May 21, 2023 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
35:23
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| I'm surprised at the left's message to men, which is that manhood is inherently toxic. | ||
| You know, I love this phrase, toxic masculinity, but if you listen closely, and I quote this stuff in the book, if you listen closely to what the leftists believe, they think all manhood is toxic. | ||
| You know, there's one social scientist who said, talking about healthy masculinity is | ||
| like talking about healthy cancer. | ||
| Senator from Missouri and author of the brand new book, Manhood, The Masculine Virtues a Man Needs. | ||
| Senator Josh Hawley, welcome back to the Rubin Report. | ||
| Thank you for having me. | ||
| Senator, I wish we were recording about 30 seconds ago because you very sarcastically said to me you're in D.C. | ||
| doing important work and I wasn't sure if it was sarcasm or not. | ||
| Yeah, it was total sarcasm. | ||
| I think my next comment was, uh, ruining the country one day at a time, you know, which, uh, anytime they say that the Senate's not going to be in session, I usually say it's probably good, right? | ||
| I mean, not doing any damage, but in all seriousness, the last two years, I mean, it has been something to watch this administration and their allies in Congress do what they've been doing. | ||
| It's unbelievable. | ||
| Yeah, so my audience, as you know, will fully get that, whether it's borders, which I want to talk to you about in a second, or economy, foreign policy, I mean, just the whole freaking thing. | ||
| So when you're there now, in D.C., in session, obviously the Republicans, you know, have the House back, so that's something, not the Senate, but the House. | ||
| Are you feeling any momentum to turn any of this around, or is it just sort of why you made the sarcastic remark in the first place? | ||
| Well, no, I think there is momentum. | ||
| I mean, certainly having the House back in Republican hands is great. | ||
| I mean, that's outstanding. | ||
| We're already seeing a difference on that. | ||
| We should have had the Senate. | ||
| I mean, there's just really no excuse for Republicans not to have won back the Senate, you know, other than what Senate Republicans offered voters, which was nothing. | ||
| So if you don't offer anything, how can you expect people to vote for you? | ||
| I mean, that's my takeaway. | ||
| But certainly I think that we're able now to stop much of the Biden agenda. | ||
| We're able to go on the offensive. | ||
| You know, this border crisis is a good example. | ||
| I mean, Republicans actually have a border plan, which is pretty easy. | ||
| It's called enforce the law. | ||
| I mean, we've got pretty good laws on the books, right? | ||
| This isn't hard. | ||
| Enforce them. | ||
| The border should be closed. | ||
| If you want to come to this country, you should do it legally. | ||
| If you want to apply for asylum, fine. | ||
| You've got to do that through the legal Process and then you should wait in Mexico or another safe country safe third country while your claims are processed, etc So I think that we can certainly make some progress. | ||
| But listen, I mean people can see the reality I mean this president is a Radical leftist or he's given in to the radical left agenda and they have been running roughshod for the last two years And we've got to turn that around Let's just dive into the border thing for a moment, because these videos coming from our southern border are insane. | ||
| I mean, it looks like a zombie invasion. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| Every zombie movie you ever see, people flying over the walls. | ||
| That's basically what it looks like. | ||
| And nobody's really doing anything. | ||
| I mean, what can you as a senator do when you talk to, say, crews down in Texas? | ||
| What can you do to help them down there? | ||
| Because obviously the federal government is not going to do anything. | ||
| Well, one of the things we ought to do is give states the power to actually enforce federal immigration law. | ||
| And you saw Governor Abbott down in Texas send a Texas National Guard troops to the border. | ||
| I've introduced legislation that would say, listen, I mean, the federal government's not going to enforce our own laws. | ||
| Let's give the states the power to enforce federal laws. | ||
| I'm not talking about make the laws. | ||
| I'm talking about enforce the laws that are on the books. | ||
| Again, this shouldn't be that hard. | ||
| So that's something we should do. | ||
| That's something that we could do. | ||
| But in terms of what's going to have to happen, we're going to have to get an administration that actually believes in the rule of law. | ||
| Solving the border crisis, I think, is not that hard. | ||
| Dave, all you have to do is Title 42 ought to be permanent. | ||
| We ought to leave it in place permanently. | ||
| By the way, there's bipartisan support for that on Capitol Hill. | ||
| And then we ought to have safe third agreements with other countries, which just means that if immigrants want to come to this country and they're claiming asylum, fine, they can apply for asylum, but they've got to do it first. | ||
| In another country, and if they apply for asylum in the US, they've got to wait in another country while their claims are processed. | ||
| You can't just come in here and go into the interior of the country and disappear while claiming asylum. | ||
