Washington State Congressional Candidate Joe Kent Will Put America First

CLAY: Man, I’ll tell you what. Every single day, it feels like just an onslaught here as we sit 19 days from the midterms, and I cannot wait. And I bet, more than anything, Joe Kent knows exactly what I am talking about. He is a Trump-endorsed America first congressional candidate in Washington’s 3rd District. He’s also a Special Forces veteran Gold Star husband who served 11 combat tours. I was reading about you, Joe, in the New York Times as they wrote — I think it was in a Sunday edition, you’ll know probably better than me — about all of the veterans who are Republicans and who have decided to enter into elective politics. And they try to make you and everybody else who is a Republican sound like a crazy person. But I read it and I thought —

BUCK: It was like a list of badasses, though, you know?

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: It was amazing. It was like, “Oh, look at all these amazing patriots.”

CLAY: But I read it, though, Buck, and I thought, “Man, this guy…” I know that the intent was to try and make everybody in this article sound awful, but I was like, “Man, Joe sounds like a great guy.” So, I’m glad that we have you on the program. Tell us what you’re seeing on the ground, what the reaction was to that hit piece in the NYT.

KENT: Yeah. Thanks for having me on, guys. I really appreciate it. You know, I mean, the New York Times, when they come after you, it’s usually a good sign, especially when they run a kind of breathless article like that saying that, hey, there’s these two Green Berets and these two Navy SEALs that went and served their country and, you know, put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into the War on Terror. And now they’re kind of rejecting what the regime, the mainstream media and especially the Biden administration is saying.

So, you know, it’s really reflecting here in the district, and I think throughout the country, too. People are ready for actually authentic candidates who are not just repeating the same old tired talking points. So we’re actually going to go and address the issues that they care about. And Biden and Pelosi and, you know, governors like Jay Inslee, they’re destroying this country. And so people want to see that folks are actually then going and fighting for them.

BUCK: You know, Joe, we are — and thanks for being with us, it’s Buck. What we’re seeing in your neck of the woods up at the Pacific Northwest, it does feel like there is a turning of the tide right now. We’re certainly hoping you’re going to be a part of that with a big win on Election Day. We’ve been discussing Christine Drazan in in Oregon, possibly the governor just — would be the next governor, possibly — to your south. What happened in recent years in Seattle certainly has had ramifications for perception throughout that state and across the country about what Democrats do without adult supervision in some places. What are the biggest issues that when people come to you and they say, “It’s time.”? I mean, I know your district is competitive and has a fair number of Republicans, right? So, it’s not quite the same switch that you might see statewide in a place like Oregon. But what are you seeing from the people that are coming out and supporting you? What are they caring most about and what are they saying?

KENT: Yeah. You know, really, we just got rid of a 12-year incumbent Republican. She’s one of the ones that voted for the impeachment of President Trump. So, really, people are sick and tired of the party. They’re sick and tired of somebody who has an R Hat and a D Hat on saying different things, but then really just giving us the same old nonsense. But in particular, right now, what the Biden administration has done — and what Pelosi’s done for the last two years of one-party rule of crushing the economy through inflation — everyone remembers what the gas prices were just two years ago, and they could afford to live. And what have the Democrats done to relieve that? Absolutely nothing whatsoever.

Crime is another huge one. We’re a stone’s throw away… We’re in southwest Washington, so a stone’s throw away from Portland, Oregon. So the crime that comes in flows of the I-5 corridor from Portland and then down south from Seattle, that directly affects our district. So the amount of fentanyl that’s getting pumped into the district, the amount of petty crime and violent crimes, quite frankly, that have skyrocketed because Democrats here at the local level are literally opening up our prisons and letting child-killers roam the streets free.

People are furious about that. The cultural issues such as the sexualization of our children, that’s on full display here, because Planned Parenthood essentially runs the sex education in our high schools. So this “gender-affirming” care, the mutilation and chemical castration of children, that comes up frequently ‘cause people are furious about this. So really, they want to go and they want to fight everything that one-party rule was done to our nation.

CLAY: Joe Buck and I have talked a lot about Portland. You just mentioned Seattle, San Francisco. The Pacific Northwest for a long time was one of the most beautiful areas of our country.

KENT: Yeah.

CLAY: It’s been ruled by one party for so long that finally that one-party Democrat rule is leading to collapse in these places which are otherwise fabulous places to live. You’re obviously getting Republican support, but I bet you are seeing, Joe, a lot of just disaffiliated, disaffected voters who may not have been that politically active before, just looking around and saying, “Things are broken; we’ve got to fix it.” This feels like things are broken. We’ve got to fix it. Election. Are you seeing that where you are in the Pacific Northwest?

