Show notes
In this week's episode of Breaking Battlegrounds, we're honored to host Carla Sands, former U.S. Ambassador to the Kingdom of Denmark and current Vice Chair at the America First Policy Institute. She brings unparalleled insights into pressing global issues, including ambassadors' advocacy for Israel and the dynamic role of ambassadors in conflicts similar to those in Israel and Ukraine. Join us for a comprehensive discussion on the risks associated with Biden's energy plan, featuring facts and figures that shed light on it all. Later in the show, we welcome back Attorney General Austin Knudsen, addressing his recent reelection bid for Attorney General, the constitutional implications of Hawaii's gun ban, and the support for a mother suing a school district for hiding her child's gender transition. Visit AustinForMontana.com to learn more. Wrapping up, we have a special podcast feature with labor law and policy expert Vinnie Vernuccio, exploring deceptive salting loopholes in unions and their impact on the workforce. Plus, don't miss Kiley's Corner, where Kiley provides updates on the Idaho 4 murder case and reports on the suspicions surrounding the suicides of four Los Angeles Sheriff Department deputies within a 24-hour span on Monday. It's a power-packed episode you won't want to miss! - Connect with us: www.breakingbattlegrounds.vote Twitter: www.twitter.com/Breaking_Battle Facebook: www.facebook.com/breakingbattlegrounds Instagram: www.instagram.com/breakingbattlegrounds LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/breakingbattlegrounds - About our guests Ambassador Carla Sands is currently the Vice Chair, the Center for Energy & Environment, America First Policy Institute, and also leads AFPI's Pennsylvania Chapter. She previously served as U.S. Ambassador to the Kingdom of Denmark which includes Greenland, and the Faroe Islands from 2017-2021.During her tenure, she and her team increased U.S. exports to Denmark by 45% according to MIT's Observatory of Economic Complexity. Her number one goal as ambassador was to increase U.S. national security by establishing a consulate in Greenland. By working with the inter-agency and Congress, her goal was realized in 2020.Additionally, she successfully executed trade and cooperation agreements with Greenland and the Faroe Islands to counter Russian and Chinese malign influence. In 2021 she was awarded the Department of Defense's highest civilian honor, the Medal for Distinguished Public Service.In 2015-2017 Carla served as Chairman of Vintage Capital Group and its subsidiary company Vintage Real Estate which specialized in the acquisition and development of regional malls and shopping centers across the country.Before an orderly wind-down of the company starting in 2018, Vintage Real Estate had a portfolio that included 13 properties with 4.3 million square feet invested in underperforming assets. The team was vertically integrated with in-house leasing, development, and property management.Early brief careers included film acting and practice as a 3rd generation Doctor of Chiropractic. Carla pursued her undergraduate education at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and Elizabethtown College where she studied pre-med and earned her Doctor of Chiropractic from Life Chiropractic College.Carla is currently a board member of the Parliamentary Intelligence-Security Forum and serves on the advisory boards of Krach Institute for Tech Diplomacy at Purdue, and the International Women's Forum. She has served on many charitable and philanthropic boards. - Attorney General Austin Knudsen grew up on his family farm and ranch just outside of Bainville (in the far northeast corner of Montana) where they grew wheat, sugar beets and raised angus cattle. Austin was a 4-H kid, raising steers to show at the fair, and volunteering at community events. He participated in Future Farmers of America (FFA) throughout high school. In fact, Austin met his wife, Christie, while they both served as FFA State Officers during their freshman year of college at Montana State University-Bozeman.Austin put himself through college in Bozeman working jobs at the local butcher shop and a hardware store, and each summer he returned to work on the farm and ranch. Austin and Christie were married shortly after graduation and moved to Missoula where Austin earned his law degree from the University of Montana. Their oldest daughter Leah was born in between Austin's first and second years of law school and they were later blessed with a son, Connor, and their youngest daughter, Reagan.After law school, Austin and Christie moved their family back to the farm and ranch where they knew they could instill in their children strong Montana values. Austin worked at a law firm in Plentywood before opening his own practice in Culbertson.In 2010, Austin was elected to serve as the Representative for House District 34, defeating a two-term incumbent Democrat in what was one of the most expensive State House races in Montana history. Having quickly noticed the extent of the disconnect between Helena bureaucrats and political insiders and the rest of the people across Montana, Austin took on leadership roles within his