Sen. Josh Hawley & Power Of Populism
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All right, boys and girls, we are back with another edition of the Ben Domenech podcast brought to you by Fox News Podcasts. You can find all of the great Fox News podcasts at foxnewspodcasts.com. I hope that you'll rate and review this podcast and encourage your friends to subscribe to it.

Today we'll be talking with a politician who represents a number of different factors that are major points of discussion within the Republican coalition and the conservative movement.

Josh Hawley is without question one of the most controversial members of Congress in Washington, D.C. today. He's someone who everyone has an opinion about, whether it be good or ill. A populist from Missouri who has really made it part of his brand to discuss and redefine what conservatism means.

means in the era of Donald Trump and in the post-Trump period. He's someone who is perhaps an unlikely source of this kind of populism, given that his resume from born in Arkansas and then graduating from Stanford University in 2002, Yale Law School in 2006, clerking for Judge Michael McConnell and for Chief Justice John Roberts before working as an attorney or

both in private practice and then for the Beckett Fund, a religious liberty-focused organization. It's an unlikely resume, given how much it's something that seems like an insider, for him to be the voice of people outside Washington. Yet that's what he's really become, a populist fire breather in many different issues that cut across party lines and often lead to behaviors that might not be expected from a Republican member of the U.S. Senate.

Hawley's detractors are certainly very loud with their judgment of the approach that he's had. His approach to taking on big tech in particular has ruffled feathers among both corporatist Democrats and Republicans alike. And he represents in many ways a Republican Party that is going through a period of significant transition, trying to find its way forward. And this period of redefinition and

and the resurgence of a political populism that challenges many of its members to seek different ways to satisfy their voters, ways that may often be not delivering on their promise or things that in the past may have confused voters or prevented them from recognizing that they were being gypped. Hawley is someone who tells it like it is, who says what he believes, and who is very much

member of a new generation of politicians who are changing Washington. Born on the last day of 1979, he represents a millennial presence in Washington that is definitely going to have an impact on both sides of Capitol Hill.

Josh Hawley talked to us today about a number of different issues, big tech, about censorship, about the changing nature of the Republican political coalition and its future, as well as issues of foreign policy and of the changing nature of the American culture war. Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri joined us today. You're listening to the Ben Domenech podcast. We'll be right back.

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Senator Hawley, thank you so much for taking the time to join me today. Thanks for having me. I want to talk to you about a bunch of different things. But first off, I just want to say, I think that you've become someone who is kind of a lightning rod for a lot of different subjects. And I wanted to get your perspective on why that is. Within the general arc of conservatism, you've been more of a communitarian type of conservative for a long time.

Why do you think it is that your push for a shift within the institutional priorities of the GOP has been met with such pushback from different corners of corporate America and of the existing party? Well, because I think it's with corporate America in particular, Ben, I think it's a threat to them. I mean, you've seen the corporate...

oligarchs have really exerted quite a bit of control over the Republican Party for quite some time now. And I think they're very threatened by anybody. We certainly saw this with former President Trump, but anybody who challenges their dominance in their policy agenda and anybody who says, wait a minute, maybe we ought to be focusing on working people, on working families. Maybe we ought to be looking at how the policies of the last 30 years, a lot of them, unfortunately, pursued by Republican as well as Democrat administrations, have

have hollowed out our economy, have left working people no place to stand, have embroiled us in foreign wars in the case of our national security policy that has no discernible benefit to our security. I mean, this is the legacy of the leadership class. And when it comes to the corporate giants, they are a big part of that. So they don't like to be challenged. Of course, the left doesn't like to be challenged either. But it's time that we had some folks in office who are willing to stand up and make those challenges.

Republicans have, as a rule, been viewed as the defenders of business, particularly big business. That's something that has been true pretty much throughout both of our lifetimes. We're about the same age. This is something that has become often confused with defense of free markets. And you hear conservatives talk a lot about free markets, even about markets that don't seem particularly free.

How do you make the distinction between making a case for a lot of market principles that I think conservatives broadly believe in and the need to address a lot of the different types of problems that the working class in America in particular has faced even during a period of neoliberal approaches to markets that a lot of Republicans and conservative economists have favored?

