Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) joins me on The Megynkelle Show to discuss his career in the Missouri Senate, his opposition to Big Tech, and why he thinks George Will is a domestic enemy.
00:04:51.540But I wasn't going to allow that then to throw me off track and to change what I told my voters I would do.
00:04:57.980Because here's the thing, Megan, it's my voters' concerns, my constituents' concerns don't have anything to do with the criminal psychos who came to the Capitol and tried to interrupt the very debate that I and others were attempting to have.
00:05:12.560And so that's why I said, I'm going to, I said I was going to object.
00:05:16.040I said I was going to register concerns about what happened in Pennsylvania and say more broadly that going forward, we need to talk about election integrity.
00:05:24.240How much of this do you think is 2020 hindsight?
00:05:26.860Because you're right, you are not the first to stand up and challenge that event where we, where the Congress basically accepts the certifications from the states and the vice president signs off on it and so on.
00:05:38.660That's happened many, many times in the past.
00:05:40.400Now, this was an unusual situation because President Trump himself was very vocal in making claims in many states about alleged fraud and really leading the charge and getting millions of people spun up.
00:05:53.380It wasn't just like one of the sort of the normal Senate or lawmaking lunatics who loves to get up there and just push a bunch of BS, right?
00:06:02.780It was like the president himself had been pushing it.
00:06:05.300It had been a big story in the country.
00:06:06.440This is one of the reasons why people say, well, it was different to have eight senators and 100 plus House members stand up and object, fed a fire that was already primed to explode.
00:06:21.640Yeah, listen, I think that either either it's legitimate to object during the certification process or it's not.
00:06:27.920And it doesn't change on who the president is.
00:06:29.860It doesn't change on what the what the political fault lines are of the moment.
00:06:34.880And, you know, it's interesting during the last impeachment, Megan, I was I was intrigued to listen to the impeachment managers tiptoe around this because, as you probably recall, at least one of those impeachment managers was himself an objector.
00:06:48.040He had objected during a previous election to the state of Florida in his case.
00:06:53.020And so the impeachment managers had to admit that, you know what, actually, there was nothing wrong with objecting.
00:06:58.160And they even said about January 6th and the objections, they said nobody did anything wrong in objecting.
00:07:03.820Their words were it's a bipartisan tradition to have a debate during the certification process.
00:07:32.120And that's my view, whether it's rioters in Portland or Seattle or anywhere else, or if it's the United States Capitol, I don't care where it is.
00:07:39.660So I do think that just to your question, Megan, I do think a lot of this is the left clearly, clearly hates the former president.
00:07:48.300They want to discredit anybody who is in any way associated with him.
00:07:51.460And the truth is, they really don't like Trump voters either.
00:07:54.080And I was very clear from the time I said, I'm going to object.
00:07:58.220And here's why that it was about the concerns of my voters raising, pointing out the in Pennsylvania, their failure to follow their own law.
00:08:06.420You know, in Pennsylvania, we didn't get to the question of fraud or not.
00:08:09.020They didn't follow their own law and their own.
00:08:12.580What the Republicans were saying about Pennsylvania was the best objection they had in the wake of the, you know, the whole thing, in my view.
00:08:22.560But the reason I ask you about 2020 hindsight is because the morning of that riot, I had Hugh Hewitt on the show and he's a recovering lawyer, just like I am.
00:09:10.120Well, Megan, I would not have in terms of actually raising an objection and saying that, listen, I think that what happened in Pennsylvania was wrong.
00:09:19.020I think that we need to have a debate about election integrity, which we're having now, by the way, because the Democrats now are proposing to change all of these state laws in one fell swoop.
00:09:27.600You know, they were trying to do it state by state.
00:09:52.100And that's why I say that I've got zero sympathy for anybody who rioted for whatever reason they rioted for.
00:09:58.540And, you know, you're certainly not going to no one's going to elicit any sympathy for any rioters for me, whether, again, it's whether it's the people on January 6th or whether it's the deranged psycho who killed a cop at the Capitol a few weeks ago, or whether it's rioters in the streets to Portland or elsewhere.
00:10:14.440If you break the law and assault cops, you're going to jail or you should.
00:10:17.920What do you make of now even President Biden is out there saying it was an insurrection caused by, quote, the big lie, the big lie storyline, right, that that, you know, Trump won, that there was massive electoral fraud, you know, that Biden had won legitimately.
00:10:36.200And so even if he might not say you have blood on your hands, like some of the lovely press has said, you know, the new narrative is the big lie is blameable on everybody who helped perpetuate questions about whether there was fraud.
00:10:51.540And the big lie is what led to that riot.
