May 15, 2021 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
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| I will say I have sat down personally with Mark Zuckerberg. | ||
| I talk about this in the book. | ||
| He came to see me back in September of 2019, I believe it was. | ||
| I found that meeting much more interesting because that was a face-to-face meeting, which he was really trying to change my view about Facebook. | ||
| I think that's why he came to see me. | ||
| This was in Washington in my Senate office and he came to see me and he really tried to convince me. | ||
| that Facebook should be kind of a national champion, that we needed Facebook to be big | ||
| and powerful in order to take on communist China. Now he really went on and on about this for quite | ||
| some time. When I turned the subject to the question of monopoly, he got much less interested | ||
| in the conversation. | ||
| He said, well, well, well, you know, I mean, we're not a monopoly. | ||
| And I said, OK, well, if you're not, if you're not afraid of competition, why don't you sell off Instagram and WhatsApp? | ||
| I mean, you bought them so that they wouldn't compete with you. | ||
| You didn't start them. | ||
| You bought them. | ||
| Why don't you sell them? | ||
| Why don't you spend them off? | ||
| You know, that made him very angry. | ||
| He was very offended by that. | ||
| He thought that that was a ridiculous suggestion. | ||
| And I said, well, that's because you're committed to your monopoly. | ||
| I mean, you don't want competition. | ||
| You want to be able to control the whole show. | ||
| And that's really the problem with these companies. | ||
| I'm Dave Rubin and joining me today is the junior senator from the great state of Missouri | ||
| and the author of the new book, The Tyranny of Big Tech, Senator Josh Hawley. | ||
| Welcome to the Rubin Report. | ||
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| Senator, what are the chances that this video is not gonna be algorithmically depressed by YouTube? | ||
| Do we have any chance that anyone's gonna see this thing? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Given my history with big tech, maybe not, but we'll keep our fingers crossed. | ||
| I've got a similar history with big tech. | ||
| So I wanna start by, I just literally in the last five minutes, as we sat down with you, I saw two headlines that I thought, okay, these are perfect to tee up for the Senator. | ||
| So Breitbart is just reporting in the last couple of minutes that, I'll read you the exact tweet. | ||
| Twitter is reportedly developing a feature to make users reconsider sending messages that its system detects as quote, mean. | ||
| I suspect that will include a lot of your stuff. | ||
| I suspect what will happen is, well, first of all, if they actually enforce that, wouldn't that shut down all of Twitter? | ||
| That's it for Twitter. | ||
| Twitter seems to subsist on, but of course, in practice, I'm sure that will mean that conservatives and libertarians, that their tweets are all silenced and the left can go on with the hate mongering as long as they like. | ||
| That's usually how it works. | ||
| Yeah, that pretty much is it. | ||
| And then this other one, which it seems obvious, and I actually warned that this was gonna be coming. | ||
| Twitter is now, so this is from Becker News, Twitter is now suspending users who share Donald Trump's statements. | ||
| So as you know, Trump launched, in effect, a blog. | ||
| It wasn't sort of, people were saying he was gonna come out with this big platform. | ||
| Apparently, that's not it. | ||
| But he launched this thing with just buttons that could send stuff to Twitter and Facebook. | ||
| Now they're actually deleting accounts that just link to his stuff. | ||
| Yeah, that's just, it's unbelievable. | ||
| And their determination to completely silence and erase and cancel The former president of the United States. | ||
| It's just shocking. | ||
| And the fact that they have the power, the monopoly power, to do this and to get by with it, and that there's nowhere else the former president can go. | ||
| I mean, think about this. | ||
| Former president of the United States had, what, 78 and 80 million followers or something on Twitter and many more on the other platforms. | ||
| And there's no alternative for him to go. | ||
| He's got to try and create his own thing. | ||
| I mean, that tells you something about the monopoly power of these companies. | ||
| Okay, so let's start right at the heart of it because you are a constitutional conservative. | ||
| And at least as far as I know, we're still governed by the constitution, although I'm not quite sure these days. | ||
| But I know that a lot of people, every time you say, okay, we've got to do something about big tech, they say, well, what do you mean? | ||
| They're private companies and we should just leave them alone. | ||
| What is your argument against that? | ||
| Well, listen, a monopoly is a threat to the free market and also a threat to liberty. | ||
| I mean, this is the problem for those of us who believe in free market capitalism, is that monopoly stifles competition, monopoly raises barriers to entry, raises barriers to new entrants into the market, slows down innovation, And of course gives the holders of the monopoly incredible power in politics, and we're seeing that now with these big tech companies. | ||
| So I would just say to those who consider themselves defenders of the free market, to those who consider themselves defenders of capitalism, that it is incumbent upon us to dismantle monopolies so that the market can function, we can have more competition, consumers could have more choice. | ||
| Bottom line politically is, our framers understood, monopoly and liberty do not go together. | ||
| And we've got to recover that understanding. | ||
| Do you think in some sense, though, the ship has just kind of sailed here? | ||
| You know, I covered all the hearings. | ||
| Obviously, you were very involved in all of those. | ||
| And when Trump was in power, there was this idea that, oh, maybe something's going to happen. | ||
| But at this point, Biden's in charge and the Democrats are in charge. | ||
| And it's like, well, why would they do anything on this stuff? | ||
| Because it's helping them. | ||
| Yeah, there's no doubt. | ||
| I think the Democrats have really fallen in love with the monopoly power of these companies. | ||
| And if you listen to those hearings... | ||
| And cover them as you did. | ||
| What you hear over and over is the Democrats saying the companies ought to censor more. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They use their power more aggressively. | ||
| I mean, they're no longer worried about the concentration of power. | ||
| They're basically cheering the companies on and then threatening to regulate them if the companies don't get more censorious, which is sort of hard to imagine. | ||
| But I do think that the Democrats have really given up on the monopoly question because they've come to love it. | ||
| But that doesn't mean that the conservatives have to. | ||
| I mean, we have to now more than ever. | ||
| Get back to our founders' understanding that monopoly and liberty are not compatible. | ||
| And what we need is more competition. | ||
| What we need is to return power and control to the American people. | ||
| That includes control over your own speech, control over your own personal information, your personal data. | ||
| And I think we've got to be bold in pushing forward reforms and legislative proposals that will do that. | ||
| Why do you think Trump didn't move on this? | ||
| You know, there was this threat of doing something about Section 230 of the Communications Act that we've covered a million times before, but nothing happened. | ||
| What do you think was the holdup there? | ||
| I think that really the White House can get focused on it, and the President, I think, did not begin to really push it until it was in an election season, and it was very hard then at that point to galvanize Congress into action. | ||
| But also, the real sticking point was never the White House, it was always Congress. | ||
