Transgender Legislator Zooey Zephyr EXPELLED for Disrupting With Protesters

Welcome back to The Liz Wheeler Show. Something crazy is going down in the Montana State House. I know that sounds kind of random. What kind of political drama happens in Montana? Not a lot, not usually, but right now there is a state legislator by the name of Zooey Zephyr, or at least that’s the name that this person has or the name that per this person uses to identify themselves as actually a biological man who claims to be transgender now calls himself Zooey Zephyr. And he’s created quite a ruckus in the Montana House of Representatives because he opposed a bill. It’s Senate Bill 99 for anybody interested. Senate Bill 99 would ban transgender surgeries for children. And that includes not just the surgeries themselves, but also puberty-blocking hormones, cross-sex hormones, any kind of medical surgical transition for minors. Senate Bill 99 had already passed. 

This is the extra strange part. Senate bill 99 had already passed in the Montana State House in the Montana State Senate, and the governor of Montana gave a line item veto to this bill, which means he basically sent it back for edits. He said, yeah, I’ll sign this if you address X, Y, and Z. In fact, let’s not just call it X, Y, and Z. Let’s read what he said. It’s Governor Greg Gianforte. He said, as currently written, Senate Bill 99 provides an imprecise definition of male and female, as currently written, the bill does not contemplate treatment for a child requiring a necessary medical procedure because he or she was born with a medically verifiable disorder of sex development. Finally, as currently written, the bill is unclear about public funding restrictions. So in other words, the Governor of Montana wanted restrictions for intersex individuals, which is a legitimate medical condition. 

It’s not a mental condition. It is a physical deformity, essentially, where an individual, it’s very rare. An individual is born with, at least some of both male and female sex organs, regardless of what the DNA shows here. So this is the background. What’s happening in Montana. It’s a great bill. I’m glad it passed. I hope that the governor ultimately signs it. But when the governor sent it back to the legislature with these amendments, this transgender representative Zooey Zephyr started making a fuss. In fact this video, you might have seen this on Twitter or on another social network because it went very viral. Zephyr actually told Republicans in the House of Representatives that if they passed this bill, they would have quote blood on their hands. Take a look at this. 

And then the only thing I will say is if you vote yes on this bill, and yes on these amendments, I hope the next time there’s an invocation, when you bow your heads in prayer, you see the blood on your hands. 

So that’s pretty obviously a violation of the decorum of any house, any deliberative house. But then when the vote actually happened, Zooey’s Zephyr participated in a raucous disruptive, well, disruption of the process of the house. And I’m gonna show you that video in just a second. But we are gonna dive all the way into who this transgender individual is. What’s the background and where did this person come from? Because until 2019, there was not a footprint on the web anywhere for Zooey’s Zaffer. So let’s get to it. Okay, so the original comment from Zooey Zephyr, blood on your hands, that was the initial violation, decorum violation. This is not permitted in, in any state legislature, not in Montana, not anywhere, to my knowledge. Shouldn’t be at least. But then, Zooey’s ever participated in a demonstration on the floor of the Montana House of Representatives, where he raised up a microphone to amplify the voices of protestors who were in the balcony disrupting this vote. Take a look at this. 

Clerk will record the vote. Mr. Chair of 63 representatives, 34 voted no. Speaker has been upheld. Guests will come to order, our guests will come to order, our guests will come to order. Sergeant of Arms, will you please clear the gallery members? Will you please go to the side of the chambers, members? Please go to the side of the chambers. 

You can see a Zephyr right there in the middle, standing in that striped dress, holding that microphone up. This, by the way, was about a different bill. This was about parental notification laws. If your child’s in school and transitioning, whether you as a parent have a right to access that information or whether the school is allowed to just trans your kid without your knowing. So as a result of these behaviors, the Montana State House of Representatives, censured Zephyr, and actually prohibited Zephyr from participating in debate on the floor of the house for the rest of the session. Now, the rest of the session is like one more week. We’re right at the end of the session. Zephyr is still allowed to vote, not allowed to be on the floor because of disruptive behavior, but still allowed to vote. So not taking away, not disenfranchising the people who voted for this individual. And yet, Zephyr is, of course, doing what you would expect and politicizing this. Zephyr said that the Republicans who do control the Montana House are using the idea of decorum as a tool of oppression. Take a listen to this. 

