Dec. 16, 2022 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| I've actually talked to some of the energy folks from Massachusetts point-blank on this out of their state legislature and their goal is is to make Massachusetts more energy renewable friendly by importing renewable energy from other states. | ||
| So my statement to them is so what you want us to do is put up more wind towers in our state because you don't want to have wind towers in your state and then you stop using these other forms of energy but make us cover our whole landscape with wind towers so you don't have to look at them. | ||
| That's really what their plan is at the end of the day. | ||
| When I talk to them about switching from, let's say, home heating oil to burning cleaner natural gas, they'll say, well, we're trying to just get rid of all carbons entirely. | ||
| But in the meantime, our plan is for decades and decades and decades to keep using home heating oil. | ||
| They're not really serious about all these issues. | ||
| They're just trying to be able to make everyone think that they really are, but look at what | ||
| they're really doing and that makes a big difference there. | ||
| I'm Dave Rubin and joining me today is the junior senator from the great state of Oklahoma, | ||
| James Lankford. | ||
| Senator Lankford, welcome to the Rubin Report. | ||
| Hey, very good to see you. | ||
| Good to be on with you and have the conversation. | ||
| I'm looking forward to chatting with you because I mentioned to you right before we started that we had your governor, Kevin Stitt, on about a month and a half ago. | ||
| And I'm going to start with the same exact question because I don't think people know a lot about Oklahoma. | ||
| So if someone says to you, what's going on over in Oklahoma, what do you tell them? | ||
| Freedom and Liberty. | ||
| That's what's happening in Oklahoma, actually. | ||
| It's four million great people who skip away from tornadoes occasionally. | ||
| We get a bad rap for that, but there's lots of job opportunities. | ||
| There's lots of people working that are there. | ||
| It's a really great community, and I have people that I talk to all the time that are from other places in the country, and they moved away. | ||
| I will never move away because of the people that are here, and so it's a pretty remarkable state. | ||
| It's a left coast, calls flyover territory. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But we're glad they just fly over us because it's a, it's a great place to be able to live. | ||
| What kind of influx are you guys getting in these last two years? | ||
| You know, everyone talks about all the Cali and New York people going to Texas, going to Florida, going to Tennessee, but you guys are getting a pretty decent influx as well, right? | ||
| We are actually, I talked to a real estate agents around Oklahoma and I'll always ask them, who are you selling houses to right now? | ||
| And they're telling me they're selling houses to people from Washington state, from Oregon, from California, from Minnesota. | ||
| From all these states are moving into Oklahoma and my first comment to them is are you checking voter ID with them | ||
| before you sell my house? | ||
| Right, which by the way, they can't do that's not legal. | ||
| But then then the second statement they make is oh no These are the people we want to be able to move | ||
| They're fleeing from all of that in those areas of the country and they're coming to a place. That's more | ||
| Do you think people are getting it? | ||
| Because, you know, there always is that concern. | ||
| I've told the story on the show many times. | ||
| When I moved to Florida last year, and I'd be walking my dog, and people would come up and say, hi, oh, you're the new neighbor. | ||
| And they say, where are you from? | ||
| I'd say, Cali. | ||
| They'd freak out for a second. | ||
| And then, you know, I'd have a Florida man shirt or hat, or I'd show a picture of me and the governor or something, and then they're okay. | ||
| But the OGs, there is that concern, right? | ||
| That you guys have done it right in Oklahoma, and you don't want that mucked up. | ||
| That's correct. | ||
| And again, we're open to everybody coming. | ||
| All political persuasions. | ||
| People talk about Oklahoma as a very red state. | ||
| All 77 counties voted Republican in the last three presidential elections. | ||
| So we get that reputation somewhat, but we've got lots of people, lots of diversity of opinion on that. | ||
| And that's a good thing for us to continue to be able to drive that. | ||
| But we also want to be able to maintain the culture that we have of freedom of opportunity, of business starts. | ||
