Firebrand: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the MAGA Revolution

by Matt Gaetz

  My very young staff all have alerts on their phones for my tweets. My Chief of Staff Jillian Lane-Wyant, Operations Director Alison Thomas, and Communications Director Luke Ball are the very best at what they do on Capitol Hill. They prepare, scheme, and strategize constantly. I do not lower their blood pressure. “If something embarrassing came out about you, she’d never have your back. Why are you doing this?! Republican congressmen don’t defend Democrats in sex scandals, boss!” Ah, youthful idealism.

  “Why Is Matt Gaetz Defending Katie Hill?” asked Mother Jones, a liberal oppo research outfit masquerading as a news organization. They couldn’t figure it out. Maybe I had nudes. I don’t. At least I hope not. But who really knows anymore? Could it just be a crass political play for young voters? Aren’t we supposed to want young people to vote? Was I gay? If I am, I’m terrible at it. Not that there is anything wrong with it.

  In boomer Congress the millennial notion that we’ve all made mistakes—the pictures are everywhere—and we don’t get too worked up about it, is totally alien. My mug shot from an arrest twelve years ago is online. So what? Some people share nudes. Big deal. Do we really care? The president is friends with Kim Kardashian, and we all know how she became famous. Kardashian is now using her fame to help others. Good for her. We millennials contain multitudes.

  As millennials, we were handed phones with video cameras at the most hormonal stage of life and we document every transgression. Who needs the deep state when you have an Instagram history of every slutty Halloween costume? What did you think we were going to do? What would we know of our parents and their worst choices if they had been boomeranging through Woodstock naked and throwing the sexual revolution of the ’70s on TikTok? We can’t see them drop acid on Snapchat though they don’t stop chatting about how great it was to break all the rules that they expect us to follow in technicolor. We learned of our parents’ youth through grainy family photos in Sunday’s best. Our children will digitally harvest HD images of the body paint we wore to Coachella. The permanent record they scoffed at is something we live with. Our digital identity is our real identity and vice versa for better and oftentimes for worse.

  We need more weirdos in Congress—more MIT geniuses like Rep. Thomas Massie and more risk-takers like Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas, who abandoned the black robe of the judiciary for the fray of Congress. We need the freak flags to fly at full—not half-mast. The place is far too boring because it is filled with old bores.

  Rep. Charlie Wilson plotted the demise of the Soviet Union amid hookers and blow in a hot tub. Where are all the badasses we were promised?

  Only fools would expect this boring batch of octogenarians and septuagenarians to solve our most serious crises when they are themselves on their way to checking out of the hotel of life.

  The budget crisis, climate change, Big Tech bias, immigration, or any number of other generational issues require the focus and attention of those who will deal with these crises and their aftermath. The young have perspectives the old do not.

  It gives us a chance to be more real, more, yes, representative, if we seize it. Everyone just needs to stop clutching their pearls long enough to evolve. President Trump evolved. So should we.

  May 16, 2020

  Camp David. Movie theater, watching Tora! Tora! Tora!

  “My Kevin is a genius! He said we’d be the first to flip a California seat from blue to red in recent history. We did it!”

  McCarthy went all in and won back Katie Hill’s seat in a special election with fantastic candidate recruitment and millions upon millions of dollars. Sex had cost the Democrats power. Or at least a House seat. Or was it momentum? Perhaps a sign of good things to come in the 2020 election? I guess we’ll see.

  “Hey, Gaetz.” I was sitting behind the president during the movie. He talks the whole time and doesn’t miss a line. “That thing you did for the girl with the naked pictures. That was a good thing. You were right to do that.”

  The president is at his best when he is being magnanimous. But I still couldn’t convince him I never dated her.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Uncanceled

  The radical Left of the ’90s and ’00s wanted the power to control our lives with government. They essentially won on all fronts.

