Tennessee Congressman Tim Burchett on Navigating Through the Waters of Washington, D.C.’s Woketopia

 

Live from Music Row Thursday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. –  host Leahy welcomed Congressman Tim Burchett (TN-02) to the newsmakers line to discuss the environment in Washington, D.C. under a Biden administration and how conventional politics is no longer working today.

Leahy: We are joined on the line by our good friend Congressman Tim Burchett from the Second District up in the Knoxville area. Congressman Burchett, thanks for joining us.

Burchett: It’s an honor being there. I miss being in Nashville from my days in the legislature. But I don’t miss the traffic. (Leahy laughs)

Leahy: We hear you on that. Although I must say when I drive into the program at about 4:30 a.m. from my home in Williamson County, there’s not a lot of traffic but you do that three hours later and it’s bumper-to-bumper. You’re quite right about that. What’s the traffic like in Washington, D.C. ? Are you in Washington this morning?

Burchett: No, actually, I’ve escaped actually through three layers of security to get out. It’s like from a third world country up there.

Leahy: What’s with the 9,500 National Guardsmen up there right now? What is that about?

Burchett: I don’t know. I guess they just trying to enforce their Woketopia on all of us. It’s the only thing I can think of. I was glad that our Governor Bill Lee brought ours or told ours to come home. It was ridiculous. They treated them terribly with all the threats and Pelosi and Biden wanting to show their forcefulness.

But they treated our fighting men and women pretty badly. I thought the way they didn’t give them a place to stay. And then one of the liberals of I think it was from Oregon got on one of them downtown at a Dunkin Donuts because he wasn’t wearing his dadgum mask. It’s unbelievable really.

Leahy: It’s Woketopia. I love that phrase you just introduced. Isn’t that I think where we are as a country right now Tim? I look at this and I say, you know, the new Biden administration is filled with people who, and this is my characterization, lack common sense. A, to begin with. B, mostly are dishonest. Almost all. This is again my characterization not yours, but isn’t that what the country has come to you right now? We have dishonest mainstream media. A dishonest Democratic Party. Dishonest Big Tech trying to tell all the rest of us what to do and it doesn’t feel so good.

Burchett: Yeah. It’s like that verse in the Bible that talks about professing themselves to be wise they became fools. They can’t imagine that any of us peasants would question their ability to govern which they are not governing. They are just ordering with 21 executive orders I believe we’re up to. There is no telling what will happen today. You start with the Keystone pipeline. And then out of the same breath, they’re saying how they are promoting jobs.

They killed over 8,000 union jobs. 8,000 union jobs. I think almost 12,000 total with just one swipe of the pen. And the trouble with labor is the average member and of the teamsters, even around here they go to church and they hunt and they fish. They don’t agree with the Washington agenda. They just need a job. And their union bosses just roll over for Biden and just fawn over him and give him this endorsement and then it just kills these jobs. And that is not the way. It’s top-down management just like with the masks.

I mean, you know everything they do is top-down. They’re going to tell us how to do it. If you don’t want to go to San Francisco, don’t worry folks, it’s coming to you. Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco is coming to you and that is the definition of Woketopia. And from abortion to everything else they’ve done. You know, they said you can’t drill on federal lands. I mean they’re catering to foreign businesses. And they are just caving into everything.

And then you know this false flag they throw up and you know him and Putin talking Russia isn’t our worry right now. It’s the dadgum Chinese. and if you don’t think that they’re not in bed with them you need to figure out what’s going on because we are killing our energy jobs. Under current under President Trump, we were an exporter of energy and now we’re just reversing that. Why in the world would you reverse that of all things and the jobs that go along with it? So get ready folks for four years under President Kamala Harris it’s going to be pretty rough I’m going to tell you.

Leahy: Well, look, it’s funny because we’ve already started the countdown like every Wednesday. One week. Up to one week and one day of the Biden administration. We have 206 weeks and six days left. I don’t know, it’s going to be tough. Do you have a strategy to make it through? Is it a week-by-week thing? Do we look for their latest idiocy and push back against it? What is your strategy for surviving the next 206 weeks and six days?

