Brendan Muir is bidding to be the republican nominee for Michigan's fourth congressional district. I sat down with him to hear his stances on the issues. This interview was conducted on June 21st and has been edited for clarity. This interview was conducted before the first presidential debate and before President Biden dropped out of the race.
WE'RE ABOUT A MONTH AND A HALF AWAY FROM THE AUGUST PRIMARY. WHERE DO YOU FEEL THINGS ARE STANDING FOR YOU RIGHT NOW?
I feel very positive. From my perspective, we have over 100 door knockers across the six different counties. We're going to hit 50,000 doors, and get in touch with the people. And I think that people are ready for something different, a fresh look. Right? If we look at what's happening in the country today, debt is at an all time high. Why is that? At an all time high? It's because our Republican legislators suspended the debt ceiling last year, and has added trillions of dollars in debt. Bill voted for that as well. We look at the border, right, the border is wide open, we've had nine and a half million illegal immigrants cross the border in the last four years. What has the Republican legislature done to stem that tide? If you take nine and a half million people and you put them in one state, that's the 12th largest state in the United States. If we look at our spending, not only are we raising the debt ceiling, but we're filling it with spending, so the grocery stores, the bills are going up. I see less people in restaurants now than last year. You know, waits used to be an hour and a half. And now I can get in on Friday night. So the average Americans are getting hurt, and they are hungry for someone who's going to stand up for them and solve the root cause of the problems and not just give them lip service. Sure.
WHO ARE YOU? WHAT, WHAT GOT YOU TO THIS SPOT? IF SOMEONE'S WATCHING FOR THE FIRST TIME AND THEY'RE LIKE, I HAVEN'T HEARD THIS NAME. I DON'T KNOW WHO THIS GUY IS. JUST GIVE US A LITTLE BIT OF A RECAP ON WHAT GOT YOU HERE AND JUST WHO YOU ARE IN GENERAL.
I grew up on the east side of Michigan in Plymouth Township. I went to Michigan State University. I'm a Spartan, and graduated with an Applied Engineering degree with the technical sales concentration. After that, I went into the automotive industry, as most people do in Michigan, and I worked at a tier one automotive supplier. I worked my way up to be a project manager, where I launched a $400 million project with a team of 30 people across six continents. I worked with people from all over Japan to all over Europe, China, Mexico, Canada. So I have a very global understanding and how the market dynamics work in the automotive industry. After working at that company for almost a decade, I left and I moved to the west side of Michigan to be closer to my family and honestly the outdoors and the Great Lakes. I mean, Lake Michigan is beautiful. Lake Macatawa is beautiful. So I came to be closer here and 2020 was really what's got me involved. So you know, the unconstitutional mandates by Gretchen Whitmer, she got striked down twice in the Michigan Supreme Court for her her mandates. And then the 2020 election. And the 2020 election is really what got me involved. After that, I started researching elections and election integrity. I did that for around two years at a nonprofit called election integrity force where I researched the law. And I compared it to the you know, the qualified voter roll, we found many inconsistencies and have launched basically a qualified voter roll cleanup program. But in 2022, when I moved to Ottawa County, someone from that election integrity force network said, Hey, Brendan, come to Ottawa County Republican party executive committee meeting. So I showed up, and that first time I went, I got elected to the board. And then five months later, I became the Chair of the Ottawa County Republican Party and the rest is history. That's how I got involved.
HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE THE STATE OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY RIGHT NOW? A LOT OF PEOPLE FEEL LIKE IT'S PRETTY DIVISIVE. THERE'S A LACK OF UNITY. THERE'S A PRETTY STAUNCH CONTRAST IN VIEWS IN THE REPUBLICAN PARTY. SOMEONE'S STEPPING INTO THE ROLE. AND IF YOU WERE IN FACT, THE NOMINEE, THAT CANDIDATE, WHAT WOULD YOU DO TO UNIFY THE PLATFORM?
Well, it's interesting. You mentioned the platform. So the current platform that we're using is the 2016 Republican Party platform. That was the last one that was passed. And if you compare current Republicans to the platform there not doing a very good job. I think what happened was after 2020, a movement started a revival of the Republican Party. And that revival is contingent on following the platform. And so when they moved in, they started discussing and talking with the elected officials at the time, and saying, Hey, this is our platform, why are you voting against it, and the elected officials didn't like accountability. And that's what happened in Ottawa County. The elected officials at the county level, did not listen to and support the Republican citizens. So in 2022, they were vastly, all voted out. And a new guard came, that supports the platform in a strong way, and does not capitulate to the Democrat ideologies. And I'll give you an example in Ottawa County, and Ottawa County in 2019. They brought in DEI, and that was a Republican LED board. Right now, DEI is not a part of the Republican platform. So when they're confronted with this, they did not want to change it. So what I see is a revival of the people within the party. And unfortunately, there are going to be people who are voted out because they don't participate. They don't agree with the platform, and they agree more Democrats. And what we're really seeing is the people who agree more Democrats are unhappy that Republicans are filling the party backup. And so that unity will come behind the Republican Party platform and shared values. And the people who don't share the values don't want to work with us. I mean, I've, I'm open, I said, I will meet with anyone, I will meet with people who disagree with me, I will meet with people who were kicked out of the party, kind of right. And or feel like they were kicked out. And let's have a discussion. Let's talk about our differences and move forward. They don't want to. Bill Huizenga doesn't even want to meet with me.