| We've got to put a stop to that. | ||
| Are you shocked that, you know, as 2024 rolls around, that Biden, whether it is him or it's the radicals, as you said, you know, beneath him in the party, that this is the direction they're going? | ||
| Like, as crazy as the Democrat Party has become, I don't see how this could possibly be thought of as a winning thing until you flood us with enough people that will just vote for Democrats. | ||
| But in the meantime, I think it turns off a lot of people, just optics-wise. | ||
| I think it's crazy. | ||
| I think what it really shows, though, is their religious devotion to their ideology. | ||
| I mean, they are devoted to this globalism of open borders. | ||
| I mean, let's kind of remember who the base is now, the Democrat Party. | ||
| The base of the Democrat Party flies around in private jets and goes to conferences at Davos. | ||
| Like, that's their base now. | ||
| That's who they are. | ||
| They love this open border stuff. | ||
| They want to collapse the immigration system. | ||
| They want cheap labor. | ||
| If you ask me what I think is really driving a lot of this, they want cheap labor. | ||
| And that's why they like illegal immigration in particular, because illegal immigrants, you can pay them nothing. | ||
| That's what they want. | ||
| These global corporations who are the base of the Dem Party, they want the cheap labor. | ||
| So bring them over, let the cartels have free reign, and if kids in Missouri die from drug overdoses because all the drugs flooding across the border, No, that's just collateral damage, the way these people think, which is totally unconscionable and morally wrong. | ||
| And Joe Biden has that on his shoulders. | ||
| I mean, these are his policies. | ||
| He's responsible. | ||
| Yeah, it really it's just it's just incredible watching these videos. | ||
| But let's just hit a couple other things. | ||
| You've also been pretty outspoken on the Ukraine situation. | ||
| It seems to me the machine is just endlessly marching us to war, that that it's either about money. | ||
| Funding things, giving them weapons, like there's just no off-ramp here. | ||
| Do you see any way we can reverse some of this without World War III? | ||
| Well, what needs to happen is we need to say that, first of all, we need to give no more money to Ukraine. | ||
| I mean, period. | ||
| I voted against this. | ||
| I'm against this continual funding. | ||
| I mean, it's clear to me, you basically are just talking about escalation. | ||
| And it looks to me like the Biden administration has a policy of unending escalation, just more and more and more. | ||
| Now we know that they're actually U.S. | ||
| troops of some variety in Ukraine. | ||
| We were told they weren't because of all these intelligence leaks. | ||
| Now we know there are. | ||
| So who knows what else they're lying to us about? | ||
| But it's constant escalation, more money. | ||
| Apparently, The ruling class has learned nothing from Afghanistan and Iraq. | ||
| Nothing. | ||
| Right down to lying to the public and lying to Congress at every turn about what we're actually doing. | ||
| So step number one... Well, maybe they learned that they could get away with it. | ||
| Is that what they learned? | ||
| That they can do that and just it keeps going? | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| I mean, maybe. | ||
| I guess you could argue they kind of got away with it in Afghanistan, except for you provoke the voters of this country finally to say, no more of this stuff. | ||
| You know, Joe Biden felt that he had to get out of Afghanistan because the voters had had enough of this endless war. | ||
| So, you know, I think we're, I think we're there with Ukraine as well, but yeah, I mean, they just keep going and going. | ||
| So my view is no more money. | ||
| Number two, we need an accounting of every dollar that's been spent. | ||
| I mean, this should not be difficult. | ||
| We ought to know every dime, where has it gone, what has it been used for. | ||
| We've sent Ukraine over $100 billion. | ||
| Even if you loved what was happening with Ukraine and you thought the United States should be fighting on the ground, surely you'd want to know how our money is being spent. | ||
| But yet, I can't get senators to vote for basic accounting. | ||
| But we'll just keep after it until we can actually get the truth here about how our dollars are being spent. | ||
| Let me hit you on one other, which is just the economy in general. | ||
| You know, we had Silicon Bank going down, Silicon Valley Bank, about a month ago. | ||
| Then about two weeks ago, my bank, First Republic, is now part of Chase. | ||
| Too big to fail, keeps getting bigger. | ||
| What do we do about this? | ||
| Well, first of all, I'm totally against the bailouts. | ||
| I mean, let me just tell you, I don't agree with people in Missouri or anywhere else having to pay for these billionaires in California to get bailed out. | ||
| I mean, I tell you what would happen if a bank failed in the state of Missouri, community bank failed in the state of Missouri. | ||
| What they would say is all these New York Wall Street people would say is, oh, That's the free market. | ||
| We just have to live with it. | ||
| But when it's full of liberals who are doing stuff like their green agenda, which is what Silicon Valley Bank was heavily invested in apparently, oh, then it's different. | ||
