My Speech to the Kansas GOP

An Address to the Bob Dole Dinner

I know readers are expecting my weekly newsletter, but I had a busy weekend of travel, including giving a lengthy speech at the Bob Dole Dinner at the Kansas GOP Convention. I asked organizers what was expected of me ahead of time, and they said, “Be funny and be edgy”… as if I could be any other way. It was an honor to be invited, and although many people in attendance did not appreciate the speech, I stand by it and hope you enjoy hearing my words and sense of humor for which it was intended.

Thank you all for inviting me. Thank you to Chairwoman Danderi Herbet and everyone involved in putting this together. I don’t get invited to a lot of these types of things, so it’s an honor… I’m usually banned from speaking in certain places… CNN comes to mind, as do a couple of radio shows. The Stand Up Blue Valley doesn’t invite me to anything… So I’m genuinely grateful to be here.

It’s ironic that I’m speaking at the Bob Dole Dinner, because 1996, when I was 9 years old, was the first time I ever learned that there would be a presidential election. I vividly remember researching the candidates for my class at school, hearing about what they believed in, and going to Grandma’s house for family dinner, where I would tell everyone to vote for Ross Perot.

And has been the case for most of my life, everyone ignored me and voted for Dole.
I know this isn’t a speech about Bob Dole, but I would be doing a disservice to him by not mentioning how much I respect his bravery. Not just for being a war hero and taking on the Clinton in the 90s, passing important legislation on border enforcement and anti-terrorism legislation but in the twilight years of his life in 2015, when the mainstream media were celebrating any Republican there was who would just crap all over Donald Trump… All of a sudden, Ellen DeGeneres would take a break from berating her staff to dance with George W. Bush… the man who worked to stop her from getting married to another woman… This broad is doing the tango with him because he’s not Trump and he’s being lauded a statesman just because they have a new enemy, give me a break.

When the incentives to be celebrated by the people who had hated him during his presidential run were present, Bob Dole stood with the party. He was the only living former GOP nominee to endorse President Trump.

That's a kind of bravery that suits someone who has shown leadership from his time fighting for the United States in Italy during World War II to standing up for our party’s nominee when he needed it most and not letting this country fall into the fate that Hillary Clinton would have brought us.

I must mention it because people of my age and those with my political leanings, who tend to be more populist and nationalist, often forget; therefore, I must honor him and his legacy.

I was with several members of this committee last night to discuss saying some nice words about Bob Dole, and they mentioned another Republican icon from Kansas, Dwight Eisenhower. It’s so much easier to speak about his legacy. Dwight Eisenhower won the battle of D-Day, built the highways, and deported the Mexicans. 

You know, if Trump wanted to have fun he would have named Tom Homan as Operation Wetback 2.0 Czar… you think the liberals are having a tough time with deportations now.

I have to say that the first time I realized Trump was going to beat Hillary was back in 2016, when my friend Amanda’s Puerto Rican grandfather, who had a complexion comparable to Walnut, looked at me and said, “Mr. Trump is going to get rid of those Dominicans.” I was like, see the key to this man’s success is that everybody hates somebody.

By now, you can probably see that I’m very reserved and shy, and I’d rather avoid making controversial statements. However, while honoring this icon of the past, I would like to discuss the crossroads we find ourselves at as a party today.

Because, while we are still the party of Eisenhower, Dole, and Reagan, we are also the party of the working class for the first time. We’re the party of those that make under $50,000 a year, of not just the farmer but the farm worker, of union member, of people who are unwelcomed, and uncouth, and unfashionable… men who may not have all their teeth and women who think dressing like Tammy Faye Baker isn’t just for drag queens.

What President Trump has managed to do is open the doors of a party historically reserved for people at the country club to the masses, and it’s extraordinary. What hasn’t happened is that the Republican Party and our elected officials haven’t caught up with the times. You can smell the residue of Bush lingering in the air like someone passed gas in an elevator. 

Too many people who still speak on behalf of this party, write legislation, and for all purposes run large segments of our party have their MAGA bumper sticker over their Romney, McCain, and Bush bumper sticker. They’d gladly rip it off at any time to replace it with someone who favors nation-building and endless wars. Free trade with China, mass immigration, and diversity are our strengths, and tech oligarchs are going to make us better, and the working class should just shut up because they can buy a cheap television. 

