WASHINGTON – United States Senator Bill Hagerty (R-TN) joined Mornings with Maria on Fox Business to discuss President Biden’s joint address to Congress and the continued threat of Big Tech censorship.
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Partial Transcript Below:
Hagerty on Biden’s tax hike plan: “He’s imposing the biggest tax increase in history, certainly in my lifetime. And to think that that’s going to do anything to accelerate the economy is folly. He should look at what we do in states like mine, right in Tennessee. How do we grow our economy? We lower taxes. We have no income tax now. We deregulate, we keep a solid and secure border at the Southern border. And we really do our best to create the business environment that creates job growth, not crushing regulations that he’s talking about… this is a socialist wish list. He’s punishing corporations, he’s punishing job creators.”
Hagerty on Biden’s border crisis: “I appreciate your being there [at the border] and bringing attention to this, Maria, because this is the crisis that [Biden] tried to avoid talking about last night. At the State of the Union he listed a litany of crises and didn’t get to the border until the very end. But what he’s doing, I think, is flooding the border, creating massive disarray to our economy, putting pressure on the lowest end of our workforce, and he’s turning every town into a border town. Because as he implements this turnstile at our Southern border, they’re pushing these people into the interior of our nation as rapidly as they can. It’s a true crisis.”
Hagerty on Biden’s foreign policy: “As you know, my previous job was serving as U.S. Ambassador to Japan—very tough neighborhood there. And I’ve seen firsthand China’s aggression. They’re building their military at a very rapid pace. We have more U.S. military stationed in Japan than any place else in the world for a very good reason. The last thing we need to be doing right now is building down our military when we have China’s aggression moving forward. The world needs a strong America, and I don’t understand why the Biden Administration thinks that the opposite should be true. Look at them kowtowing to Iran. They’re doing everything they possibly can to weaken us, to dealing with countries like Iran that certainly don’t have our best interests at heart. We need to stand strong right now, now more than ever.”
Hagerty on Biden taking credit for Trump’s policy successes: “Well, it was interesting last night, Maria, we heard President Biden come on and open the whole speech last night with all of the successes. What he described was the greatest economic comeback that any nation is seeing right now. What he did was take credit for it, rather than give credit to Operation Warp Speed that President Trump put in place. That’s plagiarism— something we’ve seen before from this president. What we’re doing right now, though, is talking about the biggest tax increase certainly in our lifetimes, Maria, that’s going to have a major dampening effect. And what he’s going to do is turn down, take away the great Blue Collar Comeback that President Trump put in place. And what he talked about last night wasn’t a Blue Collar Blueprint. This is a Blue Collar Jobs Killer that he’s talking about with these tax increases.”
Hagerty on Big Tech censorship: “I appreciate the fact that President Trump is describing this. If I think back to his election in 2020, President Trump didn’t have to just beat Joe Biden. He had to beat the media and he had to beat Big Tech. Big Tech has really gone out of control in this section 230 protection. What I’m proposing is eliminating Section 230. We’re going to do away with Section 230 and we’re going to treat these large public utilities, is what I would call them, these large private companies have become essentially the modern day public square. But what they’re doing is they’re censoring language there. If we treat them like common carriers, which is what I’m proposing, then they’re going to have to be open to all comers in a non-discriminatory fashion. And we’re going to eliminate their ability to use political bias to censor Americans… I’ve heard a lot of conversation from the Democrat side. They’re concerned about Big Tech too. As the president said, they’ve really run out of control. And when political speech is censored, when you have situations where major mainstream political actors, like the President of the United States, can be censored here in America, yet Ayatollah Khomeini can talk about eliminating Israel and even talk about how to do that on Big Tech platforms— there’s something very wrong there. When they can suppress a New York Post story about Hunter Biden, something’s very, very wrong.”