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Nov. 1, 2022 - Sean Hannity Show
31:24
Senator Tom Cotton - October 31st, Hour 3
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Stay right here for our final news roundup and information overload.
Our news roundup and information overload hour.
Glad you're with us.
Sean Hannity Show, toll-free.
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Sean, if you want to be a part of the program, eight days until these all-important midterm elections, I know a lot of you would like me to reassure you that things will go the way that we want them to go.
I wish I had that crystal ball.
I wish I had the gift of prophecy.
I don't.
Do I think things are looking up for the Republicans?
Yeah.
Do I think things are breaking towards conservatism?
Yes, I do.
Do I think that when you ask the simple fundamental question, are you better off than you were 21 months ago?
The answer is obviously, no, you are not.
Nobody is better off.
The races we've been following the most closely, we expect that the Republicans should do well in the House.
I think their commitments to America was a really good idea, putting down on paper those things that they say they will vote for, and we will hold them accountable in the Senate.
I think Marco Rubio will win in the state of Florida.
Herschel Walker is showing every indication he's got a pretty good lead now in the state of Georgia.
Whether we will need a runoff on December 6th or not, I don't know.
Ted Budd is leading by a pretty healthy margin, four and a half points in North Carolina.
We see now Don Bullduck is running in New Hampshire, and now he is dead even with Maggie Hassen.
That would be a huge pickup.
Dr. Oz is now leading John Fetterman in Pennsylvania, but Pennsylvania is always a tough state for a Republican to win statewide.
JD Vance looks like he's doing pretty well in the great state of Ohio, the Buckeye State.
Eric Schmidt is doing well.
We think Ron Johnson's doing well in Wisconsin.
We hope for a pickup in Arizona with Adam Laxall.
We got Blake Masters.
Tiffany Smiley is only down one point according to the latest Trafalgar poll against Patty Murray.
That could be a big sleeper.
I don't expect problems for Tim Scott or John Kennedy or Rand Paul or Chuck Rassley.
I think they're going to do fine.
Our friend Senator Tom Cotton is here to analyze a lot of this for us.
He's been out on the campaign trail.
He's been at our town halls, and he's talking to voters all over the country, trying to get people motivated and aware of what is at stake here.
His brand new book, Only the Strong, Reversing the Left's Plot to Sabotage American Power, it's coming out just today, and it's in bookstores everywhere on Hannity.com, on Amazon.com.
These are scary times we're living in.
Senator Cotton, welcome back to the program.
Hey, Sean, it's great to be back on the show with you.
Thank you for having me on it.
Thank you for what you're doing.
You've been a real road warrior this last month all across America hosting town halls.
I was happy to join you in Pennsylvania for a mime Oz.
But I see you each night.
There's three people who are doing more to make sure that we put the brakes on Joe Biden's agenda than you, and we really appreciate your hard work.
It's pretty scary.
Your book, though, hits a lot of these themes, Only the Strong, Reversing the Left's Plot to Sabotage American Power.
I don't think I can recall in my adult lifetime a point where America had less respect than it does now.
We have a lot of hostile regimes in this world.
We have a lot of enemies out there.
You see the moves with Vladimir Putin in Ukraine.
You see the saber rattling with President Xi in China.
We don't know what the Iranian mullahs are up to, except we know that if, God forbid, they ever got nuclear weapons coupled with their radical ideology, that could be an unmitigated disaster with God knows how many people dead.
We've got a lot of hot zones in this country, and I'm afraid that American weakness, sadly, is contributing to a state of chaos, if you will, in the world.
Yeah, it is, Sean.
And as I describe it in Only the Strong, we didn't get here by accident.
It's not bad luck.
It's not misfortune for Democratic presidents.
It's declined by design.
Democrats like Joe Biden and especially Barack Obama are ambivalent at best about America, and they're openly hostile to American power.
So they try to erode the sources of our power.
Of course, the most fundamental part of our power is our military strength, as I explained in Only the Strong.