And in that hearing, our caucus pleaded with the Republican Chair of the Judiciary Committee to not allow certain testimony to keep decorum. And we were told a lot of people have a lot of opinions on things. So when I rose up and said, there is blood on your hands, I was not being hyperbolic. I was speaking to the real consequences of the votes that we as legislators take in this body. And when the speaker asks me to apologize what he is on behalf of decor what he is really asking me to do is be silent. When my community is facing bills that get us killed, he’s asking me to be complicit in this legislature’s eradication of our community. And I refuse to do so, and I will always refuse to do so. I would also say that if you use decorum to silence people who hold you accountable, then all you are doing is using decorum as a tool of oppression. Additionally, when the speaker disallowed me to speak, what he was doing is taking away the voices of the 11,000 Montanans who elected me to speak on their behalf. 

Literally, every single thing he says right there is patently false. In fact, fun fact, the Dutch studies, which were the studies that you know, that the Dutch conducted, that underpin the gender affirming model, there was actually an 18-year-old young man who died undergoing these transgender surgeries. So you wanna talk about blood on your hands, you wanna talk about actual death, you wanna talk about harm to transgender bodies? Let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about these transgender surgeries, but of course not one to let a political opportunity go to the side. Zephyr tweeted this picture. I wanna show this picture on the screen. This is Zephyr outside of the hearing room. Once he’d been expelled, or once he’d been centered, he wasn’t allowed in there. He sits outside like this. You can see this picture saying, Republicans used a series of procedures to remove every bill from my committees, silencing my constituents beyond what they already voted to do. 

My constituents elected me to speak on their behalf in committee, and on floor stopping me from doing so is anti-democratic. Actually, you know, the one disrupting the democratic procedures is Zooey Zephyr. Now, Zephyr has announced that he is suing. He says, I’m suing the recent actions, violate my first amendment rights, as well as the rights of my 11,000 constituents to representation. Montana State House is the people’s house, not speaker riggers. And I’m determined to defend the right of the people, to have their voices heard again, Zephyr is allowed to vote just not to be on the floor because he abused the privilege of being on the floor by disrupting procedures. All of this to say, this is a very strange thing to be happening in the state of Montana. You wouldn’t expect Montana this to be happening in Montana. This is not the stereotype of the type of, the type of politics that happens at the state level of Montana. So I wanna, I think it would behoove us to ask the question, who is this individual? Who is this radical trans activist who is so counter to the views of the people of Montana? Where did he come from? When did he trans, what are his political aspirations? And joining me now to unpack this is Claremont Institute fellow Jeremy Carl. You can find him on Twitter at @JeremyCarl4. Jeremy, thanks for joining me. 

Thank you so much, Liz, for having me on. 

All right, Jeremy, you had a couple of really great, very viral threads on Twitter, digging into the background of Zooey Zephyr. So let me just pose this question to you. Very open-ended. Who on earth is Zooey Zephyr? 

Well, that was really what got me interested. I mean, this is not, typically, I’m not an investigative journalist. I’m normally kind of, you know, aiming to kind of look at a little bit higher-level issues in politics. But I am a Montana resident, and I was watching the kind of geography of this particular individual by the press. And nobody was even asking the most basic questions either in the state or national media about who is this person and what did they come from? And so I started doing some digging. And what I found out, and you alluded this in your open, Liz, was that Zooey Zephyr didn’t even exist until 2019. He before that was a man named Zachary Rash who had grown up in Billings, Montana and in Washington state. And had then eventually moved to Missoula and worked in some marketing jobs, worked at the University of Montana, and had some kind of very peculiar and upsetting things in his background and things that he shared. And I put some of those in the thread and said, you know, is this really the sort of person that we want representing us? 

