Former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley argues that nations secretly prefer American moral leadership over Russian or Chinese influence, citing Trump's Syria strikes as proof while condemning the Biden administration for allegedly tipping off Iran on Israeli operations. She advocates for small government policies, noting states that closed during COVID suffered higher death rates, and urges Republicans to unite against socialism by reaching diverse communities including Hispanics and Asians. Looking ahead to 2022, Haley emphasizes winning back the House and Senate as crucial, endorsing candidates like Michelle Steele and Young Kim while maintaining her identity simply as Nikki rather than a declared presidential candidate. Ultimately, she calls for resilience against media censorship and political negativity to restore U.S. strength. [Automatically generated summary]
I mean, I think if you had told us all of this was going to happen, you know, prior to 20, nobody would have believed it.
But to really see all the forces at play, you know, the fear tactics, the idea that they, you know, keeping kids from school, the masks, You know, just the over-exaggeration of everything.
I hope it's taught a lesson, which is, look, we all want to keep people safe.
We all want to do our part.
But there is a role that government has, and there's a role that government doesn't.
And the idea that small businesses, that we lost thousands of them through this, the idea that people were not allowed to make their own decisions, that's a real mistake, and we shouldn't let that happen again.
So, as a conservative, do you think, in a weird way, as terrible as this has all been, this has been the best argument for sort of small government policies, that people are kind of waking up, look, we're here in LA right now, in California, you know my feelings about this place, that real world examples have sort of led people, I think, to fall more in the conservative bucket?
Look, I think we have to see this for the opportunity it is.
It was a reminder that states should be able to control what happens, you know, in terms of laws.
We don't need the federal government mandating down.
States know their people best.
If you look at, you know, whether it was Georgia when they were the first ones to open up and people were screaming about it, a governor knows where their hot spots are.
A governor knows which areas they have to be careful of, so allowing governors to decide that.
But if you look at the states that stayed open versus the states that closed down, you had more deaths in the states that closed down.
I mean, there is something to personal responsibility.
And when I was governor, I always thought when we had hurricanes, you educate, you give people the facts.
Then let them make the best decision for them and their families.
Government doesn't need to make that decision for them.
And this was a real lesson during COVID of, you know, it does go too far.
And when you watch the economy and what we've been through and the number of people out of work and the small businesses that have closed, it didn't have to happen that way.
I know we could do, we could probably do an hour and a half just on COVID and all that stuff.
But you sent out a tweet yesterday in the midst of this John Kerry firestorm that is erupting.
Right now, so I actually want to read the tweet and then we'll give a little context to what happened.
You said, this is disgusting on many levels.
Biden and Kerry have to answer for why Kerry would be tipping off Iran, the number one sponsor of terror, while stabbing one of our greatest partners, Israel, in the back.
And what this is in reference to is audio has leaked of the foreign secretary of Iran basically saying that then Secretary of State John Kerry told him about Israeli strikes in Syria.
This seems like a massive scandal, but in the 24 hours since it got out there, like, yeah, the right is talking about it, but pretty much nobody mainstream, nobody on the left.
I mean, this is, you know, first of all, if it's true.
He can't be in the National Security Council.
He shouldn't be a cabinet member.
Biden should answer for it.
Kerry should answer for it.
I happen to believe it.
And the reason I happen to believe it is Kerry and Zarif were very close.
They worked on the Iran deal together.
Obama and Kerry never liked Israel.
They basically stabbed Israel in the back even after the election was over in the UN at the Security Council.
And so the idea that you would go and support and help our number one state sponsor of terror around the world, but stab our friend Israel in the back, Is as unconscionable as anything I can imagine.
But it's so typical of the Obama 2.0.
It's so typical.
And I think it's dangerous.
And I don't trust Kerry.
I don't trust him to not have done this.
I don't trust Biden to make Kerry answer for it.
And I think we still have to be loud about it because this is not OK.
And it's, I mean, the idea when we all heard John Kerry was going to be back in the cabinet, in the National Security Council, I think we all took a breath back because we knew how much he wanted that Iran deal.
And even though he's supposedly, you know, the climate envoy, he's going to always be weighing in on all issues of Iran.
Well, when they cover it, they'll say, Republicans pounce, right?
That's what they always say.
