00:05:14.420Today, in 2017, I passed the largest expansion of federal school choice ever, making 529 plans cover K-12, over the objection of every single Senate Democrat.
00:05:33.660Also, just two years ago, the Democrat governor of Virginia had put the photo of a man dressed as a KKK Klansman on his personal yearbook page.
00:05:47.300And today, the sitting Democrat president, Joe Biden, gave in 2011 a flowery eulogy for an exalted cyclops of the KKK.
00:06:06.340The Democrat Party aggressively supports open borders, which has led to the deaths and brutal assaults of thousands of Hispanics.
00:06:16.800And AOC somehow can't seem to find her white pantsuit to cry over their suffering.
00:06:24.920Senator, it's amazing how easy it is for the left to play the race card.
00:06:31.180And I love the fact that you had that Twitter thread with her.
00:06:35.600I also think this is going to clearly be part of the strategy for the Democratic Party going into this next election cycle.
00:06:41.740It seems to be the strategy that they're going to use no matter what on anybody that they see as a threat, a conservative that's up and coming.
00:06:48.480The fact that the NAACP has now done this, they've not put out a travel warning to places like New York City, San Francisco, Detroit, Chicago, my hometown of Memphis.
00:07:00.240They haven't put out travel warnings to any of these other top crime cities.
00:07:04.560They haven't done it in Baltimore, even in Washington, D.C.
00:07:06.960But they're doing it for an entire state of Florida because they don't like the guy who's the governor and they don't like he's about to announce he's running for president.
00:07:15.380So, therefore, we're going to label him a racist.
00:07:19.060And sure enough, it worked because in a lot of the news stories in the last 24 hours, they're like, well, Ron DeSantis is going to announce he's running for president.
00:07:27.600And the NAACP has said it's not safe for African-Americans to go to Florida.
00:07:58.580And listen, as I said in my initial tweet, I really do respect the NAACP.
00:08:04.420What they did in the 1950s and 60s, standing up against segregated schools, which coincidentally had been put in place 100 percent of the times by Democrat politicians.
00:08:17.240What they did litigating Brown versus Board of Education at the Supreme Court and ending segregation.
00:08:25.240What they did fighting the civil rights movement, what they did in sit-ins, what they did at lunch counters, what they did in marches, what they did with Dr.
00:08:42.500It was extraordinary, and it is sad to see the current leadership, who they're just Democrat partisans.
00:08:50.460They're not pretending to be concerned.
00:08:51.920If they actually cared about civil rights, the NAACP would join me in leading the fight for school choice, in leading the fight to say every African-American child in this country has a right to access quality education.
00:09:05.040And we're not going to accept politicians trapping our kids in failing schools.
00:09:10.140We're not going to accept African-American kids in schools where children aren't learning, where they don't have literacy, where they're dropping out of schools, where they're drug dealers in the hallways, where little girls are being violently assaulted in the bathrooms.
00:09:25.640They would have righteous indignation and rage, but they don't have any of that.
00:09:35.320And I got to say, AOC, her response to this, look, it typifies the response of many hyper-partisan Democrats that are suffused in ignorance, but also supremely sure that the corporate media will never report on what they're saying.
00:09:52.100So I actually think when she typed in, why don't you tell us, Ted, what happened to the parties after that, that it never occurred to her that I would accept her invitation.
00:10:01.800Now, I got to say, you and I are recording this late in the evening, Tuesday night.
00:10:41.220You know exactly where this thread came from.
00:10:43.340I read the idiotic tweet from AOC and I sat in the car.
00:10:47.440In fact, I delayed a meeting to sit there on my phone and type out each of these seven responses because I was so pissed at her dishonesty.
00:10:56.400Because the Democrat Party record on race is shameful.
00:11:01.940And they eagerly lie to the American people about it.
00:11:27.020Yeah, if she does respond, it'll be some sort of ad hominem attack that that is just personal and nasty.
00:11:33.100And her legions of left wing Twitter followers will all immediately coup.