Democrats have been neutering the military almost throughout modern times.
Every time they come to office, they slash the defense budget.
They use it for social engineering.
They impose politically correct and woke indoctrination sessions on our troops as opposed to training them to fight.
They undermine the source, another key source of our power, which is a strong, prosperous economy.
You lay down a lot of those, whether it's 13% inflation or unfortunately, it looks like we could be stumbling into a recession because of that inflation, spending trillions of dollars that we don't have.
They've undermined our sovereignty, opening our southern border, committing us to all kinds of international organizations at the United Nations or bad one-sided treaties.
And then when you look abroad, they consistently appease and coddle our adversaries, countries like Cuba and Iran and Venezuela and China, while ostracizing and condemning our friends, countries like Israel or Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates.
All this has contributed to the sense of decline that Americans see.
But one of the main points of Only the Strong is its decline by design by these Democrats because they are so ambivalent about America and openly hostile to American power.
Well, you know, American power only incurs weakness.
American weakness only incurs aggression.
That's all there is to it.
You know, one of the main principles, I think, of being a conservatism, we talk a lot about the economy.
I mean, I don't think it's hard to be a conservative.
You believe in liberty and freedom and capitalism and our Constitution and limited government and greater freedom for people.
And we want lower taxes, less bureaucracy.
We want law and order so people can be safe and secure and pursuing happiness.
We certainly want our borders, especially the laws enforced in this country.
I think most conservatives believe in energy independence, especially because we have the vast natural resources we've been blessed with.
We have them in abundance.
We ought not be begging people that hate our guts for our energy.
I think we believe, most people believe in an educational system where kids can actually learn.
And then beyond that, none of this happens if you don't have a strong national defense and you don't have the peace through strength philosophy that has kept the world free and kept the world strong.
And when America's weak, so too does the world suffer.
Yeah, Sean, I think you can see that from the lessons of history.
You know, look at what happened in the late 1970s after our humiliation in Saigon with helicopters lifting off our embassy because Democrats like Joe Biden in his early days in the Senate had voted to cut off military aid to the South Vietnam government.
And for the next five years, you had communism underwritten by Soviet Russia rampaging across the world.
Look what happened in Barack Obama's tenure and now in what is, in effect, his third term under Joe Biden.
You see the world in flames.
Iran spreading terror throughout the Middle East, kidnapping Americans and threatening our interests.
China shooting missiles over Taiwan.
Russia is invaded for a second time under a Democratic president.
Ukraine, leading to the largest war in Europe since World War II.
These are all the direct and predictable results of democratic weakness, not just weakness abroad, but weakness at home.
You mentioned energy independence is something I write about a lot in my book.
Some people say that's just a political slogan.
No, it's not, because the opposite of energy independence is energy dependence, which is a slavish condition for any nation, but especially a great superpower that leads the free world.
This is another source of American power that Democrats, for ideological reasons, have tried to undermine, waging a war against fossil fuel production here in America.
So Joe Biden had been begging numerous times OPEC to increase production.
It's really OPEC Plus, and OPEC Plus would be Saudi Arabia.
It would also include Russia.
Every time Joe Biden made a request, he was rejected.
Then Joe Biden decided to get on an airplane, Air Force One, and fly over to the country that he referred to as a pariah nation, Saudi Arabia, to meet with the man, MBS, who he says is responsible for killing and likely is journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
And he was begging OPEC Plus and begging the Saudis to increase oil production.
I don't quite understand why we're not producing it here.
You know, what impact is there a different impact on Mother Earth if you import oil from Iran or Venezuela or the Middle East or Russia versus producing it here?
Because I would argue if we do it here, we do it cleaner.
We do it faster.
We do it cheaper.
So it never made any sense to me.
But then Joe Biden was not only told that they wouldn't increase production, that they were going to announce a decrease in production of 2 million barrels a day.
And then the Saudis got angry when Joe Biden said that there would be consequences and a realignment of our relationship.