WOULD YOU SAY YOU'RE MORE STICKING UP FOR JUST TRADITIONAL REPUBLICAN IDEOLOGIES? OR DO YOU FEEL LIKE THAT WAS AN INSTANCE OF, YOU KNOW, JUST AN EVOLUTION OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY?
I don't think it was an evolution of the Republican Party. If you look at the current, we'll say general consensus on DEI in the Republican Party, it is not supporting of that feature, right. And if we look at DEI, in general DEI is a a mindset that teaches institutionalized racism, right? We are for treating one another, like ourselves, right? The best doctrine is to love your neighbor, like you love yourself. And I would support that over trying to teach kids that just because your skin color means you're automatically racist, or you owe another group, reparations.
TALK ABOUT YOUR OPPONENT. HE'S BEEN IN OFFICE, YOU KNOW, GOING THROUGH YET ANOTHER TERM. HE OBVIOUSLY HAS BEEN VOTED IN MANY TIMES. HE'S POPULAR AMONG VOTERS.
The biggest difference is I will vote no. Bill has voted for four and a half billion in debt ceiling increases, he's voted to suspend the debt ceiling last year. And if you add that all up, that's around $8 trillion in debt that he's added to the 35 trillion that we're all at almost right now. That is unsustainable. He's voted for 10 omnibus bills over his tenure in Congress, that fund, tons of programs outside of what the federal government is supposed to do. We need to do the proper budget process and the federal government and I would vote no for debt ceiling increases and I would stop the overspending of the federal government. The other thing is, I stand up for the Constitution, the Bill of Rights. Bill has three times past FISA or the reauthorization of the Patriot Act, which allows for warrantless searches on citizens and basically promotes the spying network in America, and that same FISA program was used against President Trump in 2015 and 16 to spy on his campaign. So vote I would vote no, I would stand up for the citizens. Right. And then the other thing is, gotta be strong on the border. The House over the last two years has had control of the purse. When you have control the purse, you can strong arm the current administration, the Biden administration, Newt Gingrich. did it back in? I think with Clinton, right? They shut down the government multiple times saying, Nope, we need this, this and this. So with the power of the purse, you have a negotiation tool. And our Republican Congress has used their negotiation power very poorly. So I want to build caucuses around issues. Right. I have a border issue. I have a finance issue, right? How are we going to solve the problem of inflation? How are we going to solve the problem of the border, not just give lip service and talk about it? Right. And the other thing is, we have to have strong men in Congress who will say no, and are okay saying no. And bills, just a yes, man at the end of the day.
IN THE REPUBLICAN PARTY, AS WE WERE SAYING THERE IS A LITTLE BIT OF DECISIVENESS. I THINK IT'S CLEAR TO SAY THAT YOU WOULD FALL ON PROBABLY THE MORE RIGHT [end] OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY. HOW WOULD YOU LEAN ACROSS, NOT EVEN ACROSS THE AISLE, BUT ACROSS THE REPUBLICAN PARTY TO FIND COMMON GROUND? WHAT ARE SOME THINGS THAT YOU FEEL LIKE MAYBE BILL HAS DONE?
Yeah, I mean, he's represented the position. Well, he's an upstanding guy. He's nice, as a lot of people say, if you look at the, so the heritage score, the heritage score kind of ranks you on how well you maintain the Republican Party platform. He has, you know, something in the high 70s 78% or something over the last 14 years. So he's done a decent job of maintaining the moderate path forward, right. At the end of the day, if we want to work together, we have to meet and talk. And I have reached across the aisle and I always offer to people who are upset with me, I'll talk to you. I'll work through it with you. And there's a lot of Republicans who in the last couple years during this divisiveness have reached out and we've talked and we've said oh, we actually agree on a lot more. Right? We agree on 90 percent of everything of the issues. But if you don't have that conversation, and you leave that huge hole in communication, there will always be division. So my recommendation to anyone who's upset with the Republican Party that feels they're a Republican, reach out, talk to us, let's work together. I lead a team of 30 people. I'll tell you one story, right. So I'm sitting at my desk, I'm typing away, I'm working. And one of my test engineers comes up. He says,Brendon, the software guy won't work with me. He won't return my my messages or my emails. And I said, Okay, well, I have a question for you. He sits right over there. Have you gone over and talk to him? And he's like, Well, no. I'm like, Okay, have you called? But well, no. I said, Okay, well, why don't you go talk to him. And then if there's an issue, come back to me, and we'll settle it. And nine out of 10 times the issue goes away. If we stop talking to one another, that's when we lose. And so I open up the door to have the conversations to work together and make it happen.