So tell me what you found. I mean, so Zachary Rash is the birth name of this individual. He was obviously born a boy. I mean, you can honestly tell by looking at him, he doesn’t look like a girl. But he wrestled in high school. He wrestled as a male, and he wasn’t actually present in the state of Montana on election day, correct? Where was he? 

No, no. He was flying to New York City to have wound treatment, essentially. I mean, he would call it something else, but wound treatment for his neo-vagina, for lack of a better term. The wound had opened up when they removed his natural genitalia. So he was there. He said he was trying to make it back by evening. I don’t know if he actually did make it back, but you know, he was, he was off in New York City for at least some of election day. 

So what’s the background of this person? I just gave a speech last week at James Madison University, and I was talking to the students there, including the nearly a thousand radical trans activists who were protesting my speech, about how oftentimes the people that fall prey to this queer theory, that’s what the transgender ideology is. They have preexisting conditions, they have mental health issues, maybe they’ve been abused, maybe they suffer from bipolar, maybe they have fallen down a rabbit hole on TikTok or online. What is the background? When and why did this person become trans? 

Well, it’s not clear. And I mean, I think the orthodox theory that would be most common is there’s sort of two different types of people who identify as trans. And there’s a book called “The Man Who Would Be Queen,” that came out from a Northwestern University professor, a psychologist named Jay Michael Bailey in 2003. And at first it actually won a bunch of, like, gay book awards. And everybody said it was great. And then the trans community, which was much smaller back then, but still obnoxious, flipped out at this guy. And so, you know, it kind of became a non-book. But essentially it finds two different things. People who were at least on, among males who were very, very feminine boys from an early age and kind of go in that direction. That’s category one. Category number two. 

And I wanna stress you know, I don’t know, I’ve never treated Zooey as a patient. I don’t know him personally. So I’m just speculating based on what I think is good evidence from this book and other researchers who’ve looked at this, are essentially males who often do very stereotypical male things growing up. They’re wrestlers, you know, they’re not people who you would associate as being feminine, and they develop what’s called autogynophelia. In other words, they become sexually aroused at the idea of themselves as a woman. And you saw this with the University of Pennsylvania swimmer. This didn’t get a lot of attention, but they were later exposed to be in autogynophelia forums. So, you know, again, that was a guy who had obviously been very male in his presentation and behavior before who suddenly decided that they were female. 

So I think that’s part of what’s going on. There’s some things with video games that I talk about in the thread. And he was part of a video gaming community in a very serious way that had very serious sex scandals, sex abuse of kids scandal in 2020 in in-person meetings. Again, I’m not suggesting that he was, he may have just been a bystander and totally innocent. He may have been a perpetrator, he may have been a victim, but boy, that’s kind of an interesting coincidence and something that if we actually had investigative journalists, they might wanna be looking at. He is into some sort of very disturbing… 

What happened with that? 

Well, it’s not clear to me. I mean, I, you know, there’s only there, there’s so many ways. I mean, there are plenty of follow-up articles for an enterprising journalist to go look at some of this stuff. 

But there was, I think it involved more than a hundred people ultimately who were abused or victimized, who were identified. And Zooey expressed some concern in a Twitter thread before he was elected about feeling bad that he had brought some minors to this thing and sort of told the parents that he would take care of them. And then maybe those minors had been abused. Again, I don’t know, I wanna stress, I don’t want to go beyond what I know, but just to say that, hmm, you know, that’s kind of an interesting coincidence that at least would merit some investigation. It was called Super Smash Bros was the game, I guess. And he was, he was a really elite player. Like you can find him playing online. He was at, kind of at that level. And so that was some of the things I put in there. Additionally, he sort of had some interesting interests in kind of semi-pornographic anime that he had posted on his Twitter. And again, that’s something that is often associated with, you know, kind of a variety of gender dysphoria issues and other things. It’s kind of a gateway into transgenderism commonly. 

