The Daily Signal - INTERIVEW | Sen. Hawley Blasts Biden’s Decision Authorizing Sending Reserve Troops to Europe, Sen. Cruz Warns of Long-Term Consequences if Flow of Fentanyl into US Isn’t Stopped

Episode Date: July 18, 2023

Republican Sens. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., and Sens. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, join today's episode of "The Daily Signal Podcast." President Joe Biden’s decision to authorize reserve troops to be sent to Europe is “a sign that the Ukraine policy has become just another endless war,” Sen. Josh Hawley says. “I mean, this is all about Ukraine. This is exactly what I said would happen, that we have to send more troops there,” says Hawley, R-Mo. “We have to spend more money there. He’s doing this at a time when our own southern border is completely overrun.” “Child traffickers, sex trafficking, drugs everywhere. He’s doing it at a time when China is absolutely eating this administration’s lunch,” the Missouri lawmaker says. “I mean, just eating their lunch, stealing our jobs, stealing our trade, and yet what’s he doing? Thousands more troops to Europe. This will never end.”  Hawley joins today’s episode of “The Daily Signal Podcast” to share his message to young people using the Chinese-owned app TikTok; to discuss what he sees as the most egregious examples of government overreach and abuse; and to talk about his book, “Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs.” Sen. Ted Cruz says “a whole lot more Americans dead” will be the No. 1 long-term impact if the flow of the illicit drug fentanyl flowing into the U.S. is not stopped. “You look at last year: We had over 100,000 overdoses last year. That’s the highest rate of overdoses in the history of our nation,” says Cruz, R-Texas. “Two-hundred-thirty-plus years of our nation’s history. We’ve never had that until last year.” “Of those, 70% of those were from Chinese fentanyl coming over the southern border, and it is profoundly dangerous,” he adds.  Cruz joins today’s episode of “The Daily Signal Podcast” to discuss the ongoing crisis at the U.S. southern border, President Joe Biden’s decision to authorize sending 3,000 reserve troops to Europe, and the controversy surrounding the new “Barbie” movie. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Tuesday, July 18th. I'm Samantha Sherris. And today, we are joined by two very special guests, Republican senators Josh Hawley of Missouri and Ted Cruz of Texas. I spoke with both senators over the weekend during the Turning Point USA conference in West Palm Beach, Florida. Senator Holly and I discussed the Chinese-owned app TikTok, his thoughts on President Biden authorizing 3,000 reserve troops, to be sent to Europe and more. During my conversation with Senator Cruz, we discussed the ongoing final crisis

and its long-term impacts, controversy surrounding the new Barbie movie, and more. We'll get to my conversations with Senators Holly and Cruz right after this. Virginia Allen here, I want to tell you all about a great way you can stay in the know

on all the news the Daily Signal covers. Social media. The Daily Signal has an active presence on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. We are constantly posting news stories, clips from interviews, videos, and more across all our social platforms. Follow the daily signal on social media so you can get all the latest content from Reels on Instagram to video clips on Facebook and political commentary on Twitter. Senator Holly, thank you so much for joining us today. Now, there's been a lot of focus this Congress on the weaponization of the fair.

government and you know just government oversight in general. From your experience over the years in the Senate, what have you seen as the most egregious examples of government overreach and abuse from the government? Well, how about when this FBI treated parents who are showing up at school board meetings as domestic terrorists, labels them as domestic terrorists, activates the counterterrorism division of the Justice Department against them? I mean, to me, when you are calling parents domestic terrorists, you know that there's something seriously wrong. Merrick Garland should have been gone. The Attorney General, Christopher

Ray, the FBI director, should have been gone over that alone. And that's before we even get to them targeting pro-life protesters, going to their homes, using SWAT teams against them. We could go on down the list. How about the coordination with Big Tech, where you've got the White House and Big Tech working together to try to de-platform people? I've never seen anything like it in my lifetime. Let's talk a little bit more about Big Tech, because you have been one of the most vocal voices, leading the effort to ban TikTok. And just recently, a Pew Research Center poll came out showing that a majority of Americans think the app

is a threat to national security. What do you say? We're at Turning Point Conference. What do you say to young people here and throughout the country who maybe have TikTok, don't understand the threats, want to ignore the threats, what's your message to them? I'd just say if you've got TikTok on your phone,

take off your phone right now, and then crush your phone in a blunder. I mean, it's a run over it maybe with your truck. listen, here's the problem with TikTok. It's that it is a backdoor for the Chinese Communist Party into everything you're doing. I mean, it is tracking your phone calls. It is tracking your emails. It is reading your text messages, your contact list.