00:10:56.880You've seen Joe Biden tell a lot of lies of his own about election integrity measures.
00:11:00.840I mean, he's saying now that in Georgia, for instance, which is a set of election integrity reforms that he has called Jim Crow on steroids.
00:11:11.040I think the effort, Megan, that you just referenced to tie anybody who wants to talk about election integrity, anybody who wants to raise some of the irregularities like in Pennsylvania in the last election, then the left strategy is to say, oh, you are a violent criminal.
00:11:26.320There's no qualitative difference between you and the criminals who came into the Capitol.
00:11:32.520And that's not only wrong, it is I think it's dangerous because what it tells the 75 million people in this country who voted for Donald Trump and many, many, many, many of whom have concerns about election integrity.
00:11:45.180What it tells them is that your voice cannot be heard in the political process and there's no place for you in the political process.
00:11:51.440That's dangerous. We have, you know, as I said, actually on the night of January 6th, we have this process of objection, debate, vote.
00:12:00.020We have that as part of the certification process.
00:12:02.400So people's concerns can be aired democratically, peacefully.
00:12:06.560And so then we hear them, we resolve them, we move on.
00:12:10.180And I think what concerns me about Mr.
00:12:12.160Unity, Joe Biden, is these relentless efforts to tear apart the country by basically delegitimizing anybody who disagrees with them.
00:12:19.340And that's what this really is. You know, if you disagree with me, you need to be silenced.
00:12:23.900And that is not a recipe for unity. It's not real leadership.
00:12:43.800You keep repeating the lie, repeating the lie.
00:12:45.920So that's you and Cruz, you're Nazis, you're employing Nazi tactics to say that you wanted to look into the fraud, the allegations of fraud.
00:12:57.540Now, I know you don't agree with Joe Biden.
00:14:06.020And that's where it starts to get uncomfortable.
00:14:08.860Yeah, just to the point about fraud, Megan, just to go back to that.
00:14:11.820This is why in my objection to Pennsylvania, what I said that I was objecting to and cited was not any allegations of fraud one way or the other, which, you know, I don't know about it.
00:14:23.580Look, I'm not I'm not currently a prosecutor.
00:15:09.340That court refused to hear the challenge.
00:15:12.500They just dismissed it on the doctrine of latches.
00:15:15.000You know, so basically they said it wasn't timely.
00:15:17.160And that itself was not you, but they had months and months and months to raise these questions.
00:15:23.340Yeah, that was that was their argument, which I think probably is not right factually.
00:15:26.640But the bigger point of that, Megan, is that their own doctrine, Pennsylvania, their own doctrine says that when there's a constitutional challenge to a law, the doctrine of latches doesn't apply.
00:15:35.100I mean, we're really in the weeds now.
00:15:36.120But here's the point is that the substance of that claim about the constitutionality of Pennsylvania's mail and balloting statute was never resolved by their Supreme Court.
00:16:00.680And then you had also, of course, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court intervening further in the law, changing the time for the return of ballots.
00:16:06.780Justice Thomas wrote about this in his dissent from denial of cert.
00:16:42.520He had the right to do it, but I also like where they soften me.
00:16:46.180I'll just tell you as a, you know, whatever, for whatever it's worth, a journalist, a lawyer, a pundit where they soften me is after the riot.
00:17:02.480Like we let it play out in the courts.
00:17:04.420We the state certified Republican states certified.
00:17:07.660Like at that point, did you have any pause?
00:17:10.480Like think to yourself, I got to put an end to this.
00:17:13.380And my view on that, Megan, was that if, if I changed course at that point and did something different than what I had said to my voters, I was going to do, it would be number one, allowing the criminal rioters to determine my own course of action.
00:17:27.280And it would also be, it would also seem to indicate to me, at least that, well, actually I wasn't ever that serious about the objection anyway.
00:17:33.680You know, it would, it would just be like, yeah, you know, now that I thought about a little bit more, actually, nevermind.
00:17:38.600I don't, I'm not really that interested.
00:17:42.280I thought it was a serious issue that deserved to be raised.
00:17:45.060I thought my voters deserved to have it raised.
00:17:47.280And frankly, you know, as I said at the time, when I first announced I was going to object, I don't know what I would have told my voters at home if I didn't use the one point of the process I had to try and have a debate about this.
00:18:01.340I never thought about that, that, that maybe the people who went back in and changed their position, the ones who were going to object, that it was a telegraph, that they, they never really meant it to begin with.
00:18:14.360That they were trying to appease Trump or that they were just trying to, you know, sort of get to the right of certain people in the party.