| And a lot of, listen, when I came to the Senate just two years ago, And I began proposing to reform overhaul section 230 to break up these monopolies. | ||
| I couldn't find very many takers on my side of the aisle. | ||
| I mean, there were very, very few Republicans who wanted to be associated with that or involved with that. | ||
| And so I think you just didn't have a lot of enthusiasm. | ||
| And that's because Republican elected officials were a lot of the times out of step with their own voters. | ||
| Their own voters are saying, wow, These companies have too much power. | ||
| They are radical left. | ||
| They are censoring speech. | ||
| They are shutting down. | ||
| Our speech and the democratic process interfering with it. | ||
| But you said Republicans who weren't willing to move on it. | ||
| I think that that is changing. | ||
| But as you say, the last two, four years were really a missed opportunity for Republicans in that respect. | ||
| And now we've got to make up for lost time. | ||
| And we can do that by being bold with our thinking, bold in our proposals, and go to the American people with an agenda to trust bust here in the 21st century. | ||
| But do you fear that now that the Democrats are in charge, that if they were to do anything about all of this, that it would actually just be worse? | ||
| Because you made the point. | ||
| They were basically saying, hey, if you guys don't regulate speech, we're gonna punish you. | ||
| I mean, that's basically what AOC said to Zuckerberg. | ||
| And he pretty much was like, well, I can't, I can't do that, I'm not God. | ||
| But now that they have the power, like, it's hard for me to envision basically them using that power to expand freedom. | ||
| Yes, I agree with you. | ||
| I think this is one of the reasons why I'm very, very skeptical of increasing government regulation over the companies, especially the way the Democrats want to. | ||
| Democrats want to further regulate the speech content that's on the web and that's on these platforms. | ||
| That's what they really want to do, and they want to tell the companies that you need to define this as offensive, and you need to define that as threatening, and you need to take down this. | ||
| That I think is exactly the wrong way to go. | ||
| We don't need less speech. | ||
| We need more speech. | ||
| We don't need more political control. | ||
| We need less political control and more freedom on the internet and everywhere else. | ||
| So I think that the way to go is not to increase the government involvement, but to break the companies up. | ||
| I mean, let's get the free market involved again. | ||
| Let's get some competitors in that space. | ||
| Another thing I would say is let's give people the right to sue these companies, these monopolies, if they get deplatformed and they're treated in bad faith. | ||
| It used to be, I mean it still is true in every other walk of life of every other industry, that if a company violates its contract with you, you can sue them. | ||
| Well, with big tech, you can't sue them if they violate their terms of agreement because the federal government protects them, immunizes them. | ||
| That's section 230. | ||
| I think we ought to withdraw that and allow people to sue If they're treated in bad faith by these companies, if these companies violate their terms of service, I think that could be a game changer. | ||
| Can you talk about what actually breaking them up would look like? | ||
| Because I've seen a lot of my more libertarian friends basically say that is the answer. | ||
| Like they've just sort of hit the end. | ||
| They got to the end of the road and it's like, all right, we don't really like to do this stuff, but I think they're kind of with you. | ||
| It's like, we have no choice. | ||
| What does that actually mean? | ||
| So, okay, we're gonna break up Twitter. | ||
| Like, what does that really look like? | ||
| Well, here's where I would start. | ||
| I would start by making these companies spin off all of the various industries that they've tried to consolidate under their control. | ||
| So, for example, Amazon. | ||
| Amazon has the dominant e-commerce platform in the world. | ||
| We're all familiar with that. | ||
| It also, though, has a major, major share, if not a controlling share, in the cloud. | ||
| That's AWS. | ||
| It also has its own retail line of products that it sells on its own platform using information from competitors. | ||
| They shouldn't be able to do all of these things at once. | ||
| I mean, this is really what used to be called a conglomerate merger, where you have this massive conglomeration of industries under one set of hands, under one control. | ||
| I think we ought to make them spin those companies off by just saying in law that they can't combine these different industries into one giant tech company. | ||
| Almost all these tech companies do it. | ||
| I mean, Google does the same thing, right? | ||
| Google has Search, of course, the dominant search platform in the world, but Google also owns the advertising, the digital advertising sphere at a monopoly level, such that if you want to advertise anything on the Internet, you've got to go through Google. | ||
| We should make them spin off those businesses. | ||
| Sell them off Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram. | ||
| They should have to sell those off. | ||
| So that when I think about breaking up big tech, that's where I would start. | ||
| Let's reverse this conglomerate mergers that big tech has done and performed by gobbling up all of these other companies and let's begin to reintroduce some competition. | ||
| So you don't think we can send a couple government bureaucrats into the Google offices to look at the algorithm and fix that thing? | ||
| Is that what you're saying? | ||
| I don't trust the federal government to do much of anything. | ||
| I certainly don't trust them to try and fine-tune these companies. | ||
| I would say that what that really amounts to, to get serious about it, is a form of corporatism. | ||
| That's when the government says to big business, why don't we partner up? | ||
| And we'll work hand in glove, and we'll work together. | ||
| That's what the Democrats want, I think. | ||
| The Democrats have become corporatists. | ||
| They want to see this alliance between big business and big government. | ||
| They're pursuing and building that alliance. | ||
| I think as conservatives, we should say, no, no, no, we reject that whole premise. | ||
| We don't want big business or big government. | ||
| We don't want them working together. | ||
| We want competition. | ||
| We want there to be liberty, and we're going to pursue policies that will get that. | ||
| Can you talk a little bit about what it's like to be in those meetings? | ||
| Like, when you're sitting there and you're looking at Jack from Twitter who looks like he just got off a three-week Ayahuasca trip and you got Zuckerberg who looks like he was just pulled off like a synthetic human, you know, like, whatever. | ||
| Like, what do you make of these guys? | ||
| Like, really, like, what is that experience? | ||
| Like, also knowing that the entire world is watching everything they say, watching everything you say. | ||
| It's all gonna be cut and edited in crazy ways and everything else. | ||
| I've actually found that their appearances before the committees, in my case it's the Judiciary Committee that they've appeared before a number of times, tend to be very, shall we say, unenlightening. | ||
| And you know this, you've covered it, you've commented on it, you've analyzed it. | ||
| They say nothing over and over and over again, and they try to say nothing in new and more interesting ways. | ||
| And I personally think that those hearings have a value in putting questions to them and exposing the fact that they prevaricate and obfuscate and sometimes just outright lie, that's the | ||
| value. But in terms of actually extracting information, they don't give you anything. I | ||
| mean, there's really little value there. I will say I have sat down personally with Mark | ||
| Zuckerberg. I talk about this in the book. | ||
| He came to see me back in September of 2019, I believe it was. | ||