  I wrote most of this book under a coronavirus lockdown strong enough to strangle small businesses to death, but our ailments began much earlier. When Republicans lost elections, government took over health care and the economy. Things weren’t any better when we won. George W. Bush grew government, creating new federal agencies and inventing new authorities to spy on us. After the reign of “43,” now treated as a beloved elder statesman, government was strong enough to have secret courts approve any desired political interference based on fabricated or altered evidence. “Compassionate conservatism” sure was nosy.

  Winning against some of our party’s boring standard-bearers—Bush, Romney, McCain—hasn’t satiated the Left’s thirst for power. The Republican losers of yesteryear had fortitude but not electoral success. Perhaps they were wonderful men, some like Sen. McCain even great men, but they were losers all the same, Romney and McCain at the ballot box, Bush in the annals of history. Appeasement is always and everywhere a weak strategy. We were promised “peace through strength,” but we got war without winning.

  The conflict that matters most, though, is domestic, and the political struggle here can be just as vicious. Ivanka Trump can’t give a speech at Wichita State to empower women and inspire a modern workforce thanks to leftist pressure there. I don’t want to live in a world too woke for Ivanka. First they came for the nerds; then they came for the hotties. This cannot stand.

  The Left wasn’t satisfied feasting on the political carcasses of Republican losers and wimps. They’ve grown hungrier. Today, the woke Left wants to control what we see, hear, and say so they can program what we think. Woketopia achieved! America defeated. CHAZ proliferated and widely adopted.

  If we consider our enslavement by political correctness “small stuff we can sweat,” if we tell ourselves to be still as uncomfortable ideas around us are canceled, the story of America is finished. No other issue we examine in this book will matter, because the future will belong to the controllers forever and ever. Political correctness and its Big Tech hall monitors are more dangerous than any South American caravan or Middle Eastern mullah. If we lose, it will be the only fight that mattered. If we win, every future debate is a fair one and therefore we are the favorite to win them.

  You never know when the mob will come for you—or for the voices that stir your American First ambitions. You must always be ready. The mob is always waiting for its chance to take your scalp. They are the witch-hunters who never want to run out of witches. Tweet the wrong thing and you’re erased, just like that. But preemptively give up the arena—the public square—and it will be like you never existed to begin with. Invisible.

  Why bother with politics, why bother with anything, if nobody hears what you say or argues for a better nation? What if Reagan had been banned from TV? Or Obama from the internet? Or Trump from Twitter? As each of those communications revolutions occurred, those of us who wanted to partake and might have an unpopular view had the element of surprise. Now, though, we have targets on our back—every deplorable among us. That which our enemies could not achieve through election, they now seek to do through algorithm. It’s all about shutting us up. Well, I aim to misbehave. I was promised we would win so much we’d get tired of winning, and I’m not yet the least bit gassed.

  Bill Clinton’s Democrats of the ’90s would “Mediscare” old people—especially in my beloved Florida—to win elections, making people think they’d be left without doctors. Those politicians, tactics, and targets may be fading away, though. Today’s woke Left is after the young, the future. It seeks to dominate them with debt and diminished expectations—but most of all by narrowing their intellectual horiz
ons.

  Millennials and zoomers experience the world principally through their phones. Control what they see, and you control their destiny—and ultimately all of ours. What sorts of things will trend on that phone? What ideas will be permitted? What arguments will be suppressed, curated, or promoted? Meme magic (manipulations through catchy ideas) is real, and there are magicians among us, with quite a few practicing the dark arts.

  Like the president, I use Twitter to go directly to the people. And like the president, my successful use of technology angers my political opponents, precisely because I am so effective at it. They’d like to think that they alone control the conversation because they control the narrative. They tilt the field of debate in their favor. All tech companies go through an evolution: liberation, then corporate control, then government control, and ultimately woke left-wing despotism. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and centralized power makes controlling thought easier. Those who own the platform think they own the content—and therefore they have no need to debate; they simply bid ideas they dislike adieu. Shaming and shadowbanning are easier than winning the votes of real Americans, they’ve learned.