Yeah, I wonder why that is. I’m not an anime fan. I’ve never really watched it, but that seems to be increasingly more common that these people who later in their lives as they are a little bit older, not like young children, these people that are in maybe their twenties and thirties and suddenly come out as trans. Like Mr. Beast. Remember that YouTuber, Mr. Beast? His sidekick came out as trans. And likewise we saw on Twitter that was posting all kinds of weird anime things, including, like you said, I would call it, I would call it fully pedophilia pornography, like pornography that is fetishizing children, which is the most grotesque thing possible. I wonder what it is about anime. 

Yeah. And, again, that’s correct. And I mentioned that in my, in my longer article, which I linked from the Twitter thread. And again, I don’t wanna overstate my brief. There’s plenty of normal people out there who like anime. It’s not that if you like anime that you’re automatically some, you know, person who’s gonna become transgender or a pedophile. But there is clearly a correlation there. And it’s, I think, sort of symptomatic of people who also are really, really online, and people who are all the time online, particularly as Zach, seems to have been. Zach, Zooey, and his partner Tony Aaron Reid. That is a huge risk factor for kind of getting into these weird communities and putting yourself at risk. 

Yeah. I wanna talk about who Zooey Zephyr is dating in just a second, but talk to me about his family life a little bit as well. I believe that there was some significant problems there, too. 

Yeah. And again, I didn’t get into this too much in my article, because my goal with none of this, first of all, I wanna say I think both Tony and Zooey/Zach, I, they are right now, particularly, I think they’re being perpetrators of abuse, which is why I’m speaking out against it. But they’re also victims and they’re victims before they’re perpetrators. And I think that unfortunately this is a pattern that we see with lots of types of abuse, where victims sort of become perpetrators over time. So again, it’s not based on absolute knowledge, but I’ve just, I’ve seen that pattern and certainly what they’ve done is so unhealthy that I can’t help but view them for themselves as victims. His parents, again, I didn’t delve too deeply into this because my goal was truly not to embarrass this person. 

It was simply to make the facts known. There was a lot of avenues that could be mined by the investigative journalist that I did not go down. You know, I had his parents’ names and contact info. I didn’t contact the parents because I felt that it would be traumatic for him, and I didn’t need to do that to tell the story. But they were conservative Christians, at least according to him. They did not accept his transition at all. And so that obviously led to some interpersonal difficulties at home. 

And this person that he’s dating, another individual who identifies as transgender calls himself Aaron Reid, although his birth name was Anthony Reid, is to my understanding, a fairly prominent transgender activist. 

Yes. A very prominent activist, and one who got very aggressive with me on the Twitter thread before I finally blocked Aaron Reid. As a person who has some criminal background that is documented, has done some things with drugs and had kind of put some unsavory things they’d done with drugs and drug dealing in the past on threads, not under their own name, but under a pseudonym that I and many other people were able to connect with them. There were just, there were a number of disturbing behavioral things. And again, this person is, I think they’ve got 150,000 Twitter followers. I mean, this is a very prominent person in the community, and I think this sort of speaks to, I mean, why I knew I could investigate this and find something is they always want to tell this story of, oh, you know, I was just a boy and you know, but I was really a girl and I just was kind of a normal girl inside. And now I transitioned and I’m happy as a girl. When you look into it, it’s almost invariably never that there’s all sorts of weird things with fetishes and, you know, other sorts of mental illnesses, criminal behavior, other kind of things that are really the hallmark of unfortunately disturbed individuals. And I don’t say that with any joy. I’m not trying to be mean to these people, but that’s just the fact of what these, these are. 