| I found that meeting much more interesting because that was a face-to-face meeting, which he was really trying to change my view about Facebook. | ||
| I think that's why he came to see me. | ||
| This was in Washington in my Senate office and he came to see me and he really tried to convince me that Facebook should be kind of a national champion, that we needed Facebook to be big and powerful in order to take on Communist China. | ||
| And he really went on and on about this for quite some time. | ||
| When I turned the subject to the question of monopoly, he got much less interested in the conversation. | ||
| He said, well, well, well, you know, I mean, we're not a monopoly. | ||
| And I said, OK, well, if you're not, if you're not afraid of competition, why don't you sell off Instagram and WhatsApp? | ||
| I mean, you bought them so that they wouldn't compete with you. | ||
| You didn't start them. | ||
| You bought them. | ||
| Why don't you sell them? | ||
| Why don't you spend them off? | ||
| And that made him very angry. | ||
| He was very offended by that. | ||
| He thought that that was a ridiculous suggestion. | ||
| And I said, well, that's 'cause you're committed to your monopoly. | ||
| I mean, you don't want competition. | ||
| You wanna be able to control the whole show. | ||
| And that's really the problem with these companies. | ||
| Do you have some sympathy for these guys when they're testifying? | ||
| Like Zuckerberg, they're, you know, in that moment when he kind of said, you know, we just can't do all of this stuff, that's what he said to AOC. | ||
| I actually kind of sympathize with the guy. | ||
| I know it's hard to sympathize with these people, but at some level, you know, they start these tech companies. | ||
| I don't think they're all evil necessarily. | ||
| I think they get lost in their own thing and it's almost an unwinnable position in a bizarre sense. | ||
| But do you have any sympathy for him? | ||
| You know, I don't tend to be very sympathetic when I'm getting lied to, and I do think that they have deliberately misled Congress many times, and would do it and will do it if you let them get by with it. | ||
| I will say that sometimes, depending on who's questioning them, You do actually feel a little bit of sympathy. | ||
| I mean, some of the questions that they have to answer are really ludicrous and ridiculous. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But on the whole, my view is these guys are billionaires. | ||
| They're not stupid people, as you point out. | ||
| These are very capable people. | ||
| They didn't get to where they are by being dumb. | ||
| I mean, they're very smart, they're very accomplished, and they can certainly hold their own. | ||
| So I tend not to feel too sorry for them. | ||
| I wish they'd be more forthcoming. | ||
| I wish they'd be a little bit more honest. | ||
| But at the end of the day, We can't look to anyone's CEO's personal characteristics or personal character traits and hope for the best. | ||
| What we've got to do is make decisions about the structure of our economy. | ||
| And when you have monopolies who are actively suppressing competition and actively trying to control speech, that's a problem. | ||
| And it doesn't really matter who's in charge of the company. | ||
| What matters is what they're doing as a company and their power. | ||
| And we've got to do something about that. | ||
| Yeah, do you sense that also some of this is that they can use a lot of linguistic tricks to get out of all of the legal stuff? | ||
| So they'll use phrases like de-boosting or shadow banning or unbiasing, all of these things that they mean something, but they mean different things to different people. | ||
| So I've had Jack from Twitter tweet directly at me in response to me saying, we don't shadow ban. | ||
| Well, it's like, we all know that you shadow ban, but he may in his mind, just have a different definition. | ||
| of what Shadowban is. | ||
| So they make up words so that they're never really on the hook for anything. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| You know, this has happened repeatedly. | ||
| It was interesting in the hearing, the last hearing where these folks came before the Judiciary Committee was I think in November of 2020, so just a few months ago. | ||
| And shortly before that hearing, I had had a former employee of Facebook, a whistleblower, come to my office and say that he had information he wanted to share about Facebook's censorship practices. | ||
| And I tell some of this story in the book. | ||
| And one of the things he revealed to me and revealed to my staff was the existence of an internal Facebook platform called Cintra, which allows the company, it's like a souped up surveillance platform, and it allows the company to track their users across multiple different platforms, including across different usernames and aliases, And to track their posts, to track their internet activity, to track what they're doing in different countries, their geolocation. | ||
| I mean, it's extraordinary. | ||
| And he shared with us screenshots of this platform in use with particular individuals. | ||
| It was amazing. | ||
| So I get to the hearing, and I ask Zuckerberg about this. | ||
| He was clearly very surprised to be asked, but he initially tried to deny it by very carefully choosing his words and saying, I'm not familiar with any such tool by that name. | ||
| Plausible deniability, right? | ||
| Yeah, wait a minute, I said, so are you telling me that that doesn't exist, or are you telling me that you call it something else? | ||
| I mean, what is it you're trying to say? | ||
| Eventually, by the way, Facebook admitted they do have that tool, and it is called Cintra, so he was wrong on all counts, but he engaged in this back and forth with me where he was desperately trying to thread this needle to not outright deny it, but to suggest I was wrong, and that's what they do all the time. | ||
| Does anyone go to jail after any of these things? | ||
| I mean, I know not Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey from Twitter, but like when they do that sort of pretty much lie thing, does anyone ever get punished for lying to Congress anymore? | ||
| Is that a thing? | ||
| Not really. | ||
| No, not really. | ||
| You know, I can remember a time that a Google executive testified also before the Judiciary Committee, and I was asking him about the tracking that Google performs on its Android phones. | ||
| And I said that, you know, even if you turn off the location services on your phone, It still tracks you, right? | ||
| And he initially outright said, I mean, no, that's not accurate. | ||
| I said, really? | ||
| And so we started walking through it, and I said, I thought that even with location services off, the Wi-Fi function on your phone still scanned for other Wi-Fi in the area, still made a note of it, still stored that information, and still communicated it back to Google. | ||
| And then he said, well, yeah, that's true. | ||
| I said, well, so it's still tracking you? | ||
| At which point I said, well, I wouldn't use the word tracking. | ||
| I mean, so there you go. | ||
| I mean, where it's this constant, constant game to get them to be honest with you, sometimes about the most basic stuff. | ||
| I mean, I often think that these tech folks, when you put them on the stand, if you put them under oath, if you asked them if the sun was shining outside, they would prevaricate. | ||
| Well, you know, define sun. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| So that's how these hearings go. | ||
| Do you think some of your involvement of this is not only because I know you actually care about the Constitution and freedom, and I wanna talk about lockdowns and a lot more, obviously, but also because you're younger than the average senator, and partly what we have going on here is a 78-year-old president, and I got, I'm here in California, I got like a 106-year-old senator in Feinstein, like we have these old, And I'm not even, I don't mean that to be ageist. | ||
| Pelosi, we have these, and even Trump was 74. | ||
| He would be 75 right now if he was president. | ||