KENT: Yes, certainly. I mean, absolutely. So, I have people that come to my events all the time that say, “Hey, I used to be a Democrat.” I even get quite a few people that came and say, “Hey, look, I know you’re endorsed by Trump. Trump is not my cup of tea. I didn’t like him. I couldn’t stand the man. So therefore, I voted for Joe Biden. But I didn’t vote for this. I feel like I got bait and switched. I thought we were going back to normalcy, and all we’ve gotten is these extreme policies.” Our governor out here, Jay Inslee, he’s basically as bad as Cuomo. We stayed locked down until about last year.

So businesses decimated, kids kept out of school. That drove a lot of people over to our side because they were, you know, quite frankly, told that they weren’t allowed to even dissent from what Jay Inslee was dictating towards them. So we get a lot of folks that come out to our events all the time and say either, “Hey, I was a Democrat,” or, “You know what? I just didn’t think politics affected me. But now it’s ruling my everyday life.” So, what you’re saying actually makes a lot of sense, because I think the issues that we talk about, I don’t think they’re necessarily Republican or Democrat. I feel like they’re just very common sense American.

BUCK: We’re speaking to Joe Kent. He is running for Congress in Washington State’s 3rd Congressional District. We’ve got a lot of Washingtonians. I guess it’s a Washingtonian if you’re in D.C. or you’re in Washington State, right. I got to get this.

CLAY: You’re nervous after your Granite State debacle yesterday.

BUCK: Joe, I messed up Granite State with “New Hampsherian” or something yesterday and that was not good.

CLAY: (laughing)

BUCK: So, I got to make sure I get this right.

KENT: (laughing)

BUCK: Okay, but on to something on something serious here. You served 11 combat deployments and know what it is to have to not only meet and fight the enemy, but to put yourself — and I know your wife gave her life in the service of country as well. So you understand what it is to be in war and the losses from war. With the Biden administration approach to Ukraine, we were just talking before about possibility here of major escalation. It seems like something we need to be thinking about but certainly don’t want to happen. What do you see going on? I mean, in essence, as a frontline war fighter, what do you want people to know after 20 years of what we’ve seen abroad and how that should be reflected in policy?

KENT: I want people to remember where we were just 20 years ago, and we were being told that we had to go take out Saddam Hussein because he had weapons of mass destruction and because he was deeply linked with Al-Qaeda. And if we didn’t fight Saddam over there, we’d have to fight him and Al-Qaeda over here. And we found out that that was all a bunch of lies. We were lied to, and we’re being lied to once more. Except this time the consequences are still much higher. We’re not talking about knocking off Saddam. We’re not talking about the Taliban and Gadhafi or any of that nonsense. We’re talking about a nuclear-armed country.

Now, look, Russia is in the wrong it shouldn’t have gone. Ukraine started killing people. But we have to ask ourselves, is that worth going to a nuclear war for? Don’t we have more sophisticated tools we could be using to get Ukraine and Russia to the negotiating table to prevent nuclear war — and then also, you know, to prevent any kind of nefarious actions by Russia? But then also zooming out more broader scale, what did we do when we continued to escalate this conflict by sending billions and billions of dollars over there?

Number one, we put our country last. We have a wide-open southern border. Americans are being killed by fentanyl every day. But we’re being told, “We have to send $80 billion over to Ukraine. And, hey, if things go wrong, don’t worry about it. It’ll just be a nuclear exchange.” Biden himself the other day said, “Hey, we’re closer to a nuclear war, and we’ve been since the Cuban Missile Crisis” (summarized),’ and yet no one in Washington, D.C. is saying, “Hey, let’s ease tensions and let’s get to the negotiating table.”

And we’ve just handed this on a silver platter, I think, to China, because China’s come in and they’ve been able to bankroll Russia. And so now we have the combination of Russia and China — the Eurasian landmass — what we are trying to prevent for the entire Cold War. So we need some actual sober, rational people right now to say, “Hey, the government has been lying to us for a very long time. The military-industrial complex is very powerful; they have their own motivations. What we need to ensure is that the U.S.’s vital national security interests are being met — number one, to protect our people and our southern border — and then to get us to the negotiating table to prevent any kind of nuclear exchange.”

CLAY: Joe, we’re certainly rooting for you. We want to see you in Congress. For people out there who are listening to us right now — not only in Washington, but all over the country — what could they do to help?

KENT: Yeah. So, unfortunately, we’re in a war for resources. The Democrats just dumped, like, $2 million into the race. So, JoeKentForCongress.com is what people can go $5, $10, $15 goes a really long way to keep us on the air, and then the fight if you’re in the district, JoeKentForCongress.com. I’m doing multiple townhalls per day every day until Election Day so come out to us.

CLAY: Outstanding stuff, Joe. We’ll be rooting for you, and certainly what you can do in the Pacific Northwest can make a tremendous difference, not only there but around the country. Thanks for your time.

KENT: Absolutely. Thank you, guys.

CLAY: That is Joe Kent. You just heard it. He is likely, I think, to be able to win that district. Go give him some support.