Voters in red state and specifically red county America who gladly put a W. bumper sticker on their cars 20 and 25 years ago to say screw you the elites as their children were sent to war, as wealth consolidated, as mass immigration made them feel like strangers in their own communities, and as their children became to the cheap fentanyl… is it wonder that for two decades the GOP couldn’t win the popular vote?
Nearly 40 percent of the people who voted for Obama were members of the white working class. That number is down to 30 for Kamala Harris because they have finally found a home and, most importantly, an advocate. Sure, he’s an overweight reality star with orange skin, and his model wife doesn’t smile, but sometimes gifts come in strange packages.

In the midst of all the conversations about bombing Iran, we need to emphasize that the only country we should be nation-building in… is this one.

Because I’m not sure if any of you have looked around recently, but there are places that time has forgotten. 

In Italy, there’s an expression called Non funziona niente, which basically means that nothing works. I learned about this phrase on the train between Rome and Siena when I realized there was no air conditioning. The windows weren’t opened… As the feeling of being suffocated built up around me, I asked the man taking the tickets in broken Italian where I could get some air, and he said that when the doors open at the stop, you get some air. 

And that’s how I learned the word that nothing works… only a country that doesn’t have a bridge between Sicily and the rest of the country, an idea first thought up by Julius Caesar, but they haven’t gotten around to it yet. There are parts of this country that are on the Non funziona niente Plan… I spend half my year in New Orleans, and I saw a pothole so big that a man put a mattress in it. I’ve been part of rural America, where there is absolutely no high-speed internet service; you've a better chance of meeting a non-virgin at Comic Con than getting Wi-Fi reception. 

Working on campaigns across the country, you see a lot of places and meet a lot of people, and it’s non funziona niente everywhere.

At one congressional campaign near Akron, Ohio, a volunteer offered to distribute lawn signs in their car, and when he opened up the trunk, there were hamsters inside. And I said, “Do you know you have hamsters in the trunk of your car?” and he said, “Oh, you should see my garage, they’re all over the place.” Discatsi 
And it’s not just more rural parts of the country; I’ve been to East St. Louis, which makes Afghanistan look welcoming, and parts of Florida where they must do the casting for My 600-lb Life. 

We need to do a pulse check on parts of this country.

Which is why we have Donald Trump as our President, a man who came down the escalator nearly 10 years ago to this day and while everyone remembers him saying some Mexicans were rapists, but what he also talked about was deindustrialization, the stagnation of middle and working-class wages, the failure of military interventionalism in the Middle East, falling labor participation rates, the drug crisis, how mass immigration had failed the American people, and how our leadership class, so drunk ideology were failing our countrymen.
It was the Queens, New York version of when Lincoln said, “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.”

We, as the party built on conserving our nation, must think and act anew because the Trump moment, where he is almost like a titular figure that we identify with our party, is coming to an end sooner rather than later. So many people haven’t learned a damn thing from him aside that it’s okay to tweet like you’ve been a happy hour since breakfast.

When President Trump brought up the idea of a tax on people making $5 million a year or more, which would hit Wall Street Bankers, Hollywood actors, and Big Tech oligarchs the most - i.e., the Democrats’ donor base, Congressional Republicans in leadership said no. When he asked to close the carried interest loophole, they said Over my dead body. 

They freaked out over tariffs, and Thom Tillis, the dumbest graduate of Chattanooga Community College, is calling for regime change in Iran, which will add idk about another several trillion dollars to the debt he pretends to care about. Something has to give: either we reduce ourselves back to being the party that could only garner 47 percent of the vote, or we double down as the party of the working class and adopt national populism.

Now, I’m not a psychic, but I have known to call a few balls and strikes in my career that have turned out to be true. I wrote an op-ed in 2010 encouraging Donald Trump to run for President on a platform that included tariffs and infrastructure improvements. 

So here are some issues that the GOP leadership needs to catch up with their voters on.

First, immigration. Americans don’t only want to deport illegals, something that there’s almost universal consensus on now among Republicans - even Lindsay Graham, who dreamed of turning America into Uganda, hasn’t brought up amnesty in a few years. But Americans also want lower levels of legal immigration.
For a generations, you’ve been served these nonsensical lines that we were told to believe because they made us feel good - like diversity is our strength; we’re all immigrants if you go back far enough; if we don’t have lots of immigrants, who will pick our food; and immigrants create unicorn companies.

I’d like to take this on one by one if you give me a minute.

Having the choice of whether to eat Italian, Mexican, or Chinese is our strength… choosing between Domino’s, Taco Bell, and Panda Express is a boon for the anti-acid and toilet paper industries. 