  They really do shadowban the arguments they don’t want people to see—like when Twitter got busted by Vice News for shadowbanning the four members of Congress most aggressively defending Trump: Meadows, Nunes, Jordan, and Gaetz.

  We are “too dangerous,” they tell us. But real danger befalls a people managed and programmed by prevailing thinking at Manhattan dinner parties or Silicon Valley gender-intersectionality seminars. The Left treats us as children. We are so weak that we cannot confront the strange, uncomfortable, and even horrid thoughts expressed in a free society, they say with their demands for censorship. But the First Amendment doesn’t exist only to protect pleasant speech. Sometimes we necessarily are all unpleasant—especially in politics.

  Politics is inherently divisive. Congressmen used to cane each other. Roman senators stabbed Caesar. Cuban representatives break into fistfights in the Florida legislature every few years. Sure, we should all aspire to the most austere of political engagement. And yet when we fall short, now the digital death penalty is imposed, and it’s both prosecuted and enforced by faceless cogs who we will never meet. It is a cold regime. There is no appeal. It is un-American to be deprived of the opportunity to face your accuser. It is positively antihuman.

  For the most part, the prison wardens of Woketopia are right that Republicans don’t know how to communicate, so censoring them isn’t really necessary. Few bother to seize the narrative. Instead, they sacrifice boldness at the altar of fear. To avoid Twitter Jail, they won’t commit the crime of independent thought or provocative speech—assuming of course they have either to offer. But then, it’s downright shocking how ineffectual most Republicans are. The court of last resort isn’t the Supreme Court but the court of public opinion. You should learn to joust and engage in combat if you ever expect to win. The public loves a champion and will tolerate you getting knocked off the horse and muddy if you get right back up and get back to it.

  “We ain’t one-at-a-timin’ here, we’re mass communicating!” to borrow a line from one of my favorite movies, O Brother, Where Art Thou? When we’re tweeting nowadays, we’re governing and doing so at the speed of thought. We wanted flying cars, but we got 140 and now 280 characters. I intend to make every one of them count. Leftism requires carefully laid plans because it needs to work so hard to sell the lies it is peddling. Twitter allows us to disrupt the cycle and to always keep them on their back foot, unsure of when and where we will hit them next.

  Twitter also has many participants who, like all cults, do little thinking and much signaling. Sycophants will happily retweet whatever the cause du jour is, no matter how absurd. The more absurd the better. It doesn’t matter if it’s true. It only matters if it trends—just so long as the mob doesn’t get them. The hashtag is not a program but a slogan, a sentiment. Their Woketopia will never be achieved, but that’s kind of the point, isn’t it? Cheap grace cheapens people and turns them into liars, pretending each new battle is the pivotal one. Really, they’re just terrified their fellow social justice warriors will turn on them if they display a lack of zeal. Cowardice is contagious, and it too goes viral if you let it.

  But then again, courage is contagious too. I won’t surrender, not to the mob, not to the Chinese, and certainly not to the press. But everything in politics now is about trying to bring you to your knees. Once you are on your knees, you never get to stand tall again. You’re done. And everyone knows it.

  Twitter “labeled” one of my tweets for “glorifying violence.” I explicitly and frequently speak against political violence in America. What did I tweet? That following the designation of Antifa as a terrorist organization by the Department of Justice, I hoped we would hunt them down with all the vigor with which we prosecuted our War on Terror. The threat of Antifa is real and it is here.

  Patrick Underwood was killed serving our country as a federal police officer in Oakland, California. Rioters shot him. He was fifty-three. Captain David Dorn had retired from the St. Louis Police Department but was willing to help his friend defend his small business from looters. It cost him his life. Both of these dead American heroes are black. As Project Veritas proved in an explosive video series showing an Antifa-insider-turned-informant, these people intend violence and death. The only way to give them what they want is to give them everything—your submission, your fortune, your children—up to and including your life.