And they announced to the world that Joe Biden had requested that they delay the decision until after the midterm elections.
Now, why do I believe if Joe Biden's last name were Trump or any other Republican, that that would be viewed by the media and by Democrats as some type of collusion to impact our elections?
That sounds like a quid pro quo, Sean, where we heard this before.
I think it's very telling that Joe Biden didn't ask Saudi Arabia just to keep production high.
He asked them only to keep production high until after the election.
The Democrats are waging this war on fossil fuel production, not only here at home, but around the world.
I promise you that after next week's election, they're going to be back in the open doing it again, just as Joe Biden was doing it privately with Saudi Arabia.
Now, fortunately, we're not as dependent on Middle Eastern oil or foreign oil anywhere as much as we were back in, say, Ronald Graves' days, if we would simply allow our roughnecks and our oil producers to get out and do their work in the oil patch.
We shouldn't have to rely on deadly enemies like Iran and Venezuela for oil.
Frankly, we shouldn't have to rely on friendly nations like Saudi Arabia or Canada for oil.
We should be able to produce it enough here for ourselves and to support our allies around the world.
But the case of Saudi Arabia is a good example of what I write about in Only the Strong.
Democrats consistently will appease and coddle our adversaries, countries like Iran, and condemn and ostracize friendly nations like Saudi Arabia.
For 80 years, Saudi Arabia, albeit a very different system of government, very different culture than ours, has worked with American presidents.
And on the issue of oil, for instance, Sean, you remember when Ronald Reagan worked with the Sauds in the 1980s to keep the price of oil low, which undermined Soviet Russia's economy.
He was able to do that, yet Joe Biden's unable to do that.
And it's because Democrats have consistently sided with our enemies in the Middle East, countries like Iran and Syria, and sided against allies like Saudi Arabia and Israel.
Let me ask you a deeper question then.
Yeah, go ahead.
Finish your thought.
I was just saying a simple premise of foreign policy, and I write it only the strong, is you have to be able to distinguish friends and foes.
It would be nice if we lived in a world where every ally could be a representative democracy that shares our social and cultural sensibilities.
But we don't live in that world, and the world's not a church picnic, and we have to take our allies and friends where we can find them.
And the question in the end should not be so much, is a country democratic or non-democratic?
It should be, is a country pro-American or anti-American?
The Democrats ask that question, too.
The problem is they want a country to be anti-American before America starts to appease them and grant them concessions.
All right, quick break more with Tom Cotton.
His new book is out, Only the Strong, Reversing the Left's Plot to Sabotage American Power.
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Senator Tom Cotton is with us.
He has a new book out.
It's called Only the Strong Reversing the Left's Plot to Sabotage American Power.
Amazon.com, Hannity.com, bookstores everywhere.
Do you think that the Biden family, now you mentioned the quid pro quo, and you're not going to get a billion dollars, Joe bragged, of taxpayer money unless you fire a prosecutor, prosecutor that we find out is investigating his son being paid millions without any experience in Ukraine or experience in energy, oil, whatsoever.
Then we have the case where we learn that he got money from Kazakhstan and some oligarch in Kazakhstan.
And then we learn that Hunter Biden got $3.5 million from the former First Lady of Moscow and a $100 million investment in a real estate firm that he was putting together from the former First Lady of Moscow.
Then the Bidens got a $5 million forgivable no-interest loan.
Now, for forgivable, to me, means you get to keep it.
You don't have to pay it back.
Add to that the $1.5 billion deal of China.
My question to you is, do you believe that when you look at the entirety of the Biden family and their foreign business dealings that seem very favorable to the Bidens with no experience, that in fact that it's very likely that that family is compromised by these hostile regimes?
I do think there's a genuine likelihood of that kind of conflict of interest, Sean.
As I write in Only the Strong, the American people deserve someone better in Barack Obama's tenure than Joe Biden representing our interests to China.
I think he was in charge of the China portfolio.
And we still deserve someone better than that, given all of Hunter Biden's dealing in China.