| That baby boomer generation is just hanging on to power too long and now there's these new industries and they don't know how to react to these things. | ||
| I do think there is a generational component to this. | ||
| I think there's no doubt about it. | ||
| And I can tell you just from my experience in questioning on the Judiciary Committee, there were multiple times where I would be asking a line of questioning that this is really not earth-shattering stuff. | ||
| I mean, this is even about location services we were just talking about. | ||
| A lot of people know that, but I was asking some of these questions, and I had older colleagues | ||
| who just aren't familiar with these technologies. | ||
| They probably do have an iPhone or an Android, but they don't really use it that much. | ||
| They use it to make calls, that's it. | ||
| Their staff does a lot of the other stuff. | ||
| I had them come up to me afterwards and say, "I've never heard that before. | ||
| Is that true? | ||
| I wasn't aware that any of this was going on. | ||
| And that's been a pretty common response. | ||
| I think that's just generational. | ||
| I think that they're not as familiar with this technology. | ||
| And that's one of the reasons why in these hearings, you've really seen, especially a couple of years ago, you could really see the tech executives tie up members of congress and not because | ||
| you know the initial question might be pretty darn good from a senator | ||
| congressman but then the response you know they just wouldn't know how to respond and and the | ||
| tech ceo or executive would give a a prevaricating response and | ||
| and then there was no follow-up There was no way to untangle that web that they had just spun. | ||
| So I'm glad that as more people get focused on this and spend more time getting prepped for this, I think Congress is getting better at doing oversight. | ||
| But to go back to earlier point, we can talk all we want about oversight hearings, lots of talk. | ||
| We have to do something. | ||
| We can talk all we want, but the time has come to do something about this, and the book is, that's partly what this book is about. | ||
| Yeah, okay, so let's, so we're sort of dancing around all the topics in the book, but let's talk about the book. | ||
| So it's called The Tyranny of Big Tech, and ironically, the book almost didn't get published. | ||
| Can you explain what happened there? | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| The book was initially commissioned by Simon & Schuster, one of the two biggest publishers, I believe I'm right in saying, in the country. | ||
| And Simon & Schuster naturally has been purchased by the biggest publisher in the country. | ||
| So there you have further industry consolidation, just like everywhere else. | ||
| But Simon & Schuster Signed the contract for the book before it was written. | ||
| So it commissioned me in that sense to write the book. | ||
| I wrote it. | ||
| They saw it, were happy with it. | ||
| And then in January, they said, oh, oh, oh, actually, you know what? | ||
| We're not gonna publish it. | ||
| We don't think you should be able to publish, we don't think you should be able to speak. | ||
| And they said that, you know, I, actually, they said to me nothing. | ||
| They never reached out to me personally. | ||
| I read this in a press release. | ||
| That's incredible. | ||
| So they never reached to anyone on your team to say, I mean, just even legally, you'd think they'd have to reach out to your lawyer to say, hey, we're severing the contract or something. | ||
| I think what they did is that they sent, I think they made a phone call, an informal phone call to the folks, to my agent, and said, we're going to cancel this. | ||
| But they didn't send, they didn't reach out to me. | ||
| They didn't send a letter. | ||
| Then they did a press release. | ||
| And he said, well, why? | ||
| What are you going to say? | ||
| And it's like, well, we'll be putting out a statement. | ||
| And so it's like, well, I guess we'll read it. | ||
| I guess we'll read the statement, which is what I did. | ||
| You know, I read their statement, which directly, I can't remember the exact words now, but basically said that, you know, well, Holly helped incite a riot on Capitol Hill. | ||
| And you get the impression from that, that, you know, I was there at a criminal riot, a rioter on the Hill. | ||
| Totally false. | ||
| 100% false. | ||
| They knew it was false. | ||
| And the whole reason they did it is because they went along with the woke left mob that wanted to cancel, and still does, wants to cancel conservatives. | ||
| Wants to cancel Trump supporters, wants to cancel anybody who will not bow down to their woke mentality and their woke agenda. | ||
| And I wouldn't then, and I won't now, and I'm delighted that the book founded an independent publisher who had the guts to publish it, who believes in, you know, free speech, a pretty basic American value, and now people can read for themselves. | ||
| Yeah, well, let's give Regnery a little shout out here because they're the ones that picked up the book, and they've picked up a couple other controversial books. | ||
| The Parasitic Mind by my friend Gad Saad, another one really going after the woke, and they picked him up as well. | ||
| What is it that you want people to mainly take away from this? | ||
| I mean, is it just so that they understand the issues better? | ||
| Like, what do you want the average person to do after they read this book? | ||
| Well, I wanted to say that first of all, there's no reason we have to accept the power of these tech monopolies. | ||
| We don't just have to accept it. | ||
| I think that's often what we're told. | ||
| You know, well, this is just how it is. | ||
| And yeah, if you use these platforms, as overwhelming majorities of Americans do, you're just going | ||
| to have to get used to having your data taken from you. | ||
| And you're just going to have to get used to being spied on all over the web. | ||
| And you're just going to have to get used to your children being tracked. | ||
| And that's just our economy. | ||
| That's how it is. | ||
| It's not how it has to be. | ||
| It's not at all. | ||
| We can do something about that. | ||
| These tech companies got big and powerful with the help of government. | ||
| Now it's time to cut them down to size and restore the free market. | ||
| So I think that's the message. | ||
| I want people to feel a sense of empowerment that things can be different and they will | ||
| be different if we demand it. | ||
| And also, we've got some control in our own lives. | ||
| We need to address this situation politically and legally. | ||
| We need to cut these companies down to size. | ||
| But also, personally, we can do things that will take back control. | ||
| We can spend less time on the platforms. | ||
| We can take steps that will limit their ability to spy on us. | ||
| We can try to get them out of our children's lives. | ||
| And I share about some of that in the book. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know if you know this, but I do every August off the grid. | ||
| No phone, no computer, no news, no nothing. | ||
| And it's, I honestly think it's one of the things that has helped keep me sane over the last couple of years because that news cycle and that endless scroll, you know, everyone calls it doom scrolling, where it's just more and more and more and more. | ||
| It's actually, it's making people crazy. | ||
| It is. | ||
| It is making people crazy and I discussed some of the data in the book and what we're seeing, especially with young people, we're seeing startling correlation between increased device and especially social media use. | ||
| And depression, isolation, anxiety, and suicide. | ||
| The statistics are really, really alarming. | ||
| And again, this is true, the depression piece of it is true for people of all ages, but it's really pronounced among young people and especially young females, young women. | ||
| The social media use and then the correlation between that and depression and even suicide is really stark. | ||
| And this is something that we need to get out in the open, and that the tech companies need to be responsible for. | ||