| Of low taxes. | ||
| I mean, those are all things that we want to continue to be able to maintain and protect in our state. | ||
| And you guys must be pretty proud of the policies when it came to COVID and not crushing the economy and killing all the schools and all of that stuff. | ||
| Yep, schools stayed open, churches stayed open, businesses stayed open. | ||
| We had that few week time period there at the very beginning in 2020 where things were closed down like the rest of the country and then reopened rapidly on it to say, hey, this is a terrible idea. | ||
| And got things back open again, and it showed the real difference there in the way our businesses bounce back. | ||
| Are you shocked how different the blue and red states have become? | ||
| I mean, obviously there's always been a difference in policy between Democrats and Republicans, but how the last couple years have really unearthed something that is causing people to flee certain states and go to certain other states, and it really doesn't go the other way. | ||
| I'm guessing you're not losing a lot of Oklahomans who are on their way to Cali. | ||
| No, we don't have a lot of Oklahomans that are packing up. | ||
| In fact, if you want to, this is kind of the running joke that people have in Oklahoma. | ||
| If you want to rent a U-Haul truck, a one-way rental to California, you can almost get that for free because it's so cheap to go towards California with a one-way truck. | ||
| But if you're coming out of it, it's really expensive to be able to come the other way because they're looking for more people to drive. | ||
| So no, we're not surprised. | ||
| There are very few people leave Oklahoma that come to Oklahoma. | ||
| We're grateful to be able to have great families. | ||
| We have a lot of veterans that as they serve at Tinker Air Force Base or Fort Sill or all kinds of places or Enid around our state, they'll serve there and then ten years later they'll circle back to Oklahoma and retire coming back to Oklahoma because they just love the patriotic environment. | ||
| I don't know if you've seen the meme, but there's a really hilarious meme of Gavin Newsom working at U-Haul, number one U-Haul salesman of the last three years, I think. | ||
|
unidentified
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He is. | |
| He's a good exporter of things California because people are leaving his state, so. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Can you talk a little bit about just the economy and what you guys are doing on the energy side of things? | ||
| Because that's the type of thing that I think sort of translates to people that don't live in Oklahoma that are watching right now. | ||
| Yeah, one of the lowest unemployment rates in the country is in Oklahoma, so we have very high employment in our state. | ||
| We are an energy state, but we are truly all the above energy state. | ||
| People know us as an oil and gas state, but we do oil and gas. | ||
| We do a little bit of coal in the eastern side of our state. | ||
| We have a lot of wind power. | ||
| Sing the song, Oklahoma, where the wind comes sweeping down the plain. | ||
| We've taken that wind, and we've harnessed it for power and electricity. | ||
| We use it not only in our state, but we export it to other states as well. | ||
| We have solar power. | ||
| We have hydroelectric in the eastern part of our state. | ||
| We have geothermal. | ||
| We're an all-the-above energy state, and it's always funny to me. | ||
| I'll have some of my liberal colleagues in DC start lecturing me about oil and gas, and I'll say to them, let's look up right now your portfolio of energy usage in your state, and let's compare it to mine. | ||
| I'd be glad to be able to lay Oklahoma side by side with Massachusetts, for instance, because we're using clean natural gas to heat our homes, home heating oil in their basement, which might as well be burning a lump of coal in their basement to be able to heat their homes on it. | ||
| There's no comparison. | ||
| We're so much cleaner in our energy development than the Northeast is, but yet they're always the one trying to be able to pile on new requirements on us. | ||
| So we've already done that in our state, and we're very proud to have so many energy jobs and such great energy diversity. | ||
| So when you're talking to a colleague, let's say a senator in Massachusetts, maybe Elizabeth Warren, just using her as an example, and you say, hey, you know, we're doing it right here and we've got this diversification of energy. | ||
| You guys don't have that yet. | ||
| You seem to want to destroy the energy sector. | ||
| Do they respond? | ||