00:11:37.540Oh, you got him by saying something nasty.
00:11:40.080But what she won't do is respond substantively.
00:11:42.940What she won't do is dispute the points.
00:11:44.920Look, the incumbent Democrat president gave a glowing eulogy of a self-declared exalted Cyclops of the Ku Klux Klan.
00:11:56.460Now, the Democrats live in this bizarre fiction, which is they admit from 1860 to 1870 to 1880 to 1890 to 1900 to 1910 to 1920 to 1930 to 1940 to 1950 to 1960.
00:12:11.960Their party were a bunch of bigoted racists who hated African-Americans, who founded the Klans, who engaged in lynching, who discriminated, who put in segregated schools and were horrible, vicious bigots.
00:12:22.420And they also admit from 1860 to 1870 to 1880 to 1890 to 1900 to 1910 to 1920 to 1930 to 1940 to 1950 to 1960.
00:12:33.140The Republican Party was founded to end slavery, was fighting for civil rights, was fighting against the Democrat bigots and was the one leading those efforts for more than a century.
00:12:44.300Now, here's the weird Democrat fiction that all of these historically illiterate leftists insist on Twitter.
00:12:53.020They say, well, yeah, that's all true.
00:12:55.840But in 19 in the 1960s, the two parties magically switch places.
00:13:01.920And suddenly all of these evil, vicious, bigoted Democrats became Republicans.
00:13:09.840And suddenly, by the way, so the way their narrative works, all of the noble Republicans who were fighting racism apparently decided to become the old racist Democrats, which is a really weird like how exactly does that work?
00:13:25.560You know, I just wish I was in the party of Bull Connor, I'd feel better about race if Bull Connor and I were aligned.
00:13:37.360And by the way, virtually all of those Democrats stayed Democrats their whole lives.
00:13:43.540You didn't actually see the South shift to Republican until the 1980s or the 1990s or the 2000s.
00:13:49.540And it shifted really because the Democrat Party abandoned working class voters and abandoned cultural sanity.
00:13:58.520But none of that Democrats can't be bothered with it.
00:14:02.900They just assume there's a fairy godmother that came from Cinderella, waved her wand, and suddenly the bigoted Klan founding Democrats became noble Democrats.
00:14:15.100And if that's true, why did Joseph Robinette Biden praise and give a flowery eulogy to Robert Byrd?
00:14:25.480Robert Byrd was the Senate Majority Leader.
00:14:28.140He was a Democrat Senate, and he was a, quote, exalted Cyclops of the Ku Klux Klan.
00:14:32.600By the way, the Klan gives idiotic names to their idiotic racist positions.
00:14:37.280But Robert Byrd got that because he was a recruiter for the Klan.
00:14:41.120He called up people and said, hey, I'm a bigoted Klan's member.
00:14:59.060You don't get to pretend that the history of bigotry in your party that extends to the current resident of the Oval Office has magically disappeared.
00:15:11.420I also want to talk about something else that's happened, and that is I am so happy and encouraged to watch what's happened with Bud Light.
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00:16:57.360Senator, you've been watching and it's been very interesting to see and it makes me happy to watch conservatives that are organizing to the point where Target has had to hold an emergency meeting over their LGBTQ plus merchandise for Pride Month.
00:17:14.900In some of their stores, they're even moving these displays from the front of the store to other areas of the store because in some of their, quote, southern locations, because they're trying to avoid the customer outrage that Bud Light, and as they described it, apparently, the Bud Light situation.
00:17:34.200Many Target locations across the country are featuring a massive area.
00:17:39.360I'm talking about real square footage of June Pride Month displays on an annual basis.
00:17:44.580They've gotten bigger and bigger, but this year they seem to have crossed a line that many mothers are saying no.
00:17:51.260This includes tuck-friendly bathing suits so young boys can look like girls and wear girls' bathing suits for, quote, transgender people.
00:17:59.380And they are also having a line of gender-fluid outfits.
