Man Who Confronted Pocahontas on Student Loans Calls Us

BUCK: There’s a throwback to when Elizabeth Warren was confronted by somebody with the reality of the so-called loan forgiveness, but it’s really people doing the right thing getting screwed and people who made a choice who you know will be getting a little political payoff.

BUCK: That was Joe Lutz from Missouri, and he is with us now, actually, the guy who confronted Elizabeth Warren. Joe, thanks for calling in?

LUTZ: Hey, how you guys doing today?

BUCK: We’re good. You got a lot of people fired up with that exchange with Senator Warren, and I just want to know: Now that you see Biden’s comeback to this, what are you thinking? What does it feel like now that you see they may go through this anyway?

LUTZ: Well, you know, you just see what the cost is, the picking and choosing of winners or loser, and then they can’t understand why anybody’s pissed off at ’em when they do it. That’s what’s really amazing.

CLAY: It is kind of fascinating to speak about. You are speaking, I think, for many people out there. The thing that I found most compelling about your confrontation with Elizabeth Warren was — and I know there are a lot of people out there listening us right now — you specifically chose to help your daughter pay for college when you could have spent money for other luxuries. You could have bought a new car.

You could have gone on fancier vacations. You made that choice. I think a lot of people out there listening to us have made that choice now. How furious does it make you to think that your choice, your sacrifice on behalf of your children when it comes to putting them through school, the government now is treating that as if it doesn’t matter at all and rewarding people who made less solid financial choices for their children?

LUTZ: Well, you know, you look at it and you say to yourself, “I can be mad about this, I can be upset,” and you are. But my daughter is the one who did a lot of the work to put herself through school, to not have those debts. And she has a great job now, and she will mop the floor with the people who get the free college, who get their student loans paid off. You know, in the short run, it’s a nice deal.

In the long run, you know, it proves that, “Oh, I don’t have to work hard.” Well, my daughter already knows how to work hard. She’s already mopping the floor with ’em. She’s gonna end up on top and they’re gonna end up second fiddle in the long run. In the short run, it’s infuriating. In the long run, you know doing the right thing will pay off just for that simple fact.

BUCK: I’m just wondering, Joe, when you’re squaring off on this issue and confronting Elizabeth Warren with some truth that she didn’t want to hear, what was her demeanor like toward you after this?

LUTZ: Well, her demeanor?

BUCK: Yes, sir.

LUTZ: Well (sigh), she sat there — and I knew you only had maybe 20 or 30 seconds in the selfie line, because I didn’t get to ask a question during the event; so in the selfie line I felt, well, I drove all this way. I’m from Missouri, not Iowa, and I thought, I’m gonna ask the question then. I thought, you know, I’m in the front of the line, I’ll jump in there. And I knew I wanted to set her up because you weren’t gonna have a policy debate here. You had a little bit of time to get it in.

But the other thing was, I was by myself. You know, I didn’t think anybody was filming it. I didn’t think any of it was being recorded, and I think because of that it came off as a lot more genuine than if you would have tried to stage it. But when I said that, you know, “My daughter’s getting out of school,” et cetera, and she said, “God bless you,” and then it was time to drop the other shoe and, you know, do just, do the old, “You know, are you gonna give my money back?”

And it’s amazing, all of politics, I’ve never had a quicker answer in my life than “of course not.” You know. And she was going to go into her long-winded explanation about, “Well, you know, if you work there with Social Security, should we not have done Social Security?” I knew what she was gonna do. I could tell what she was gonna come back with. So, I didn’t give her the chance.

I made sure that I got my 15 seconds in so I could let her know exactly how myself and everybody else felt about it. And, like I said, you could tell by the way she was fidgeting that she was like, “Uh-oh. Now what do I say?” You know, and she just had to sit there and take it. There wasn’t much she could do. And I’m just sitting there in the back of my mind going, “Whatever you do, don’t cuss, don’t cuss.”

CLAY: (laughing)

BUCK: Good man. That is always a good rule. And, Joe, you made an important contribution to this discussion, debate over the so-called cancellation of student loans, man. Thank you so much for calling in. That’s fun.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: That clip has been everywhere still. It’s a real moment. Well done, sir, by the way. Clay was speaking about courage before. For somebody who’s just living a private life, asking a tough question like that of a U.S. senator, that takes some gumption.

CLAY: Yeah, and I think it’s interesting to his point that the way it was recorded, he wasn’t like staging it. Somebody else just happened to grab it as well.