| Then it's systemic risk, whatever that means. | ||
| Then the taxpayer is going to be on the hook. | ||
| I am totally opposed to that. | ||
| As to why this is happening, the big banks are out there right now, if you ask me, and just talking to people watching this, the big banks are out there trying to drive down the stock. | ||
| And trying to drive down the assets of these medium-sized and smaller banks, because they want to gobble them all up. | ||
| And the Biden administration is helping them. | ||
| They're for that, because the bigger the banks get, then the more the government can partner with the big banks. | ||
| And they want three or four banks that will be basically controlled by the government, because then they can de-bank and de-credit people who don't do what they're told to do, like gun owners and people who sell guns, for one example. | ||
| Right, so we get three or four banks, but in essence, we really just get one bank because it's the United States government saying, so what do we do about that? | ||
| I mean, we keep hearing more about this, like, global currency, or there's going to be this United States digital currency. | ||
| You know, DeSantis is fighting hard against it in Florida. | ||
| It sounds like about 20 other red states are kind of joining him on that. | ||
| Is it just inevitable that we'll all continue to go in this direction? | ||
| No, oh no, goodness sakes, no. | ||
| No, it's not inevitable, and we've got to hit reverse. | ||
| I mean, one of the things I disagree with a lot of my fellow Republicans in Washington about is, is that they've been for this big bank stuff. | ||
| I mean, they're the ones who have put in place, or in some instances, taken away the barriers for letting the big banks get bigger. | ||
| So what should we do? | ||
| I think we ought to say to the big banks, you can't get any bigger. | ||
| Sorry, you can't buy up any more of these small and medium-sized banks, no more. | ||
| Number two, we're not going to sweeten this deal by bailing out All of these banks, because who profits from that? | ||
| What happens is, the big banks come in, they get the bailout money essentially, and they gobble up the little banks. | ||
| So we're going to stop that whole sweetheart deal. | ||
| No more of these secret bailouts. | ||
| We're not going to let the big banks get any bigger. | ||
| And we're going to put in place laws that actually help and protect community banks, like local, truly local banks, where people know each other, and you can go get a loan from somebody who knows you, and it's not being controlled and dictated by Washington or Wall Street. | ||
| It makes sense to me. | ||
| We shall see. | ||
| All right, let's talk about the book a little bit, because I was whipping through it this morning, and you're channeling your inner Jordan Peterson, if I'm not mistaken. | ||
| Well, I think that Jordan Peterson has been a powerful and much-needed voice in encouraging men all around the world, in his case, but men in this country need to hear it, to say to them, listen, we need you. | ||
| You are needed, you are important, you can be a force for good, and we need you to step up. | ||
| So turn off the computer in mom and dad's basement, you know, come on out. | ||
| Go get a job, maybe get married, start a family. | ||
| That is how you're going to leave a legacy. | ||
| That is how you can change this country. | ||
| And really, the book is about that. | ||
| It's about how we need men to be all that they can be so that America can be all that we can. | ||
| Are you surprised that you had to write a book like this? | ||
| I've heard you talk about this before, the issue about men in society. | ||
| But look, you're a senator. | ||
| Mostly people would think, oh, he's going to write a book about politics. | ||
| But that's really not what this is. | ||
| No. | ||
| Yeah, it's not about politics, and I suppose it is surprising given just where we are. | ||
| I'm surprised at the message of the left. | ||
| I'm surprised at the left's message to men, which is that manhood is inherently toxic. | ||
| You know, I love this phrase, toxic masculinity, but if you listen closely, and I quote this stuff in the book, if you listen closely to what the leftists believe, they think all manhood is toxic. | ||
| You know, there's one social scientist who said, talking about healthy masculinity is like talking about healthy cancer. | ||
| There you go! | ||
| That's the last view. | ||
| And they tell our kids this. | ||
| I've got two little boys who are school age. | ||
| You know, I worry about what are they hearing in school? | ||
| What are they hearing from the media? | ||
| This is really the big reason I wrote the book, was thinking about my own boys. | ||
| Our boys, from the time they're small, are told that being a man is a problem, that men, when they are masculine, hurt things, break things, make society worse. | ||
| We need to send the exact opposite message, that we need strong men, we need you to stand up and provide and protect and sacrifice and you can change your family, you can change your neighborhood, you can change your country if you'll do that. | ||
| We play the videos on my show every now and again, but if you want to see how toxic masculinity is, go watch the videos from, like, 1920s New York City, Manhattan, when they have these guys up on those skyscrapers, not strapped into anything, hanging off their, you know, building, the Empire State Building. | ||
| Absolutely incredible. | ||