Right. That’s objective reality. And sometimes the most compassionate thing you can do is speak reality, even if it’s difficult for some people to hear. So what’s gonna happen in the Montana House, in the Montana Senate? What’s gonna happen to these bills? What’s gonna happen to this individual? The session’s almost over. 

Yeah. Well, so the good news is either a day or two ago, Governor Gianforte actually did sign the bills. And so they are, they’ve been passed. Montana kids are protected. That’s really great. It was a heated debate. Now, we do have a super majority, not just a majority of Republicans in both houses of the legislature. So it’s a very conservative state, and a lot of people were like, how did somebody like Zooey Zephyr get elected in Montana? Well, we have 11,000-person House district. So even in a very conservative state, Missoula is the most liberal city in Montana. He’s in a liberal part of Missoula and was able to get elected from there. There was actually also another non-binary identifying individual from Missoula who was also elected at the State House at the same time as Zooey Zephyr. You haven’t heard almost anything from that person because they were not disrupting the proceedings of the legislature. And this is not about Zooey Zephyr’s identity. It’s about Zooey Zephyr’s behavior. And so that was what was sanctioned, not, you know, contrary to what Zooey Zephyr was saying on the floor. 

Yeah, I think that’s actually the most important point to make tonight, is that the behavior was what caused center not the identity, it’s the behavior, it’s showboating, it’s intentional behavior. He did this deliberately because he wanted to get the exact attention that he is receiving. And when he receives this attention, unfortunately for him, I suppose his background is going to be dived into because it is important to our political dialogue, when someone in a position of political influence is leveraging their identity to force that identity on us. And in this case, on children, or at least that’s what he wanted. We are certainly going to dig into it. Jeremy Carl, thank you so much for the reporting. Thank you for joining me tonight. I really appreciate it. 

Thank you. It was a pleasure to be on. 

All right guys, it’s Friday. So let’s check the mail bag. What have we got here? By the way, if you wanna leave a comment for me, if you wanna ask me a question for the mailbag, you can go to LizWheelerShow.com/Locals, LizWheelerShow.com/Locals. This is an exclusive privilege just for VIP supporters to ask any question. And this happens on a weekly basis. So go to LizWheelerShow.com/Locals. Our first question from the mailbag today is from JoeMoeXX88, who says, this is a funny question. Do you and your staff do concealed carry? Joe, I’m not gonna betray our security procedures because that would reduce their efficacy, but let me just tell you, I as an individual believe that it is my responsibility as an adult, and as a citizen to fully protect myself and to be confident and competent in the use of a firearm, should that necessity arise. 

(22:15): 

And my team, my staff, my studio, we do everything necessary to protect everyone involved in the production of this show. So I’m not gonna answer that question directly because I don’t know what kind of creeps and losers are also listening to this show. I don’t wanna betray any of the details of our security detail, but rest assured, we are very well protected. We are very secure. We are very safe. Hope that answers your question. All right. Sometime I’ll tell you the story about, no, maybe I’ll tell it to you now. I’ll tell you the story about the time that when my husband and I were dating, he is former military, he was Navy, he was in the Navy at the time. He took me back to his hometown for the first time. And we went shooting at this range, at this shooting range that was like not a very official shooting range. 

It was more like, it was more like this little clearing in the woods, where at the very end were like targets and stuff. But it was outdoor. It was very unofficial. There was no one running it. You just had to be part of the shooting club of the town to be able to use it. And, let’s just say, I won the contest that we had. I won that contest. We were using Glocks, Glock-19s, and I won that contest. So you can ask him, you can verify this, you can verify this story. This is absolutely true, absolutely true, and I’m very proud of it. And while that was nearly 10 years ago, as you can imagine, I don’t let him live that down, even to this day, the one and only time that I defeated him at that contest. 