So that's the huge problem. And forget what's on TikTok. Just think about the Communist Party being able to track you everywhere and to get every personal detail of your life. We just can't have that. And that's why we need to ban it. Absolutely. And Senator Hawley, you have a new book out, Manhood, that our colleague, Mary Margaret O'Lohan interviewed you about earlier, it doesn't seem like the left is in favor of

manhood. Why is that? Well, they're not in favor. They don't believe in men or women. They're not in favor of anybody who's strong who stands in the way of their agenda. So they don't want men who would actually stand up for their families, stand up for their jobs, who would be independent. They don't want women. These are the same people who say that a man can be a woman tomorrow, that women shouldn't really exist, that men should be in women's sports. So they don't believe in gender, they don't believe in the family, and I really think it's about control. You know, if they can get us to be just androgynous consumers, which is what they want, just tell us to shut up, don't have families, don't get married, buy a bunch of stuff that we tell you to do and let us

run the country, then they can be in charge forever. And I tell you, if that happens, then we don't have a Republican anymore. And just in terms of teaching our young men about good masculinity, I know you're a dad. So from, you know, being a parent, how are you teaching your sons about, you know, being a good man and good masculinity? Well, what I'm trying to do is, number one, tell them the great stories from American history. People like Theodore Roosevelt, who is a hero of mine, people like Abraham Lincoln, people like George Washington, who are good, strong men. Tell them the stories of the Bible. You know, we go all the way back to really the ground of our Western tradition, also of my faith. But the bottom line is this, is that to be a man is a journey of

character. It is becoming someone who can take on responsibility, who can sacrifice his interest for the good of other people, and ultimately it's willing to lay down his life so that others can live and flourish. That's really what it means to be a husband, to be a father, to be a builder. And so I hope that my boys will have that vision and will want to live that out. And I hope that men around America will want to as well. Absolutely. And another hot topic that we just got last week, President Biden authorizing 3,000 reserve troops to be sent to Europe. Is this a sign of deterrence, you know, escalation? What are your thoughts on it? Well, it's a sign that the Ukraine policy has become just another endless war.

I mean, this is all about Ukraine. This is exactly what I said, what happened, that we have to send more troops there. We have to spend more money there. He's doing this at a time when our own southern border is completely overrun, child traffickers, sex trafficking drugs everywhere. He's doing at a time when China is absolutely eating this administration's lunch. I mean, just eating their lunch, stealing our jobs, stealing our jobs, stealing our jobs, stealing our our trade and yet what's he doing thousands more troops to Europe this will never end I mean unless we switch course it will never end and we got to go to the Europeans and say guys this is your continent you got to step up here and take lead of defense of Europe and just speaking of

China and the threat that we've been just constantly seeing you know we were talking about TikTok earlier we have the fentanyl crisis we have their aggression toward Taiwan what should the Biden administration be doing to counter that threat and if we don't what happens to our country Well, number one is take away most favorite nation status from China. Why are we giving them special trade deals? It's insane. We need to kick them out of the World Trade Organization. We just need to actually eliminate the World Trade Organization.

We need to kick them out of Most Favorite Nation status. We need to slap tariffs on them, and we need to tell them, we're bringing our jobs back. You've stolen our jobs, $4 million. You've stolen our industry. We're going to rebuild that in the United States of America. That has got to be priority number one. Absolutely. Senator Hawley, any final thoughts?

No, not just this is a great conference. I'll just say that. It's awesome to be here at TPUSA. Awesome. Thanks so much. I appreciate it. Yeah, of course. Senator Cruz, thanks so much for joining us today. I want to first start with some reports that we got last week of President Biden authorizing 3,000 reserve troops to be sent to Europe. Is this a sign of de-escalation? Is this a sign of escalation? What are your thoughts on this? Well, I think it's very concerning, and I think it's reckless. I think the Biden administration should make. make absolutely clear that under no circumstances will U.S. servicemen and women be involved in fighting in Ukraine. And this step, I think, is widely seen both here at home and abroad,