Oh, Republicans pounce on the thing that we should have been talking about.
All right.
Let's let's shift away from that.
And we'll come back to like straight up politics and all that stuff.
But I just thought for a second, we could just talk a little bit about just like your family history and just like the stuff that people don't really know.
When I was elected governor, there was a conservative that called me a raghead, and there was a Democrat that said I was just a conservative with a tan.
I mean, you know, it's never enough for anyone.
But the thing is, minorities in particular get really offended when there's a minority that's a conservative.
And so, yeah, we fight battles from all sides.
But at the end of the day, you have to stay true to yourself and you have to, you know, talk about what you believe.
And I feel like that through my life, even though there's been hate from different sides, if you push for the right thing, you know, people see that.
It's why I get so upset when they say we're a racist country.
I mean, did we have racial issues when I was growing up?
Yes.
But that's the same state that allowed my dad to be a professor.
That's the same state that supported my mom and her small business.
It's the same state that allowed me to be governor.
You know, it's the country that allowed me to be ambassador.
And I'm one of millions of cases like that where only in this country can you do or be anything you want to be and government will stay out of your way.
At least for now.
We have to make sure for always.
But you know even being at the United Nations, there's something amazing when countries would come and be amazed at how we had freedom of speech and freedom of religion and the opportunities awarded regardless of where you were born and raised.
That's special and that's why it bothers me so much when people criticize America.
We are the best Are you shocked that it feels like so many people are kind of folding right now and just being like, oh, this thing, whatever it is, wokeness, Marxism, cancel culture, it's just encroaching and encroaching, and it doesn't seem like a lot of people are fighting.
And you've been fighting for a long time, and we'll get to the U.N.
If you've been to the Democratic Republic of Congo, where they use rape as a weapon of war, when you've been to South Sudan where I've sat with crying mothers whose babies were taken from their arms and thrown into fires, when you've been on the Simon Boulevard Bridge watching thousands of Venezuelans holding the babies in their hands for hours in the sun to go get the one meal they might get that day.
You know, my husband's a combat veteran.
He served in Afghanistan and he said, I wish people in America could just spend one day in Afghanistan because they, even the homeless here, have it better than what they have in Afghanistan.
That's what I want people to remember is, you know, even on our worst day, we are blessed to live in America.
There's a reason if you look at, if you speak with legal immigrants, they are in some ways so much more patriotic than people that were born here because they get it.
They get what's on the other side.
What I want us to remember is we're not perfect.
We're a work in progress.
But boy, we've gotten it better than any other country.
And the second you let this woke culture and this cancel culture start bullying people out of what they believe and what they think and what they want to do to succeed, don't tear down the one part of us that's so great that other countries envy us for it.
I had started doing the books for my family business when I was 13.
And didn't know that wasn't normal until I went to college.
But really, when times were tough, I learned how to stretch a dollar.
I had to figure out what we were going to pay and what we weren't.
And when times were good, we never celebrated because you knew bad times were going to happen again.
Ended up going to Clemson, go Tigers.
Graduated with a degree in accounting and then worked for a company and six of its subsidiaries as the accounting supervisor.
And then I got tired of working for the guys down the hall.
And so we came back home to the family business and one day I was complaining to my mom about how hard it was to make a dollar and how easy it was for government to take it.
And she said, quit complaining about it, do something about it.
I did not know you weren't supposed to run against a 30-year incumbent in the primary.
I truly didn't.
Ignorance is bliss.
But once I realized he was related to half the district and I had thrown my head in, the only option was to win.
So my husband got in the driver's seat, I was in the passenger seat, we put our two little ones in the back seat and I started knocking on doors.
And was able to win that state house seat.
And truly, it was, I thought there were way too many lawyers at the state house, and they needed a really good accountant.
I went to our Republican Speaker of the House and I said, this is why people don't trust us.
And I filed some legislation that said anything important enough to be debated on the floor of the House or the Senate is important enough for people to have votes on the record.
So the speaker pulled me aside and he said, put the bill away.
We don't need to have it.
We will decide what the public needs to see and what they don't.
And I remember going to my husband that night saying, if I can't even get legislative votes on the record, what am I doing here?
And he said, then fight.
So I went around the state of South Carolina and said, did you know of all the bills passed in the House?
