Navy reservist and pilot Michael Cassidy spoke about his runoff election against Rep. Michael Guest (R-MS) to Breitbart News and said there needs to be a “seismic shift” in Mississippi’s representation in Congress.
Breitbart News Saturday host Matthew Boyle opened the interview by discussing Cassidy’s upcoming runoff election against Rep. Michael Guest (R-MS). Although Boyle said “nobody in politics” expected Cassidy to get more votes than Guest and force a runoff, Cassidy said, “on the ground, it was it was quite evident that we were going to make this at least a close race, if not better.”
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Cassidy criticized Guest for voting for the January 6 committee and two massive spending bills that gave funds to Planned Parenthood.
“And so one of the big things that the that really turned a lot of people off about my opponent, Michael Guest, is that he voted for the January 6 Commission. He was the only Mississippi Republican to do so,” Cassidy said. “He was one of 35 Republicans overall who did that, including, I think all of the impeachment voters.”
Cassidy also explained that Mississippi voters are upset with the way Guest has handled January 6 “political prisoners.”
“Another huge issue related to January 6 is that he hasn’t lifted a finger for the people that are being held as political prisoners that were nonviolent, that were simply up there unhappy about the sham that was the 2020 election,” he said. “And that, that is something that, you know, people, everybody knows that people will make mistakes.”
Cassidy said despite his district being “one of the most conservative districts in the nation,” they have not had true conservative representation in Congress. He called for a “seismic shift” in the district’s politics after pointing out that no Mississippi member of Congress is a part of the freedom caucus.
After discussing his race, Cassidy spoke about his time spent in the military and how the September 11 terrorist attacks inspired him to serve.
“I was up in Northern Virginia and Arlington when September 11 happened, and that 9/11 was hit pretty close to home for me, and it inspired me to join the military, and some people, they might say that it’s a subjective belief, but I think it’s an objective belief, that the cool thing you could do in the military is fly jets off aircraft carriers. And so that’s what I, that’s what I tried to do, and I was fortunate enough to,” he said.
However, Cassidy believes the Navy retaliated against him for statements he made in a private capacity criticizing the military for its strict adherence to woke doctrine. He thinks the military should be a merit-based organization that should use “overwhelming force to destroy anybody that wants to mess with the United States” if deterrence fails.
Cassidy recounted his experience with the Navy following his statements, saying, “And so anyway, so I have that as part of my platform, and the Navy found out about it, and they said, ‘Well, you are, you’re saying things that are contradictory to official Navy policy official squadron policy. And that is, you can’t do that. You if you were to fly with a female student or minority student, well, then they’re going to just say that you’re a racist.’ And I said, ‘I’m saying that we need to not use sex or race in anything in any way.’ So they said, ‘Well, you can’t fly.’ And I said, ‘that is, that’s ridiculous. That’s absolutely ridiculous.’ I’m, if I can’t, if I cannot criticize Navy policy, if I can’t criticize an official Navy policy as a politician, how in the world can anybody in the reserves?”
Cassidy then talked about how he’d “love to join” the House Freedom caucus and his top priorities if elected to Congress.
“I would certainly want to join it. And I want to join it in order to help keep leadership in case it’s not a Freedom Caucus-type person in leadership, which we would certainly hope for in a Republican majority Congress, but to keep leadership from straying too far to the left,” Cassidy said.
On election integrity, he called for mandatory voter ID and an end to voting drop boxes.
“I think we need to make voter ID mandatory. I think that we need to eliminate the ballot drop boxes that we saw in at least in Georgia that are just there’s so little oversight of those,” he said. “They’re so easy for there to be fraud, even if there isn’t. It’s the perception and everybody, Democrat, Republican, Independent, everybody should want there to be no question about elections.”
On immigration, he called on Congress to finish funding the southern border wall and increase the amount of border patrol officers.
“So that’s one with immigration, not only do we need to finish the wall, but we need to have people that are guarding the wall,” Cassidy said. “So whether that’s increased members of border patrol, whether that’s temporarily putting military on the border to ensure that we don’t have these sex traffickers that are going across the border, we don’t have the drug traffickers, let alone the massive amounts of illegal aliens that are coming across the border, we got to, we got to deport all the illegals that are in the country, we got to also implement e-verify.”
He also called for an end to birthright citizenship. “So there are a lot of things that we need to do that are much more pro American immigration agenda than we have right now.”
Breitbart News Saturday airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 from 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. Eastern.