| You know, they want to act as if, "Oh my gosh, they're the model citizens, | ||
| and their products are all about making our lives easier and better." | ||
| Well, actually their products are about addiction, and their model is to addict us, | ||
| and that has major, major negative consequences. | ||
| And so we need to do something about that, and that starts with us personally. | ||
| And your example's a great one. | ||
| I should see if I could follow that great example. | ||
| But where we say, listen, I'm gonna take back some control in my own life, and I'm not gonna live my life on these platforms day in and day out. | ||
| Yeah, which everyone is doing constantly. | ||
| Trust me, I don't know if as a senator you can take a month off, but it is the best thing that you can possibly do. | ||
| I mean, I can actually feel my brain resetting during it. | ||
| It really, it's something. | ||
| What do you think about that some of the states are taking some of this into their hands? | ||
| I mean, Ron DeSantis, who I pretty much think is the best governor we've got in this country at this point, he's basically saying, if you de-platform a political candidate from Florida, we're gonna fine you. | ||
| I think it was 100 grand a day or 200 grand a day, something like that. | ||
| Do you think that it can work sort of at the state level or does it have to be kind of federal? | ||
| Well, I think ultimately we will have to do something at the federal level, I mean, particularly to break up the monopolies. | ||
| But the states absolutely should do everything they can, and I love what Governor DeSantis is doing in Florida. | ||
| I think there's similar proposal maybe in Texas and a few other places. | ||
| And I used to be Attorney General of the state of Missouri. | ||
| That's what I did before I was in the United States Senate. | ||
| And in that capacity, I filed an antitrust investigation, the first of its kind in the country, against Google and Facebook both. | ||
| So there is absolutely a role for the states here, a role for governors, state legislators, and attorneys general to go after these companies in every way possible. | ||
| And especially now, when you've got the Democrats really cozying up to big tech, really falling in love with their monopoly power, and Democrats in charge, of course, in Washington. | ||
| We've got to use every tool at our disposal to try to hold these companies accountable and try to give the American people some control back. | ||
| And I applaud these states who are doing it. | ||
| Yeah, let's shift from big tech a little bit to just some of the broader stuff. | ||
| So because you are a constitutional conservative, and it seems to me that the Constitution is under complete assault right now, that the Democrats, whether it's packing and expanding the courts, or getting rid of the electoral college, or moving on guns, or certainly the free speech stuff as related to big tech and everywhere else, it seems that the Constitution is just being attacked, and I wonder if there are enough people at this point, because our education system is so screwy, if there are just enough people who will stand up and fight for it because they don't even know what they're fighting for anymore. | ||
| You know, particularly when it comes to speech, just to start with that piece of it, | ||
| it has been remarkable to see even in the last five years, the collapse of treasuring and valuing free speech | ||
| among the sort of leading institutions in this country. | ||
| Think of our universities, the institutional press, the legacy press, these folks who used to be, | ||
| even though they were leftists, used to be defenders of free speech to some degree, | ||
| and now are not at all. | ||
| In fact, to the contrary, if they disagree with you, they want you silenced. | ||
| If they disagree with you, they want you cancelled. | ||
| So this, I think, is a remarkable development and a really, really dangerous one. | ||
| Because if we're not free to speak, then we can't deliberate. | ||
| And if we can't deliberate, we can't have self-government. | ||
| I mean, the whole idea of our republic is that normal people, everyday people, should have control over their lives and control over their government, and we ought to be making the decisions. | ||
| And we make the decisions because we talk together and we're able to converse together. | ||
| And if we're not able to do that freely, you know, if you've got these companies or the government interfering and saying, nope, can't say that, no, you can't express that view, nope, I mean, my gosh, how is our democracy to go on? | ||
| So I do think that we are at, to your point, as constitutionalists, we're at a moment of great peril, and we need to be bold in standing up for the Constitution, because you talk, in this moment of division, by the way, there should be nothing that unites us like the Constitution, and I think, and the principles it's based on, and I think we've got to be bold in going out there and fighting for those. | ||
| How much of that do you think has to do with sort of the general collapse of liberalism, that the progressives have just wiped away any of the old school liberals? | ||
| Because even though you're a Republican and a conservative, I suspect you probably enjoyed having debates with liberals at one time. | ||
| And now I don't know where those liberals are. | ||
| I used to be one of them. | ||
| My whole book is defending liberalism, except I'm defending something that seemingly is gone. | ||
| Yeah, I think that's right. | ||
| I do think that when you think about the liberal tradition, that this country is part of the tradition of freedom of speech, freedom of worship, free government, that is something that today's so-called liberals really have abandoned. | ||
| And again, it's happened with such speed. | ||
| I mean, even when I was in law school, which wasn't all that long ago, a decade or more ago, when I was in college before that, you could still have robust debate on campus. | ||
| You could have events where you had a conservative, you had a liberal, you had a libertarian, you had a liberal, and they would go at it. | ||
| People come and listen. | ||
| They wouldn't try to shout down the conservative viewpoint. | ||
| But that is increasingly difficult today on many, many, many American campuses. | ||
| And it's that same sort of campus culture, that woke leftism. | ||
| that is spreading into every sector of our society, at least into the areas of influence. | ||
| It's the leadership class in this country, the self-appointed leadership class, that is really imposing this wokeism and this cancel culture on the rest of the country. | ||
| Are you shocked how the Democrats just kind of folded? | ||
| Ask me seven years ago, say, like, was Nancy Pelosi truly this radical? | ||
| I actually don't think so. | ||
| Chuck Schumer, certainly, I don't think was really this radical. | ||
| Joe Biden, I mean, I don't know what he believes anymore, but I don't think, you know, he's ushering in all of this now. | ||
| I mean, are you shocked how quickly they all folded? | ||
| I'm very surprised at how hard to the left they have turned so quickly. | ||
| And I think what it probably tells you is that for decades now, their commitment to core constitutional principles has been weakening. | ||
| You know, we saw it earlier, I think, with freedom of worship. | ||
| That has been one where the Democrat, that used to be a very bipartisan issue. | ||
| It used to be that people would say, hey, religious liberty, that is a core, core constitutional conviction. | ||
| And whatever faith you are of, or even if you're a person of no faith at all, like we should all be able to agree, protect religious liberty. | ||
| The Democrats walked away from that now 20 plus years ago. | ||
| And you've seen them do the same thing with free speech. | ||
| I predict that Freedom of the Press, they basically have done the same thing. | ||
| If you're a conservative outlet, I mean, that's the Hunter Biden New York Post story, right? | ||
| I mean, if you're a conservative outlet, no, you shouldn't publish. | ||
| So it has been, their move towards a form of control-oriented liberalism is really exceptional. | ||