Only 8% are on the record.
Did you know of all the bills passed in the Senate?
Only 1% was on the record.
So if you didn't know how your House member voted 92% of the time, if you didn't know how your Senator voted 99% of the time, how did you know who to vote for when you went to the polls?
The people of South Carolina were shocked.
Now to put this into perspective, my first year in office I was chairman of the freshman class, my second year I was majority whip, my third year I was on a powerful business committee, my fourth year I was subcommittee chair of banking.
The year that I didn't put the bill away, they stripped me of everything.
I mean, we went from a 13% unemployment rate to the fact that South Carolina didn't have any industry.
All our jobs were in the textile market and they had all gone overseas.
And we had to wake South Carolina up.
And so I went in there and said, if you're costing a person or business time, you're costing them money.
That's no longer acceptable in South Carolina.
And we got to work.
And by the time I left, we were building planes with Boeing, more BMWs than any place in the world, five international tire companies, the largest carbon fiber producer in the world.
They were referring to us as the Beast of the Southeast.
And I loved it.
And no unions.
I was a union buster the whole time.
If there was a company that wanted to come in that was unionized, we strong-armed them and said, we don't want you.
So what would you say your guiding political principles are because it's interesting to me like you're 13 years old doing the books so like there's numbers and those things matter and now we live in this bizarre time where everyone's like two trillion for this and I just saw this morning they want they want to pass another 80 billion to fortify the IRS.
And I learned that that dollar, you can only stretch it so far.
And so really understanding the value of a dollar.
Appreciating small and limited government so that people can be successful without government getting in the way.
Understanding the importance of a good education, and that education not being government responding to money, but government actually responding to kids and allowing families to decide their education.
And then allowing job creators to do what they do best, which is create jobs.
You know, if you give a small business, if small business makes money, they don't go on vacation.
They hire more people.
And so the goal is you want small businesses to have cash flow so they can spread the tentacles out and do that.
You want a strong foreign policy where you're, you know, making sure you're safe overseas and it's not coming here.
These are basic principles.
It's not rocket science.
But it's core values that I think are at the heart of the Republican Party, but they're at the heart of a good America too, if we do it right.
The thing people don't know is Donald Trump and I knew each other before.
When I won the primary for governor the first time, I got this envelope with this great gold trim and in it was a support check and there was a note that said you're a winner.
And so I got on the phone and we chatted and we were acquaintances throughout the years.
And then 2016 happened, and we had a great slate of talent on that stage.
I mean, it seems like the most backwards, at least the Security Council stuff.
I know they do some, I suppose they do some good humanitarian stuff.
Maybe you can comment.
I don't know.
All right, well, you can comment on that, obviously.
But, like, to just go in there and try to at least defend freedom, try to get some of these insane votes that they're constantly doing reversed and change some of that stuff.
Like, I'm guessing you were walking down the hallway.
People were not like, oh, yay, there's Nikki Haley.
No, they bash us publicly, but what they would say is they wanted us to lead because they don't want to follow Russia.
They don't want to follow China.
They do see us as the moral authority there.
And you know, it's a perfect example is when Trump finally, you know, when Syria crossed the red line and did chemical weapons, and Trump did the first shots back and did the missiles, the number of ambassadors that came to me and said, it's so good to see the United States lead again.
That's what they want.
They want us to call out evil.
They want us to do good.
They want us to show something.
And that's why I've always said the United States leadership isn't going to war.
Sometimes, just when the United States says something, countries follow.
You know, when we mention this is what should happen, they do tend to move with us.
And so there's good that we have there, but we have to continue to use that voice and be a force for good.
I mean, the key is, look, I'm in a military family.
So the last thing I'm gonna say is, with my brother was full-time military, my husband is, the last thing you want your family members to go to war.
But the military is there for a reason.
And what you do want is, for example, you know, with Biden wanting to pull out of Afghanistan, well, my husband served in Afghanistan.
I know what was happening there.
We don't need thousands of troops there, but you do need some there for intel purposes.
That's really what you want, is military for intelligence, to tell you on the ground in Syria whether they're getting ready to do a chemical weapons attack, to tell you on the ground in Afghanistan Whether there's another plot for 9-11.
So the only thing I'll say is that Biden's foreign policy is really backwards in the way that Look at how much has changed from the Chinese delegation comes to Alaska and humiliates our American delegation.