as a step towards escalation, but also escalation going in the wrong direction, escalation going in the direction of putting our own soldiers and sailors and airmen and Marines in harm's way. And it should be the soldiers of Ukraine fighting this war. It should not be Americans soldiers on the ground. Now, I want to talk about China and the threat that we're facing from the Communist Party, whether it's TikTok, whether it's aggression toward Taiwan or the fentanyl crisis. As a Texan, you are seeing firsthand the impact of both the border crisis and the fentanyl crisis. So what are the long-term impacts if we don't stop the flow of fentanyl coming into this country

five, ten years from now? Well, the long-term impacts are, number one, a whole lot more Americans did. You look at last year, we had over 100,000 overdoses last year. That's the highest rate of overdoses in the history of our nation. 230-plus years of our nation's history. We've never had that until last year. Of those 70% of those were from Chinese fentanyl coming over to the southern border. And it is profoundly dangerous.

Look, we've always had drug overdoses. have always been a problem as long as people have been using drugs, but with fentanyl, it's something qualitatively different, where in many ways they're not even overdoses. They're more like poisonings, where, you know, it's not a junkie on the street who's been on heroin for a long time and who takes too much, but it can be one kid, one teenager, one 20-year-old at a party who someone hands them a pill, said, hey, try a Xanax or a percassette or what have you. And they take one pill, and it's late. faced with fentanyl and they dropped dead.

And I have met with too many parents, too many moms, too many dads who have lost their kids to fentanyl poisonings. Look, I understand this firsthand. My older sister, Miriam, died of a drug overdose. And this is, it's an epidemic that faces the entire country and plagues the entire country. Everyone has been touched in one way, shape, or form by this. but what is happening in our southern border has made it qualitatively worse. The volume of Chinese fentanyl coming in is massive.

And the overall crisis on our southern border is massive. We have right now roughly 7 million illegal immigrants have come in under Joe Biden. That again is the highest in our nation's history, and it is lawlessness from this administration that is producing a line of Biden bodybags as far as the eye can see. And just along the same lines of talking about the Chinese Communist Party and the threat that we're facing, what is different about this threat from China

than our other adversaries than Iran, North Korea, Russia? Look, I've said for a long time, when I first got elected to the Senate in 2012, I came to D.C. and I said at the time, I said, communist China poses the single greatest geopolitical threat for the United States for the next 100 years. And I got to tell you, when I was saying that in 2013, 2014, that was a lonely view.

Almost nobody agreed with me. All the Democrats disagreed with me, and most of the Republicans did. And they looked at China and they saw nothing but dollar signs, as far as the eyes could see. They saw a huge market and they wanted cheap goods from China and they wanted to sell their goods in China. I got to say where we are now, more and more people,

their eyes are opening up to just how malevolent China is. I think the COVID pandemic changed a lot of people's perceptions of China. I think we need with China a comprehensive strategic plan to defeat China in the competition for the globe for the next hundred years. And I think we need a plan that is very much modeled after what Ronald Reagan laid out and implemented to win the Cold War, to defeat the Soviet Union. I've spent the last decade in the Senate laying out an approach like that that focuses on, number one, calling out the evils and abuses of China. Reagan did it masterfully when he stood up to the Soviet Union.

He referred to the Soviet Union as an evil empire. When he said Marxism, Leninism will end up on the ash heap of history, when he stood in front of the Brandenburg gate and said, Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. Those words had power and tyrannies fear, truth and light and exposure. We need to do the same thing. And so I spend a lot of time calling out the Chinese government for the murder, for the torture, for the concentration camps that over one million people are languishing in Chinese concentration camps right now today. We need to call them out. We need to call them out and hold China responsible for the COVID pandemic.

For the trillions of dollars of losses, for the over one million. in lives lost to COVID. We need to hold China responsible for that. We need to stand up to their theft, their intellectual property theft, that they systematically go after and steal our intellectual property, both military and scientific and across the board. We need to go after and stop their propaganda and their espionage. And I've introduced over two dozen different pieces of legislation to do exactly that. And in fact, I'll point to one that just recently got passed in December. So it's a recent victory. It's a bill I introduced called the Script Act.

Now, we've seen a pattern in Hollywood that is really dismaying where Hollywood films will edit their films and censor their films to make the Chinese censors happy. So, for example, Top Gun 2, the sequel. The first one, Maverick is wearing a bomber jacket. On the back of the jacket, there's a patch for Taiwan and a patch for Japan. For the sequel, when they put out the trailers,

those two patches miraculously disappeared because China doesn't like Taiwan and they don't like Japan. And so I called them out. I went to the Senate floor. I was like, you got to be kidding me. Maverick is scared of the Chinese communists. And I got to tell you, just the heat on the TV studio was enough. They flipped and put it back in. What the script act provides is it says, okay, if you're a Hollywood studio, we're not going to try to regulate. We can't do that under the the First Amendment. But what we can do is this. Many, many films use U.S. government assets to make their films, something like Top Gun. They've got Navy jets. Lots of films, they'll use ships, they'll use tanks, they'll use jeeps. If they're down on the border, they'll use

helicopters, they use lots of equipment, and the federal government allows Hollywood to use a lot of U.S. government assets. The Script Act says you are ineligible. You cannot use any U.S. government asset if you are going to let the Chinese communist censor your film. That if you're going to do that, if you're going to be a censor for the Chinese communist, the U.S. government's not going to help you do that. And we got that passed. Hollywood fought hard against this bill. We got that passed in December. And just last month, the Pentagon laid out the new guidelines, making clear that we're not going to cooperate. The U.S. government's not going to cooperate in Hollywood letting the Chinese communist be censors for American films.

Well, also a more recent movie, Barbie, is getting a lot of backlash right now. Just one final question for you. If we don't counter the threat of the Chinese Communist Party, as we were talking earlier with the fentanyl crisis, what's at stake for the United States of America? Well, an enormous amount. Let me go back to Barbie for a second before we get to that. Because, look, the Barbie movie is coming out right now. I'm the dad of two young daughters.

This is going to be a big movie, particularly for a lot of young girls. There's a scene in Barbie where there is this map of the world, and it's drawn like with crayon. I mean, it's really a very simple cartoon. And so they have this blockish thing that is called Asia. And then they've drawn what are called the Nine Dashes, which is this is Chinese communist propaganda, which the Chinese are asserting sovereignty over the entirety of the South China Sea. And they don't have any right to it under international law. but they're trying to take it away from their neighbors there,

take away and claim China's in charge of the entire sea, and no one else, whether Vietnam or Singapore or other nations in that area, they don't have any rights to access that water. It's blatantly false, and it's Chinese propaganda. Well, the stupid little cartoon map has the nine dashes drawn on there, and they did it for one purpose and one purpose only, to kiss up to the Chinese communist censors. And I've got to say that is shameful.

I've called them out. As you know, I do a podcast every week. Three days a week. It's called Verdict with Ted Cruz every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Everyone listening to this should subscribe to Verdict with Ted Cruz. We're here at Turning Point. We're getting ready to do a live episode of Verdict here at Turning Point. But we did a whole show on Barbie walking through, and I've got to say, the press likes to mock this and be like, oh, come on, why are you talking about something like Barbie? Because Hollywood, would letting the Chinese communist dictate what is in American films is a real threat and we need to call them out. You asked about the broader threats of China. Look, fentanyl is killing

Americans. You go down to the southern border. I was last at the southern border down in Brownsville, the southern tip of Texas. It has been the heaviest trafficked area for illegal immigration. When I was there just a couple of months ago, they were seeing every day between 90 and 100, Chinese nationals crossing in Brownsville, Texas. And to be clear, even on a Barbie cartoon map, I'm pretty sure the country south of Brownsville is not China. They've got to go a long way to get to Mexico to cross into the U.S. And if they're sending 90 to 100 in, just in one place in Texas,

and most of these are young military-aged men. And they are people, often, we don't have any criminal backgrounds, We don't know if they're spies. We don't know if they are working for the Chinese communist government. It is a serious threat. And the Biden administration is endangering the country by allowing 7 million people to come into this country illegally. And by allowing a flood of drugs that is killing Americans. Well, Senator Cruz, thanks so much for joining us.

I appreciate it. Thank you. And that's going to do it for today's episode. Thanks for listening to my interviews with Senators Josh Hawley of Missouri and Ted Cruz. of Texas. If you haven't gotten the chance, make sure you subscribe to the Daily Signal wherever you get your podcast and help us reach even more listeners by leaving a five-star rating and review. We read all of your feedback. Thanks again for listening. Have a wonderful Tuesday, and we'll be back with you all this afternoon for top news. The Daily Signal podcast is brought

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