| Are you able to have that conversation? | ||
| Do they realize how misguided the policies are? | ||
| Well, they don't like the comparison side-by-side, but I've actually talked to some of the energy folks from Massachusetts point-blank on this out of their state legislature, and their goal is to make Massachusetts more energy-renewable friendly by importing renewable energy from other states. | ||
| So my statement to them is, so what you want us to do is put up more wind towers in our state because you don't want to have wind towers in your state, and then you stop using these other forms of energy but make us cover our whole landscape with wind towers so you don't have to look at them. | ||
| That's really what their plan is at the end of the day. | ||
| When I talk to them about switching from, let's say, home heating oil to burning cleaner natural gas, they'll say, well, we're trying to just get rid of all carbons entirely, but in the meantime, our plan is for decades and decades and decades to keep using home heating oil. | ||
| They're not really serious about all these issues. | ||
| They're just trying to be able to make everyone think that they really are, but look at what they're really doing, and that makes a big difference there. | ||
| What kind of tension do you have as a state that has, you know, you've got the renewables, you've got the traditional energy sources. | ||
| You know, the federal government obviously wants you to go in one direction. | ||
| You don't want to put people out of work. | ||
| How do you manage all that? | ||
| Well, a couple of things in that. | ||
| We have a lot of manufacturing in the state because we have some of the lowest electricity prices in the country. | ||
| So we literally have manufacturers moving to Oklahoma for cheaper electricity because we produce so much electricity from such a diverse portfolio of it. | ||
| So that makes a big difference on it. | ||
| The other parts are the jobs that go with that, because we'll have a lot of jobs that are created in the energy market and in manufacturing because of that. | ||
| That's why we have such a low unemployment rate in our state. | ||
| So it does make a difference in our own economy. | ||
| One of the things that I talked to Governor Stitt about that he was very fired up about, really wanted to focus on, was some of the tensions existing around what's going on with the Native American communities and law disparity and all of this stuff. | ||
| How is that all shaking out right now and your position on all that? | ||
| So yeah, we've got a pretty wide diversity of opinion on that. | ||
| We have 4 million Oklahomans. | ||
| About 7% of our state is Native American. | ||
| That's a very high percentage for any other state on it. | ||
| We now have six tribes that have a special allotment from the Supreme Court called the McGirt Decision. | ||
| That McGirt Decision said that the federal government has to be the one to actually prosecute major crimes in the state for those particular tribes and in those tribal areas. | ||
| It's not small, and a lot of people across the country may not track this. | ||
| They may see Indian reservations in other states where it's only tribal members live in that area. | ||
| That's not so in Oklahoma. | ||
| Oklahoma, we're very integrated on it. | ||
| You would literally drive through areas and not have any idea if this is tribal area or non-tribal area, or you may have one house that's a tribal member and next door to them is a non-tribal member on it because of just our integration of where we are as a state. | ||
| This has dramatically shifted what's happening in law enforcement in our state. | ||
| Where a police officer doesn't know whether they can prosecute a crime or there has to be the FBI coming to be able to do it. | ||
| And it's created quite a bit of chaos and stir. | ||
| While the tribes are trying to step up and do some things, we have unequal justice currently in our state, and this is something that has to be resolved. | ||
| We're going to have to have a federal solution, but it's going to have to have all of those tribes agree, our state agree, and the federal delegation to also be able to agree on this to be able to get some solutions. | ||
| In the meantime, we'll have individuals And we've already had an occasion where an individual had multiple DUIs, but was let off every single time, and then that same person runs over and murders a five-year-old. | ||
| There's no way to explain to some dad, hey, it's because this particular individual was tribal, and so they can get off with it when a non-tribal member cannot. | ||
| That can't be so. | ||
| We've got to be able to have equal justice in process, and we've got to have some way for law enforcement to be able to prosecute this. | ||