You know, Putin's challenging Biden to a debate.
How ridiculous is that?
Kim is starting to test off ballistic missiles again, and here Biden's falling all over himself to do business with Iran, but is boycotting Georgia?
You know, like these things, and then all- Georgia the state, not Georgia the country.
Absolutely, and all these things, and he's cutting our defense spending.
You know, I'll be the first one to say the military's bloated.
It's bureaucratic.
There's a lot that we shouldn't be paying for.
But if we don't modernize our military, China and Russia are already moving.
Iran is already speeding up.
We look so distracted right now.
And making sure we modernize our military, making sure we have strategic military on the ground in certain places to keep us safe and to keep bad actors from doing more harm, that's an important thing.
So what do you think is behind Biden and the decisions he's making?
This is the question that everyone gets asked all the time, like, because I think most people don't really believe it's Biden leading this thing anymore, that it's either the Obama machine behind it or something that's left of the Clinton machine or something else altogether.
Like, to me, it seems like if you would have asked Joe Biden 10 years ago if he agreed or disagreed with some of the things you just said there, he probably would have agreed, where now it's like, Who knows what he believes?
So what can be done at the international level, like with the UN at this point?
Like if you were there right now, which probably ain't going to happen, but if you were there right now, I mean, this, this just in the last couple of days, Iran got put on the, the, what was it?
It's why the United Nations doesn't have credibility.
It's why they struggle.
First of all, if I was at the United Nations right now, I would immediately call a Security Council hearing and hold China accountable for what they did to the world with COVID.
I would ask what the World Health Organization knew.
I would call out Iran for all of the violations of UN resolutions that they're doing, and say, how can you turn around and get into an Iran deal when they're violating multiple resolutions?
You know, there's a lot of things that could be done and should be done, and instead what we've seen is the UN ambassador went and basically criticized America for being racist.
That here I was defending America, and here The Chinese delegation goes and humiliates the American delegation and the UN ambassador basically gave them all the fuel to do it.
You know, I mean, you don't go, we're not a racist country.
We are the least racist country.
And so the idea that they would say that is, it's such a, I can't even understand what Biden or the ambassador think that will do to help America.
And don't they, wasn't there some massive scandal where they were like racking up something like a hundred million dollars worth of parking tickets in New York City?
But what, like, are we on some inevitable collision no matter what here, just because of debt, if nothing else.
Like, if they just call in, hey guys, you gotta pay us back for some of this stuff, and then it's like, well, we can't, we don't have the money, and we do have missiles and bombs.
And after that Olympics, they will go and try and take Taiwan.
And if they take Taiwan, that's a total game changer around the world.
And so they're trying to get as much good press as they can.
If we call them out, they hate that.
So Making sure that we call them out on genocide, making sure that we actually hold them accountable on intellectual property, modernizing our military, which scares them, or having a military presence anywhere scares them.
You go and you look at what President Xi did.
He started a commission that basically said any company that does business with China has to cooperate with our Chinese military.
Now think about our tech companies.
Think about all the information they have on our habits, on our pharmaceuticals, on everything we do, and now know the Chinese military has access to that.
Think about that.
Like, that's dangerous.
And we watched this play out in real time with COVID, that when we were trying to save millions of lives, What was China doing?
They called two American companies, 3M and Honeywell, who have business in China, said you are not allowed to sell any of your PPE.
They bought it wholesale and they would only give it to countries that agreed to do business with Huawei, their 5G network.
This is a country that is out to really take over the world and do all that.
That's what all these investments around the world are.
It's when they're running up this debt, Then they go and they say to these little countries, OK, give us your military installation.
Give us your utility.
And the debt that we are in, it's the first time our debt is bigger than our economy since World War II.
Do you know what that does?
Makes China so happy.
Because when you weaken the dollar like that, that's a national security threat beyond anything else.
There's a reason China and Iran just got into a bank together.
Is they're trying to make sure that the U.S.
dollar is no longer the world's reserve.
And we're sitting back and watching this happen and not doing anything about it.
So do you think no one in the administration gets it?
Because I think most people watching this are probably, even if they're not that in the weeds on all this, they're probably like, yeah, that does feel like basically what's happening.