| What was really the genesis of it? | ||
| Was it really looking at your kids and going, they need a message on this? | ||
| Or, I guess, where do you think we really went off the rails on this thing? | ||
| Well, I think in terms of why I wrote the book, yeah, I've got a 10-year-old and an 8-year-old, both boys, and then I've got a baby girl who's my youngest. | ||
| But as my boys now get older, really for me, the book started me thinking about, what's my obligation as a dad to help my boys be who they were meant to be? | ||
| What is it that I'm teaching them? | ||
| And I look at what the culture is teaching them. | ||
| I'm like, man, that is frightening and it is wrong. | ||
| And so the book really started about me thinking through that with my own kids. | ||
| And the book is really about holding out role models. | ||
| I talk a lot about American history, talk a lot about the Bible, role models of what to look like to be a strong man and to be a good man and tell those stories about being a husband, being a father, being a warrior, building, being a builder, being a priest and being a king. | ||
| And each of those is a chapter of the book. | ||
| And it's really saying to men, hey, there's something for you to go after. | ||
| We need you to step up. | ||
| And be a contributor in these ways. | ||
| So that's how it started. | ||
| How do we go wrong? | ||
| I think it's really the left and their embrace of this new Marxism, which says that manhood is toxic, that manhood is evil, that American society is systemically racist and oppressive and bigoted and men are the problem. | ||
| And that's the message men are told, especially boys, are told from the time they are little. | ||
| And we've got to counteract that because it is just dead wrong. | ||
| How much of that stuff is leaking into your life, your constituents' life in Missouri? | ||
| I feel like people think about this stuff, they're like, alright, it's happening in schools in Cali, it's happening in New York, but it's probably not happening in Missouri. | ||
| Oh no, it's in the curriculum everywhere. | ||
| I mean, that's the sad part about it is that it is in school curriculum. | ||
| And look at the data, don't take my word for it. | ||
| Just look at the data. | ||
| Look how often boys, young boys, elementary age boys are diagnosed with ADHD versus girls, versus other demographics, right? | ||
| I mean, it is overwhelmingly boys have been medicated basically into submission in our schools. | ||
| We've had a constant mantra that, you know, boys shouldn't be allowed to play aggressively. | ||
| If they bring toy soldiers to school, there's something wrong with them. | ||
| If they bring a toy gun to school, that's an intervention. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| It starts early. | ||
| I mean, I have parents talk to me from all over my state, all over the country, come and say that, you know, I just heard this happen. | ||
| I just heard my kid, you know, brought a G.I. | ||
| Joe to school. | ||
| He was disciplined for it, etc., etc. | ||
| It is crazy, crazy stuff. | ||
| What is the effect of that society-wide? | ||
| Again, just look at the numbers. | ||
| Record numbers of young men suffering from depression. | ||
| Record numbers of young men trying to commit suicide. | ||
| Record numbers of young men struggling with drug abuse and alcohol abuse and Record numbers of men not working. | ||
| So, if you like that pattern, then I'd say, great, keep doing what the left wants you to do. | ||
| But for those of us who say, no, actually, we need men to work. | ||
| We need men to be fathers and husbands. | ||
| We need men to step up and provide. | ||
| We gotta do something different. | ||
| How much of this, at the end of the day, do you put on the parents? | ||
| I mean, I think everyone gets that the culture's working against us, and okay, the movies, the TV shows, Disney, blah, blah, blah, but at the end of the day, and I say this with a certain amount of irony, I mean, I have basically an eight-month-old and a six-month-old, so I'm not there yet, but like, that it really is you, the parent, that should set the agenda here, and I think too many parents probably just didn't realize that or got lost on their phones or whatever it might be. | ||
| Well, I think that it's hard to parent in this environment when it's basically you versus the world. | ||
| I mean, when it's you versus what your kids are being told in school and what we learned in COVID is that a lot of times parents, they don't know what's going on in school, not because they don't want to know, but because as we found out in COVID, administrators keep it from them. | ||
| You know, I want to see my kids curriculum. | ||
| Oh, no, you're not allowed. | ||
| No, I want to come and sit in on a class. | ||
| Oh, no, no, you're not allowed. | ||
| You know, I want to see what they're reading. | ||
| No, you're going to you're a domestic terrorist. | ||
| We're going to kick you out of the school board meeting. | ||
| That's what we discovered in the last couple of years. | ||
| So parents, whether it's schools, whether it's big tech, you know, I mean, the kids get on the phone and it's like | ||
| the parents try to monitor it. | ||
| But meanwhile, these kids have constantly pushed to them this imagery, this rhetoric, this ideology about how, | ||
| you know, they're not the gender that they are is not what they should be, | ||
| that there's no such thing as gender. We could go on and on. | ||