There are limits to the benefits of diversity. Studies from across the globe have shown that when you force diversity, especially through mass immigration, you erode social trust. The kinds of things that build communities. People vote less often, volunteer less often, and not only don’t trust people who look different than them, but also those who look the same as them. And that is something you cannot buy and cannot simply grow out of.

Secondly, this notion that we were all immigrants at one point, if you go back far enough in your ancestral tree… yes, and at one point, we all buried our food and hunted in packs. Who gives a shit. I am a descendant of colonists from England, criminals from Italy, and day laborers from Poland, and I have more in common with the man who kept hamsters in the trunk of his car than with anyone from those countries. 

No, 200 years of slow immigration rates, followed by 40 years of an immigration moratorium, four wars that included a draft, and a monolithic national media culture for a half century made a singular people. We are just Americans, I cannot go back across the ocean and live in Sicily, I enjoy air conditioning and don’t nap in the middle of the day for two hours.

Who will pick our food? Think of the farmers.. Why, in the year 2025, are we still conducting agriculture in the same manner as feudal societies in the Dark Ages? Why haven’t we incentivized the automation of farm work? Japan doesn’t have a legion of Mexicans coming to their rice patties every year; they have machines. We have machines, but we don’t use them because illegal immigration of farm labor allows the costs to be socialized while a handful of people consume the profits.And lastly, immigrants make billion-dollar businesses… something I hear all the time, one of the stupidest lines in the world. Almost all of those businesses are made by people from Israel, Western Europe, East Asia, or the descendants of those places. When the only African you can point to as a billionaire tech wizard is whiter than your napkins, you’re not making the case you think you are. Immigration from 10 percent of the wealthiest, most high-IQ countries should not be the defense for open borders from the entire world.

Illegal immigration strains our local services and gives credence to the idea that people who play by the rules are suckers. As of 2017, Kansas taxpayers spend $150 million a year educating, giving free healthcare, and incarcerating illegal immigrants. A survey from the Cato Institute, a think tank that believes America would be better if it weren’t so heavily populated, found in 2021 that 68 percent of people want to reduce legal immigration by at least 50 percent. 

It is time for Republicans in Congress, including those who represent Kansas but live in Florida, to support that goal. 

Things can be done federally and should be, and things could be done in the state legislature and should be. Why is Oklahoma the only state to tax remittances? Money that illegal aliens take out of the US economy and send abroad?
Cmon Kansas? Millions of dollars leave your economy to go to India, Mexico, and Ecuador, and you don’t tax it at the same rate as the federal government does, even if I were to give a cash gift to someone. 

Now I would like to bring up the subject of Artificial Intelligence, something that will shape the course of the next few years in our economy.

That’s why it’s so comforting to know that when dealing with this groundbreaking technology, we have 90-year-olds plotting their re-election. Seriously, Jim Risch announced that at 83, he’s running again for another six years, Nancy Pelosi, although she stepped aside, is still the de facto leader of the Democratic Party, and she’s so old that her teeth don’t fit.

And I genuinely love older people. I believe they deserve more respect in society than they currently receive. I think there should be another option for them aside from either making our laws or contracting crabs in The Villages in Florida. 

Tech leaders are boasting that they will eliminate 20 percent of white-collar jobs in the next five years, and this year, currently, is the worst job environment for recent college graduates that we’ve had since the COVID pandemic… It’s the first time in 40 years that recent college graduates have higher employment rates than people with associate degrees, and these are not people graduating in basic weaving and how to overthrow the patriarchy. These are individuals with degrees in computer science and STEM fields. 

And this will not only hit Gen-Y but also their Gen-X parents who have cosigned their student loans… Gen-X is the most conservative generation currently voting, and we’re about to make their children’s lives a lot more difficult. 

They keep saying, it’s going to be great, everyone will have a Rosie the Robot in their house to do choirs and maybe so… and maybe there’s no way to stop AI, the Trump Administration is certainly throwing us head first into this unchartered technology.

But the first rule of AI is that it should always be pro-human… and these people who talk openly about replacing all workers, chipping the brains of children, creating a social credit score like they have in Communist China, and living forever… they’re like people who read the Frankenstein book and took away all the wrong lessons.
I have a question for policymakers: How will you ensure this new technology, which will bring good to the world, also benefits the American people without making them unemployable? 

I don’t for the life of me understand why, for instance, we treat tech people like they’re some sacred calf. It has been 20 years since the creation of Facebook, and Congressional Republicans still haven’t passed any meaningful regulation on social media despite the fact that we know Snapchat is the number one app used to peddle drugs to children, and Facebook censors news. I am a big fan of President Trump, but why the hell haven’t we banned the Chinese spyware known as TikTok?Are we really that dependent on nurses doing dances in hospitals while patients are dropping dead behind them?