00:18:27.200And just my own and just what I was thinking on, on the day, you know, as we, as we sat and waited as the, as the police officers and then the, the National Guard, as they struggled to inject those criminals, putting themselves in harm's way to do it.
00:18:41.780You know, as we sat there and I, I thought about this, you know, just like you asked me, I thought through it.
00:18:46.640And what I thought was, listen, I think that what happened in Pennsylvania is something that we should talk about and has validity, regardless of what these thugs are doing.
00:18:56.580And I just thought, again, if I, if I, if I change course now, people are going to say, oh, well this, you know, you never really believed that this was a stunt and now it's no longer serviceable to you.
00:19:17.900I mean, I, they don't like you, you're a Republican and you're a Trump supporter.
00:19:20.920So like that explains a lot of the dislike, but there's that photograph of you with the fist up as you walk past the, what were then protesters.
00:19:29.460Like you weren't, there wasn't an assault on police officers going on and you stuck your fist in the air.
00:19:35.380I mean, like I don't, the media is so dishonest.
00:19:37.420I was like, he saw protesters protest is American.
00:19:40.800Haven't they been telling us that all summer?
00:19:42.500Like, I don't mean to give you your defense up front, but I, I want to say, I thought that was a misrepresentation of what you meant to communicate, but why don't, I'll give you the chance to set the record straight on that.
00:19:53.380Well, listen, that was, yeah, that, that, uh, that photo was taken as I, as I was walking over to the house chamber there on the, I guess it's the East side of the Capitol, um, of that morning or shortly afternoon on the, on the day.
00:20:05.500And to your point, what we had been were, I mean, there were a lot of, there were tens of thousands of demonstrators in the city and I had, I had, you know, just driven into the city and I'd seen them everywhere.
00:20:13.600And so as we drove up there, uh, and, and got to the, to, um, the Capitol, they were, uh, standing on, they were well off the plaza.
00:20:20.940The police had barricaded them off the plaza and they were standing there behind the barricades peacefully waving American flags.
00:20:28.500And, uh, as I was walking, I waved to him.
00:20:30.600Some of them started to call out my name.
00:20:31.980So I waved to him and I gave him, I think the thumbs up and I pumped my fist at him.
00:20:35.520And, and, uh, you know, that was like, Hey, how, how's it going?
00:20:39.060And, uh, and good for you for being here because it is their first amendment, right?
00:20:54.840I will say, because I will, I will defend the right of anybody to gather and demonstrate peacefully in accordance with the first amendment.
00:21:03.540I did that for the BLM protesters who I did not agree with this past summer, but I said over and over, there's a difference between the folks who are gathered peacefully, lawfully,
00:21:18.540I mean, this isn't the last time we'll have a demonstration in America and that's fine, but we've got to draw a hard line between folks who demonstrate whether we like them or not.
00:21:27.420And those who, uh, commit acts of violence.
00:21:33.340They never show the wide shot of that photograph.
00:21:35.400It's always just the closeup of you with the fist, like the wide shot.
00:21:38.140But I, I'm, I'm going to guess, cause I, I know what time of day it was, uh, would not have shown anybody storming the Capitol or assaulting anybody.
00:21:46.040It's like, there's no distinction in the media.
00:21:48.760Um, and of course now most of us expect that now.
00:22:23.360The more they stay the same, the more they change, whatever the vice versa.
00:22:26.020So what does it feel like for you there day to day?
00:22:29.780It feels like for me, Megan, just doing my job.
00:22:32.420And, you know, these, the, the left, uh, my, my observation about the left is, and I've only been in the Senate for two years.
00:22:37.940So I don't, I don't have the, the, uh, depth of, of experience on this that others like Senator Cruz might have.
00:22:43.460But my observation is, is that when the left needs your vote, then they're all about bipartisanship.
00:22:49.620When they don't need your votes, then they couldn't care less about it.
00:22:52.420And you see that with all that they're doing right now.
00:22:54.860I mean, they, they passed their massive, uh, COVID quote unquote COVID package, which was really had very little to do with COVID with not a, any support from Republicans.
00:23:03.740I guess one Republican Senator ended up voting for it, but no bipartisanship whatsoever.
00:23:13.620If they could pass it without us, they absolutely would.
00:23:16.620If they could get their caucus unified, they would absolutely steamroll us.
00:23:20.160So, you know, to me, they can use whatever excuse they want.
00:23:24.460Uh, I have, my history is I will work with anybody.
00:23:27.820And I mean, anybody, if it is good for the people of my state, I just did it with Senator Sanders, Bernie Sanders.