| So I think, listen, as a parent myself of three, I. | ||
| I just, I have a lot of sympathy for parents who are like, wow, I feel totally overwhelmed. | ||
| And that's one of the reasons I wrote this book, is I think every, particularly every father out there is trying to figure out, I'm sure it's true of you, trying to figure out, okay, how can I raise my kids in a way where they can be all that they're meant to be? | ||
| And part of that is we band together, we tell the stories that we know and that inspire us, that call us up to be something more and something better. | ||
| How would you scale that up? | ||
| Do you think that really just starts obviously in the home and then hopefully at the school and then school board and kind of up that way? | ||
| Or is there a way to kind of put that on steroids? | ||
| Because obviously we're working against algorithms here. | ||
| That's a tough battle. | ||
| Yeah, it is. | ||
| Great point. | ||
| We are working against algorithms. | ||
| I do think it starts in the home, but I do think that we've got to strengthen those networks, you know, the churches, synagogues. | ||
| I mean, these places that are places of real community, not the virtual online kind, which is fake largely. | ||
| but the real communities where parents band together and they raise their kids together, | ||
| you know, around their common values. We need more of that in this country. And at the national level, | ||
| policy level, we need policies that actually encourage that. | ||
| Like we ought to be encouraging marriage rather than we still penalize marriage in our tax | ||
| code. I mean, it's unbelievable. | ||
| We're still sending jobs overseas. Stupidest thing ever. | ||
| Four million jobs, blue-collar jobs, lost to China since the year 2000. | ||
| One of the biggest, stupidest policy mistakes in American history. | ||
| We're still doing it. | ||
| We need to turn that around, bring back jobs where men can work, provide for their families, contribute to their neighborhoods. | ||
| So there are things that need to be done at a policy level, but really, we've got to put power in the hands of parents, fathers and mothers, and we've got to strengthen them. | ||
| You mentioned common values. | ||
| So I'm just back from 10 days in Israel and four days in Hungary, and one of the things that I found was these are two countries that, despite all their political disagreements internally and everything else, they have common values. | ||
| It's very obvious what it is with Israel in terms of religion, and Hungary as a small country trying to protect their borders, their Christian heritage, etc., etc. | ||
| What do you think the common values are for Americans? | ||
| Because I think that's What we seem to be struggling with most, it's like we're 350 million people, we all look different, came from all these different places. | ||
| What is the common part? | ||
| Well, I think what's in common is the history and the principles that unite us. | ||
| And in that, you can go to our Declaration of Independence, and you can look at our belief that we have inalienable rights that are endowed to us, given to us by our Creator, not by government. | ||
| And you look at what underpins that. | ||
| I mean, really, the tradition of the Bible, I know I'm not supposed to say this, right? | ||
| The left hates it when I say this stuff, but it's just true. | ||
| The tradition of the Bible has underwritten a lot of American culture and a lot of our shared principles. | ||
| And that's been true whether you are a religious believer or not. | ||
| It wasn't that long ago in this country. | ||
| You'd say, yeah, you know, the principles of the Bible, maybe for some people, it's | ||
| like, I don't think that they're literally true, but I agree with them in principle, | ||
| etc. | ||
| That has been our fundamental shared tradition in this country. | ||
| It gave us things like liberty of conscience, liberty of speech, liberty of assembly, right? | ||
| These fundamental rights. | ||
| And what the left has been doing is, the left has been running down our whole history and saying, no, American history, systemically racist. | ||
| American values, systemically bigoted. | ||
| They want to overthrow all of it. | ||
| This is the Marxist element in them. | ||
| They want to overthrow all of our cultural heritage. | ||
| And I think we, as conservatives, We've got to be about preserving those things that unite us. | ||
| Our basic fundamental commitment to our inalienable rights, our basic fundamental commitment to liberty of conscience, liberty of assembly, liberty of worship. | ||
| We've got to go back to those fundamental things that hold us together, and that includes our biblical tradition. | ||
| What do you do about the people on the other side that just obviously don't believe that? | ||
| You know, when basically AOC tells Biden that he should ignore judicial rulings, or it's fairly obvious that half of the party—I don't even think I'm being sarcastic, probably more than half the party—they simply don't believe that the founding of America is good. | ||
| It's one thing to have a difference of political opinion, but the fundamental tenets seem wildly opposite or oppositional. | ||
| I don't know how you get over that. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| And just to that point, I mean, that's the part of the Democrat Party, the Marxist part, that says that this country was really founded in 1619, right? | ||