But very proud of that. Okay, next question is from Amy B. Amy says, what are your top three issues for the 2024 election? And who do you think would be best suited for the job, whether they have officially declared or not? Well, let’s take the first half of that question first. What are my top three issues for the 2024 election? And it’s actually hard for me to narrow it down to three issues. I would say my number one issue is Marxism. Marxism comes in several forms. It comes in the form of queer theory, the transgender ideology that’s being indoctrinated into our kids, that’s infiltrated our institutions, from our schools to our medical community, to the government. It’s destroying children. And we should stand against it because of the children who are being destroyed. We should stand in defense of those children, but we should also stand against it because the ultimate goal of queer theory, of the Marxist transgender ideology, is the destruction of our nation. 

Marxism also comes in the form of Critical Race Theory. It’s the same thing. It assaults particularly children, white children, black children, telling white children that they’re racist because of the color of their skin. Black children, they’re oppressed inherently because of the color of their skin. And it calls for revolution. It’s supposed to pit one demographic of people against the other, in order to agitate for a revolution, whose ultimate goal is the destruction of our nation and the imposition of Marxism. We also have Marxist enemies abroad. We have a, a Marxist ideology that exists within the World Economic Forum of the Klaus Schwabian worldview that has taken root in our country in the form of ESG, ESG metrics and ratings, which is this social credit score system where companies and businesses are ranked, against metrics like sustainability and DEI and corporate citizenship, which just means abortion activism. 

And if companies don’t get a rating high enough, then they can face discrimination in the marketplace from banking institutions and, investment firms. They can be denied access to loans or good rates for these loans. Basically access to capital, which is necessary for entry and existence in the market. They can face discrimination on that front. It’s actually what we’re seeing with Anheuser-Busch, right? This company that ostensibly was apolitical whose consumer base is a very conservative consumer base. And because of pressure from the human rights campaign, actually a subsidiary of the human rights campaign, I think it was called the Corporate Equality or Corporate Equity Index, I assume Equity, Corporate Equity Index, pressures corporations to take part in transgender activism in order to increase their ESG score. 

This is all forms of Marxism, right, that are trying to subvert our cultural institutions, which is a very Gramsci, Antonio Gramsci-esque form of Marxism. Marxism is my number one issue in the 2024 election. If politicians and political candidates don’t acknowledge the reality of this political enemy that we face, name it as Marxism, understand the different forms that it takes, then we’re not gonna be able to fight well against this onslaught, this cultural onslaught, and we risk losing our culture. And if we lose our culture, then we will ultimately lose our system of self-governance, our freedom, and our liberty and our justice for all. So that’s certainly my top issue. My number two issue is probably election integrity, because what we saw in 2022 in the midterm elections is that even if people are generally dissatisfied with the president, even Democrats were dissatisfied with Joe Biden. 

We see inflation, high inflation, high gas prices, high food prices, which results in people’s wages, while technically increasing, their real value is decreasing. Even with this kind of dissatisfaction, we did not see Republicans win in the red wave that was predicted that they would, and I know that there’s, part of this is the vilification of the Republican name. Part of this is the effective onslaught that the Democrats have pushed on voters saying, if you’re a Republican, then you are a white supremacist, you’re a racist, you are a homophobic, transphobic, xenophobe. They’ve been very effective in branding the Republican name as being hateful, as bigoted and extreme and domestic terrorists. But that’s not the only reason that what happened in 2022 happened. It’s also not the only reason that Joe Biden won in 2020. The reason that those happened is electioneering, and I’m very careful when I use this word electioneering because I know there’s been a lot of wild accusations about different things that happened around the 2020 election. 

And when I say electioneering, what I’m talking about is I’m talking about states around the country who changed the procedures surrounding their elections, whether this be drop boxes that were placed in places around the city that were unmanned, they were available 24 7, whether this was ballot harvesting that was previously not allowed because of the obvious vulnerability to fraud. Whether this is universal mail-in ballots that were sent without requests to every voter in the state, sometimes to dead voters, sometimes to people showing up at people’s houses when they’ve already moved. I’m talking about rules that were changed without the authority of the state legislature that were counter to the constitution of the state. Like what happened in the state of Wisconsin. Election integrity plays an enormous role in whether or not we even have the capacity to compete with Democrats in 2024. So on two fronts, the Republicans need to understand what we’re facing. 