| And this woke-ism, which again is basically like my way or the highway. | ||
| Either you agree with me or you're a terrible person and you should be silenced and not able to participate in public life. | ||
| Yeah, do you sense more people are waking up to this? | ||
| I mean, obviously you're talking about it from a political position. | ||
| Plenty of people like me talking about it. | ||
| I sense there's like some pushback starting now, but you know, there's still a lot of people that are awfully afraid of this thing. | ||
| Well, I think that voters, I mean, again, working people, everyday working people, I think they hate this woke-ism. | ||
| I think they hate it. | ||
| I think they hate being told that you have to use this particular set of words. | ||
| You can't use that set of words. | ||
| And by the way, it changes all the time. | ||
| And again, it's the self-appointed leaders of the country who will tell you what you can and cannot say. | ||
| I think they hate that stuff. | ||
| And you know what? | ||
| People also hate being told all the time that they're bigoted, that they're backward, that they're racist. | ||
| And that's basically what the Democrat party on the left says to at least half this country, maybe more, is that since you don't agree with them, well, that's because you're a racist. | ||
| If you believe in the Constitution and are proud of the history of this country, you're a bigot. | ||
| I mean, if you don't agree to go along with their agenda to transform our society, to cancel women's sports, for instance, then there's something deeply wrong with you and you are a terrible person. | ||
| I think people are sick of that. | ||
| And this is frankly one of the reasons I think President Trump became president, is because he was willing to call it out and people said, oh, thank you! | ||
| Someone who is willing to stand up to this nonsense, and I don't think that's changed. | ||
| I think even folks who would identify as being more liberal, they say, I don't agree with this wokeism and this effort to control speech and ideas. | ||
| As I always say, defending my liberal beliefs is becoming a conservative position. | ||
| It's a very odd time we live in. | ||
| Let's shift a little bit to some of the other things going on here. | ||
| So we still, I suppose, according to the infallible Fauci, we are in inning six of the pandemic. | ||
| That's what he told Wolf Blitzer a couple of days ago. | ||
| What should the average person feel about the pandemic at this point and the government response to it? | ||
| Well, I mean, here's the thing. | ||
| You hear more and more people in Washington complaining about the fact that there aren't more Americans who are getting vaccinated. | ||
| And part of my response to this is that if there's going to make any difference, To anybody in their daily life, if you get vaccinated or not, why would somebody go get vaccinated? | ||
| Now listen, I mean, full disclosure, I'm vaccinated. | ||
| I recommend people get vaccinated, but it's their personal decision, right? | ||
| It's a medical decision. | ||
| People got to make that decision for themselves, and if your message to them is, yeah, go get this vaccine, does that mean that I can wear, I can take off my mask? | ||
| Nope. | ||
| Does that mean that I can get together with the extended family? | ||
| Nope. | ||
| Does that mean I can go to a full-scale sporting event? | ||
| Nope. | ||
| They're like, well, Okay, well, what's the point then? | ||
| I just think that you can't have it all ways, and they're just this fear-mongering. | ||
| I saw this hilarious article, I think it was in the New York Times not long ago, where the Times was wondering, why is it that people are so afraid of COVID-19 and have all of these irrational fears about it? | ||
| And I thought, I don't know. | ||
| Why do you think? | ||
| Maybe it's because of your hysterical, irresponsible coverage for months and months, over a year now, where you are not content to just report the facts to the American people and inform them, but you really want to control them. | ||
| And I think That's what I hear from folks at home. | ||
| They say, we just feel like we're constantly being controlled. | ||
| That the government wants to control us. | ||
| They want to control our behavior. | ||
| Just give us the facts. | ||
| Tell us what the real situation is. | ||
| And then, you know what? | ||
| We're pretty reasonable people. | ||
| We'll do the reasonable thing. | ||
| But that doesn't seem to be what the experts in DC want. | ||
| Do you think it's in some ways too late to fix that? | ||
| That the expert class and the intellectual elite class, they have so... | ||
| either often been wrong or misled us, or however you want to characterize it, that I don't think people want to listen to them anymore. | ||
| For example, it's a year and a half past two weeks to flatten the curve. | ||
| Those first two weeks, everybody, everybody wore masks, everyone socially distanced, everyone stayed at home. | ||
| We did exactly, everybody, we did exactly what they wanted us to do. | ||
| Now we don't even talk about that phrase anymore because it would sort of show how ridiculous this all was. | ||
| Yeah, and the goalposts have constantly moved. | ||
| I know, I think to your question, has the leadership class that ruined its credibility? | ||
| Yes, they have. | ||
| I mean, this is part of what we see going on in the country right now, is that everyday normal working people, they don't trust the leadership of this country. | ||
| And that's not just the political leaders, the elected leaders, they don't trust people in the leadership class, the media, the legacy media, the press, the leaders of the major corporations, they don't trust them. | ||
| Because they think that those people, A, live differently than the rest of the country, B, don't understand the rest of the country, and C, want to control the rest of the country. | ||
| And you know what? | ||
| They're pretty much right on A, B, and C. I mean, that's pretty much true. | ||
| My view is that you hear all the time, usually from the experts about how, You know, the typical American and the typical American worker, you know, doesn't work hard enough, isn't well educated enough, isn't willing to take the tough jobs. | ||
| I don't believe any of that. | ||
| I think that's exactly wrong. | ||
| The typical American is the hope of this country. | ||
| The problem is with the leaders in this country. | ||
| The problem is with the leadership class in this country. | ||
| And they are desperately trying to hold on to their power while telling everybody else what they can and cannot say and can and cannot do with their lives. | ||
| And I think people are sick of it. | ||
| Where are you guys in Missouri at right now in terms of lockdowns and regulations and all that stuff? | ||
| Well, we never had actually a statewide mask mandate. | ||
| We have a Republican governor and he said, listen, I'm going to give the local cities and counties The ability to make their own decisions on masking and so forth. | ||
| And I thought that was the right decision. | ||
| So we never had a mask mandate in the state of Missouri. | ||
| And now those counties that did have a mask mandate, most of those are now gone, or at least they're significantly relaxed. | ||
| And our numbers continue now to be very, very low. | ||
| And the vaccine deployment is going forward. | ||
| More and more people are getting it. | ||
| So, you know, I thought that my state actually took a very sensible approach to this, which was Give people the facts. | ||
| Put it out there. | ||
| What's the infection rate right now? | ||
| What's the total number of cases? | ||
| How many people have recovered? | ||
| Break it down, county by county. | ||
| Let people see all of that. | ||
| Let them make their own decisions and let local municipalities make their own decisions. | ||
| I thought that was a pretty good move. | ||
| Is part of the problem, though, that half the country just doesn't see that? | ||
| I mean, if you're watching MSNBC, you are not gonna see that the numbers are incredibly low in Florida. | ||