| And when we were founded on oppression, we were founded on slavery. | ||
| Those are lies. | ||
| And I think, what do we do about it? | ||
| We have to call them out as lies. | ||
| I mean, you just can't compromise with that. | ||
| You know, I mean, we can respect the people. | ||
| I mean, I serve with a lot of these people in Congress, respect them as people, happy to have a discussion about it. | ||
| But I'm not going to say that, oh, yeah, that's, you know, you have a good point there. | ||
| No, you don't actually. | ||
| The country was not founded in 1619. | ||
| Sorry, that's a lie. | ||
| We were not founded on oppression. | ||
| America is a nation of liberators, not a nation of oppressors. | ||
| That's the truth. | ||
| We have to say the truth. | ||
| You know, this country has a deep heritage in the Bible. | ||
| That's the truth. | ||
| You can like it or hate it, but that's the truth. | ||
| We should speak the truth. | ||
| So I think we've just we've got to tell the truth. | ||
| This is a time for truth-telling in this country. | ||
| And I think that's the solution and we just cannot go along with the lies and you can do that respectfully and you can do that civilly. | ||
| We should but you got to tell the truth. | ||
| You've been leading on the tech stuff sort of outside of this, but this is obviously very connected to the tech side of it. | ||
| I mean, I'll watch my niece flip through TikTok and, you know, you just suddenly out of nowhere, literally, you know, she's suddenly, it's my little pony, and then it's some weird gender thing, and then five more videos and something else. | ||
| What do we do about that? | ||
| And, you know, I know you've been one of the guys trying to figure out, okay, do we break them up? | ||
| When are we supposed to use government power here? | ||
| Well, I just say again as a dad, I want to raise my kids. | ||
| My wife and I, we want to raise our kids. | ||
| I don't want big tech raising them for me. | ||
| I don't want some algorithm raising them for me. | ||
| Period. | ||
| So I'm against tech being able to track our kids all over the internet, collect all their personal information, build dossiers on them. | ||
| I think we should just prohibit that. | ||
| Just straight up. | ||
| You cannot target children under a certain age. | ||
| You cannot build dossiers on them. | ||
| And I think we ought to give every parent in America the right to get their kids' information back from all these social media platforms. | ||
| platforms. | ||
| You ought to be able, as a father, to go on and say, OK, my 10-year-old kid, now my kids | ||
| are not on social media, but I know the day is coming. | ||
| I'm trying to delay it. | ||
| But as a parent, I want the right to go on and say, I want from Facebook everything you've | ||
| collected on my kid. | ||
| I want it all back. | ||
| You delete it. | ||
| Give it to me. | ||
| delete it. Every parent ought to have that basic right. You mentioned breaking | ||
| them up. I am a big competition guy so my view is is that Facebook, Google, they're | ||
| monopolies. I mean they really are. They've tried to kill competition all | ||
| the time. We ought to break them up and let there be more competition. We ought | ||
| to we ought to allow others to get in there to compete and to have real | ||
| privacy protections. | ||
| But bottom line is, we've got to give power to parents. | ||
| Got to give them power to protect their kids, to get their kids information. | ||
| Don't allow big tech to raise kids. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Did you focus at all on the female side of this? | ||
| I know that obviously the book is about young males. | ||
| There's a whole other set of issues happening with young females. | ||
| Many of them seem to be transitioning more than males, although it's happening. | ||
| Both directions. | ||
| But I assume you think some of the issues are somewhat constant. | ||
| Oh, absolutely. | ||
| And particularly with tech. | ||
| I mean, listen, I think the left, the left has a war on the whole idea of gender. | ||
| It's a war on men, but it's also a war on women and look no further than their campaign to get biological men into women's sports. | ||
| I mean, this is insane. | ||
| We couldn't even have imagined this conversation three or four years ago. | ||
| But the idea that it is now like an article of faith with them, that a biological man | ||
| must be able to play women's sports and use the locker room with the girls is insane. | ||
| So yeah, I think what you're seeing from the left, again from the Marxist left really, | ||
| is a campaign against gender. | ||
| It's against womanhood. | ||
| It's against manhood. | ||
| There are a lot of similarities there in how they're trying to destroy these things that | ||
| are permanent, these things that are constant. | ||
| and we've got to stand up for them. | ||
| So conservatives got to stand up and say, no, you know what? | ||
| You don't get to be a woman by just wanting to be a woman. | ||
| There is such a thing as biological womanhood and it's awesome and should be protected. | ||
| And girls playing sports should be protected. | ||
| And men on your side of the aisle, your side of the equation, we need you to be good, strong men, and we need you to stand up and be providers and be responsible. | ||
| So we got to do both. | ||
| And I think the left is really attacking both men and women. | ||
| And you can see it. | ||