That China is saying we're going to be the new superpower and they're setting up all the pieces in play.
But do you think anyone, do you think the administration cares?
So they see what China's doing, they're treating it like symptoms, but they're not treating the disease.
That China is a disease that we have to stop thinking if we're nice to them, which Kerry just said, oh, we should be nice with China so we can cooperate on the environment.
We have to stop thinking that if you're nice to China, they'll want to be like us.
They don't want to be like us.
They want to be communists.
They're going to continue to do whatever it takes.
They're laughing at us right now.
What we have to do is let China know we're on to them.
And we have to act accordingly.
Now that doesn't mean that they can't buy grains and poultry from us.
or we can't buy t-shirts and light bulbs from them.
But it does mean they don't get to control our pharmaceuticals.
We don't need to go in so much debt that they own us.
Like there's certain things we just need to be smart about, strategic about, instead of just curing
We should be able to handle both at the same time.
It's not an either or scenario.
There's something to be said for balance and prioritizing and making sure that everything is in its order.
You talked about the race aspect.
One of the things that was so appalling to me is what happened with the Georgia bill.
You know, South Carolina, when I was governor, we passed voter ID in 2011.
Much tougher than the one Georgia did.
And I said at the time, if you have to show picture ID to buy Sudafed, if you have to show picture ID to get on a plane, you should have to show picture ID to protect the election process.
I was vilified at the time.
They said that I was trying to disenfranchise voters, that, you know, a lot of people couldn't get picture IDs, and I said, okay, fine.
If that's the case, I will send someone, we will pick you up, we will take you to the DMV, we will get you a free picture ID, and we will return you home.
But look at this, so they're sitting there and they're going through all this stop Asian hate, all of this, but why was it the Democrats that shot down the part that said stop discrimination of Asians in schools?
I mean, you know, so it's just hypocritical in terms of what they think is racist and what's not.
You know, when you're brown, it's almost worse because they think you're not black enough or you don't count or, you know, they can discriminate against you in schools, but hey, don't don't mess with them when they're trying to vote.
All of these things.
But all of that does is it assumes minorities are dumb.
And it assumes minorities are less than.
And it's Democrats that are doing that.
And we have to keep calling them out on how racist they are.
They see what too many Republicans do, too many white Republicans frankly do, is when they call you racist, they just back down.
They go into a corner.
Don't do that.
We're not racist.
It's the reason why I'll say this until my last breath, is we are not a racist country.
Do we have some bad eggs?
Always.
But so does everyone else.
But we have progressed over the years, over and over again.
You can see it through all the things on how women are empowered, on minorities are empowered, everything.
People have been lifted up in total.
That's what you want to continue to see happening.
So what I would like to think that the Republican Party will be is it won't go back to the party before Trump because that was a really important move that we made.
So many people like where I grew up in rural South Carolina who felt unheard, misunderstood, not paid attention to, suddenly came into the fold and they made our party better.
The problem is we lost women.
We lost the suburbs.
But more importantly, we have to expand our tent.
We've got to reach out to Hispanics.
We've got to reach out to the Jewish community.
We've got to reach out to Asians and make sure that we have that conversation.
African Americans.
I did it in South Carolina.
It can be done.
But you don't go to them and say, you should be one of us.
You go to them and say, what do you care about?
And when you have that conversation, suddenly they realize you care about the same things.
And then you have a conversation.
I know if I went and spoke to several hundred Indian Americans right now, 70% would be Democrat.
But if I just showed up with respect, had a conversation, we'd win half of them.
It takes more work.
It takes more time.
It takes more effort.
But if we do it, we will be a better party.
Do you know we've lost the last seven out of eight popular votes for president?
That means we're doing something wrong.
If we grow our tent, if we grow our party, we will be a stronger country and we will be able to move the ball.
Not for the next presidential election, but for 20 and 30 years down the road.
Do you think oddly that a lot of the Democrats now are doing the complete reverse, which is sort of nodding to the violence that we're seeing on the streets and they don't mind when this chaos is erupting?
I mean, when you go, it doesn't make sense when you have these violent protests and you're tearing down you know, an African-American small business, or you're
seeing an African-American police officer shot.
Like, these things, you're hurting your own people.
I mean, at the end of the day, the protests and the violence, if you're upset, I get it.