| So this is something that came out of the Supreme Court several years ago. | ||
| We're still working to be able to get to resolution on this, and we have to get to keep working until we get to resolution on it. | ||
| Yeah, are you trying to get it back to the Supreme Court? | ||
| I'm actually not even sure technically how that happens. | ||
| So, there's actually a case that's already come back to the Supreme Court called the Castro, it started with McGirt, and then it went back, it was called Castro Huerta, second case, and then it helped define, for instance, if a non-tribal member commits a crime on a tribal member, where does that go? | ||
| Does that go to the FBI or does that go to the state? | ||
| The Supreme Court ruled in the second case. | ||
| Well, that one goes to the state. | ||
| So you can see the chaos that's going on in trying to be able to prosecute through individuals. | ||
| Now you've got to know the perpetrator of a crime before you know who can actually go through and investigate and prosecute that crime. | ||
| If you knew who the perpetrator was, you would have prevented the crime in the first place on it. | ||
| So it's a very difficult process. | ||
| So yes, it may go back to the Supreme Court. | ||
| I'm doubtful that it will fully to the Supreme Court. | ||
| What we've got to do is get a piece of legislation through the federal I don't know if you track all this, but federal courts don't typically handle murder cases, for instance. | ||
| That's a pretty rare thing for a federal jurisdiction to handle a murder case. | ||
| That's a state crime. | ||
| and try to figure out how to be able to do prosecutions. | ||
| In the meantime, all of our courts are overwhelmed. | ||
| I don't know if you track all this, but federal courts don't typically handle murder cases, | ||
| for instance. | ||
| That's a pretty rare thing for a federal jurisdiction to handle a murder case. | ||
| That's a state crime. | ||
| Fifty-seven percent of all the federal murder cases in the country are in one small part | ||
| of southeast Oklahoma. | ||
| 57% in the whole country of the federal murder cases are just in that one small section. | ||
| That's not the federal jurisdiction, that's not what they handle typically, they don't have the expertise to be able to do it, and they're overwhelmed with it. | ||
| And we've got occasions where if a car is stolen... Right, just to be clear though, it's not because you have a crazy amount of murders, it's because of this decision. | ||
| It's correct. | ||
| It's because the federal government typically doesn't have that many murder cases, so All that they have, the vast majority of the cases that they have at all are in Oklahoma because of this McGirt decision. | ||
| And if they're prosecuting those murder cases, rightfully so, that also means if someone stole a car from a tribal member, no one's prosecuting them. | ||
| And so now they're just victims of crime that no one's prosecuting because no one has the jurisdiction or the time to go get it. | ||
| That can't be so. | ||
| This is why it's so important that our state and our tribes and the federal government work together to be able to resolve this because we've got to have equal justice for every single person. | ||
| We're not at odds with each other. | ||
| The tribes and the state and individuals, we're four million neighbors. | ||
| We've gotta just figure this part out, but it's a mess right now. | ||
| Yeah, it really sounds like it. | ||
| I mean, equal protection under the law, it's one of the most American ideas that there is, and hopefully it works out. | ||
| Let me ask you a little bit about just D.C. | ||
| in general, and being a senator, having to go to D.C., which is obviously very, very different than when you're back home in Oklahoma. | ||
| The red wave didn't happen, so you probably thought maybe you were gonna have a little more power, the Republicans. | ||
| At this point, like, what's the general state of things in D.C. | ||
| right now? | ||
| Well, right now, it's a mess because of what's going on with the appropriations process. | ||
| And you're right. | ||
| We all expected the red wave would happen. | ||
| We hope for that, prayed for that, quite frankly. | ||
| That didn't happen. | ||
| And we're still going through all the process of the whys and the whats of all of that. | ||
| But that didn't happen around the country. | ||
| So it's not just praying for me a little more power on it. | ||
| It's a little bit of sanity into the process. | ||
| Realize in the Senate there's been no oversight hearings on immigration. | ||