| You can see it in the huge number of kids now who are totally confused about their gender and say that they want a transition. | ||
| They don't even know what that means. | ||
| And it's being promoted by leftist ideology and the alliance with big tech. | ||
| Yeah, you know, one of Jordan Peterson's lines on this is, even if you were to take the kid who is the 0.0001% that has gender dysmorphia, it doesn't mean after all the hormones and surgeries that they're going to be happier. | ||
| They most likely won't be, actually, and that's in the case of when it genuinely is real, which obviously there's a social contagion element to this. | ||
| Yeah, totally. | ||
| And if you look at those numbers, it's really striking. | ||
| If you look at the breakdown in gender dysphoria in those cases clinically diagnosed from, say, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, versus today, it is impossible to argue, I think, that this isn't a social contagion. | ||
| You look at it those years ago, and the Huge explosion, huge win! | ||
| Right around the time the smartphone and social media really take off and that every teenager in America has one, boom! | ||
| Right then we see huge numbers and it is, the gender dysphoria issue is concentrated largely in young girls, in teenage and preteen girls. | ||
| And we've seen just off the charts numbers there. | ||
| And for the left to say stuff like, oh we have to, we have to be for this, we've got to promote gender transition, gender surgery, hormone treatment. | ||
| I mean, I think this is crazy when parents don't know, if the parents haven't consented, looking at what is really driving this, the social contagion. | ||
| Again, the left is so out of touch with reality and is so contrary to what parents want. | ||
| Are you guys in Missouri doing anything like what we've done here in Florida with the Parental Rights and Education Bill? | ||
| Are they allowed to do this in schools without you knowing as the parent? | ||
| You know, the Missouri legislature, I think, has done some really good work, both on parental rights when it comes to schools, and then also just on this gender treatment issue, saying that, listen, you know, parents, you can't push this gender trans ideology on kids behind parents' back. | ||
| You can't do this without parental consent. | ||
| You can't do this without getting the minors full consent. | ||
| So just in this last legislative session, I think our legislators have done some really important stuff. | ||
| And it's going to take, you mentioned the states. | ||
| It's going to take the states stepping up here and creating walls around the family and saying, we're going to protect parents and we're going to protect kids and we're going to empower parents. | ||
| Because if we don't do that at the state level, these, the bureaucrats will just run roughshod over families, over kids, and they will push their ideology until they get what they want. | ||
| Yeah, you know, it's funny, I can't really get Democrats to come on this show anymore, and I'm not noted as the hardest interviewer, and I would treat them with respect, but they simply don't want to do it. | ||
| But when you talk, or I'm guessing they don't talk to you that often, probably either, but if you're in the Senate, you're wandering around the building, the offices over there, and you happen to see somebody, Chuck Schumer, somebody, I'm not talking one of the real, real radicals, like someone that 20 years ago might have been thought of as somewhat sane. | ||
| Did they buy this? | ||
| Didn't they all just vote against a bill that was going to protect girls in sports? | ||
| Every single Democrat? | ||
| Yeah, they did. | ||
| Over on the House side, and I'm sure they'd vote against it in the Senate. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know what their real beliefs are, and I won't pretend to speak for them, but I just think that the radical left, the Marxist left, has so captured the Democrat party that they live in fear. | ||
| I think they just live it. | ||
| That's why they won't say the word woman. | ||
| You know, they say people with I mean it's just it is insane insane. | ||
| They can't even say, when I say they, I mean senators, Democrat senators won't say woman anymore. | ||
| I mean, it's just, it is insane, insane. | ||
| And I think it is fear of the radical left who are so powerful now in their party. | ||
| Yeah, where do you think education comes into this in terms of what a man should do with his life? | ||
| You know, we sort of had this idea that everybody had to go to the four-year school. | ||
| We now know that they were basically brainwashing everybody, but that there are a lot of other jobs and things that you can do in your life that are valuable without following that path. | ||
| Oh yeah, I believe that 100%. | ||
| Listen, 70 plus percent of American men do not have a four-year college degree. | ||
| They shouldn't have to get one in order to get a good paying job in this country and be able to provide for a family. | ||
| That's my bottom line. | ||
| So I'm not for this shove kids and shove young men in particular towards four-year degrees, make them take on tremendous amounts of debt, allow them to be brainwashed. | ||
| By the university establishment, who are some of the worst actors in America. | ||
| You talk about what they've done to this country, while taking our money, by the way. | ||
| I mean, just taking, gobbling up taxpayer money, and yet indoctrinating our kids. | ||
