PANAMA CITY BEACH, FLA. — Marco Rubio joined the Brian Rust Show this morning to discuss the state of our country under Joe Biden, his efforts to help veterans exposed to toxic burn pits, his race against Val Demings, and more.
To listen to the interview, click below or HERE.
| On Joe Biden’s Failures “We have a crime wave in America because that’s what happens when your ideology tells you you can’t arrest people and if you do, you got to let them out of jail and you waive bail. By the end of Biden’s first two years, over four million people have entered our country illegally. Why? Because we’re telling people, ‘Hey, come. And by the way if you come, we’re going to let you stay and you may even get benefits American citizens don’t get.’ So you go down the line, you pour $1.9 trillion into the economy, government spending in March of 2021 at a time when there’s also supply shortages, you’re going to have inflation. And now, the way they deal with inflation is they have the Fed raise interest rates, so now we’re going to have a recession. And, so, it’s all driven by incompetence, but an incompetence that is the natural byproduct of these guys treating America like some social experiment. We’re going to try all these crazy things that professors have been talking about for forty years. We’re going to actually try them in the real world, and then when they meet disaster, they want to change the subject or pretend it’s not happening. It’s a terrible situation that I hope we can reverse here soon. “Part of the problem we have is all of these really important institutions are losing their primary purpose for existing. We have a military to win wars, but you wouldn’t know that by looking at their Twitter feed, or last month, they kept putting up rainbow flag stuff and videos on the Navy about what’s the right pronouns to use. So for the first time ever, I have had families say that they don’t want their kids applying for West Point in our nomination process because they consider those to be woke academies. It’s a big problem. That’s what’s happens when our schools aren’t about learning… The federal government has basically become an enforcer of an ideology, of a woke ideology and its put that above its primary purpose which is to pursue the common good. So I think part of the challenge we have in all of these places that you’re talking about is they’ve really appointed commissars to oversee the enforcement of the ideology instead of forwarding or furthering the actual purpose for these institutions, for these agencies to even exist.” On Wokeness in Corporations “I think these corporations some of them are being blackmailed by employees that are threatening to go crazy, not go to work, whatever it is. Others, frankly, are run by people that share in these views. It’s a free country, they can believe in whatever they want. What they can’t do. I think there’s two things happening. Number one, my biggest problem with the new ruling class in America is they don’t just want to have their opinion. This is a free country. You want to believe crazy stuff, believe crazy stuff. What you can’t do is use your power, whether it’s in government or private sector, to ram it down everyone else’s throat. And there’s a secondary effect to this which is really damaging and that is there is no escape from it. We can’t escape politics anymore. You can’t watch a sporting event, you can’t watch a movie, you can’t listen to music, you can’t go anywhere without being pounded over the head with politics. So where are people who have differences of opinion on politics supposed to find common ground? How are you supposed to share something in common with people so we can share our country? We might disagree on the tax rate, but you know what? We root for the same team or we watch the same TV program. You can’t do that anymore. Even entertainment, even sports, is now forcing you to pick a political side and it’s adding to this dimension of division in our country in a very destructive way.” On Divisions in Our Country “America is an incredibly powerful country. But what makes us special has always been fragile. We are the world’s only successful multi-ethnic, multi-racial Democratic Republic. The only people who have ever taken people from all over the world, from all different backgrounds and from it, made one people, one nation. But what holds us together is fragile. The country is strong. But the glue that holds us together is fragile, the voluntary associations at the local level: members of the same PTA, members of this, members of that. And now what’s happening for the first time, and that fragility, that very fragile thing that holds us together, we’ve had generations after generations that’s been committed to keeping that. They made changes because they lived in a new era, there had to be changes, and obviously some very positive changes that we had to make throughout our history, but never have we had what we have now which is a governing class that basically says, ‘our history is terrible. We’re smarter and morally superior to people in previous generations, and it’s time to just throw the whole thing out and start over and rebuild this thing in a new image.’ And that’s what we have, and that’s what’s causing the division. You know what’s causing division? There are things that five years ago that were widely accepted, not even controversial. Today, these things are considered immoral, unjust, and you’re not allowed to say them publicly because if you do, you could be fired, you could be investigated, you could be put out of business, you could be canceled. It’s insane. People aren’t just going to take this, they’re going to fight back.” On the Democrats’ Double Standard “I think your broader point is the right one is that you don’t have these editorials about it. You don’t have these leading dignitaries in the commentary world talking about it. There is a double standard. I’m against political violence. I’m against political violence in our democracy. I don’t think people on my side should be doing it. I don’t think people on their side should be doing it. The problem with those guys is they