Burchett: It’s a day by day and watching a lot of YouTube videos. (Laughter) If you need someone to fix your Cushman Motor Scooter, I’m the guy. I’ve seen the video on it multiple times. And my Dave Ramsey videos if they’ve had any air before this thing started he sure as hecks not letting anyone win it in because I don’t believe they’ve seen a Dave Ramsey video.

But all kidding aside. Honestly, we’re going to have to pray for our nation. I told our conference we call it the caucus but we call it a conference in Washington. I’m not sure where that came from. But I said this is past doing the normal stuff. We’re at a point where we’re going to have to ask God for wisdom because everything that’s right is wrong. And up is down it’s complete bedlam. When they start talking about guaranteed income to people that honestly, they wouldn’t work the third shift at a donut shop.

I mean, you’re talking about paying people to stay at home and with welfare. Now, they’re guaranteeing an income for people. That is the next move. I thought that would never happen. But there it is. You’ve got The Squad or whatever you want to call it is basically dictating what’s going to happen to our country. And we are going down the tubes fast and we better hold on and ask God for some wisdom and his intervention because conventional politics is not working anymore. And you are right. The national media has sold us out.

Leahy: You mentioned The Squad and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She’s a colleague of yours.

Burchett: I pray for her because reason is out the window. I’ve talked to her about energy and things about my Green New Deal which involves capitalism. That kind of green. And hers does not. And so I think some of our solutions to the environment and other things are in my book and my opinion is capitalism.

This cell phone I’m talking about, 20 years ago it was a 100 million dollar computer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and I guarantee it wasn’t some dadgum government program that put this thing in my hand. It was capitalism. It was profit. It was making it better and finding a market share for it. And dadgummit here we are. I’m sitting here talking on a cell phone.

Everybody in America has a cellphone or multiple ones. So, you know that that capitalism is what drove that not a government program. And we used to teach that in public schools. and I worry about that now. are poor public educators, we always want to beat up on them, but it’s not them. It’s these gutless school boards that won’t put the right books in their hand that yield them to the leftist groups and in our for teachers are demoralized about what they have to teach. And in a lot of instances all the testing and all the garbage they have to do and then you wonder why your why these kids in college, which is what Alexander Ocasio-Cortez is exactly. And she’s an economics major.

Leahy: (Laughs) Was it Marxist economics? She’s not the brightest bulb in my view.

Burchett: She reads a press release very well. (Laughter) I’ll just leave it at that.

Leahy: We’ll talk a little bit more about her. You know, I want to continue on the theme of the problem with education. And I think we may have mentioned it to you before that we here at the Tennessee Star, this will be our fifth year, we do a Constitution Bee. It’s like a spelling bee for kids. We’ve written a book called Guide of the Constitution and Bill of Rights for secondary school students. And kids earned scholarships last year. One kid earned $10,000. in scholarship money that we paid and he’s going to the University of Alabama with it. We have other scholarships that we give away.

Burchett: I wasn’t aware of Alabama, I thought that was a two-year school.

Leahy: (Bellows) That’s a great line. So our experience of doing this has been when we take the book into public schools a couple of teachers are interested in taking them but they are in a system where they are not rewarded for teaching an originalist view of the Constitution. They have so many other things to be tested for and that’s not on the list. And it’s very very troublesome. One thought that we had, maybe you can think about this over the break.

Here’s the question that I’ll pose to you. You think about it over the break and then maybe come back to it. My view is a lot of the terrible things going on in education is coming from these crazy rules and regulations issued from Washington and the Biden administration now that 10 percent of K-12 publication education funds are coming from Washington. I think it would be a great idea for the state of Tennessee to say you can keep your 10 percent federal government and those regulations and we’ll manage our schools ourselves. So Congressman Burchett, think about that one and we’ll come back after this break.

Burchett: Sure.

Listen to the full interview here:

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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to the Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.