| So, no, I'm not for forcing people to go down that route. | ||
| I think that men ought to be able to learn a trade, they want to do that, get an associate's degree, not go to college, and they ought to be able to get a good paying job. | ||
| And I just come back to the fact, That our policymakers have sent almost 4 million blue-collar jobs to China in the last 20 years. | ||
| Those jobs are jobs that used to be able to support a family overwhelmingly held by men. | ||
| We need good blue-collar work in this country. | ||
| And if we don't get it, we're not going to have a country. | ||
| So what would that work look like now? | ||
| So let's say it's, you know, January 7th or January 12th, 2025. | ||
| Let's pretend we've got a Republican president. | ||
| It worked out. | ||
| You either got Trump or DeSantis, let's say. | ||
| What's the policy that's going to actually bring jobs back? | ||
|
unidentified
|
These types of jobs. | |
| Yeah, what I would do is I put tariffs on China. | ||
| I put a 25% tariff across the board on all Chinese products right now. | ||
| I do it right now. | ||
| We have a massive trade deficit with them that is really, in my view, the most important deficit that we have and nobody wants to talk about it. | ||
| It's so important because it represents money we are giving to them. | ||
| We are paying them. | ||
| to take our jobs and build their military on the backs of our middle class. | ||
| Literally, that's what's happened for the last 20 plus years. | ||
| So I'd slap across the board tariffs on China, get that trade deficit down to zero, | ||
| make it clear that we're not going to allow them to use their slave labor | ||
| in order to take away the wages of our free laborers here in this country. | ||
| So that would absolutely begin the process of bringing back our critical supply chains to this country. | ||
| I think we can do more. | ||
| Listen, for our critical supply chains, a certain percentage have to be made in the United States of America. | ||
| It's a Make in America, Buy America program. | ||
| I'm not at all bashful about this. | ||
| I think we should apologize for saying that we want stuff made in this country and we're going to stop trade cheaters and we're going to stop our adversaries from taking our jobs. | ||
| I don't know why Republicans are bashful about this and I don't think we should be. | ||
| Well, let's just pray the current administration can't bang it up too much worse for the next year and a half. | ||
| All right, I got two more. | ||
| Now I'll give you the hard two. | ||
| So now your sons, they say to you, Dad, we want to watch whatever's on Disney. | ||
| We want to watch Mandalorian or blah, blah, blah. | ||
| You don't want to fund Disney+, I'm guessing. | ||
| What's the answer as a father on that one? | ||
| Well, our answer so far, again, my boys are 10 and 8, and I recognize families do this different ways, but our answer is that our kids watch very, very little TV, and they don't do any social media. | ||
| Zero. | ||
| They absolutely do not have phones. | ||
| They don't even have iPads. | ||
| We try to keep our kids off of social media completely, and frankly, off of devices as much as we possibly can. | ||
| My wife deserves the credit here. | ||
| She very carefully curates what the kids watch. | ||
| She will watch the show before they watch it. | ||
| She's amazing. | ||
| That's what we do. | ||
| That's obviously hard. | ||
| This is why I say it's hard to be a parent right now. | ||
| I'm a very imperfect parent. | ||
| Don't get me wrong. | ||
| I'm very imperfect. | ||
| But it is hard hard when you've got the whole culture and these huge corporations against you But yeah, I just think we're in an age when it used to it used to be right when when I was a kid You think Oh Disney wholesome anything Disney go for it. | ||
| That's not the case anymore Yeah, I think there's going to be a lot of parents busting out their VHS tapes from Disney movies of 1985 just because they don't want to pay for Disney Plus anymore. | ||
| Let me ask you one other purely on the political front. | ||
| Obviously, this 2025 thing is heating up. | ||
| It's looking like a Trump or DeSantis situation. | ||
| Can you just lay out, I know you're not going to just drop a name for me, but can you kind of lay out what you see the landscape looking like that may lend itself to either one of those guys? | ||
| Well, I'll be honest with you. | ||
| I think Donald Trump's going to be the nominee. | ||
| I mean, I really do. | ||
| I think he will be the nominee in 2024. | ||
| And I think it'll be a Trump-Biden rematch. | ||
| I mean, I guess it'll be Biden. | ||
| I mean, to me, that's the real shocker. | ||
| I just, it's amazing to me, the idea that the Democrats would re-nominate a man who clearly, he's number one been a Terrible president. | ||
| The worst president of my lifetime. | ||
| And clearly is not up to the job. | ||
| I mean, everybody knows this, but looks to me like it's going to be a Trump-Biden rematch. | ||
| And I mean, I sure as heck know where I'm going to be on that, but I really do think Donald Trump will be the nominee. | ||
| Senator, I thank you for your time and the link for the book is right down below. | ||
| Appreciate it. | ||
| Thanks so much. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics instead of mindless drivel, 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. |
Export Selection