And when we win back the majority next week in Congress, it's going to be on our agenda to get to the bottom of all these shady business dealings.
I, for one, think that Hunter Biden may soon face indictment, but it seems to me if you believe leaks from the FBI and the Department of Justice, he may be indicted on process fouls, things like filling out an ATF form incorrectly or even some kind of tax crime.
It doesn't sound like they want to go after the real meat and potatoes behind this case, but they do want to go after Donald Trump in case they pack some classified material and brought it to Mar-a-Lago.
Anyway, the book is called, and congratulations on this, Only the Strong, Reversing the Left's Plot to Sabotage American Power.
Senator Tom Cotton, it's on Amazon.com, Hannity.com, bookstores everywhere.
Eight days to go, Senator.
Keep up the good work.
We appreciate you're out there campaigning for a lot of good folks.
Thank you, Sean.
Thanks for everything.
Thanks for all your hard work on the campaign trail as well.
It's great to be on with you.
Appreciate it.
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All right, 25 now to the top of the hour.
Eight days till the all-important midterms.
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Interesting exchanges over the weekend.
I see Kathy Hochl.
Now, during the debate with Lee Zeldin, she made a pretty dumb comment and just said, I have no idea why you're so obsessed with crime.
And, you know, now she's calling Republicans and the media master manipulators and data deniers for saying crime is up in Democratic states.
Well, it is up in Democratic states.
It's up dramatically.
Not sure exactly what she's talking about, but maybe she ought to turn on the local news in New York City on any given day and see the record crime that is taking place, violent record crime in her own state.
You would think she would know that.
Everyone, these are master manipulators.
They have this conspiracy going all across America to try and convince people that in Democratic states, they're not as safe.
Well, guess what?
They're also not only election deniers, they're data deniers.
The data shows that shootings and murders are down in our state by 15%, even in New York City, down 20% on Long Island, where Lee Zeldon comes from.
And it's the Republican states where they have almost no restrictions on guns.
She couldn't be any more wrong as per usual.
And it's like, what part of what's happening every day are you missing?
Because people are getting the crap beat out of them in New York City.
People are getting thrown before subways on a regular basis in New York City.
Crime has never been this out of control.
We have had record violent crime across the country, especially in blue states run by liberal Democrats like her forever.
But this is a campaign season, so I guess you can say anything you want.
Interesting exchange, Jen Circleback Saki talking to a mother of four who says Biden's economy is not working for her.
Listen.
So what's most important to you as you're thinking about who to vote for?
What do you care about?
As a mother of four children, the jobs, they say that all these jobs are out there, but they don't want to pay enough for you to actually live off of the job.
So, you know, I'd like there to be, you know, more jobs available with the flexibility, you know, to be able to actually work and take care of your family and not have to worry about choosing one because I'm in that situation now.
You know, I need to go back to work when I can't afford to pay for child care.
Well, thank you.
Being a mama for is not easy.
Oopsie, Daisy.
And then, you know, now just passing off inflation.
Now, think of one of the biggest drivers of inflation under the Biden economy.
Gross domestic product was 1.4%.
That's what he inherited.
Now we have nine, what going on, 10 months of 8.5%, a 40-year high every month.
It's not transitory.
And all the economists, all the economic, you know, the brightest minds on Wall Street and banking are saying this is going well into 2023, maybe even into 2024.
And she's trying to just pawn it all.
This is a global issue.
Not much Democrats could have done.
Listen.
Look, on inflation, it's a global issue.
It's happening around the world.
I think there's not a lot Democrats could have done to change that reality.
What you are seeing people like Barack Obama and Joe Biden do is really try to make this about a choice and not a referendum on President Biden.
You heard him say almost exactly that when he was answering questions over the weekend.
If we're looking back and the Democrats can't hold the Senate, that will be a question should they have hardened that and been tougher on that earlier.
But right now, I think that's their closing argument.
It's about we know inflation is an issue.
We know your costs are too high.
But who has a better plan?