Well, I would say that as a conservative, what I believe in is free markets and free competition. I really believe in the value of free competition that is open to new businesses, that is open to new entrants, and that protects the rights of working people and ultimately redounds to the benefit of the American people as a whole. And I think what we've seen for decades now is we've gotten away from a free market, free competition approach to

And we've drifted towards a corporatist economic policy where the biggest corporations are the ones who benefit. You know, they're the ones who really push this mega globalization.

that has been the focus in many ways of our economic and our trade policy for the last 30 years, maybe 40 years. And I think that turns out to be a big mistake. So I think for those of us who believe in competition, we believe that the market economy is the best thing for workers. It's also the best thing for small business. We've got to go out and make that case. And I would just say, Ben, if you look at the history of the Republican Party,

This is actually something that we've done before. We've been here before. We were here about a century ago. A century ago, we faced mass concentration in the American economy. We faced and attempted a corporate consolidation of the American economy. And it was the Republicans who were simultaneously the party of

Business people say, oh, you better believe we believe in free markets, but also, importantly, American workers. And what we said back then, what our policy was back then as Republicans was, is that we want free and fair competition. We want business people, small producers, independent producers to be able to flourish. We also want an industrial base in this country. We don't want our supply chains. We don't want our goods all made overseas. And we're going to defend the American worker. There's a legacy of that that is part of our history that we need to reclaim.

After the 2012 failure of Mitt Romney, around that time, there was this project known as the Reformacon project started by a lot of smart people, including people like Yuval Levin. I know that you've written for places that have published all these folks and they engaged in this project

that was basically designed to try to solve some of the problems that you're talking about, but it really didn't catch on. They basically just became viewed as Democrat light. And to the extent that their ideas were taken up in 2016, perhaps by mostly Marco Rubio, they really didn't connect with people.

How is your vision different than theirs in terms of delivering on policy solutions for the working class as opposed to just talking about their importance?

Well, I think that whatever we do as elected leaders, in my case at least, I've got to respond to my voters and I've got to respond to their real and felt needs. And for me, the greatest education I've ever had in my life is spending time with voters. And getting around my state of Missouri, I ran two statewide elections in the space of just over two years. That's an education. It's a tremendous privilege, a tremendous blessing to get to do that. And when you talk about

with voters, what you hear is that they have a different set of policy priorities than the DC establishment. They don't believe in the dogma of trade at any cost, trade at any price. They actually think that we ought to have, we ought to prioritize American industry. They don't believe that we ought to just acquiesce to the rise of China.

They don't believe that corporations should just get to do whatever it is that they want to do and be held unaccountable, left unaccountable. And they don't believe that big tech ought to be able just to run free. So you start listening to voters and you'll find that they actually, first of all, I think there's a greater consensus out there among voters that,

then the D.C. establishment begins to recognize. But there's also a tremendous wealth of common sense there. And it's really focused around what I think are really core conservative principles. It's about the value of work. It's about the value of neighborhood. It's about the value of family and faith and community. And as conservatives, I think we ought to be in the business of pursuing policies that protect and conserve and strengthen society.

those things. Because those are the things that really make up the texture of our life together as Americans. And at the end of the day, it's preserving that way of life, our way of life, that is what we should be in the business of doing.

I want to ask you about a couple of critics that you've had recently in the media. First, I'll take the unserious one, which comes, of course, from The New York Times, which asked basically your prom date and your middle school principal, who's a self-identified socialist, why they don't like you anymore. I wondered what your response was to that article.

Well, I didn't read it, which is my policy with The New York Times. I only read journalism. So, you know, this is the kind of hard-hitting, serious journalism that they do over there at that paper now. And unfortunately, a lot of these leftist outlets. But I do think it shows you something about just the pettiness of many on the left that, you know, rather than engage in ideas...

rather than actually grapple with substance, it's this kind of name-calling that they want to pursue. So I just frankly think all of that's a waste of time. And you know what? Voters do too. And this is why trust in the media and trust in establishment media figures is at all-time lows and continues to drop, is because voters know that...

that more and more the establishment media have a left-wing agenda that they don't even attempt to hide, that they cannot be trusted. You look at the things they said, the flagrant misreporting and disinformation for years on the Russiagate hoax, right on down the line. And it's just, it's unbelievable. They won't even acknowledge their mistakes. They won't acknowledge that they've misled the public. And people know that. People aren't stupid. They know that. And, you know, the public is right. Most of the time, these guys aren't worth paying attention to.

So that was the unserious one. The more serious one, slightly, I would say, is our friends over the secular libertarians over at Reason who put you on the cover. And Peter Suderman, a writer over there, really just laid into you for a lengthy article.

I just want to quote a little bit of it to you and have you respond to it. "Hawley combines the MAGA movement's ugliest traits with many of the worst tendencies of the pre-Trump Republican Party. He may well be the GOP's dark future, bringing the culture war into the social media era and repurposing the progressive era's statist playbook for faux populist ends.

Holly also descends from the party's scolding, censorious past, its tradition of waging showy but largely unserious culture war battles against exaggerated moral panics, including, he says, sordid tales of crime syndicate sex trafficking or more domestic concerns like Facebook destroying the minds of young children, as well as Hollywood leftists and the liberal media.

I'd like you to respond to that because I think that that actually has more in common with the criticism that you get from establishment Republicans, which is, oh, basically you're playing footsie with progressivism, the faux populism kind of thing. And you're doing this culture war stuff in an unserious way. Uh,

that doesn't actually, you know, is basically just for show and doesn't really achieve anything. How do you respond to those critiques? Well, there's a lot there. I don't know how much of that is particularly serious. This is, remember, from folks who think that the corporate control of the American economy is fine and dandy, who think that monopoly power is no problem at all. I mean, this is from folks who call themselves, I guess, libertarians, libertarians.

but who are fine with two or three companies running and dictating the American economy, who are also dedicated globalists. You think it's fine that this hyper-globalism, which is the playground of these multinational corporations, that's all fine too, supposedly just a natural outcome of the market, which is totally false. So I think there's a lot of preconceptions there that are wrong, and I'm happy to challenge all of those. I would just say this, that I think that when it comes to

what I am trying to do in the United States Senate. I'm just trying to reflect and represent the people who I was sent here by. And those folks are really concerned about the fabric of their communities. Those folks are really concerned about their children and the kind of environment they're going to grow up in. So, yeah, they're concerned about big tech and tech chasing their kids all around the Internet. They're concerned about being followed by pedophiles online. They're concerned about being exploited online.

They're also concerned that they're going to have their speech censored and shut down. So I don't make any apologies at all for my effort to hold big tech accountable and to break them up, which is, I think, what absolutely needs to happen. I'm resolutely pro-life, and I'm not going to apologize for that. You know, I think getting Amy Coney Barrett on the United States Supreme Court...

was a great watershed moment for the pro-life movement and openly pro-life justice, the first openly pro-life justice of my lifetime in terms of someone who had said before she was nominated that Roe was wrongly decided.

and was very open about it. And I think to have her confirmed to the Supreme Court of the United States without retracting that position is a very big deal. And so I'm certainly not going to apologize for that either. But I think it just comes down to it's really a clash of visions, I think. I mean, do you want...

an economy that works for corporate America and the few? Do you want to have a nation where our children are growing up in total chaos and disorder? Or do you want to have a place where your families are protected, where your kids are safe, where parents have the power to raise their own children, not big tech?

And where those of us who believe in life and believe in the value of faith are able to live that out and to see those things expressed and protected in law.

I want to hone in a little bit on that progressive era policy criticism. You know, you said before that the Republican Party was in a similar position a little more than a century ago. When people look back at that period, you know, they become, I think, concerned about the level to which government action plays.

the basis for what Woodrow Wilson would later do and to a degree what the progressive movement would be able to achieve over the coming decades. How can you use Teddy Roosevelt as an example for the approach that

the Republican Party ought to have perhaps to a lot of these big globalist corporations without running into the danger that this is something that could be exploited by the left to achieve their ends in the future in ways that a lot of conservatives would be uncomfortable. That's a great question. I think that what you see with the progressives from a century ago is

of which I am not one in any sense. The progressives really loved government. They really loved central planning. What they really wanted to do was a sort of corporatist settlement, the American economy. You see this with Wilson. You just referenced Woodrow Wilson. You know, Wilson really wanted to basically make a deal with the big corporations, and it would be that we'd have big government

And we'd have big business. And they'd learn to get along together. And, you know, big government would sort of regulate big business. And that would be the settlement they got to. FDR, you know, ends up in a very similar place. I think that's a fundamental mistake. I mean, there is such a thing as the curse of bigness. You know, and I believe in that. I don't want big government.

But I also don't want a big business entities controlling the economy. And this gets back to we want free competition that works for normal working people, not a few people controlling the economy or supply chains and certainly not government doing it. So, you know, let me let me take this in the direction of globalization. I think that the challenge now, Ben, is that what's happened in the last 30, 35 years is

is that a bipartisan consensus in many ways has pursued a mega globalization strategy where we have lowered all the trade barriers no matter what, where we've allowed the free flow of big money across national lines no matter what. We've seen jobs go overseas. We've seen labor arbitrage, tax arbitrage. You know, the corporations shop around for the lowest taxes.

in different countries, which means they leave America and pay no taxes here. And both parties and their establishment wings have been fine with that. Well, that's involved a series of government choices. That just didn't happen naturally. That's the result of policy. And I think as conservatives, we ought to say, whoa, we object to those policies. So it's I don't want government to do more. I want government to do different.

I want government actually to stop promoting globalization that hollows out our industrial core, that hollows out our working class. I want them to stop promoting policies that cause chaos and disorder in our communities and our families on our streets.

And I actually want government to do what I think its job is, which is to set a framework where working people who are the backbone of this country can succeed, where they can have control over their own lives, where they can make their own family decisions, where their speech is protected, where their communities of faith are protected. That, I think, is the alternative vision. And it's about rejecting the policy choices of the last 30 years and making different and better ones.

On the big tech issue, I think more than anybody in the Senate, you've taken enormous flack

from your own side on this. At the same time, I would argue that basically the past two years have been proving you correct in terms of your predictions about the unfolding of what big tech would attempt to do. For a lot of people who were defending these big tech companies, I think that the closing days of the 2020 election really put them in a very tough spot in terms of having

having any argument that these entities were not essentially acting as partisan political entities, whether they violated the law in that extent or not. In terms of having those views proven correct,

What have you learned from that? How are you planning to engage your colleagues on it? And do you think that there's an opportunity there to maybe shift some people who might have opposed what you were saying when you first showed up in Washington, but may have run into the challenge of events, dear boy, events? You know, I think that it's been a remarkable shift in Washington.

the party in just in the elected officials, I should say, in just the short time I've been in the Senate, as you allude to, when I first came to the Senate, was talking about big tech. I had a lot of trouble finding very many takers on our side of the aisle who were interested in the issue at all. There's several notable exceptions to that, but for the most part, it just wasn't an issue of interest. And many folks were deeply skeptical about anything that would challenge the power of the massive tech companies. But boy, has that shifted. I mean, you'd be hard pressed now to find a senator, Republican senator,

who was not at least rhetorically very critical of big tech and in favor of doing something about it. And I think that doing something about it is we have to break them up. I mean, we've talked about reforming Section 230, which is the sweetheart deal they get from government, and I'm all in favor of taking away that sweetheart deal. But I think at the end of the day, this is about structural power. I mean, how are they able to silence –

the sitting president of the United States, Donald Trump, back in January. It's because they're monopolies. How are they able to suppress the free speech of conservatives and libertarians all across the country? It's because they're monopolies. If they didn't have monopoly power...

then their anti-speech antics wouldn't be nearly so threatening. Ditto with all of the terrible things they do with child security and privacy, chasing our kids around the Internet, exposing them to pedophiles. Well, if there were alternative platforms for parents, and I say this as a parent of three young children myself, then it's like, okay, we can get off YouTube and go to an alternative. But they are monopolies. So I think we're relearning some of the wisdom there.

of our founders actually who were deeply, deeply hostile to monopolies, who wouldn't allow monopolies to exist in the American economy or American government. I think we're finding, you know what? Monopoly is always a bad idea. And so we need to break them up. We need to have new competition and we need to protect people's rights and safety. And I think that's the path forward. Why do you think it is that so many people on the right are so quick to conflate monopolies

antitrust solutions with regulatory solutions, because it seems to me that those are actually in opposition on a fundamental level. I think you're right. They are in opposition. And what we've seen the left try to do, and this dates back to the progressive era, is basically get out of antitrust in favor of government regulation, heavy oversight. And that change really started to happen in a big way in the Wilson administration to take us all the way back a century. And that's basically been the left's

The left's approach. I mean, you see them flirt a little bit with antitrust. Franklin Roosevelt flirted a little bit with antitrust briefly, but not not really in any sustained fashion. They the left generally likes big government and big business. And the great thing about big business from their point of view is they can extort it.

They can threaten big business and say, now, if you don't do this, then we're going to put regulations on you to do that. But now, Ben, as you know, big business and the left are big-time allies. I mean, who's the biggest pusher of the woke agenda? It's the woke capitalists.

It's the woke corporations. I mean, who is pushing left wing social change in America? It's it's woke business interests who are in league with big government. So there's there's there's no accident about that. That's not happenstance. And so I think this takes us back to rather than trying to layer on regulation after regulation, multiply regulatory agencies, all that kind of make deals with these companies. No, just let's just get back to competition.

And by the way, let's see if we can encourage some new small businesses and some independent producers along the way and get them into our economy and deconcentrate it so that the woke capitalists don't have all of this power. So there's a rich anti-monopoly tradition that goes all the way back to our framers. And it certainly was a big part of our Republican past that I think is worth recovering.

The thing that I hear about big tech from conservatives across the country is frustration with a lot of elected Republicans who they feel like are perfectly happy to hold hearings where they yell at the various members, the leaders of these global, you know, multi-billion, multi-companies that are essentially nation states unto themselves. And then that's it.

They just yell at them. They send some letters. They complain, but they don't actually do anything. And the answer that they typically get is, well, just elect more Republicans and we'll do something. But they certainly didn't see that happen when they got the White House, the House and the Senate in 2016.

How does that change? What is the difference that needs to happen in terms of actually delivering change within this space as opposed to just having another instance of yelling at Mark Zuckerberg? Well, I think that, you know, vote. The only thing that will change that is voters saying over and over and unequivocally that you've got to do better than that. You know, I could say is.

as a pro-life conservative that we've, in the pro-life movement, we've struggled with that for years, where you've got Republicans who will run all the time, pretty much every Republican.

will run and say, oh, I'm absolutely pro-life, 100%. You bet. You could count on me. And then they get to Washington, and it's like they don't want to take any votes on it. They don't want to go out in favor of pro-life justices. They don't want to put their names on the line. And, you know, I just think that that, unfortunately, is a pattern. But, hey, at the end of the day, what I've learned in my short two years in the Senate is if there's anything that concentrates the mind of an elected official –

It's the will of the voters. And I think what you're seeing from our voters is, and this is why so many Senate Republicans, I think, have changed their tune on big tech. It's because their voters at home are saying, we're not going to stand for it. We're not going to stand for being censored in our own country. We're not going to stand for our children being exploited in our own homes. We're not going to have it.

And I think that you're starting to see Republicans shift. So what we need now is good policy. You know, we've got to say, OK, what are we going to do about it? And this is why I come back to the number one thing we've got to do is we've got to break these companies up. We've got to break up their structural power, not just the tech companies, but the monopolies, the woke capitalists, the monopolists across the economy, right?

And when it comes to big tech, we've got to allow people to sue them. I mean, you know, if you get deplatformed, if you're censored in violation of these tech companies own terms of service, because they all say, oh, we don't censor. We don't do that. Well, fine. Make that enforceable. So if somebody gets censored, if you get deplatformed, if you get taken down, you can sue and have your day in court. So I think you do that and you let people and you break them up.

I want to shift a little bit to the shift that's happening within the Republican coalition regarding donors. In the wake of January 6th, there was certainly a lot of consternation among leading Republicans that they were going to lose out on corporate dollars flowing to them. And yet you saw the NRSC and other places essentially replace that with a flood of small donor donations.

I want to connect that, though, to a little bit of the culture war conversation. We saw this big story over the course of the past week involving South Dakota and Governor Kristi Noem there essentially changing her mind regarding a bill that was designed essentially to ban biological men from participating in women's sports. That's just a thumbnail version of it. But essentially, that shift seems to have been driven

by the Chamber of Commerce and other corporate-related interests in her state. Tell me a little bit about how the culture war dynamics of the moment have shifted the Republican donor base and whether you think that's a good thing. Well, I do think it's a good thing insofar as I think we cannot be reliant. Republicans shouldn't be reliant on these woke capitalists.

in order to fund their campaigns or do anything else. I mean, we shouldn't be taking we should be taking orders from our voters. And I think any shift that makes Republican elected official, but Republicans, the ones I care about, that makes them more responsive to their voters is good. But just on the on the broader issue you touch on, Ben, you know, I think what the voters understand is, is that the woke corporations are not with us.

They have their own left-wing agenda that they are pushing for their own reasons and interests. And the reason in many cases is that the whole leadership class of these corporations, they are all very hardcore left woke capitalists. I mean, they buy into the progressive left-wing agenda, and they're not afraid to

to use their corporate power to push it. And you see that right now in this fight over women's sports. I mean, you see the left wing of the, heck, not just the left wing, the whole Democrat party out there essentially advocating for the abolition of girls' sports and women's sports in America. It's crazy. Let me just ask you a little bit about that, though, because it seems to me that one of the things that is odd about this particular issue is that

from Politico and Morning Consult, not known in any way to have a Republican bias, quite the opposite, find that a majority of Americans are in favor of banning biological men from participating in women's sports. The opposition is only about a third.

And that's something that would seem to me to embolden people, particularly within conservative states, to take a stand on that issue. Is this a situation where the corporate powers that be, whether they're actually on the left or not, have gotten used to a situation where the the woke left is

makes a lot more noise than the center and the right on these culture war issues and that they're not used to any situation where conservatives create any friction in them going along with that woke left agenda. That's right. And I think the woke left and the corporation, the capitalists, the woke capitalists,

are used to a situation where they can use their power to drown out the voices of ordinary voters and force their agenda anyway. And they'll ostracize anybody who sticks up their head and disagrees with them. They'll label them. You're a bigot. You're a racist. You're this, that, or the other. Pick your label of the day. And we've seen that time and again.

And we're seeing it now when it comes to the women's sports issues where you've got some of the big corporations and some of the large associations are threatening states. They used to do this on the religious freedom issues, too, religious liberty issues. And they say, ah, if you do that, then we're not going to open our headquarters in your state. Then we're not going to bring our tournament to your state and so on and so forth. And they're used to, I think, the right approach.

sort of keeping their heads down and just not saying anything. Even when, as you point out, Ben, especially in this instance, a large majority of normal people are like, whoa, whoa, whoa, we do not want to see women's sports torched. We don't want biological males playing in female sports and dominating them and taking away that place for girls or young women.

So, this I think has been a pattern and what I think folks now are looking for are people who are going to say, "No, I'm not going to go along with that. I'm willing to stand up and challenge these woke capitalists and their allies in government on the left and to say, 'No, I'm not going to be blackmailed by you. You can call me all the names you want, but I'm going to take a stand and I'm going to stick with it.'" And I think that that's one of the reasons that Republican voters love Donald Trump is because he was willing to do that.

And I think that that's just, it's a different standard in leadership now, I think, that voters are looking for. On paper, the possibility of a left-right populist alliance makes a lot of sense.

But practically speaking, the attempts toward that type of alliance really haven't gone that far. You obviously endorsed the $2,000 checks back in December with along with Bernie Sanders, something that the president that President Trump at the time also endorsed. And that obviously you ended up with that not happening. And those two Senate races in Georgia going down in part because of that. But it's

But in terms of just the experience of your other colleagues, you had that situation where Ted Cruz and AOC were agreeing about something, but then she fired back that he had literally tried to get her killed or something like that. Is it even possible to have a left-right populist alliance

given the nature of the identity politics woke left as being the animating force within the Democratic coalition. Yeah, I think that that last piece will make it difficult, Ben. I mean, I've said for my own part that I'm willing to work with anybody if it's going to be good for the people of my state. It's going to be good for working people and for the values I believe in. And, you know, that's I have worked with Bernie. We were able, by the way, you know, in the December relief bill, there were no people.

There was no direct relief in that bill, zilch, not a cent, until Bernie and I insisted on it. And we didn't get enough, but we got some that wasn't going to be there before. So you can actually get real things done. I mean, that made a real difference to real families. But I do think the left has – they've got some questions they're going to have to answer, and one of them is they've got to decide –

Does the how enthrall to the hardcore progressive left wing of their party that is all about identity politics? Are they going to allow them to set the entire agenda or are they going to actually do something that focuses on what unites us as Americans and focuses on working people? And I think those things are in big tension for them right now. And you can see that.

as they in this administration, you know, so far, Joe Biden is totally captive to the hardcore left. This is why you see him doing things like canceling all of those blue collar energy jobs and pursuing policies that are bad for working folks. But, you know, that's what the hardcore left wants, whether it's for identity politics reasons or climate, their radical climate change agenda. So they've got, you know, there's a lot there that they're going to have to decide about.