WHAT ARE THE MAIN THINGS RIGHT NOW AFFECTING MICHIGANDERS THAT YOU FEEL LIKE THERE IS UNITY WITHIN THE THE REPUBLICAN PARTY,
I mean, everyone's feeling inflation. Everyone's concerned about the border. And you know, the cost of fentanyl. And then I don't know if you know, in Van Buren, Van Buren County Sheriff gave a presentation that the cost of fentanyl was $350 5 years ago. And now it's $85. And they're having two people die a week in Van Buren County, which is a very decent percentage, compared to five years ago. Right? So they're concerned about the real issues, right? Can I buy groceries? Can I afford rent? Are my friends and family being harmed by violent crimes or by, you know, drug overdoses? Those are the issues that I'm focusing on. And that's what's in my platform. And on my website, inflation is, number one, how do we solve inflation? The borders number two, how do we limit illegal immigration and fix the problem? And then I also go into how do we help farmers? How do we help veterans? How do we fix the schools? Right, returning to educational excellence, all the issues that are on my platform, on my website, Republicans agree with it's really the biggest, I'll tell you what the biggest thing people disagree with, in the Republican Party is who is in power. That's it.
SO HOW WOULD YOU DIFFER AND BE DIFFERENT THAN YOUR REPUBLICAN OPPONENT, BILL HUIZENGA?
So the Constitution outlines very easy way to target inflation, and that is backing the currency with a physical asset. Right. So in the Constitution, it lays out gold and silver. We also have oil, farmland, you know, physical assets that other countries value. I don't know if you've heard but the petro dollar agreement with Saudi Arabia, Arabia was cancelled last week, they didn't renew it. So now the dollar is not used or does not need to be used in sales of oil from Saudi Arabia. The reason the dollar was so strong over the last 50 years was because people had to stock dollars to pay for oil from Saudi Arabia. So the US did not renegotiate or reinitiate that deal. And now other countries like Russia or China, they are doing deals in their home currency. with Saudi Arabia. This means that the dollar and their reserves will most likely go down because they don't need the dollars anymore to buy oil. So Bill is not talking about how to solve that problem, right? We need to back our currency with physical assets. I like gold and silver oil is something that, you know, can be discussed land, farmland, those are other opportunities, but we have to value our currency with something or else dollars will flood back into the US. And our currency across the planet, its value will start plummeting because the demand isn't there. He's not talking about that. Right? Immigration. So for immigration, right, Congress has had two years or let's say, a year and a half to really come up with a strong border policy, use the purse to negotiate with Biden, right? They've been weak on the border. Are they waiting? I don't know. But we have to fund the programs necessary to protect our border and to ensure the citizens here are safe. And then educational excellence, you know. School is about reading, writing, and math. And across the board, our test scores have gone down. Since Common Core was implemented. Basically, for the last 30 years worldwide, we are just going down on a downtrend, right, we are not going on the uptrend, and with COVID, taking kids out of schools, right? We're seeing increased antisocial behavior, decreased math and test scores in fourth and eighth grade work. It's about the children. We need to defend them and make sure they're getting a proper education so they can make it in this world. And we are failing them just by the math itself, just looking at the numbers. So we have to support education programs that focus on reading, writing, and math, the real things that allow kids to grow and learn for themselves and not indoctrinate them in the schools. And social issues like this are usually what steered away from in the typical Republican sphere. So we need to protect our kids.
WE’VE SEEN A WAVE OF OTTAWA IMPACT IN THE LAST YEAR OR SO. EXPLAIN WHAT OTTAWA IMPACT IS FOR THOSE THAT MAY NOT KNOW AND YOUR THOUGHTS ON KIND OF THE MOVEMENT HAPPENING WITHIN OTTAWA COUNTY.