| You're not gonna see they're low in Missouri, you're not gonna see they're low in Tennessee, and you're not gonna see they're low in Texas. | ||
| So people don't see it, and then they go, oh, well, it can't be true. | ||
| If you can't see it, you can't know it's there. | ||
| Yeah, I do think that's a problem. | ||
| And this is where the irresponsibility of much of the legacy media, the lefty media, really, I think, comes into play. | ||
| The alternative universe that they have constructed, particularly these left-wing outlets that they have constructed, is really irresponsible. | ||
| It's really, really irresponsible. | ||
| And again, what it does is that it creates such a mood of hysteria. | ||
| Then the people, they can't get the facts, they have trouble making a rational choice, and then ultimately they feel betrayed. | ||
| But it turns out that so much of the hype is wrong with so much of its disinformation, | ||
| then they say, "Okay, well, I'm never going to trust any of these people ever again." | ||
| In some cases, I mean, there's their outright falsehoods that they've told about | ||
| this pandemic. I just remember, you know, on that point, back in the early spring last year, | ||
| where we were lectured and heckled and told, "Do not wear a mask. You know, you're un-American if | ||
| you're wearing a mask." | ||
| Why are you wearing a mask? | ||
| You know, people naturally, I remember this in March, I think, of last year, people were like, oh, well, maybe I'll get a mask and wear that. | ||
| And, you know, the hectoring, no, no, no, you mustn't. | ||
| You mustn't wear masks. | ||
| And then what, basically, just three or four weeks later, we were told, you must wear a mask. | ||
| You absolutely must. | ||
| It's essentially you do. | ||
| I think people, again, are just tired of that, and it's taken its toll in the credibility of the people who are always reporting it, always forcing it down our throats, and never admitting in the past when they were wrong. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And then, of course, you know, when Trump went for a China ban, that was racist. | ||
| Now Biden has an India ban. | ||
| Is that racist? | ||
| I'm not sure. | ||
| Senator, is that racist? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I haven't heard a word about it. | ||
| I mean, I guess, you know, apparently it's not. | ||
| MSNBC says it's not. | ||
| It must not be. | ||
| But, you know, I was one of the senators who was urging, I called for travel restrictions. | ||
| Very early on, to and from China. | ||
| In fact, I may have been the first senator to do so, certainly one of the first, and I urged the president to pursue that ban and to enact those travel restrictions. | ||
| It was absolutely the right call at the time, but oh yeah, I mean, all the Democrats were, this is ridiculous, it's fear-mongering. | ||
| You remember that? | ||
| Oh, it's fear-mongering? | ||
| And then these same people a month later, Trump hasn't done enough. | ||
| He never took this seriously. | ||
| I mean, it's just, You know, if it's not one thing, it's another. | ||
| And again, this is why they bear a lot of responsibility, I think, for the inaccuracies and for the outright falsehoods in some cases that they perpetrated. | ||
| Yeah, so since you do care about that old piece of paper that set up this country, I thought maybe you could explain, I talk about it a lot on the show, but I think you'll be able to explain it pretty clearly, the difference, the sort of guarantee of the constitution of equality versus what the left is now pushing on us, which is equity. | ||
| Well, listen, I mean, the equality guarantee is that as citizens, We have the same rights to stand before the law and to participate in our democracy as any other citizen does. | ||
| And this is where the country is founded on this premise in many ways. | ||
| And this is sort of our core bedrock guarantee that, you know, you don't have to be born to a certain family or born in a certain zip code or have a certain amount of wealth in order to matter in this country. | ||
| And we think that every person matters. | ||
| I look back to, you know, Thomas Jefferson has this great phrase where he says that cultivators of the earth, you know, farmers, are the most valuable citizens. | ||
| Now, I come from a farming family, so I heard that a lot growing up, and I tend to agree with it. | ||
| But it was a revolutionary statement at Jefferson's time, because, you know, if you look back in human history, people who worked with their hands were usually dismissed. | ||
| You know, I was like, oh, I mean, that's manual labor. | ||
| That's for people who can't get educated, who aren't smart. | ||
| And the idea that manual laborers would have a role, would be a citizen and would have a role in democracy? | ||
| I mean, absolutely not. | ||
| You know, the Romans, for instance, the Greeks, they would never have allowed that. | ||
| Our country is premised on the idea that folks who work for a living are valuable, and that everybody should stand as an equal before the law. | ||
| And it's the law that should rule, the law made by the people, and not any particular person or group of people. | ||
| That is a long answer, I guess, to what I think our core constitutional commitment is. | ||
| What the left wants, though, now, is identity politics. | ||
| I mean, what they want to say is that they want to define this group, that group. | ||
| They want to put Americans, they want to divvy us up by race. | ||
| They want to divvy us up by identities that they will construct, that the left will construct. | ||
| They'll tell us which identities are legitimate and which not. | ||
| And they want to divvy us up along those lines, and they want to pit one group against another. | ||
| And that's what they are doing. | ||
| That's what a lot of this woke agenda is. | ||
| That's what a lot of this critical race theory agenda, really, and movement really amounts to. | ||
| And that, I would submit to you, is severely damaging to the kind of equality that the Constitution actually guarantees. | ||
| Have you seen this bill? | ||
| I think it's just circulating in the last little bit. | ||
| It has something to do with the COVID relief bill where they're actually gonna help farmers of color before they help white farmers. | ||
| Have you heard about this? | ||
| Yeah, in fact, that's law. | ||
| Oh, it actually is the law now? | ||
| It is the law of the land. | ||
| Yes, it is the law of the land. | ||
| So what do we do? | ||
| What do we do? | ||
| Systemic racism is here. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it's here and in force, absolutely. | ||
| It was in the last COVID relief bill. | ||
| And I tell you, this stuff, it's just really extraordinary. | ||
| I took a lot of heat. | ||
| For being the only Republican in the Senate to vote no on what was called the Asian-American hate crime bill. | ||
| It was Senator Hirono's bill. | ||
| This was a few weeks ago. | ||
| The reason I voted no was because it didn't have anything to do with hate crimes. | ||
| Those are already illegal. | ||
| It gave the Department of Justice the power to define hate incidents, which is offensive speech. | ||
| So it gives the government the power to decide, well, this speech is offensive, that speech is offensive, and then it gives DOJ the power to help states and local governments track it and monitor it and create a database. | ||
| I was like, this is crazy. | ||
| I mean, this is a first major First Amendment problems here. | ||
| So I'm against hate crimes, but I'm not for the government. | ||
| Censoring and defining and tracking speech for heaven's sake. | ||
| So this kind of thing is becoming more and more common and we need conservatives and constitutionalists to call it out, to stand up and have the courage of their convictions. | ||
| Do you think the legal system is the only thing that fixes that? | ||
| To me, that being part of the package, as you're saying, and it is law now. | ||
| Actually, I just heard just this morning that there is a farmer who is now gonna sue. | ||
| So I guess I must have, in fact, known that it had been passed. | ||