We have a better plan.
So give us a chance to have more time.
And we're going to have to see if that works or not.
Oh, we're just going to have to, what, roll the dice because everything they've been doing.
They're the ones that told us it was transitory.
They're the ones that said, see, it's over.
Zero inflation.
Zero.
Today it comes out.
They have another 40-year high of inflation.
Joe Biden and Kamala Harris lied to us and said, zero inflation.
It's zero.
No, it wasn't zero.
Like everything else they say.
Speaking of inflation, let's say hi to Larry in Virginia.
Larry, hi, how are you?
Glad you called.
Hey, Sean, how are you doing?
I'm good, sir.
What's up?
I just want to talk about this inflation and how it's, you know, how it's affected my life.
In the past two years, I mean, it's just been nothing but a disaster.
I'm a single father of 13 years.
I raise a son that has disabilities.
I'm a blue-collar worker.
I mean, I get up every day.
I go to work.
I pull myself up by my own bootstraps.
I go to work with good intentions.
And just in the last two years, it's been nothing but a disaster.
It's took a toll on me and my son.
I mean, it's completely took things away from us.
I'm having to make choices that I didn't have to make before.
I mean, for the last two years, I had a 401k at a previous job before the pandemic hit.
And the whole time of the pandemic, I worked.
I never missed a beat.
I worried to death towards the end of the pandemic when they wanted everybody to take the jabs.
And I was worried about losing my job and losing my home.
And me and my son would probably be homeless.
And finally, thankfully, the court stepped in with that.
And it's just, I heat my home with oil.
I can't afford to buy that.
Right now, it's about $1,400, $1,500 to fill that up.
I can't do it.
It's just, it's going to cost me about $5,000 for the winter to heat.
And that's not even that's not even counting the elective bill itself.
It's just the average family.
Just Larry, you're speaking for 75 percent of the country.
What you're describing is what 75% of the country is going through.
And it's about to get much worse because they're saying if you heat your home with gas, you're going to have, you should expect at least a 30% increase, maybe higher.
If you heat your home with oil, it's going to be a 30% increase, maybe higher.
And so you're describing the average family, as estimated by the Heritage Foundation, because of Biden inflation, is paying $7,200 more a year for the same goods they were buying 20 months ago.
And that should be what defines this election in eight days more than anything else.
Are you better off under the new Green Deal socialism and the promises of socialism and climate alarmism or not?
I don't see Americans are better off.
I see Americans struggling needlessly because of these insane policies.
It's all around me everywhere I go, grocery stores, fill-in stations, whatever.
You don't have to talk to people.
You can hear them.
You can overhear them talking.
And everybody's talking about it.
Everybody's struggling.
Everybody's hurting.
You know, it's been nothing but a disaster for the past two years of this administration from day one.
And this is not the same America that I knew two years ago.
I love America.
I love everything about it.
I want to be free.
I want to be left alone.
I want to be free.
I want to be able to do what I got to do.
I don't bother nobody.
I get up every day.
I go to work.
I take care of my son.
If I only had $2 in my pocket and somebody needed it, I'd give it to them.
That's the kind of person I am.
And like I said, this has really took a toll on me.
And you see what happened here in Virginia with Glenn Yonkin.
We mostly been blue here for a long time.
They started messing with the children.
See what happened?
Now they're messing with people's wallets.
Well, I will tell you, first of all, I'm sorry that it is such a struggle.
I wish I had better news for you than what I'm about to tell you.
It's not going to get better anytime soon.
What this election is about more than anything else is to prevent further damage from occurring.
If the Democrats get control of the House and Senate and they get a majority in the Senate, they will eliminate the filibuster, the legislative filibuster, which means they'll be able to push their Green New Deal climate alarmism basically will be on steroids and human growth hormone.
They will pack the courts so then court decisions now will be judicial activism, left-wing, again, on steroids.
And then they'll try and give D.C. statehood, Puerto Rico statehood, because they think that'll give them four Democratic Senate seats.