00:23:33.260We worked together on relief, uh, support direct relief payments, uh, this past December for folks who needed them and, uh, got that done.
00:23:40.460And, you know, Bernie and I disagree on, on probably most everything, but, uh, on that issue, which was important for working families in my state, I was delighted to work with them and, and I'll, I'll work with anybody going forward.
00:24:00.600Did you hear it all from chief justice Roberts after January 6th?
00:24:04.700As I, I mean, I assume he was a mentor to you.
00:24:06.640I have not talked to the chief justice, uh, since then, but I don't talk to the chief justice, uh, frequently, partly, mostly Megan out of, out of respect for his role.
00:24:15.900And, and, uh, and for mine, you know, the chief justice is really, really careful, never, ever to talk about politics, never, ever to talk about, of course, never to talk about cases, uh, even past cases.
00:24:27.300And I've always tried to respect the boundaries of that.
00:24:30.160So he's, you know, I will just say that, um, I loved working for chief justice Roberts.
01:05:18.720Because, you know, that I see the point.
01:05:21.480Yeah, I would say this, that I think that giving people, giving giving normal folks some bargaining power here, I think, is important.
01:05:29.220What happens now is, is that these companies, they issue these terms of service and terms of service say we don't discriminate on the basis of political viewpoint.
01:05:36.800We don't censor on the basis of political viewpoint.
01:05:38.960But as you've just pointed out, Megan, if, in fact, you do get censored on the basis of political viewpoint, and they violate their own terms of agreement, you cannot enforce it.
01:05:49.140You cannot go to court and say, hold on, hold on.
01:05:57.200My view is, let's make those terms of agreement enforceable.
01:06:00.480The tech companies' own terms, make them enforceable.
01:06:03.640I think what you would see, actually, is they would try and hew very, very closely to what they've written in their terms of agreement.
01:06:11.300I think that they would actually be, try to be more neutral, that they would do less political censorship.
01:06:16.920My guess is that they would probably pull back from trying to control political speech.
01:06:21.180But I think either way, the size of these companies, apart from just their control over speech, part of what makes them so dangerous is the sheer size and control they have.
01:06:31.340And this is why we need to break them up.
01:06:33.120It would be better if we had competition among multiple companies, some of whom would say, hey, conservatives, guess what?
01:06:51.220Like right now, the reason people can post nutty things on YouTube, I agree, less than they used to be able to.
01:06:57.380But the reason they can get on there and talk about all sorts of nutty things, which I, as a free speech advocate, don't mind for the most part, is YouTube can't be sued for that stuff.
01:07:08.140YouTube is not considered the content creator.
01:07:13.240That's why they got protection under 230.
01:07:15.000And if we change the law to say, oh, no, now you're going to be treated like you're the Washington Post and that's your reporter who printed libelous stuff about person X, then YouTube's going to start censoring videos left and right.
01:07:28.480And same with Facebook and same with Twitter.
01:07:31.020They're not going to have the manpower to do it.
01:07:32.500But, like, it's going to shrink every platform for average Joes to get their voices and their opinions out there.
01:07:40.380Yeah, I wouldn't change that part of it, Megan.
01:07:41.820I think that the basic premise, what 230 was written to do, at least in part, was to say that if there's truly third-party content, like you've just hypothesized, you've got third-party content on the platform, and the platform doesn't post it, or the platform rather doesn't change it.
01:07:55.720It's just acting as a kind of a bulletin board.
01:07:57.680Then you can't sue the platform for it, unless it's illegal, right, and they should know it's illegal.
01:08:04.700But that's not what these platforms do, because what they do now is they fool around with the content.
01:08:09.360They amplify the content using their algorithms.
01:08:11.740They can even edit the content currently, and they still cannot be held liable in any way.
01:08:18.480So they've got all kinds of powers, editorial powers, and most of this stuff, Megan, courts have made up over time.
01:08:24.380I mean, the Section 230 law that Congress passed in the 90s, it bears very little resemblance to what is in effect today, because courts, at the behest of big tech, have systematically rewritten it.
01:08:35.900And my view is, for instance, you mentioned good faith a couple of times just a minute or two ago.
01:08:40.240The good faith requirement is now gone.
01:08:47.880I remember seeing a couple of decisions where they did uphold it.
01:08:52.460Maybe they've weakened it, but it's still there.
01:08:54.480Well, it's there, Megan, but it's in a different section.
01:08:56.840And so now what the courts have said is that actually all of the authority that the platforms need in order to curate, in order to take down, all of that can be found in the section that does not include the words good faith.
01:09:14.360But they don't need to rely on it and invoke it.