| But there is a white farmer who's gonna sue, because he is not, by the color of his skin, going to get the same relief as another farmer because of the color of their skin. | ||
| Is the only recourse really that it has to get to the courts and then basically we have to pray that the courts do the right thing? | ||
| I think it is now for that package. | ||
| Once it becomes law, you know, I mean, then the only recourse you have left is to try to go to the courts and to try to rely on the constitution and defend your rights. | ||
| And, you know, I'm a constitutional lawyer by trade. | ||
| I was a prosecutor in the state of Missouri as attorney general. | ||
| And so I'm certainly not averse to going to the courts, but I will say this, that it would be much, much better If we actually stopped these kind of destructive policies from becoming law in the first place. | ||
| If we actually stopped the woke agenda from getting enacted into law. | ||
| And we need more folks who are willing to stand up and do that. | ||
| And I think right now there's a real sentiment of, well, we just have to kind of go along in Washington, D.C. | ||
| We don't have to go along. | ||
| It doesn't have to be like this. | ||
| We can present a credible alternative. | ||
| And we can make the case for the core principles of our Constitution. | ||
| And we need to. | ||
| Do you think part of this is just that a certain set of Republicans kinda wanna be liked? | ||
| They just, you know, the sort of Mitt Romney, Liz Cheney, that battle that's happening now, where it's sort of the media loves these people that only years ago they were telling everyone that Mitt Romney's racist, because he was running against Barack Obama, but now he's a hero because he's sort of against, say, Trump or you or Ted Cruz, something like that, the guys who are actually doing something, but they're, I keep calling them the pet Republicans, because they can get people on MSNBC to say nice things about them. | ||
| I do think that the media is really invested, the legacy media, establishment media, the leftists are really invested in this idea of Republican civil war. | ||
| And so they really want to create conflict and play it up. | ||
| Between establishment to Republicans and conservatives or populist Republicans. | ||
| I can just tell you, from being home in the state of Missouri and talking to actual people, actual voters, they have no interest in a Republican civil war. | ||
| There is no such thing. | ||
| They've made up their mind. | ||
| They're like, what's the conflict? | ||
| They don't want to go back. | ||
| to open borders and to ruinous trade policies and to liberal globalism. They don't want to go back | ||
| to that at all. So they're like, what's the conflict you're talking about? No, no, no, | ||
| they want to go forward. They want to know what we're going to do to stop this radical left woke | ||
| agenda that President Biden is trying to force down our throats, is trying to ramrod through | ||
| And then they want to know, going forward, what we're going to do to actually defend our Constitution, to actually get jobs back in this country, manufacturing back in this country, and give working people a voice again. | ||
| That's what they want to know about. | ||
| And I think that this media narrative that you're pointing to and talking about, it's false, and it's meant to distract from where people really are. | ||
| So what should the messaging be? | ||
| I mean, I guess that's sort of what you're saying. | ||
| What should the messaging be for Republicans going forward? | ||
| Because I feel like it's still, you know, nobody really knows who's in charge. | ||
| Is this Trump's party still? | ||
| Is it going some other way? | ||
| Like, what do you think that messaging looks like? | ||
| Well, I think we ought to listen to our voters. | ||
| I think what our voters want is they want us to be a pro-worker family, a pro-worker party, rather, that we are for working Americans, that we are going to work to get good jobs that pay good wages for folks right where they are, that you shouldn't have to move to a foreign country in order to get a good job, that you shouldn't have to move halfway around the country to get a good job. | ||
| We need to be the party of working people. | ||
| We need to be the party of families. | ||
| You know, we need to be out there fighting for families to be able to afford to start a family and to raise a family. | ||
| And by the way, to be able to make their own decisions about their family. | ||
| I talk about this in the book. | ||
| Big tech shouldn't raise our kids. | ||
| We should raise our kids. | ||
| And American families want to have the authority and the power to raise their kids and tell big tech, get out of my life. | ||
| I want to raise my own children. | ||
| So I think as a party, who are we? | ||
| We're the party of working America. | ||
| We're the party of working families in this country. | ||
| And we need to be advancing an agenda that's pro-worker and pro-family. | ||
| I think that is our future as a party. | ||
| If it's not, I mean, if Republicans are not willing to be the party of working people and to be the party of working families, then we're not gonna have a future as a party. | ||
| I mean, it's just that simple. | ||
| That is who our voters are. | ||
| And if we're not gonna be responsive to them, if we're gonna be the party of Wall Street, or if we're gonna be the party of the globalists, we're not gonna have a party. | ||
| Where does Trump fit into that equation? | ||
| Oh, I think that's up to him. | ||
| I don't know what he wants to do or will do in 2024 or beyond, but I think that is entirely up to him. | ||
| I can tell you in Missouri, he still enjoys among Republicans. | ||
| Very, very strong support because I think people look at his policies that we've just been talking about. | ||
| They look at that and they say, yeah, I agree with the direction that he was taking this country. | ||
| I agree with the policy proposals and vision he was putting forward. | ||
| So I think it's entirely up to him as to what happens next for him. | ||
| I have no insight into what decisions, plural, he will make, but I think the ball's in his court on that. | ||
| So I got one more for you, which is a question I often get from my audience, which is, are you hopeful? | ||
| Do you actually, because we've talked about some serious stuff here. | ||
| I mean, the big tech threat, the ever-expanding government threat, the wokeism threat rampaging the institutions. | ||
| I mean, this is serious stuff, but you know, you're in the middle of the fight. | ||
| Are you hopeful? | ||
| I am hopeful. | ||
| I am hopeful, and I'll tell you why. | ||
| It's because I firmly, firmly believe that if you go to the heart of this country, if you go to the working people of this country, if you go to the working families of this country, you'll find strength there. | ||
| Our people are strong. | ||
| Our families are strong. | ||
| Our working folks are strong. | ||
| They're strong in spirit. | ||
| They're strong in their convictions about our Constitution and about our country. | ||
| They're not the problem. | ||
| The problem is the leadership class. | ||
| That's the problem. | ||
| You know, if the situation were reversed, I'd be really worried. | ||
| But I think that the great majority of this country, the great middle of this country, and I don't mean just middle geographically, I mean the middle of our society, is strong. | ||
| That's where the strength is. | ||
| That's what we've got to do. | ||
| That's why what we have to do are advanced policies that give more opportunity, that bring more strength to the middle of our country and give them a greater voice, because they're the ones who are going to be able to lead this country forward. | ||
| And what we've got to do is that the leadership class, which has become increasingly out of touch, increasingly corrupt, we've got to replace them. | ||
| And we've got to give more power to the middle. | ||
| Well, the book actually got published. | ||
| It is called The Tyranny of Big Tech. | ||
| Senator Josh Hawley, I appreciate you doing the show. | ||
| Thanks so much for having me. |
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