Are you shocked that no Democrats, I mean, really no Democrats or Joe Biden is still only saying Antifa is an idea, an idea that's caused about $2 billion worth of damage.
No, I think that they fail to see what they don't want to see.
And they immediately judge and go after what they want to assume is the culprit.
And it's harmful for our country.
And something has to change.
And, you know, our job is, again, not to sit back and say, it's done, we can't do anything.
No, you keep saying something, you keep correcting them, and do it unapologetically.
Do it with courage.
Do it with strength.
And do it with passion, because when you do that, they don't have the standing to really keep going.
Because if you were to question what's racist and what's not, or question protests, they can't say more than a second sentence, because they have no other explanation after that.
That's kind of why they're into that censorship thing too.
There's a little something to that.
So to that point, we sort of touched on this, but one of the reasons that I came around on Trump was I saw that it wasn't just Republicans fighting Democrats, it was Republicans versus Democrats and the media.
And he was just like, I'm not going to take it.
What do you think Republicans can do in that fight?
Because I get a lot, I hear a lot of people now that are really regretting, my few good liberal friends that'll still talk to me, they're not happy with Biden.
But what they're saying is we still had to get rid of Trump because of his, you know, the way he spoke and all that kind of stuff.
But to me it was like he knew how to fight that thing and you're not going to get the perfect guy to do that.
Like, what do you think Republicans can do?
Like, you can see them doing this with DeSantis now, that awful 60 Minutes hit piece and everything else.
Like, what do you think Republicans can do in that arena?
Because that's not the political arena, that's more the media arena.
Well, I mean, I think we've seen, look, I've been hit recently by a liberal reporter that will go out and they'll do profiles and they'll try and shoot you down.
Do you think that basically conservatives, and again I mean that in sort of the wide sense of it, just have to start building completely new things?
I mean, this is sort of a new idea that's out there now, which is like, in essence, conservatives will have to have their own banks, they'll have to have their own places of journalism, they'll have to have their own educational institutions.
You know, that at some level these things are just irreparably damaged, and we should just let them have it and the rest of us will build better things.
So when I've talked to my, let's say, left-leaning friends about this new conservative movement, the two that still get them, it's always the same two.
It's abortion and belief.
That most of them come, not that they're all purely atheists, but they have this real thing about, oh, the right is just too religious, or something like that.
So could you kind of soothe them, perhaps, on either one of those?
My example, I'll just...
Tell you is, well, Rudy Giuliani is obviously a conservative, and he was obviously a Trump supporter.
And not only when he got divorced, oh, because then they'll also say the gay thing a little bit, which I think the ship has sailed on that.
Well, he lived with two gay guys after he got divorced.
He's pro-choice, and he was a Trump supporter.
So it's like nobody's doubting that he's a conservative.
And I think, again, lack of judgment is important as you go forward.
I just don't believe in being a judgmental person.
I don't think anybody else should allow them to go into that negative energy either.
But, look, I mean, conservatives are, you know, I'm a person of deep faith.
I think that God has blessed us in so many ways.
But I use mine as, you know, It's like my parents always said, you know, the best way to appreciate your blessings is to give back.
So it's more of like a service that you feel that you give back.
If you've been blessed with goods, you try and pass it on, you try and hold the ladder down, you try and help other people, and you know that There's a higher power.
Some people don't believe in that.
And that's okay.
It's not something that I would ever judge someone for.
Same thing with the pro-life.
I'm pro-life not because the Republican Party tells me to be, but because my husband was adopted and I'm blessed every day for him.
And so, I think experiences are what form us, but at the end of the day, we have to look at the greater good, right?
And figure out how we get there.
And so, I also don't think we're all one-issue people.
I mean, the way the Democrats always assume women are so divided on the pro-choice issue.
But right now I feel like I can do the greatest good by making sure we win the House and the Senate back.
And so we're campaigning here.
We're going to be campaigning for Michelle Steele and Young Kim.
We've endorsed Marionette Miller-Meeks and Julia Letlow from Louisiana.
We're going to be helping candidates all over the country, and we're going to try and recruit some really good ones, because the ones that won, you know, in this past congressional races, man, they're good quality people.
I mean, they're going to run circles around Nancy Pelosi, and we need more of that.