01:09:16.860And that's why you see a lot of these reform proposals include putting back a good faith proposal into every part and saying, no, you've got to justify every takedown decision with good faith.
01:09:28.520I would say that the platforms need to follow their own terms of agreement that they have written.
01:09:33.000And if they don't, then they should be held liable.
01:09:36.620But I would also break them up, quite apart from whatever their terms of service are, however they write them.
01:09:42.880I think that, for instance, Amazon should not be able to own both the dominant e-commerce platform in the world and the cloud, rather, as they do with AWS, Amazon Web Services, and have their own retail line of products that they build using their competitor's info.
01:10:00.520But this shouldn't be able to have all of those industries at one point.
01:10:02.560We need to force them to spin those off.
01:10:04.740We should do the same thing with Google and YouTube, Instagram and Facebook, and go right down the line and open up some space for competition.
01:10:11.620Well, I like how in the book you talk about how historically, as a country, we weren't in love with big, big, bigger.
01:10:19.320We weren't looking to have these companies get so huge and sort of take over large factions of American society.
01:10:27.000And that's why people like Teddy Roosevelt and, frankly, FDR and others started cracking down on these monopolies because they're not healthy for a democracy.
01:10:37.020Now, people like Stossel, my friend and libertarian John Stossel, might say, so what?
01:10:48.480Well, I would say that capitalism really is about the operation of the free market, the free entry and exit from the market of individuals.
01:10:56.840And the problem with monopoly, why monopoly is historically seen as an enemy of capitalism and as an enemy to the free market, is monopoly squelches competition.
01:11:05.800And you see these companies doing it all the time.
01:11:07.500I mean, heck, we have the emails from Mark Zuckerberg when Facebook bought Instagram, where Zuckerberg muses openly about the need to buy up a competitor.
01:11:15.960And he even says, he says, you know, this Instagram, this could be a competitor to us.
01:11:21.580Which is exactly what Facebook ended up doing.
01:11:24.000And one of the reasons that we have fewer and fewer startups in this space that make it for any length of time, we also have fewer and fewer new business starts in general, small businesses in this country, is we're seeing more and more consolidation across industry.
01:11:36.440But especially in the tech space, we've got three or four or five major monopolies that prevent new market entrance, that squelch competition, and that extract monopoly rents, Megan.
01:12:30.340And you know what would be even better, Megan, is if we had enough competition in the market that you would get new companies who would come along and say, new social media companies, for instance, a competitor of Facebook, who would come along and say, hey, come to my site and I won't track you.
01:12:45.540And I'll be a legit competitor with Facebook.
01:12:48.500But we don't see those companies developing and reaching any kind of scale before they get bought up or go out of business because Facebook and Google are monopolies.
01:12:57.560And by the way, Facebook itself, back in the early 2000s when it was competing against MySpace, you know, I mean, now none of us hardly remember MySpace.
01:13:06.160But Facebook at one time had competition and Facebook marketed itself to consumers as a pro-privacy platform.
01:13:37.500You mentioned Senator Klobuchar a second ago.
01:13:40.160Senator Klobuchar now chairs the antitrust subcommittee in the Senate that I sit on.
01:13:44.460And, you know, there is, I think, a lot of room here to find common ground.
01:13:48.560And I would say to my conservative Republican colleagues, you know, what we need to be in favor of in promoting is robust competition.
01:13:55.520And we've just got to recognize that when these companies are able to censor speech, when they are able to collect our data without consent,
01:14:02.780the only reason they can really get by with that is because they're monopolies, because consumers don't have a real choice.
01:14:09.920And so I think we've, the Republicans, have got to get back to being the party of trustbusters, the party of robust competition.
01:14:15.920I think there's a lot of room to work with our Democrat colleagues to do that.
01:14:20.160But it's going to require the Democrats to actually be serious, Megan, about cracking down on these, on the tech power, tech companies' power.
01:14:26.600And I don't, I'm not 100% sure they really want to do that, because I think the Democrats like the fact that they can use these companies to censor conservatives and libertarians in a way that government couldn't.
01:14:39.600Well, they want more power over big tech because they want more censorship.
01:14:44.020They think it's become a place for disinformation.
01:14:46.460And yes, it is a place for disinformation.
01:14:48.740But that's why there might be bipartisan cooperation on this.
01:14:53.060And that does raise some, you know, all of this is a little fraught because it's a little bit, you know, cracking down on free speech potentially.
01:15:00.400But I, like, it's, this is something we've never really dealt with before.
01:15:04.300We've dealt with behemoths, but we haven't dealt with groups this big that control basically all of the public square.
01:15:11.820I mean, this is how people communicate now.