NASHVILLE, TN—United States Senator Bill Hagerty (R-TN), a member of the Senate Appropriations and Foreign Relations Committees, joined Maria Bartiromo’s Wall Street on Fox Business to discuss the Pro-Hamas protests on college campuses across the nation and President Joe Biden’s appeasement of Iran that has contributed to war in the Middle East.
Partial Transcript
Hagerty on the college protests across the country: “We’ve got to address this. The campuses have really just let things run wild. And Maria, it seems like this happens every presidential election year. You think about the Occupy Wall Street protest that took place back in 2012—you think about the [Black Lives Matter] riots—now we’ve got all of this. The college campuses have become a hotbed of discriminatory behavior of violence. You’ve seen all the arrests; the American public are deeply concerned about it, certainly those of us in the Senate are concerned about it too, and I think it’s a manifestation of this ‘DEI’ initiative that’s gone way over the top. Now they’ve got these young people being indoctrinated in terms of this notion of someone’s either ‘oppressed’ or an ‘oppressor’. They’re not asking what’s happened. They’re not asking what’s behind all of this. They don’t even seem to acknowledge the fact that October the seventh took place, the horrors that took place there. Instead, they’re calling for genocide and threatening students on their own campus, and these college campuses are just becoming an area of violence and threatening behavior. It’s got to come to an end. That’s why you’ve seen the frustration coming from the Senate.”
Hagerty on foreign billionaires funding Democrat protests and elections: “We need to get to the bottom of who’s funding all of this. You look at the tents that are coming out; you see these people moving onto campuses. This is organized in some fashion; it’s deeply concerning. I put forward legislation to stop foreign investors from coming in and affecting our elections here. Hansjörg Wyss, a Swiss billionaire, is well known, to come in and try to affect the outcome of elections here. This is very much part and parcel, the type of activity that these sorts of people are fomenting and supporting and funding. We should absolutely get to the bottom of it because it’s completely destroying the sense of safety on our campuses. This is not what parents are paying for. This is not what students deserve.”
Hagerty on student loan forgiveness failing to address the real concerns in the education system: “This student loan forgiveness exercise, as you know, it’s going to fail in courts—it has continued to fail in courts—but our Federal Department of Education has completely failed America. They spend all their time on this. They can’t get financial aid applications even processed. Parents don’t know what to do this year because of the ineptitude of the Federal Department of Education. And now the Federal Department of Education is not doing anything about the civil rights violations that are taking place in these campuses that they’re theoretically supporting and overseeing. It’s a grotesque failure; [Senator] Tom [Cotton] is exactly right. We need to put supervision in place. We need to put consequences in place.”
Hagerty on Biden’s appeasement of Iran leading to war in the Middle East: “I think it underscores the fact that Iran is actually behind all of this. You recall in President [Donald] Trump’s Administration, we imposed maximum pressure on Iran. We squeezed their reserve accounts down to below $8 billion. Hamas and Hezbollah had been completely defunded. President Trump was able to move our embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem against all the predictions; there was no war. We took out Soleimani; there was no war. What we saw was peace breaking out in the Middle East. As soon as Joe Biden comes into office, he again enriches Iran, stops imposing the sanctions immediately. And what we have right now is a direct byproduct of that. Joe Biden should be looking in the mirror right now and asking [himself], why? What’s happening on these campuses, why what happened on October the seventh is happening, and needs to look no further than his own policies.”
Hagerty on the Biden Admin welcoming potential terrorists into the U.S.: “I think it very clearly is a concession to these protestors. This is about the politics of the American election in 2024. We’re talking about Minnesota—we’re talking about Michigan—we’re talking about those states that Joe Biden needs to win to win the presidency, and he’s doing a massive appeasement exercise. He certainly isn’t talking about the Americans that are still held hostage in Gaza. They’re doing nothing to address that situation in the open, but here we are. $3.5 billion was put in this last massive supplemental package that just passed the Senate. They didn’t mention this up until the day the Senate passed it, and then immediately talked about opening two new offices, one of them in Turkey, one in Egypt. These offices are going to be used to process Palestinians from Gaza into America. Now, let me ask you this: in the recent polling, 70 percent of Gazans support the October seventh attacks. We’re not supposed to be bringing people into this country that support terror or have been involved in it. Yet, this White House, and this State Department, somehow is going to be competent enough to vet this when we can’t even protect our own southern border? I think Americans should be deeply concerned. I certainly am.”
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