So as the chair of the Ottawa County Republican Party, I work with a lot of the commissioners that are on Ottawa Impact, right. And they focus on county and school board races. And where that movement came from, is essentially 1000 parents got together I believe in August of 2021. Because the health department was closing their schools and other states were opening up other parts of Michigan we're opening up but not in Ottawa County. And the old board. The old executive board was not listening to the people. I mean, 1000 people showing up at your county building and you say, Yeah, we can't do anything that's weak. So what sparked a movement is it's really a movement of parents protecting their kids. And that's why I mean, I think some of their signs say protect the children, right? That's what they're doing. They're standing up for people who were upset with how everything was handled, for not listening to the parents, the people, and for not looking at the rest of the nation saying, our county was one of the top three counties in the state for how closed down they were, and how long it lasted. So that's what sparked Ottawa Impact. I would say there's a separate movement in the Republican Party, that's really a revival of what it means to be a Republican and following the party platform. Right. So I would say Ottawa Impact does, you know, they're on our board, we have seven members of Ottawa Impact that sit on the Ottawa County executive committee. But it's also with a ton of precinct delegates that got involved because of the unconstitutional mandates, because of the spending at the federal level, because of illegal immigration, people are waking up that we need to participate in our party in politics to drive the changes that we want. So, you know, there's kind of like two groups that really got fueled to get involved. And I would say that's one is kind of like the America First movement. And then one is more specifically Ottawa Impact focused on, you know, the children and protecting our kids in schools.
WOULD YOU SAY THEY OVERLAP, THOUGH, TOO?
I mean, a lot of our I mean, most people in the Republican Party if they talk to one another overlap 90%. So yeah, I mean, everyone kind of overlaps in the Republican Party. There's a lot of people that don't like Ottawa Impact, that share 95% of their views. But again, that goes back to the communication. If you have this deep seated anger, or if you have this problem with a group of people, are you discussing that with them? Are you broaching the issue? And if we stop talking to one another, we're going to go into chaos. So that's why we need to discuss with one another, our differences and move forward.
YOU'VE HAD QUITE AN EXTENSIVE CAREER PATH LEADING YOU HERE WHAT DO YOU THINK HAS GIVEN YOU THE MOST STRENGTHS? WHAT ARE YOUR BIGGEST TAKEAWAYS THAT WILL PREPARE YOU FOR THIS POSITION IF YOU'RE ELECTED?
I think I've talked about this in a different interview. But I am an engineer by trade. And part of being an engineer is finding the root cause of problems and coming up with a solution so that they don't happen again. I see in Congress, a lot of solutions that are proposed that solve the surface level issue, right? Take the minimum wage, right. Oh, we just have to raise minimum wage, raise minimum wage, raise minimum wage? Well, why do we have to keep raising it? That's because inflation keeps going up. Right? The root cause of the minimum wage issue isn't raising it, it's solving the inflation topic, right? So part of my job is being a project manager, I lead teams of people on what's called Task Forces, where we would solve highly complex problems or issues they would take months to solve. And it might be one small thing. But we would do what's called a root cause analysis and get to the bottom of the issue, so that when we solve that issue, all the symptoms go away. And I'll take that to Congress. I want to solve the root cause issues, what's really the problem and give solutions to the citizens so that they don't have to continue worrying about it every single election cycle, or band aids keep getting put on every single election cycle, instead of solving that root cause. Problem, for sure.
WHAT WOULD YOU SAY IS YOUR BIGGEST WEAKNESSES?
Oh, man, biggest weakness. You know, I feel everyone's subjected to a little bit of a little bit of pride. I had a boss back in the day. And every day he would come in and he'd say, Brendan, do you have your humble pie this morning? So, you know, it's a constant battle to battle the inner self, and maybe a little bit of pride is probably a weakness that I would target.
DO YOU FEEL LIKE YOU'RE APPROACHABLE THOUGH, IF PEOPLE WANTED TO TALK TO ISSUES AND YOU'D BE ABLE TO?
It is up to all citizens. If you want to meet with me, I'd love to meet love to talk about the issues that all from the the ones that we talked about every day, to the ones that are really challenging and difficult to talk about, for sure.
WHERE DO YOU FEEL LIKE YOU CAN FIND COMMON GROUND WITH DEMOCRATS ON ISSUES THAT WE'RE SEEING RIGHT NOW?
I think one that I personally care about a lot is the environment. I think it's important to focus on the true causes of what's polluting our society, you know, chemical dumping. I know plastics are becoming a concern, those types of issues, I'm totally welcome to discuss and collaborate on because I mean, I want water that is pure and safe to drink. And I want that for the whole nation. I want our food supply to be safe and secure, using you know, the proper fertilizers this that and the other thing. And plastics is an interesting issue where you know, kind of in the when they first started coming out, everyone started using them and now every water bottle, you know, is a plastic bottle, and we're finding that that is these microplastics right PFAS are spreading across the Great Lakes, they're in our food they're in our water. I don't know how to solve that problem right now but I'm willing to you know, as one item, I think that is something I'd love to approach how can we make that better and safer for all of us on how we ingest our food and drink clean water?
GIVE ME YOUR THREE SENTENCE ELEVATOR SPEECH.
Hi, my name is Brendan Muir. I'm running to revive our American republic and restore constitutional values. Vote for me this August 6 in the Republican primary, and I look forward to serving you in Washington DC. Thank you.
FULL INTERVIEW:
