The Michael Knowles Show - Interview with Senator Mike Lee

Episode Date: October 30, 2022

Interview with Senator Mike Lee See all of our exciting content on DailyWire+ here: https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe-plus Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

We are in the absolute final stretch of the 2022 midterm elections. Things are looking very, very good for Republicans right now. And one of the absolutely most interesting races in the country happens to concern one of my absolute favorite United States senators. And that would be Senator Mike Lee over in Utah, good, strong conservative senator, who's facing a little bit of a weird challenge because he's running against Well, I guess he is running against a Democrat, but he's running against a Democrat who says he's a Republican with the backing of the Democrats and the very liberal Republican. Other senator from Utah is staying kind of neutral.

And anyway, it's very, very intricate and bizarre. Senator Lee, thank you for coming on the show. Oh, thanks for having me, Michael. So, Senator, all sorts of crazy races to watch this year, Georgia, Pennsylvania. Arizona, Nevada, all over the place. Yours might be the strangest one, actually, of all of them. Because I thought, look, this is a Republican year. Mike Lee has one of the best conservative records in the United States Senate, in the United States, frankly, as far as I'm concerned. Utah is a very good conservative state. And yet there's this weird fact, you're running

against this guy, Evan McMullen, who was the kind of never Trump, candidate from 2016, who some Democrats gave a bunch of money to fruitlessly. And then now he's running for Senate in Utah, but the Democrats are backing him. And I don't pretend to know all of the intricacies. How does the race stand? Here's where it stands. Look, this race is much closer than it should be for the simple reason that we've got an independent who's telling Republicans, he still thinks like a Republican.

He actually calls himself a conservative. He's telling Democrats he'll vote like a Democrat. And the local media is overwhelmingly liberal, entirely liberal, in fact. And so they cover it up for them. They don't actually make him talk about issues and where he would stand on things. In fact, the most substance he's provided on how he would vote was provided to the Utah Democratic Party while he was actively courting their endorsement. You see, he went to them and said, don't run a Democrat. because they have a D after their name.

I'll have an I after my name, but I'll vote more or less how you want me to vote, and I can get elected more easily than they can't. But let me tell you what I stand for, and he rattled off a whole bunch of things where he stood with it, including the fact that he voted for Joe Biden, he campaigned for Joe Biden, he encouraged others to do the same.

He supports things like H.R.1.S.1. This bill that would take over the authority to run federal elections, strip the states of their authority to impose voter ID requirements. and otherwise make it almost impossible for any Republican ever to win an election again. He also said that he would nuke the filibuster for purposes of passing H.R.1.S.1. This is really dangerous stuff. But meanwhile, mainstream news media in Utah, which is to say the entire media establishment in Utah,

save one or two radio talk show hosts, is backing this guy, helping this guy. So, yeah, this race is closer than it should be. It's probably as close a general election as we've had in quite a while for a U.S. Senate race in Utah. Wow. It's not surprising in a certain way because it seems to me the only way the Democrats have any hope of winning really anything this year is through chicanery. And this is a great example of that kind of chicanery. I actually didn't know that about McMullen's support for you in your very diplomatic, very, you know, polite Utah way or calling it HR1 and S1. A lot of people call it the corrupt politicians act. This is just such an awful piece of legislation. Our mutual friend Ted Cruz

Cruz coined that term, and I think it's a delightful and accurate way of describing it. Yeah, absolutely. And so to go in and basically cut a secret shady deal with the Democrats and say, look, I'll pretend to be a Republican or at least an independent to get the Republicans to vote for me, but don't worry, I'm going to be a vote for you guys because I don't really, I don't really, I'm not running on policy or anything. I'm just voting to give the Democrats political power, just like I was campaigning to elect Joe Biden, just like I was running to be a spoiler against Donald Trump, just like, just like this guy who kind of came out of nowhere seems to continue to do, you know, he's the Republican who just does whatever the Democrats want. It's just to me

is so absolutely shady. And I, I have to say, I mean, it seems. to me, basically every single Senate Republican supports you. Every conservative that I know that I've spoken about it with supports you. There is one senator who's been kind of quiet on the race. I can't help but notice. Yeah, there's one. Look, I'm very grateful to have the support of 48 of my Senate Republican colleagues. There are 50 of us in total. It's implicit that I support my own candidacy, which would be weird if I didn't. There's one outlier. My fellow senator from Utah hasn't.

But look, I'm just grateful that I've got the support of all the others. I mean, look, Susan Collins and I don't agree on everything. Talking, but we don't. And she endorses me. Lisa McCausie does as well. So I'm grateful for their endorsement. The door's always open to the remaining senator, my colleague from Utah. if he decides he wants to get on board. In the meantime, he's said he's got two friends in this race and wants to stay out.

All right. I guess that's his prerogative, his decision to make. It speaks volumes as far as I'm concerned. And I think really bolsters your conservative bona fides as far as I'm concerned as well. So, Senator Lee, I know it's a close race and there are all sorts of crazy things that could happen between now and election day. I'm confident you will be reelected. I'm not surprised that the Democrats are doing everything they can to get rid of you. You have been a big thorn in their side for many years now. So what happens? Once the Republicans retake the Senate, you go back to Washington, D.C. What do we have to look forward to? Well, look, I hope and expect that we will retake the majorities in both houses of Congress. The House looks like pretty much a luck. The Senate is looking better every day,

with some exceptions, including my race here and there. But when we get back, I really do that think we'll be on a short leash from the American people with good reason. We'll be on a short leash in the sense that they will expect us to put an end to all of the nonsense that Joe Biden is perpetrating on the American people. We won't be able to do everything that we would like to do because we still don't occupy the White House. But we can put an end to the worst of the worst of what he's doing. We can put an end to, you know, bringing in $4 trillion last year and spending seven.

That's not going to happen under Republican watch. I would hope that we would also conduct real meaningful oversight and get answers to all sorts of questions about things that have happened that shouldn't have happened in the government over the last few years, from the humanitarian crisis on the border to the fentanyl problem, to Tony Fauci, and what appeared to be blatant lies that he told under oath. I look forward to each of those things. I look forward to figuring out what happened in Afghanistan, why we botched that so badly.

But again, this is another reason why this race matters. My opponent has claimed that he won't caucus with either party, which means that he really would be strengthening the hand of the Democrats and weakening the hand of Republicans if he were elected. Especially, I mean, who knows, people are saying maybe the Republicans, they could win up to 54 seats, you know, on Election Day. Those are kind of the rosiest estimates, but not so long ago, it was very unclear that the Republicans would retake the Senate. It remains so, and there's a very good chance Republicans don't retake the Senate. And so a guy coming out there in a very conservative state and saying, I will not caucus with the Republicans, could be the difference between Joe Biden gets to do whatever he wants and Joe Biden is stopped from instituting his legislative agenda. No, that's exactly right. And in fact, I recently discovered a tweet that my opponent sent out on January 3rd, 2021,

on the eve, literally, of the Georgia U.S. Senate race, the dual U.S. Senate race, wrong off. And he encouraged people to defeat the two Republicans, to defeat them. Because as he put it, the Republican Party is, I don't remember what exactly he said. It was something like irredeemably lost and corrupt or something like that. So he did his best to disempower a Republican majority then. And by the way, that cost us at least $4 trillion in reckless inflationary spending. Thanks for that, Evan. But we shouldn't do that again.

But look, he's making it close because the media is giving him millions of dollars in free media. They never make him answer anything. He's raising millions of dollars off of Act Blue, the Democratic Party. donor network. And he's got a super PAC that is spent three or four million dollars all in attack ads on me. So I've got to be able to combat that. So if any of your listeners and viewers who want to support my campaign, they can do so at leave for Senate.com. And unlike Evan McMullen, this is not through Act Blue. I'm on wind red. I always think, you know, Senator, I always think that you can judge a man by his enemies, you know, and you can judge a man

by his friends. And I think you've got absolutely all the right enemies, and I think that Evan McMullen has all of the wrong friends. And I, I, you know, I just, the libs drive me crazy because the libs have a terrible agenda, and they cause all sorts of destruction in the country. But there's one group that I have even less respect for than the libs who were destroying the country. And that would be the deceitful people who pretend to be conservative or Republican, and then all they ever do is the bidding of that corrosive liberal establishment that is destroying our fiscal situation, opening up our borders, you know, tearing the country apart. And as far as I can tell, the only thing that your opponent has done in political life

is that? I can't idea. He came onto the scene in 2016. I mean, I'm sure he had a career before that, but he came onto the political scene in 2016. That's all the guy has ever done. And I think we've really, really got to beware of these deceitful people in politics. You, I'm not just flattering you. I say it because it's an important race. And because I mean it, you have been a real straight shooter. You're a good guy. I know you personally. The seat is very important. Utah is a conservative state, it would be insane for Utah to have a senator doing only the bidding of the Democratic Party would be absolutely awful. And so, Senator, I really wish you the best of luck in the race. I'm confident that you will win it. How else can people support you?

Look, in addition, going to leave for Senate.com, people who are online communicating on Facebook, on Twitter, on Instagram, on any social media platform can, interact when they see comments being made that don't make sense, back them up with conservative arguments. Call out people, call about people who are praising my opponent as supposedly a conservative hero. My opponent is rebranding himself still as a conservative. After getting the Democratic nomination and convincing them not to run a candidate, he's now calling himself a conservative. Only he redefines conservative to mean he likes to go on hikes and he believes in America and democracy. He actually ran sort of to the right of Donald Trump in 2016 because Donald Trump was insufficiently committed to seeing Roe versus Wade overturned and standing up for pro-life causes.

And then a few months ago, he went on MSNBC and said that he's opposed to overturning Roe versus Wade. But he still markets himself as pro-life. Only he's redefined the term pro-life to mean that he believes we should have more social programs. So he's really good at redefining things, and I frequently want to tell him. I don't think that word means what you think it means, sir. Anyway, I can use all the help I can get in messaging, and I really appreciate you having me on your show. Senator, my pleasure entirely.

I would strongly encourage our Utah listeners to, go vote for the conservative in the race, not the cynical opportunistic Democrat. Senator, thank you for coming on the show. Thank you, Michael.