00:18:03.860On top of the fact that they also brought an artist to design these children's clothing items and different things for Pride Month.
00:18:11.800One of those designers, artists, is a well-known Satanist who says that Satan is actually the party of trans people.
00:18:20.760And he is proud to be working with Target and to be designing many of these outfits for you to put your kids in them.
00:18:43.920Like, when you threw in the Satanist thing, I'm like, oh, nobody could be that ridiculous.
00:18:49.780Look, we saw Bud Light when we discovered they had no idea who their customers were.
00:18:55.920And they frankly looked down on them and thought they were a bunch of ignorant oafs.
00:18:59.900And so they wanted instead to get some new, young, woke teenagers drinking Bud Light.
00:19:05.460That has backfired on them, I think, mightily.
00:19:07.760Now, Target, listen, it would be nice if big corporations just stayed out of politics, just didn't engage, just if beer companies made beer and sold us beer.
00:19:22.400If Target made lots of inexpensive stuff that you need around the house and sold it to us.
00:19:28.580It would be nice if they didn't, if Disney wasn't preaching their woke agenda day in, day out.
00:19:38.800But at a minimum, is it too much to ask that they leave our kids alone?
00:19:46.780Look, when I saw what Target was doing, at first I was skeptical.
00:31:52.380And there are lots of downsides of that.
00:31:54.720Number one, as you noted, is the downside of emergencies.
00:31:57.900In a hurricane, in a tornado, in a time of emergency, you often have FM stations going down.
00:32:03.780And much of our emergency broadcast system is designed to go out over AM radio so it would
00:32:08.640place people unable to hear the essential communications during an emergency.
00:32:14.040But, Ben, I also think more broadly than that, I think there's a reason that big car companies
00:32:20.300were open to taking down AM radio, which is AM radio is where a lot of talk radio is found.
00:32:26.360And talk radio is overwhelmingly conservative.
00:32:31.180And let's be clear, big business doesn't like things that are overwhelmingly conservative.
00:32:37.080If the only source of your news is watching CNN or MSNBC or even the big networks, your news is going to skew hard left.
00:32:46.480Talk radio, and whether it was Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity or Mark Levin or Ben Ferguson, goes out and has an enormous impact over AM radio.
00:32:58.740I think that was a major reason why you were seeing multiple car companies move in that direction.
00:33:04.840And the consequence, an awful lot of people listen to talk radio when they're driving to work or they're driving home.
00:33:11.380And so removing AM radio means that people wouldn't do it.
00:33:14.320By the way, this also impacts farms and ranches, rural and agricultural listeners, where there are a lot of places where you're out in the country,
00:33:22.580where AM radio stations can be the only choices you have to hear what's going on on Ag Matters or music or talk or news.
00:33:32.140And so what I did, I joined with Ed Markey.
00:33:37.020Ed Markey is a liberal Democrat from Massachusetts.
00:33:40.080It's maybe one of, if not the most liberal senator in the entire U.S. Senate.
00:33:45.520And Ed Markey and I together introduced legislation that would mandate that car manufacturers include AM radio on their cars,
00:33:55.200that they not remove the ability of customers to listen to AM radio.
00:34:00.560Because in my view, as I said, it was an effort at censorship to silence conservative voices.
00:34:07.900Well, I got to say, number one, for Ed Markey and me to introduce a bill together in the world of Washington is a pretty shocking thing.
00:34:15.540Because, look, Markey and I agree on very, very little.
00:34:20.700And the most conservative member of the Senate, along with one of the, if not the most liberal member of the Senate, joining together,
00:34:28.340I think that kind of freaked a lot of observers out in Washington.
00:34:32.000It may have made them think it was a sign of the apocalypse.
00:34:34.400And what happened yesterday was a big deal.
00:34:38.740The CEO of Ford Motor Company, and Ford was one of the companies that said they were going to pull AM radio.
00:34:44.280The CEO of Ford Motor Company sent out a tweet, and I will read it to you.