caucus and was elected Speaker Pro Tempore (deputy Speaker) in just his second session of service. AustinForMontana.com - F. Vincent Vernuccio, president and co-founder of Institute for the American Worker, brings over 15 years of expertise in labor law and policy. Vernuccio holds advisory positions with several organizations, including senior fellow with the Mackinac Center. Vernuccio served on the U.S. Department of Labor transition team for the Trump Administration and as a member of the Federal Service Impasses Panel. Under former President George W. Bush, he served as special assistant secretary for administration and management in the Department of Labor. He has advised state and federal lawmakers and their staff on a multitude of labor-related issues, and testified before the United States House of Representatives Subcommittee on Federal Workforce, Postal Service and Labor Policy. TRANSCRIPTION Sam Stone: Welcome to another episode of Breaking Battlegrounds with your host, Chuck Warren. I'm Sam Stone. Our first guest up today. Carla Sands served as US ambassador to the Kingdom of Denmark, which includes Greenland and the Faroe Islands, from 2017 to 2021. Currently, the vice chair at the center for Energy and Environment and America First Policy Institute. Ambassador, thank you for joining us. Welcome to the program. Carla Sands: Thanks. It's great to be with you guys. Chuck Warren: Well, ambassador, I was listening to an interview that you had recently that said you always wanted to be an ambassador. You've always been involved in politics, very engaged. You always wanted to be one. Then one day, you get a call from the Trump administration and said, we're going to appoint you here. What? Did it meet your expectations, I guess is my question. Carla Sands: Wow. So it was a dream as a high school girl to be an ambassador, but I didn't know about the Foreign Service. Chuck Warren: Matter of fact, matter of fact. Ambassador, I wonder how many girls in junior high have the dream of being an ambassador. Sam Stone: It's. It's brilliant. I love that. Chuck Warren: I love it, too, I continue. Sorry. That's amazing. Carla Sands: No, no, not at all. So I just harbored that dream in my heart and went off and became a businesswoman. And so when I got the call, I mean, I was thrilled because we know, like when you can fulfill a dream, it's a very, very good thing. So I went off and served and it did exceed my expectations. It was extraordinary. What an honor to work for the all the people of the United States. And the power of our federal government is so immense that that, you know, the respect that you receive has nothing to do with you as a person. The the other country's leaders respect our country so much. Sam Stone: Ambassador, I have to jump in. I know we're going to get to talking about the letter that you helped organize to Congress about Israel, but from the outside, and maybe this isn't entirely fair, but it seems like there are, in essence, two types of ambassadors, those that go in a more ceremonial role and those that roll up their sleeves and dig in. And the ones that, like you did, roll up their sleeves and dig in, can get really extraordinary things done. And I think a lot of times under the radar, people don't even realize that it's true. Carla Sands: And political ambassadors, some of them do go to it seems like have have a vacation and some go to really work hard. But but the career foreign service officers, because some people make a career out of being an American diplomat, you just take the test, the Foreign Service test, and then you enter the Foreign Service and the, the, the capstone for their careers would be to become an ambassador. Those people also get a lot done, but they don't have most of them don't have that private sector experience that, for instance, the Trump ambassadors brought that where we know how to get things done. And they're also fearful of doing the wrong thing, because then it's very easy to derail a fellow Foreign Service officer's career. Chuck Warren: Oh, interesting. Interesting. Sam Stone: That makes they live in fear a lot of sense. Chuck Warren: What surprised you about the what surprised you about the job? Carla Sands: Um, what surprised me was how much some European countries dislike, like the United States and do not wish us well. Who are they? How unfair. Most of our European allies. Actually, our trade isn't fair. They do things. Their tariff barriers, non-tariff barriers. They they do. They do a lot of unfair things to our trade, to suppress our trade where we don't do that to others in the same way we're we're pretty much a fair minded country. We've cut a lot of bad trade deals. I think President Trump tried to right those bad deals and did have a lot of success. He got that phase one China deal, he got the NAFTA, became Usmca. So he was looking after the American working people and American companies and saying, you got to treat us fairly. That was a big surprise to me. Sam Stone: And that's a that was a big shift in his administration, because historically, there really hadn't been much pushback against any of those barriers or trade deals. Carla Sands: Yeah. No. Sam Stone: No. Chuck