They need to understand that, while Republicans prefer election day, we want people to vote in person on one day. And Democrats prefer election season. They want people to vote anywhere they want at a Dropbox at their home or at a polling place for multiple weeks, if not months. We cannot surrender competing with the Democrats during election season just because we prefer election day. If we don’t build the apparatus to compete during election season, while we are simultaneously advocating for voting to be constrained to election day, then we are going to lose to the Democrats, who have used this entire election season to specifically target individuals that they believe are more likely to vote Democrat, and then curry those ballots back to polling places, basically collecting votes we’re going to lose. So if we don’t understand the apparatus part and compete with an apparatus for election season, while making sure that states and localities are adhering to the law when it comes to the procedures surrounding the elections themselves, then we don’t even have a chance of competing with Democrats. 

And we’re not gonna win no matter who our candidate is, how popular they are, or how well they understand the Marxist cultural attack that we are facing. Those are my top two issues. My third issue, I cannot decide whether it’s a repudiation of all of the COVID policies that were, imposed on us from vaccine mandates to mask mandates, to lockdowns, to school closures. If you thought that COVID lockdowns and the like were justified, if you believe that vaccine mandates are something that a federal government should be involved in, or a state government has the authority, the power to do, then I don’t wanna vote for you. If you believed in some of those things at the beginning and then you realized what a horrible mistake it is, what an abuse of power it is, and openly apologize for taking part in it, I’ll think about it. 

But I cannot stomach a candidate who still pushes the COVID vaccines, who justifies the COVID lockdowns for any reason, who thinks the masks were the slightest bit effective or who stands by any of the other policies that were a blatant violation of the power of our elected representatives and our governor’s state level. And then our federal legislature, or not even the legislature, it’s really Biden’s administrative state, his executive agencies in any way, shape or form. So those are probably my top three questions, if you remember, this was from episode 275, so a little bit back now, right after Nikki Haley announced her candidacy for the Republican Primary, I did an episode titled “20 Questions for Nikki Haley.” And my intention was, and continues to be I’d like to interview all of the Republican candidates in, in the primary, I’d like to ask them all these 20 questions. 

I did it with Vivek Ramaswamy. He’s the only one, by the way, who agreed to come on my show and answered these 20 very difficult questions. They’re, they’re very hard questions. I ask them in good faith, I’m not trying to trap anybody, I’m not trying to trick anybody, but they are questions that help us. You and I discern whether a candidate has the judgment that it takes and the understanding of the political enemy that we face, that would enable him or her to fight well against it. None of the other candidates have yet to accept my invitation. In fact, some of them are actively dodging. It, dodging my invitation because these questions are very difficult. But aside from those top three issues that I mentioned, some of the other things that are extremely important to me for a candidate for president, and this is why I’m sitting here and I’m not trying to dodge the Trump versus DeSantis question. 

I’m not trying to be coy about it. I’m not trying to be uncontroversial, you know, that’s not my style. I don’t know who I’m going to vote for in the Republican primary. I truthfully have not decided yet because I want answers from candidates for these questions before I make that decision. So in addition to, Marxism, electioneering and COVID, I want to know on a scale of one to 10, how serious of a problem do the candidates believe the administrative state is? And what exactly, what process would they use to dismantle the administrative state, which is just, by the way, it’s just technocracy, it’s not part of our constitution. Maybe this comes in a list of what federal agents, agencies, you would abolish on day one as chief executive. Maybe this comes with a plan for how to fire these deep state swamp creatures that exist in the administrative state. 