00:34:50.200After speaking with policy leaders about the importance of AM broadcast radio as a part of the emergency alert system,
00:34:57.180we've decided to include it on all 2024 Ford and Lincoln Motor Company vehicles.
00:35:03.200For any owners of Ford electric vehicles without AM broadcast capability, we'll offer a software update.
00:36:16.380And I'm one of those, obviously, do a radio show on AM and have virtually my entire life since I started at 12.
00:36:24.540But for me, yes, I was terrified of the aspect of the censorship that you just mentioned.
00:36:29.760But if you know anything about AM radio, it saves lives when there are natural disasters.
00:36:36.360And that, for me, was part of the shock, I think, of this plan, as so many of these car makers were really just lockstep one after the other.
00:36:50.360And, by the way, it costs nothing, just so people understand.
00:36:54.340AM radio technology in cars is, I mean, we're talking pennies to put it in if you're already putting in all the other FM technology, et cetera.
00:37:02.260And that's where it was like, okay, not only do they seem to not understand the safety aspect of this, but is it about censorship?
00:37:10.720And that's why I'm so glad you guys got together to do this.
00:37:14.320I have to ask you, how did this alliance between the two of you happen, and what was his mindset about this going in?
00:37:22.640Well, look, and I'll say the boycott on AM radio started with electric vehicle manufacturers who argued that the electric vehicle technology interfered with the AM radio antenna and the signal, and it caused interference.
00:37:39.080Now, technologically, on an electric vehicle, it's relatively simple to solve.
00:37:43.960My understanding is with a quite inexpensive shield, you don't have the interference.
00:37:50.080But they didn't want to add the shield, and so they were removing AM radio.
00:37:54.960And when it was limited to a couple of electric vehicle manufacturers or models, it was still a pretty small presence in the marketplace.
00:38:04.460What had happened now is that more and more big manufacturers were extending this more broadly, and we were facing a very real scenario where a significant percentage of new vehicles sold would not have AM radio at all.
00:38:17.860And that would be a real problem from an emergency response perspective and a real problem from a censorship perspective.
00:38:25.400So I'll tell you, Markey reached out to me.
00:38:27.100I'm the ranking member on the Senate Commerce Committee, and Ed is on the Senate Commerce Committee.
00:38:31.860I don't know what his motivation was, but look, for many Democrats, they are in favor of all sorts of mandates, and so they're often willing to mandate that a manufacturer provide all sorts of things.
00:38:49.160As a general matter, I'm pretty skeptical of mandates, and so on many things we don't see eye to eye.
00:38:55.260But in this instance, the emergency response factor persuaded me, and the viewpoint discrimination targeting talk radio, in particular, that moved me significantly.
00:39:08.640I don't want to see important voices and free speech silenced, and I think pulling AM radio out of automobiles would have done that.
00:39:17.740And so I agreed to sign on, and the two of us rolled it out together, and I think the fact of our legislation played a pivotal role in forcing Ford to change its policy, and I hope that other car manufacturers will follow suit.
00:39:31.420One other thing that is really cool about the history of AM radio, the first station in history to be programmed for African-American programming is still on AM radio, only in my hometown of Memphis, Tennessee, WDIA.
00:39:46.220And the many African-American radio stations in America also came together over the last several weeks as well to demand that AM stay, because it's part of history, it's a part of their business, they have invested in these radio stations and bought them, and it was really nice to see so many different people come together.
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00:42:40.740I got to tell you, I loved watching the Nuggets sweep the Lakers, Senator.
00:42:45.020I was hoping you were going to go there at the beginning of your response, because watching the Lakers, I'm just not a fan of the Lakers, get swept by the Nuggets was a blast to watch.
00:42:57.160Listen, LeBron James, my last re-election campaign, he endorsed against me.
00:43:01.820He showed up in Texas wearing a Beto O'Rourke hat.
00:43:05.220And so I have to admit, no part of me is weeping that LeBron is going to be watching the Finals on TV.
00:43:11.660You know, that's, you know, karma has a wonderful sense of humor.