I am the founder of the biggest school board PAC in our country, the 1776 Project PAC. We’ve flipped over 250 seats in school boards nationwide, and have come to learn that 98 percent of all apps used in our classrooms resell the kids' data. And I’m sorry, but if data is liquid gold for these tech giants, why can’t we tax data or make these companies have to purchase these users data that their making in some cases trillions of dollars worth of money.

Look, I’m a capitalist, I love making money, I love working, i’m like a junkie when it comes to work but it was our party that broke up the robber barrons, it was our President Teddy Roosevelt that broke up monopolies, and it was stewards of the country from the Republican Party that helped create the greatest prosperity and middle class. We cannot say anything when a bunch of people with worse haircuts than Bernie Sanders from San Francisco say they’re going to wipe away ⅕ white collar jobs in the next five years.

If you want to turn millions of Trump voters into AOC voters overnight, make them unemployable and tell them there’s nothing we can do about it.
Lastly, I want to bring up education, as I mentioned with the 1776 Project, because I’ve been traveling all over the country discussing public schools. 

The good news is that conservatives at the school board level of government are really doing the Lord’s work. They’re reform-minded, they practice good governance, they’re trying their best to do a thankless job, and it’s amazing how we’ve seen states like Mississippi and Louisiana become leaders in education. 

I spend half my year in Louisiana, and the fact that it was one of only two states to make up for all the early-year learning loss from COVID is a miracle. 
These are states that spent generations as the laughing stock of our country, where they thought spelling bees were on the endangered species list, and now they are outperforming Kansas kids in 3rd-grade reading, despite spending $ 8,000 more per pupil per year.

They don’t have money on their side, they don’t have demographics on their side, but what they have is leaders willing to innovate. 

Conservatives have bought into this idea that the only answer for all of our education problems is school choice and I’m not here to crap on school choice, I think if we had an excess of a million nuns ready to teach handwriting to all the kids in America, it should be mandatory… but we don’t.

Republicans, for the first time, are more trusted on education than Democrats, and we need to lead on it.

In Miami-Dade county, we got a conservative majority to push classical education in the public schools… this is a school district where sign language is spoken more than English.

When you adjust for demographics, Kansas is #33 for fourth-grade reading in the country… your answer cannot be, at least we’re not Oklahoma. That’s like you’re the only football player who didn’t beat his wife… It’s not enough.

Kansas has every possibility to lead on education, truly be an innovator that protects kids' data, that promotes classical literature and the Western canon, and removes ideology from the classroom. Where kids graduate from school without believing we live in the worst country in the world.

But you have to be a state that is willing to lead, especially when we finally elect a Republican governor of this state in November 2026.

You have to be a state willing to lead and a party willing to lead. That’s not always the comfortable thing in the world, but bravery is rewarded by more people being brave.

Had Ron DeSantis not said no to the Karens of the world screaming about COVID, how much longer would the rest of our country have been locked down?

I do like that people are still wearing masks in public because, unless they’re like a cancer patient, it really lets you know who has a mental illness and isn’t afraid to share it. 

Bravery will reward bravery, leadership will be followed by more leadership, and it is time for Kansas to lead.

As I close, let me return to Bob Dole for a second. 

Bob Dole stood near an Italian mountain village, where an enemy looking to kill him and freedom and liberty from the Western World wounded him so severely that he lost the use of a limb, robbing him of the ability to ever again button his shirt or sign his name and was forced into a body cast for more than three years of his life.
And yet he prevailed, and decided to lead in the belief that shared sacrifice is a worthy cause for the nation that our founders and all the people who came before us built. The people who served with Bob Dole and didn’t make it home never died so that we can bring endless supplies of the third world to the United States, they didn’t die for a country because it was just market place like a strip mall, they didn’t die because it was a concept or an idea. It is a place, and we are a people unlike any other in the entire world.

He once said, Speak straight even when it gets you in trouble, and it will and always plan not to win but to win big.

The Democratic Party has all the corrosive beliefs that they have implanted into our nation over the last few years on the back burner… but they can and will come back into power with a force if we fail this moment.

 There are a lot of people who will define the post-Trump GOP, the next phase of the MAGA movement… everyone from snake oil salesmen like Vivek Ramswamy to accolades of the failed Republican Party like Ted Cruz.

It is our job at this moment not only to support the President, who has opened the doors of the working class to the Republican Party, but also to invite them in and lead them.

Thank you.