I wanna know what the plan is to address the administrative state. I also wanna know what each candidate’s philosophy is on liberty. Do you believe in absolute liberty? Do you believe in ordered liberty? Do you adhere more to the philosophy of John Locke or the philosophy of Edmund Burke? I wanna understand how you make decisions and how you want our society to be, what you want it to be. And so I wanna know what your philosophy is on liberty. I also want a definition, a very clear definition of the foreign policy of each candidate. I wanna know, are you a protectionist? Are you an interventionist? If not, what do you believe it means when you say America first, what do you, what standards do you use when you say, I’m only going to get involved if it impacts American interests directly? 

What are American interests and at what level do our interests rise to call for us to participate with the use of military force? I want to understand exactly what a foreign policy is for each of these candidates. I also want that, I want candidates to talk about Roe v Wade and the Equality Act and the Respect for Marriage Act. These, these uncomfortable social issues, marriage and gay marriage and transgenderism and abortion. And I want to hear their detailed thoughts on each of these either laws, pieces of legislations, or topic. I wanna know if the candidates continue to give money to Ukraine, would you continue that war? Would you cut Ukraine off? Or secret option number three, would you put strings attached to the money and start bossing Zelensky around the way that we have an absolute right to do since we’re giving his money? 

Would you defund the United Nations and the World Health Organization? Do you think the culture war is important at all? Would you ban TikTok? Would you, can you define ESG? What would you do to fight ESG? These are all things I know you ask for three, my top three most important things, but I cannot narrow it down to three because all of these things are critically, they’re pivotal, they’re critically important to, to not only whether we will be able to compete in 2024, but the direction of our country and whether we’ll be able to fight back against, against the Left, who right now has captured our institution and is in control of our government. So hopefully that answers your question. CJH1997 says, hi Liz, do you believe there’s a difference between a liberal and a leftist? 

Dennis Prager talks about this quite a bit, and he says that he believes there are some major differences between liberals and leftists. He says that liberals have done some good, but of course, leftists have done absolutely nothing good for society. What is your opinion? Do you agree or disagree? I certainly, Dennis Prager is correct when he says there’s a difference between a liberal and a leftist, right? There are still some people who identify as so-called classical liberals, which I would say is more of a John Lockean view. It’s almost closure to a libertarian. Leftists are essentially neo-Marxists. So there’s a pretty big difference between what they believe themselves to be, or what they believe their agenda is. I do think that so-called classical liberals make a mistake. They profess classical liberalism, but it just doesn’t work. 

And so ultimately, the end point of a liberal is going to be leftism, ultimately if we embrace, like who, let me, I’m trying to think of who’s in a good example of someone in the Democratic Party right now who is not a radical leftist, but is just a regular old liberal. Like Joe Manchin, for example. Joe Manchin just identifies as a Democrat, he just identifies as a liberal, but ultimately, even though he identifies as a liberal, and no, he’s not the same as AOC, right? AOC is obviously a Marxist. She’s a self-avowed socialist. She’s a total crackpot. But even though they probably dislike each other, they certainly have differing conflicting views. Ultimately, Joe Manchin’s views on politics, views on reality will lead to an outcome that AOC likes. Because Joe Manchin’s worldview, his liberal worldview, isn’t realistic. 

Joe Manchin’s worldview gives more power to the government, more power than government deserves a power that the government will abuse, and tries to socially engineer society, which leads every single time this has been tried, leads to what AOC wants, which is communism, Marxism. And the ultimate end of that is an authoritarian dictatorship. So yes, liberals and leftists are different. I would call liberals naive and leftists are corrupt and evil, but ultimately, politically, the outcome might just be the same thing. So I would reject being both a liberal and a leftist and just come to the good side. All right guys. If you wanna ask questions for next week’s mailbag, just go to LizWheelerShow.com/Locals. That’s LizWheelerShow.com/Locals, and you can post your question if you are a VIP supporter. Thank you for watching today. Thank you for listening. I’m Liz Wheeler. This is The Liz Wheeler Show.