| We've got 2 million people illegally crossing the border in the past year. | ||
| It's about to get even worse in the Senate's not even holding hearings like don't even look at that. | ||
| Just ignore it. | ||
| That's that's crazy to be able to have that. | ||
| And so we want to be able to get that all the fiscal sanity that we need to be able to bring back into the dialogue right now of how we're going to handle the appropriations process, which is in a shambles right now, or even how we're going to handle spending. | ||
| Spending continues to be able to go up. | ||
| Democrats don't want to even discuss that, have hearings on it to be able to talk long term about entitlements, what's going to happen to be able to stabilize our spending or to get us back into balance. | ||
| No dialogue. | ||
| So for Republicans to come back in the lead in the Senate was really a shift in leadership in the committees and an opportunity to bring some hearings up and to say, let's talk about debt and deficit. | ||
| Let's talk about immigration. | ||
| How to be able to solve these problems. | ||
| Let's talk about how we're gonna handle complicated issues that are currently being ignored, that are really important to the American people, like the economy, and how we're gonna actually bring down inflation. | ||
| But instead, it's just move along, ignore that. | ||
| That's the frustrating part about it. | ||
| Do you think that if the Republicans had got the Senate that they would have actually accomplished some of the things that you're talking about? | ||
| I think one of the frustrations that a lot of people have that care about politics and pay attention to this, I think there's a feeling sort of like, That's certainly amongst my audience and me personally. | ||
| Like, the Republicans are obviously way better than the Democrats. | ||
| The Democrats have lost their mind. | ||
| But, like, you shouldn't expect a lot from the Republicans, and they're probably gonna let you down. | ||
| Do you think you guys would have had a chance to actually do some things, or do you think, you know, the Republicans do have Congress? | ||
| You think they're gonna get some stuff done? | ||
| Yeah, so there's a couple things there. | ||
| If we'd have won the Senate back, one, we could have controlled Biden's nominees. | ||
| He's putting in really radical, progressive nominees. | ||
| We have been able to block a few of those. | ||
| But now there'll be no way to block any of them. | ||
| He'll have 51 votes and he will be able to rapidly move all his nominations through. | ||
| So yes, we could have done that and controlled that. | ||
| We could have managed the different issues that are coming up on hearings. | ||
| We still have to deal with the Democrat White House. | ||
| And so just passing everything and saying that we're going to get that passed to Democrat White House is not true, but it gives us a lot more leverage. | ||
| And if you want to talk about a big issue, the 2017 tax policy that happened when we did the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, Some of those areas expire in 2026. | ||
| So in the next two years, we're going to be doing major tax negotiations. | ||
| It would have made a world of difference to have Republicans as the lead negotiator on that tax piece than it's going to be to have Democrats as the lead negotiators on those tax areas. | ||
| So yes, I do think it would have made a big difference. | ||
| But by the way, not all Republicans think alike. | ||
| It's always funny. | ||
| Everybody elects their Republican from their state, and they'll say to me, why doesn't everybody function like you? | ||
| And I'll say, because not everyone lives in Oklahoma and thinks like Oklahomans. | ||
| Not everyone's as conservative as I am. | ||
| There are other states that are not as conservative as ours, and we have a pretty diverse opinion about that. | ||
| And Republicans tend to be able to not fly formation. | ||
| They fly like eagles. | ||
| They don't fly in formation all the time. | ||
| It's like a bunch of libertarians. | ||
| You get them around the table, and they argue about the driver's license issue for about three hours, and then everybody goes home angry, I think. | ||
| That's pretty much how it works. | ||
| I'm wondering, since as a new Floridian, I do see this place that I'm in as sort of the blueprint for a free America, and I know that Governor DeSantis, actually just a few months ago, I was at an event where he got a few, about 10 governors together. | ||
| That's where I met Governor Stitt for the first time. | ||
| Where they're starting to coordinate a little bit more sort of outside of the federal government. | ||