only criticize it when they think they can link it to the other side. When it’s their people that are bombing a pro-life center, when it’s their people that are putting graffiti up on a Catholic Church, when it’s their people that commit these acts of violence or threaten violence, they don’t seem nearly as fired up about it. And look, at the end of the day, I said it when they started it, when are we going to have the hearings on the hundreds of riots, the $2 billion in damages, and the 1,500 injured police officers from the riots in the summer of 2020 when there were people out their justifying this stuff. “And again, it’s that double standard that people see, but what it’s done is also undermine the credibility of the media in this country, which I don’t think is a good thing at the end of the day. “That’s the other thing that’s happened: we’ve become a nation deeply distrustful because of this unfairness. When you turn on a network or see a station, you know you’re not going to get just the straight facts so you can make a decision, you’re going to get a narrative. Media has become about narratives. I think clearly there is an ideological lean in the mainstream media, there’s no doubt about it. But I think adding to that, what draws ratings and clicks is outrage. Outrage leaning in one direction or leaning in another. And that’s part of the challenge we have as well in the country is that we literally have become a people that are getting their news from very different places and operating off a different set of facts. Unfortunately, it seems like the people on my side of it are always getting the short end of the stick.” On Joe Biden’s Failure to Unleash American Oil “Well I can’t obviously prove. Unlike Democrats, I don’t go on the air and just make accusations without proof that I can point to. What I can point to is this. Number one: I think he’s left us so vulnerable as a country that in essence we are. I have a piece coming out in the next couple days that talks about we are shutting down refineries. You know why we are shutting down refineries in America? Because when you have a President and a party in power that’s telling people ‘the fossil fuel industry is evil, we’re going to put you out of business in 10 years.’ Well who’s going to invest in a new refinery, right? You know who has the most surplus refining capacity on the planet? China. So it is just a matter of time before he has to go to China and ask them to refine more crude oil so they can enter the marketplace. At which point, China is going to say, ‘fine. We’ll do it. You got to get rid of the tariffs, you got to get rid of the Trump-era restrictions on x, y, and z.’ So I think that makes us a puppet, eventually, of them. The same is true on issue after issue regarding the military. I support the people of Ukraine. We can’t keep writing a $40 bill check. What I don’t understand is they keep announcing this massive troop buildup of U.S. soldiers and sailors, and ships, and airplanes going to Europe. The real issue here is not in Europe, it’s in Asia. The Russians are not going to be invading anybody else any time soon. They’ve got their hands full with Ukraine as it is and they can’t handle that. Those ships and those soldiers and those airmen, if they need to be anywhere abroad, it should be in the Asian Pacific regions. But we can’t because we’ve tied our hands in this European thing that he’s gotten into. So it’s just nonsense after nonsense. I think some of it is driven by just incompetence, but I think a lot of it is driven again by ideology. It’s an ideologically driven trap that they are in. The answer to every one of our problems is something that will put Biden at war with his own party, a civil war within the left, and that’s why he can’t do it, and that’s why he won’t and that’s why these things aren’t going to get solved.” On Marxism in American Government “One of the first things we can do is stop bad things from happening. Some of the nominees that have gotten on the bench, that have gotten on the Cabinet, the agencies in this administration are just well beyond even the left. And they’re far off the spectrum. It’s not just left. It’s far left. We’ve had people nominated that are open Marxists, some of them have had to remove or withdraw their nomination because of it, because they were too much even for some of them. But I will say we can stop bad things from happening. But I think the most important thing, I said this earlier today, I said it earlier this week to a group I spoke to, I think this is a time that reminds us of why federalism, as we understand it, is really perfect for our country. To the extent that government is going to have power over something, it should be in the hands of local governments, school boards, states, because it’s closer to the people, it’s more responsive, and it allows people to say, ‘okay, this is what I want the laws to be like within the confines of our constitutional order, and it allows Alabama to be Alabama, and Florida to be Florida, and that might be different than what California or Illinois decide.’ And then in a free country, people can move if they don’t like the taxes, the policies, the criminality, whatever. And we’re already seeing some of that. I do think that those of us in federal office should really double down on the belief that we should be returning more government decision making, if it’s in the hands of government at all, decision making to the hands of local, state officials because we do great harm when we inject a one size fits all solution on some of these problems.” On Gavin Newsom Running an Ad in Florida “I think ultimately, his biggest albatross, no matter what he run for nationally, is, do you really want to live like California? A state where people are fleeing. A beautiful city like San Francisco, these guys have ruined it. It’s a city where people are going to the bathroom out in the street. Where you have people shooting needles of heroin in their arm right outside the door of a $4 million home. These have become hellhole cities because of left-wing politicians. And that’s the state and these are the things he supports. “That ad is probably going to be very impressive to a lot of people on the left. That’s who he’s trying to impress by doing it. He’s not aiming it at people like me. But I will tell you that what I always tell people when they say that, or they try to say that is ‘why do people keep moving here?’ Like America. If America is such a terrible place, then why do people keep trying to come here? And it’s the same like Florida. Florida continues to grow with people from all over the country. Why would people come to a place that is as bad as these guys claim it is? It doesn’t make any sense. They know that. … “He’s just trying to get his name in the mix. Now, he’s being mentioned as a guy, he’s being speculated about. It’s a really ironic, unprecedented situation: you have a sitting President eligible to run for re-election and nobody, not even people in his own party think he should but they can’t say that yet. But I think that’s going to get more pronounced.” On Efforts to Help Veterans Exposed to Toxic Burn Pits “Well what happened is simple. You were overseas and you served in one of these places, you’re breathing this stuff in, and then you come back and a few years later, you have brain cancer or some rare disease that is out of proportion for people of your generation or your age. The VA will say, ‘well can you prove that it’s related to your service?’ Well that’s nearly impossible to prove that some brain tumor is directly related to some burn pit from ten years ago. This created a presumption. Not for any condition, but for these specific conditions where you have people suffering way out of proportion for what the statistics say should be for someone of that age. And in many cases, sadly, these are end of life conditions, and others are things that are treatable. It’s not open-ended. And so we started working on that two years ago and we were getting a lot of calls about it. People that suddenly had brain cancer and it didn’t make a lot of sense that you had these pockets of people that served in those war zones that were breathing that in and had it and we were able to get that bill passed. It just passed a couple of weeks ago. So what it means now is that veterans who served in these combat zones, and they had to serve there, not just spend a night there in a hotel and send an email, they actually had to serve there. These veterans will now have a presumption that their condition, that’s defined by the statute of the new law, was caused by that burn pit. They’ll be able to get treatment and help from the VA. It’s the third major piece of legislation regarding the VA that I’ve passed in my eleven years there. The first and the second VA accountability bills were my bills. The second being one of the first bills signed by President Trump and now all we need is a VA secretary that will actually enforce it and fire people that aren’t doing a good job. And so I’m a big, strong believer in the VA. It’s an important system, it’s a promise we make our men and women when they serve, and we’re going to continue to look for ways to improve it.” On Eastern Shipbuilding “I was surprised. I think everyone was because it cost us money. It’s more expensive. That company, I know there’s some parochial, people say it’s parochial, that’s Florida. Put that aside for a moment. That company that got it, in Mobile, has no experience building these types of ships, number one. They’ve actually had some investigations conducted against them in the past for some of the contracts they had with the Navy. This third is, I think it’s really unfair and it’s unwise, it’s going to cost more money. They’ve got to rebuild. They’ve never made one of these. So we initially had all those ships here and then after Michael, this was like a double hit. They took them down to four, and then after Eastern has shown ‘we’re going to be able to do this,’ they didn’t give them back half of the remaining, they just took them all and gave them to somebody else. I think it’s very shortsighted. We’re going to dig into what was behind it. Is it politics? Is it something else going on here? But clearly, I think there was something more than just dollars and cents involved because from a pure standpoint of ‘where is the place that we can think deliver these ships the fastest and at a better price?’ I can understand having the second half of the contract or some portion of the remaining contract. What I can’t understand is giving them the next eleven ships like they did. It just makes no sense to me.” On the Race Against Val Demings “She’s the one Schumer wants, she’s voted with Pelosi 100% of the time, and that’s why they picked her to run, right? They want someone that will be a rubber stamp. Look, she’s raising a lot of money. These guys on the left, they have this, if you look at her campaign donations, a bunch of small dollar donors from California, from all over the country. They give money to these liberal candidates and causes but she has a radical record. She’s voted against deporting criminal aliens, she thinks illegal aliens should vote in elections. She’s a former police officer who was talking about defunding the police being a ‘thoughtful’ idea. That’s why the Sheriff’s Association, the Police Chiefs, almost every Sheriff in Florida, 55 of the 66 Sheriffs in the state have endorsed me. Every major law enforcement organization has endorsed me because this is someone who should know better from her time in law enforcement. And actually, it’s worse when someone like that turns her back. She wanted to be picked as the VP for Joe Biden. So during the midst of all of this, she sort of went in that direction and now is trying to make up for it. But the bottom line is this: they want her there because she’ll vote whatever way Schumer tells her to vote. It’s as simple as that. We can’t let that happen. There’s no way Florida, a state that’s doing so many things right, can be represented by someone who’s going to be a Schumer puppet. You want Schumer to be your U.S. Senator, you should move to New York, but apparently they’re all moving here.” |
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