On July 3, Iraq veteran and Michigan businessman Peter Meijer released a video announcing his candidacy for the House of Representatives. He will be facing incumbent Rep. Justin Amash (I-MI) in the 2020 primary. Meijer is one of five candidates taking on Rep. Amash, who has served in Congress since the Tea Party wave in 2011.
On Wednesday, I had the opportunity to speak with Meijer, and discuss a broad range of topics, including bad actors in Congress, border security, and his stopping an event called “Drag Syndrome” from performing at one of his properties.
The following is part three of our interview. Parts one and two can be read here and here. In those portions, Meijer and I discussed the trade war with China, the rising popularity of “socialism” among young voters, veteran advocacy, President Trump, and more.
DW: There are a lot of bad actors in Congress when it comes to immigration. If President Trump is elected to a second term, and you’re also elected to Congress, how do you engage with that set of bad actors who are going to convince a certain percentage of their colleagues to keep things in gridlock because politicians love an unresolved problem?
MEIJER: Congress hasn’t solved immigration because both parties profit more off of using this crisis as a campaign tool, as a sort of messaging and narrative-building and talking-points oriented problem, than they do from a solution. And honestly, it takes good faith. I think in every problem, you need to identify the components of it that have broad agreement, and kind of fence those areas off from partisan gain. We can’t pin all our hopes on some “grand bargain” miracle.
Nobody’s going to be happy with everything, and if you see how disingenuous many of the Democrats’ comments are toward immigration … I mean, things that President Obama did that maybe he talked about it differently but, all of a sudden, that same government action, that same program, that same approach under President Trump is somehow anathema when it’s really just a continuation of the status quo. I mean, there is just such an overwhelming degree of hypocrisy around this issue, especially on the Left, that you’re correct. It will be hard to have folks remember; to sit down across from a Democrat and basically say, “Hey, remember what you thought about this five years ago?” How do we get back to that point from a negotiation standpoint so that we’re not always shifting the goalposts in this conversation?
But I think it comes down to focusing on the short-term, on incremental improvements that maybe don’t rise to the attention of anyone higher up that wants to use it as a talking point, either to their benefit or to their opponent’s detriment, trying to reach a broader consensus. I care less about where we are in one year than I do where we are in ten years, and most about where we are in 50 years. So, what are the things that we can address today to put ourselves on a better long-term path? And then we can work out who gets to claim credit on the messaging side later. I think we need that approach because there are very real and pressing issues and concerns. There are very real long-term challenges that, as soon as we throw them into a partisan meat grinder, they’re never going to survive, and we’re just going to be stuck in the same place.
Meanwhile, our economic adversaries are continuing to truck along. When we stay in the same place and our economic opponents continue to move forward, we fall behind. I’m not under any illusion that there are a lot of folks in Congress who think longer than the next election cycle about how they’re going to approach things. But I think we begin to carve out areas that we can come to some non-controversial, common-sense solutions, and hopefully respect the fact that you’ll still have things to be able to fight about and run in your next campaign ad. But let’s actually get the nuts and bolts down first.
DW: You recently stopped an event called “Drag Syndrome” from performing in a building that you own. Can you talk about that?
MEIJER: I have a building that I allowed a disability advocacy nonprofit to construct a performance space in that was meant to be able to be accommodating to individuals with all types of disabilities: completely handicap-accessible, barrier-free, all this great stuff. And then I found out that one of the performances that they would be hosting was an international troop of performers with Down syndrome who perform drag shows. And I was like, “Okay, this doesn’t seem to be advocacy for individuals with disabilities. This feels like exploitation as part of a political or cultural statement.”
I immediately reached out to other disability advocacy organizations in the community and reached out to parents of children with Down syndrome, and they all shared my same concerns around exploitation. And so, I put a stop to it. I didn’t want it to be political. This was an arrangement that was made with me as a landlord and a business owner rather than something that was occurring because I was a candidate for Congress. But the promoters wanted the controversy. They leaked my letter to the media. And now, in the past week, I’ve been called a bigot, an ableist, a homophobe, and a transphobe. Someone called me a racist, which I’m not really sure how that factors into it. But you just see how the outrage machine on the Left cannot handle a nuanced argument. No one has actually tried to address my underlying concern.
Take away drag. Have it be any other charged cultural or political performance that is going to be controversial, and I can’t replace it with anything else that doesn’t feel like you’re exploiting individuals, who – maybe they do understand, but I can’t be sure. And if there’s a one-in-a-million chance that someone has been put into a position where they’re advocating for something or becoming a representative of a cause that they can’t fully understand, I could never support that, regardless of politics, regardless of content.
I empathize with the President. I see what it’s like to kind of have thousands of people form an immediate, negative, knee-jerk reaction based on limited information and then just try to attack and run a full-court press. And it’s just absurd. I mean, I still don’t understand how anybody thought this could be a good idea.
And then you have folks on the Left who see something that people with whom they may have a political disagreement find objectionable, and they think that it’s right because of that, never actually stopping to consider, “Is this actually right or wrong?” Just, “Oh, it’s making these people angry, so of course it’s what I should be doing.”
It’s been controversial in the community, but I’ve been really humbled by the amount of folks who’ve reached out privately and said, “You know what? You made the right call. I didn’t want to say anything publicly because I saw the way that you’ve been treated in the media and how you’ve been treated by folks online, but we appreciate you standing up for what’s right.” And at the end of the day, it’s that type of feedback, it’s hearing from folks who have children with Down syndrome who are outraged but didn’t know what they could do about it – those are the people that I want to represent.
DW: Is there anything you want to say to your opponent or opponents?
MEIJER: Good luck? It’s early days. There are four other primary challengers. Other people could emerge. The filing deadline’s not until April. I hope this is a race that is something the people of West Michigan can be proud of. I’ve been disappointed to see things that show that too much of the vitriol and animosity that has become a trademark of Washington swamp politics; I’ve been disappointed to see some of that filtering in because I think it needs to go the other way. We need to be bringing more of West Michigan to Washington and less of Washington back home.
DW: Is there anything that you want readers to know that we haven’t talked about in this interview, or that hasn’t been spoken about in the media in any of your other interviews?
MEIJER: One of my fundamental guiding concerns, the reason why I wanted to get involved in politics in the first place, is because I spent close to three years overseas in combat zones. I know what it’s like to be on the wrong side of American foreign involvement. I’ve seen how destructive our foreign policy can be and how counterproductive endless wars can be to our national security interests. And I’m a firm believer that we need folks in government who understand that what the government does and doesn’t do, that peoples’ lives hang in that balance.
It’s not about building up your personal brand. It’s not about writing that witty tweet that goes viral, or about getting a good cable news hit. This is serious. This is real. And we need folks in government who appreciate the consequences of the decisions that they make. At the end of the day, that’s why I’m running for Congress: because I think the world needs America, and we need to be the best country that we can be, both for the sake of all of our citizens and for everybody else. I’m running to strengthen the country, to put us on a better path to the future, and to ensure that we deliver on the American Dream.
I’d like to thank Peter Meijer for taking the time to speak with me about his run for Congress. For more information, you can visit his official website, or follow him on Twitter.