| And I wonder what you think of that, just conceptually, that the red states are kind of starting to do some things and not worrying always, hey, what does Biden think about this or the federal government think about this? | ||
| Yeah, they shouldn't have to. | ||
| Welcome to federalism. | ||
| That's how our system was set up, actually. | ||
| Each state was supposed to compete with the state next door, and we get better in that competition. | ||
| We should be doing legislation that other states look at our state and go, wow, that's really good legislation. | ||
| We should do that in our state. | ||
| And so that competition actually helps us for Republican governors to be able to get together and to be able to say, what are you doing that's actually helping your employment, your tax policy? | ||
| What are you doing that's being able to help in different areas? | ||
| Great, continue that idea. | ||
| Our attorneys general have done that for a long time and that's been very effective for attorneys general across the nation to be able to swap ideas and be able to file suits against the federal government to be able to push back on that encroachment in a way uniquely state attorneys general can that I as a senator can't file suit against these different issues like a state can and so when the states cooperate together it makes a big difference. | ||
| That's how our system was set up. | ||
| I asked basically all my guests this question. | ||
| I wish I could get more Democrats on to ask them this question, but they don't want to show up. | ||
| We do ask. | ||
| What do you think has happened to the Democrat Party? | ||
| I mean, this is not the Democrat Party. | ||
| I was a Democrat for much of my life. | ||
| This is certainly not the Democrat Party of JFK or of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Ed Koch, et cetera. | ||
| The sort of old school blue dog liberal that you probably had a decent amount of them in Oklahoma seems to be gone at this point. | ||
| Yeah, the party's so dramatically shifted on this. | ||
| In Oklahoma, I have kind of a running joke that I have with folks to say, President Reagan got Democrats in Oklahoma to vote Republican. | ||
| President Obama got Democrats in Oklahoma to re-register as a Republican. | ||
| Because there was such a massive shift that's happened. | ||
| But if you go back just 15 years ago, every statewide elected official in Oklahoma was | ||
| a Democrat. | ||
| That's 15 years ago. | ||
| It's not that long ago. | ||
| There's been this dramatic shift that has occurred in the National Democrat Party, and | ||
| you feel it in other ways in our states with re-registration as people that have been lifelong | ||
| Democrats have said, I don't even recognize this party. | ||
| And they may be shifting to independent, or they may be shifting to Republican, but they're | ||
| shifting away from Democrat to say, I don't follow these social policies. | ||
| I don't follow this crazy spending policy. | ||
| I don't follow these tax policies on it. | ||
| They look at the different issues. | ||
| They look at, quite frankly, the open border, and they say, I'm not all in on that. | ||
| What in the world is that? | ||
| And so they just can't follow where Democrats are going. | ||
| And quite frankly, D.C. Democrats continue to be able to race each other farther to the | ||
| left. | ||
| And there's this constant push over and over again. | ||
| To see who can out left the next person, and they're just racing away from the American people. | ||
| Well, my follow-up to that always is, do you think they believe it? | ||
| When you're talking to your Democrat colleagues, do you think that they believe all of this stuff works? | ||
| That the big spending works? | ||
| That the giant government programs work, etc.? | ||
| Or is it that they're just in the rat race now and they can't turn back? | ||
| It's a bit of both on that. | ||
| I do run into some true believers that are here in the Senate, and I also run into some folks saying, Hey, I'll just get barbecued if I don't go along with this, but I'm not sure this is a great idea. | ||
| Um, so it, it just kind of depends from person to person on it, but there is a huge push for them to continue to go farther and farther and farther left. | ||
| And I think it's, it's the remaking of the country. | ||
| Uh, it's the celebration of our country was evil and its founding and its history and its laws. | ||
| And so we're going to remake the nation in our image into what we always wanted it to be able to be, but she's never been, she's always been a nation about individuals having freedom. | ||
| All together and committed to each other. | ||
| And so, but that's not where they're at. | ||
