfectly homogeneous. It shouldn’t be. But we should not be so reductive as to equate team “diversity” with race or gender alone. Humans are diverse based on how they grew up, where they live, how they solve problems, how they learn, and how they process information, among many other things. A functioning team has to be flexible, has to make use of the differing capabilities and perspectives of its members. There is room for dissent even on a loving and cooperative team. But if you’re there to sabotage it, and there are times when some activists give that impression, I will be there to call you out.

  I was fighting for a team called America when I made that first Tucker Carlson appearance. If you saw it and heard a hint of anger, I’m sure you also sensed the love. If you’re a sports fan, you’re familiar with that combination.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  A Birthright Worth Defending

  “Restricted immigration is not an offensive but purely a defensive action. It is not adopted in criticism of others in the slightest degree but solely for the purpose of protecting ourselves. We cast no aspersions on any race or creed, but we must remember that every object of our institutions of society and government will fail unless America be kept American.”

  —Calvin Coolidge, accepting the Republican presidential nomination, August 14, 1924

  I’m often asked how I juggle the responsibilities of functionally being a Fox News volunteer contributor with that of a congressman. It’s easy to go on Fox. It’s work to go on CNN, but it’s pure joy to go on MSNBC. Where else is every question about how racist you are? Predictable TV is boring TV. And I don’t do boring.

  And so it was with MSNBC host Chris Hayes who, on January 16, 2018, tried to pigeonhole me as—wait for it—a racist for thinking that America should have an immigration policy that puts American needs ahead of foreign ones. Immigration, unique among political issues, reveals just how out of touch the radical Left really is. Of course, it’s hard to be in touch when you never touch the public. The Left’s coalition is increasingly high tech, high finance, and higher education—institutions highly unlikely to be displaced by illegal immigrant labor.

  The way it works on MSNBC is that the host has to simultaneously virtue signal to his viewing base while trying to cause drama between you and the president. They stopped reporting the news long ago and seek instead to make news through opinion. Hayes or Maddow—to be honest, it’s hard to tell them apart—will furrow his/her brow and shake his/her head and ask you why it was that the president was so hurtful, so offensive, so beyond the pale, so [insert focus-group-tested word du jour].

  The standard Republican shtick is to agree with the president without necessarily agreeing with his language or his tone. You know the drill. We agree without endorsing. The host sputters and putters and then breaks for commercial. Lots of heat, not lots of light. The moment is over so fast that it’s sometimes as if it never happened. I try to make every unforgiving minute count.

  I gave the standard reply, at least at first. I was new and still learning.

  “I would not pick those terms, but I would say that the conditions in Haiti are deplorable, they are disgusting,” I said. “I mean, everywhere you look in Haiti, it’s sheet metal and garbage when I was there.”

  Hayes hit back, stuttering from my candor. He wasn’t used to it. “I would suggest that people would find that kind of characterization, where people live, have pride, and love the place they’re from, as derogatory.”

  “Look, there are very bad conditions in Haiti. It’s accurate,” I replied with a smile. “Go there. Look around.”

  Look around. Draw your own conclusions. Use your own mind. After all, as President Trump said, we don’t have time for political correctness. The first duty of being an intellectual elite is to tell the truth, but it isn’t that hard when you can easily see the truth for yourself. We’ve all seen the videos of illegal aliens streaming across our borders. We’re not streaming across theirs. There is a reason. It is better here, and everyone but our elites knows it.

  The president called me afterward. He enjoys the show, especially when his best rhetorical gladiators go beyond the friendly confines of Fox News and battle the far edges of the Left.

  “You’re a wise guy, Gaetz. You’ll always be a wise guy. But you are very sharp. Quick. You are a wise guy and a wise man.”

  But you don’t have to be particularly wise to use your eyes. No, we don’t really do the whole moral and cultural relativism thing, the president and I. America is simply the best country. That’s why so many people try to break in.

  The Haitians agree and have voted with their feet. There are at least a million Haitians living in America, some legally, some not, most in my beloved state of Florida. The Clinton Foundation robbed them of the full potential of hurricane relief funds so that the State Department’s “Friend of Bill” contacts would be awarded lucrative contracts. The Obama regime gave “temporary”—ha!—protected status to some two hundred thousand Haitians illeg
ally in the U.S. in 2010.

  You don’t typically do that when things are going swimmingly in the old country. After all, following Chris Hayes’s horrified gasping during our interview, Haiti descended into violence exacerbated by a corrupt president and horrendous living conditions for its people. Now it’s sheet metal and garbage…and blood.

  President Barack Obama took the liberty to quote James Madison, saying, “[T]he most important office in a democracy” is “citizen.” But he did everything in his power to cheapen the meaning of American citizenship. Perhaps that’s because he considered himself a “citizen of the world,” as he put it to a crowd of two hundred thousand adoring fans in Berlin. Schoolchildren may pledge their allegiance to the republic, but the last president didn’t see fit to offer them reciprocal allegiance by protecting their future from the consequences of unchecked illegal immigration. Loyalty is a two-way street.

  When I pledge allegiance, I mean it. To my friends, to my family, but most of all, to my country. America First means American Citizens First, not the roaring crowds of European nations growing weaker due to their own flawed immigration choices and cultural decadence. If Europe is a glimpse at the Woketopia, count me out.

  American citizenship makes us the “peers of kings,” as Coolidge once said, so why is seemingly everyone trying to give away our birthright? Or dilute the preciousness of Americanism? Many politicians frame the immigration issue in terms of its financial cost or impact on economic growth. But immigration policy in America really isn’t about money. To us, it’s about our cherished American identity. To them, it’s about power.

  The real reason Democrats support unlimited illegal immigration is that they see unlimited potential to use illegal immigrants to hold onto power indefinitely. The immigrants first become clients of the administrative state, climbing aboard (and thus straining) social safety nets designed by Americans, paid for by Americans, and meant to help Americans.

  Left-wing “grassroots” groups and liberal politicians prioritize connecting illegal immigrants with taxpayer-funded programs, which the Democrats run, ultimately converting the programs’ users into Democrat voters. In two-party democracies, there is always one party that seeks to expand the franchise so as to expand its power. Eventually, the expansion leads to democratic collapse, followed by tyranny. Such efforts necessarily dilute the meaning of citizenship and turn us all into subjects of a failing government.

  Today’s elites would rather import a new people than serve the people that they’ve already got—people they have too often failed. Barack Obama wasn’t the first politician to betray the citizenry, nor will he be the last. In the pre-Civil War period, the South imported slaves partly to keep the Congress proslavery. The more slaves you brought in, the more the slave states would keep their power. The North, recognizing this electoral reality, agreed to the Three-Fifths Compromise by which slaves were counted as three-fifths of a free person for voting purposes rather than as full citizens as in the North. The Three-Fifths Clause, long derided by the Left as demeaning to black people, was actually an anti-slavery compromise that limited the power of the slaveholders.

  The Southern states wanted to count slaves as free men but not let them live as free men. They were simultaneously political participants and property. The tension between slavery and freedom in a republic whose founding charter states that all are created equal could not be maintained, and a very bloody civil war became the only way out. After that war, Congress passed the Fourteenth Amendment to make clear that the sons of the Confederacy and former slaves were equal under the law and “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States when they were born.

  Now, I’m just a country lawyer, but then again, so was Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, and Calvin Coolidge, so I had to turn to the original text to see for myself. The best thing about Congress is that you can look to the congressional record and parse what they were thinking at the time. As often is the case, someone else had already done the legwork. The cool thing about being a lawyer is that you get points for unoriginality, which is kind of what originalism really is. Did you do the history reading? No? Better find a nerd who has. And when it comes to birthright citizenship, there are no better nerds than those of the Claremont Institute.

  The Claremont fellow and former Trump national security official Michael Anton has beaten me to the birthright citizenship research. Anton notes the role played by Sen. Jacob Howard of Michigan, who worked with Lincoln to pass the Thirteen Amendment, which outlawed slavery, and the Fourteenth Amendment, which made the newly freed blacks citizens:

  [E]very person born within the limits of the United States, and subject to their jurisdiction, is by virtue of natural law and national law a citizen of the United States. This will not, of course, include persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers accredited to the government of the United States, but will include every other class of person.

  So particular was the Fourteenth Amendment that it specifically excluded Native Americans. Why? Because they weren’t under our jurisdiction. (That would have to wait until after Calvin Coolidge passed the Indian Naturalization Act of 1924 and extended citizenship to Native Americans still living on reservations.)

  This jurisdictional question is rather obvious when you think about it. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, born in the United States, can’t be prime minister and still run for president. It’s nice to think that my father’s political hero, Winston Churchill, born to an American mum, could’ve been president, but he was quintessentially British. Texas transplants like Sen. Ted Cruz (born in Canada) and Congressman Dan Crenshaw (born in Scotland) to American parents are subject to the jurisdiction of America, and so they too can run for president. I suspect both will.

  No, the Fourteenth Amendment was about making slaves free. There are only two ways to become American—“by natural law or by national law,” by blood or by choice. We trivialize both paths by allowing our courts and think tanks to undermine those legal categories in the service of the corporate slave power. For while the Civil War ended legal slavery, illegal slavery—human trafficking—continues to be rampant, if not wholly unabated. Once again, business and political interests want to count virtual slaves as free people for the purposes of keeping power.

  Under a misreading of the Constitution by our Supreme Court, the Department of Commerce counts illegal aliens for the purposes of congressional apportionment. Bring in as many illegal aliens as you want, the federal government implicitly says to the states. The more you bring in, the more you get to keep and expand your power in the House of Representatives. Sound familiar?

  There are boroughs throughout the U.S. where there are few voters but tons of illegal aliens. To have a say, all those aliens need to do is have a kid who—under a mistaken understanding of the Constitution—becomes a citizen. It’s big business birthing babies in America. Victoria Kim and Frank Shyong reported in the Los Angeles Times on a raid against one such practice where “for fees starting at $38,000, the [‘maternity tourism’ hospital] guides pregnant women through the process.” The details have to be quoted to be believed.

  “[The] U.S. might refuse entry [if] the belly is too big,” one business stated on its website, advising women to travel at twenty-four to thirty weeks into their pregnancy, according to an affidavit. “The size of the belly is quite important to determine when you should arrive in Los Angeles.”

  The businesses, known as “maternity hotels” or “birthing centers,” present a headache for local government and law enforcement because it is not necessarily illegal for foreign nationals to give birth in the U.S. Many agencies openly advertise services offering assistance in getting newborns a U.S. passport and extolling the benefits that come with American citizenship, including public education and immigration benefits for parents.

  Chinese scammers, finally charged under the Tru
mp administration, weren’t subtle. They called one corrupt organization of this kind You Win USA. According to indictments charging such criminal enterprises, three businesses sold the benefits of giving birth in America, which has “the most attractive nationality,” “better air” than China, “priority for jobs in U.S. government” (just what you want from a country with a history of spying on us), superior educational resources that include “free education from junior high school to public high school,” a more stable political situation, and the potential to “receive your senior supplement benefits when you are living overseas.”

  America is not just a constitution, idea, or set of values. America is our home. And we must do everything to protect our home.

  During a trip to the U.S.-Mexico border in Yuma, Arizona, I met patriotic Americans working in the U.S. Border Patrol. If she had her way, my colleague AOC would fire them all and denigrate the role they play in safeguarding our home from uninvited intruders. Almost all were of Hispanic heritage. They spoke with disgust of cartel leaders who would sneak their baby mamas (or is it baby mamacitas?) across the border late in pregnancy so that their children—proven to be the next generation of cartel talent—would have the trappings and legal benefits of American citizenship. El Chapo’s sons and fellow cartel bosses’ sons are Americans by law. The greatest nation in human history is getting played—and rather easily—by Third World narcos.

  Indeed, every single one of the children born in these criminals’ care is as American as you or me. Or so the defenders of birthright citizenship—really a form of fraud—would have you believe. Nobody knows how many children become citizens in this way, but the State Department estimates that “thousands of children” are born in the U.S. each year to people who are either visiting or conducting business on nonimmigrant visas. This isn’t “One man, one vote” but Boss Tweed-style politics where criminal organizations take advantage of what our ruling elite’s asinine abstractions permit. Don’t hate the players. Hate the game. Then change it.