Warren: Let's get to the nitty gritty. So on October 7th, a major terrorist attack happened upon Israel. Yeah, a group of ambassadors, including you, sent a letter to Congress urging support for our closest ally in the Middle East, which is Israel. My question to you. There's two questions here. One, did you have anybody saying no to you when you try to round up this letter? And two, we have two main hot points in the world right now Israel, Ukraine. And of course, there's a bunch of other things. There are very long term but immediate focus. What is the role for an ambassador, a US ambassador in those crises? Carla Sands: Yeah, it's a really good question. So first of all, the ambassadors really did want to support this letter on behalf of. So on behalf of all of us urging bipartisan urging Congress and the Senate to support Israel and to make sure that that support stuck. And because we all saw that ISIS kind of behavior in Israel. My worry is we're going to get that in the US on our soil, because the Biden administration has a wide open border and they're not catching all of the terrorists. They already caught less than 300 like in the last recent time, but we only catch 60%. So some are getting through. And a lot of Chinese aged and foreign countries we're not friends with aged military men are getting through to tens of thousands. But the role of an ambassador. So during a conflict like this, it really depends where they're serving. Are they serving in a NATO ally country? Are they serving in an adversarial country, a muslim majority country? Right. So you got to know, like the audience and how you can get support. And then if you look at how all of these different countries around the world are voting at the UN, for instance, not to censure Russia after the Ukraine invasion, if you see how the Chinese Communist Party is having an outsized influence on a lot of these countries in the world, and then you see how if we all think about the United States Congress and the president, we have been in a bipartisan way supporting Israel, the state of Israel and the Israeli people. It's been very strong. But now you see how the left and the Muslim supporting elected officials and citizens have really, it looks like abandoned Israel in a public way. And they're supporting the terrorist group Hamas. Chuck Warren: Right. Sam Stone: Ambassador, do you think this is adjacent? But one of the things that we've seen is that these these radicalized Islamic factions have done a really good job of infiltrating US universities and education and really spreading their message there. Does Israel need to be more proactive in trying to counter that messaging at that level? Carla Sands: Well. Sam Stone: Can they? I mean, I don't know. Carla Sands: I think it's tough because there's so much anti-Semitism around the world. It's very strong. So it's a big challenge. But it's not just in academia. Iran is at the highest. Iran has people in the highest levels at the DoD, at our Pentagon. So and yes, they do in the white House and at State Department. So they have influence over our government. And you can see that in some of the softer support of Israel, how we saw Obama, very big Iran sympathizer. And we can see how, for instance, the the students for Justice in Palestine is on a lot of college campuses. That's a muslim Brotherhood offshoot, right, funded by the Muslim Brotherhood. Okay. Like ISIS kind of people, all funded through Iran. So this is all the spawn of Iran. And I think we really are are doing a disservice to the kids on our campuses to allow such an entity have such a big influence, but also Muslim countries. And they're funding things at the universities are having an influence in what our kids are learning too. Chuck Warren: Well, it seems like all these university professors do is out, raise money all the time, and they don't really care what it comes from. But, you know, like Covid, while while Covid was a tragedy, what it did do is open a lot of middle class parents eyes, upper middle class parents eyes to how bad the public schools are. And you're seeing those changes in education and the only the only spark of light in this tragedy in Israel right now is it's a waking up a lot of donors to how bad these universities are, and that they've been giving money and they're not going to do this any longer. So hopefully this has some long term effects. Have you? Being a Pennsylvania girl, are you surprised by Fetterman's absolute support for Israel? I mean, I've been impressed. I mean, he is not taken. He is giving it back. I'm really impressed by it. Carla Sands: Well, before I pivot to Fetterman, I just wanted to say that China has given $400 billion to Iran in military training and military equipment. So China is behind a lot of what is happening. There's now become an alliance which is economic and military with China, Russia, Iran. And of course, we know North Korea, but it seems like it's strengthening and becoming more bold. John Fetterman I mean, please, how it's embarrassing to Pennsylvania. It's embarrassing that he's representing us. He doesn't share my values. But yeah, I'm glad that he'…
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