| Senator, I got one more for you. | ||
| The one that I'm sure you don't want to answer. | ||
| Republicans are going to have to pick a president. | ||
| They're going to have to all, you know, follow somebody. | ||
| Obviously, Trump has announced. | ||
| There's a feeling that DeSantis will announce. | ||
| To me, there's actually a pretty great crop of people. | ||
| I think Nikki Haley, Tim Scott, like there's really a decent group there, which you don't see that kind of bench with the Democrats. | ||
| What do you see as the future of all of this? | ||
| I'm sorry, you're breaking up. | ||
| I can't hear you anymore. | ||
|
unidentified
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No, I'm kidding. | |
| The party's going to have to decide. | ||
| I mean, honestly, you just list out a bunch of folks. | ||
| Mike Pence, Mike Pompeo, they're also out there. | ||
| There's a whole big, long list of great Republicans that are out there that are good thought leaders that the nation's going to have to be able to make a decision on which way they're going to go on this. | ||
| And we'll see when the primaries actually begin. | ||
| Obviously, it's already begun. | ||
| President Trump has already announced he's going to run again. | ||
| By the time we get into early next year, we're really going to know the whole field. | ||
| If somebody's not in by this summer, they're not going to be able to get in. | ||
| But there are a lot of folks that I think we're considering it or looking at this to try to figure out if they can do the fundraising and they can get out there and be able to share the message. | ||
| I've said this publicly, so I'll say it to you and to your audience again. | ||
| In Oklahoma, when I talk to folks, about half the folks I talk to that are conservative will say they love President Trump. | ||
| They love the way he speaks. | ||
| They love his policies. | ||
| They want him to run again. | ||
| And about half the folks People will say to me, I love President Trump, his policies. | ||
| I don't like him as a messenger. | ||
| I wish there was someone else that had those policies that didn't have that way of actually speaking and acting and reacting to people. | ||
| So we're pretty divided even as a state in Oklahoma. | ||
| It'll be interesting to be able to see how many other states are divided as well. | ||
| There's been very strong support for the Trump policies because we saw what it did for immigration. | ||
| We saw what it did for the economy. | ||
| We saw what it did for our national standing on the world stage. | ||
| So people are very grateful for that. | ||
| But they're divided on whether they're going to keep going on that again. | ||
| So again, we're going to solve that, uh, as Republicans to be able to put up our nominee. | ||
| Uh, what I want to have us do is to be able to win at the end and to be able to articulate what real conservative policies are. | ||
| And it's fascinating to me, the number of college students that I talk to nowadays, uh, that are, that are young conservatives that will want to talk to me about Ronald Reagan. | ||
| And they're intrigued with a Republican who won 49 states. | ||
| They're like, how did that happen? | ||
| How did a Republican win 49 states in an election? | ||
| In his re-election, even, and to be able to get that. | ||
| And so they're fascinated with that jovial, outgoing, conservative thought that's winsome and winning people over on that. | ||
| And I get that. | ||
| Culturally, we've got to be able to figure out what direction we're going to go. | ||
| But as a party, I want to continue to not just burn heretics. | ||
| I want to make converts because I think these conservative principles actually do work and help people in every race, every community, every background. | ||
| It really, truly does lift all boats. | ||
| And so let's Let's go tell the message and let some messengers out there go duke it out. | ||
| Senator, I appreciate your time. | ||
| I hope we can do it again, perhaps in person in Oklahoma, because I do think even though they call them flyover states, they are important states and that would be fun. | ||
| You know, I actually land in Oklahoma, so I know it's possible to be able to land there and not just fly over it. | ||
| And if we get there, I can take you to some really great barbecue places and we can sit down and have a great visit. | ||
| Right on. | ||
| Awesome. | ||
| Well, I appreciate it. | ||
| Thanks for your time. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics instead of nonstop yelling, check out our politics playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist all right over here. |
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