  My oath is to defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic, and I will keep my oath come what way—in the real world, and online. It is hard to cancel a congressman, though many try. Just ask former congressmen Steve King or Dana Rohrabacher. Fame is both weapon and shield. It makes you a target but also makes them have to work to get you. All political lives end in failure, in a sense, but some are spectacular. Better to be a spectacle than to end up having never said anything worth canceling because nobody was listening in the first place.

  Federal law is quite clear about instigating mobs, at least in the real world. But the line between what is real and what is online keeps blurring. Online bullying is now a crime in most states. The consequences of an online politically correct mob can be almost as devastating as a real one. Social media has become the new public square, and every so often there’s a digital firing squad. Like the executions of old, these “cancelations” have become a regular, even routine, occurrence. Mob-instigator Twitter even has the audacity to “fact-check” its targets against the claims of left-wing groups, including criminally fraudulent hate groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center.

  When everyone is informing on themselves constantly by living so publicly thanks to social media, there’s a lot of fodder for self-appointed opposition researchers. Who needs the CIA when my generation had drunk Facebooking? The KGB would have loved the technology we’ve made to spy on ourselves.

  Writer Scott Adams promotes the twenty-year rule on ignoring past behavior and the forty-eight-hour rule for apologies and corrections. After those spans, move on. Time will only shorten these windows.

  The pressure to conform has led to an increase in suicide as young people find it hard to measure up to the Instagram version of their lives. For the young, social life isn’t mall life or sports life, it’s internet life. We don’t go out drinking on the weekends, but we do make sure every photo we have is perfect, just as we are not. There is a deep irony in Silicon Valley’s nerds creating the ideal hotbed for bullying—social media—as if they decided to make the entire world feel the pain that they felt being stuffed in lockers. Have our tweets become the new social credit score before we even realized it?

  There is a still-darker part of tech-enabled cancel culture. In theory, social media elevates the best ideas; in practice, it descends into recrimination, fake news, and foreign influence. Which drug treatment should we take to avoid th
e pandemic? Who knows. When everything is tribal and nothing is sacred, everything is a free-for-all, forever. Cancel culture targets the weak, the odd, the different—the very sorts of offbeat people we need to make the kinds of advances that made America great and will keep her that way. We talk often of safe spaces on our campuses, but we need a safe space for the truly odd among us, so long as they aren’t hurtful.

  President George H. W. Bush said upon seizing the GOP nomination in 1988, “I’m a quiet man…. I see the quiet people.” Well, maybe I’m a weird man. I surely see the weird people. It is my view that the brilliant people in our society are often rare, precious, and strange. They sometimes don’t get basic things right. But they can get complex things perfect. They are the real 1 percent who toil endlessly on the gadgets and gizmos that give us the advantages we need to advance humankind. Throughout history, many of the most brilliant have been profoundly unhappy—sometimes happy only when they are working on the sorts of problems that interest them and them alone.

  Alan Turing—the father of modern computing—defeated Nazi Germany with a team he assembled based on their answers to crossword puzzles placed in newspapers. Turing happened to be gay, and he took his own life in shame. Turing and the greatest acting director of national intelligence in American history, Richard Grenell, prove that patriotism isn’t lashed to bedroom dogmas.

  But historical figures we now consider heroes were strange in ways that might now make them targets for the online mob, maybe even cancelation.

  Sir Isaac Newton proclaimed he was proud to die a virgin. Bizarre! Tragic, even if you ask me. Howard Hughes revolutionized air travel and then became a bizarre recluse pissing in milk bottles. Cancel that weirdo! Put him on Zoloft and wheel him into the corner. We are now routinely told to wash our hands, but Ignaz Semmelweis was mocked, jailed, and killed for telling us to do just that. Yet he is revered by modern-day nerds for discovering germ theory. The brightest among us are often appreciated only after the rest of us catch up. Sometimes they even have to die first, like accused witches.