You can guarantee more open borders.
You can guarantee more higher prices at the pump.
You can guarantee more lectures about the need to pay 22 grand more for an electric car.
And there's nothing that they're going to be able to do.
These policies are destined to fail.
They've already failed.
Jensaki is, you know, trying to say, well, just give us more time.
More time.
You've already done enough damage.
And it's time now for Americans to say enough is enough.
It's idiotic to be importing energy.
That's a big part of the inflation quotient.
And we can do better.
But it's not going to be a short-term fix.
They've done a lot of damage, and it's not going to be easy.
And with Joe Biden as president, I don't think we're going to be finishing the Keystone XL pipeline.
I don't think we're going to finish building the wall.
I don't think we're going to bring back the stay in Mexico policy.
I don't think these no-bail laws are going to be rescinded.
I don't think that woke education is going away anytime soon, but it's a first step.
It's a two-step process to save the country.
First thing is we've got to plug up the hole in the boat.
We're taking on water and we're sinking.
And people, you know, great Americans like you that get up every day, work hard, take care of their family, pay their taxes, obey the laws, and serve their fellow Americans are struggling needlessly.
All of these problems that they now have brought to this country were all preventable.
We don't need chaos at the border.
We could have kept the Trump policies.
We don't need energy dependence.
We could have kept the Trump policies.
We don't need these idiotic no-bail laws, defund the police laws.
We could have kept law and order.
We don't need woke schools.
We need classical education for our kids.
Simple stuff, but profound impacts.
It's two competing visions for America.
And in eight days, America is going to decide whether they're happy with what's happening or they're going to vote to change this.
I vote to change it.
And I hope they do too, so people like you won't have to suffer and make the decisions that you never had to make before.
Sad.
It shouldn't happen.
It's all preventable and it's all fixable.
George in Florida, Georgia on the Sean Hannity show.
Mr. Taker, Mike Hall.
You know, someone who likes to play the long game, I think one of the on the Elon Musk taking over Twitter has been the most impactful thing that probably happened to, say, the conservative movement or free speech in the last three years.
He doesn't have to be a conservative, but giving everybody the platform back is going to open up.
We're going to have that alternative, that full-fledged alternative to the mainstream media that has been crippling our country and the accountability.
We're going to have that back.
So I want to see how impactful do you think Elon's purchase is to this country in maybe this, hopefully some of this midterm, but how will he live in the next two or three years?
You know, it's hard to say.
I don't know.
I find Elon Musk to be a very interesting person overall, generally.
He seems like he thinks on a different level than most people.
I admire that gift and people when I see it.
Obviously, he's done very well for himself, and he's very wealthy as a result of it.
If he's really committed to freedom of speech and the free and open exchange of ideas, I think he would make Twitter infinitely better.
And only time is going to tell.
I think it's a challenge.
At one point, I was offered an opportunity to be a part of Parlor.
I thought about it, and I was only going to be a very, very small, minor bit player in the overall business plan.
And I passed on it in large part because I said, yeah, I'll own 2% of the company and get 99% of the blame when people put up stupid stuff that I would never support or want to offer or lend any platform to.
So it's kind of a hard question.
But as far as Elon Musk, I hope he's true to what he's saying.
And that is, you know, it's not, as long as it's not a threat, as long as it's not dangerous.
All right, that's going to wrap things up for today.
Hannity tonight, 9 Eastern on the Fox News channel, eight days until the all-important midterm elections.
We'll update you in Georgia with Herschel Walker, Pennsylvania with Dr. Oz, Wisconsin with Ron Johnson, New Hampshire looking better and better for Republicans and Don Bullduck.
Also, Kellyanne Conway, Mike Huckabee, Larry Elder, Leo 2.0, Terrell, best TV coverage, election coverage available tonight, 9 Eastern on Fox with Hannity.
We'll see you tonight back here tomorrow.
Seven days to go.
One week from tomorrow, you will decide.
Anyway, thank you for making this show possible.
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