Are they really interested in working people? Are they really interested in the middle of our society, the great American middle, as I like to call it? Or are they more interested in their social agenda? Let's talk about that pro-working class policy for a minute. You

You always face a tension, it seems to me, when you're trying to help the American working class in disconnecting any of the support that you would give them either via taxpayer dollars or through other approaches.

from preventing them from having a disconnect where you are essentially given more allowance to get drunk, do opioids, to stay at home and not work. And the ultimate consequence of which tends to be more broken homes, fewer marriages, and less stability in terms of families. How do you produce outcomes

that encourage both support for working families, but also don't have these negative outcomes that we've seen due to a lot of different entitlement approaches that the left has used in the past. Well, you've got to reward work and family, and you have to prioritize those things. But let me just take one step back or a little higher level of abstraction to answer that. My basic view is I think that the working people in this country –

are the folks who are really the solid people who have their heads screwed on straight. I mean, I think if you go out to the country and you come to the, whether it's the middle of the country where I'm from, which I represent, or other places, but I think if you go to the middle of our society, let's say, I think you're going to find that folks are, they're not only decent and good, they're hardworking, and they get it. They're not the problem. The problem are actually the leaders, right?

The problem is the leadership class. It's the university class, if you like. And it's a pretty narrow band of people who get elected, who are the CEOs of the major corporations, certainly in charge of the universities. It's those people and their policies that are the problem. And basically what they've done is for 30 years or more, they pursued policies that are great for them and

And then they offload all of the bad stuff onto working people and the American middle class. And that's how it's worked. Whether that is the globalization, you know, where you've got it's great for folks at the very top and folks who are close to Wall Street, folks in Silicon Valley, it's great for them. But, of course, if you're working a factory job in the Midwest, it's gone forever. That's hollowed out.

or whether it's the policies that undermine the family, that undermine work, that undermine churches. They don't care about that, the folks at the very top, but that's the very fabric of life for the middle of our society. So my view is we've got to repair that middle fabric. We've got to allow those folks to rebuild their lives because they are the best of the country. And so when it comes to how do we...

help working folks get their feet underneath them. You know, we need to pursue policies that don't discourage work, but that reward it, that doesn't discourage getting married and having kids, but actually rewards doing that. And that gives working families a place to stand in our country. But I think that my basic worldview here is that I don't think, as I think some conservatives have in the past, have talked about like, oh boy, you know, you've got all of these Americans and all of these working and middle class people who

They need to be tended to and minded. And, you know, if you let them on there, do what they want to do, they'll just get drunk and they won't work. I just don't think that's the case. I think that that's the strength in our society. The working and middle classes are the strength of our society. It's the top that's the problem. So we need to reverse our policies to reward the middle and, you know, let the top fend for themselves.

One policy where there's certainly a good bit of conversation, but not necessarily a good bit of agreement is the question around childcare in America. Obviously, Senator Romney has a proposal on childcare. There are other proposals that have been floated out there as well. But I think one of the concerns for a lot of conservative traditionalists is that you are, by going down that route,

you are ultimately sending the message that

women really ought to get out of the home and to go to work and that you want to have a family that has two earners as opposed to one that has one. What's your view of the prioritization that ought to go in that direction? And how do you achieve that without engaging yourself in this social engineering approach that would ultimately lead potentially to women

a lot more kids who aren't being raised by having a family member in the home. Well, I think that, first of all, we've got to recognize it is extraordinarily expensive and difficult to have a child in this country now. And your father, you know that. I've got three. My youngest is four months old. So they're a tremendous blessing. But for many, many families, I mean, we're very blessed. But for many, many families, that is very hard to do just to make ends meet to have kids. And

And then to have an environment where you feel safe and secure raising kids. So I think all that to say that we do need to focus on the problem of how do we help families get started and how do we help them grow? I think, though, that when it comes to child care in particular, I think that what we've got to do is we've got to allow parents to make those decisions. I'm against any policy that would force families to.

to send their kids off to daycare or to send it off to a government program in order to access help in the tax code. I mean, that's really you're telling the family there that, you know, don't keep your kids at home. Don't make those decisions. You only are going to get any kind of help or tax relief if you decide to send your kids out of the home. I think that decision should be for families.

And I think that you should give people options. I think that parenting is a very difficult job. I think people could use help, including tax relief for parenting, but that gives parents and families the flexibility to make the choice. A lot of parents, they're going to want to stay home, one of them maybe for a period of time. Maybe two parents want to reduce their hours. There are any number of decisions different families can make. But I think that we don't want to say, to your point,

that, oh, let's pursue a one-size-fits-all policy, which is both parents must work. They must work full-time. You must do this or that with your kids. Let's give the families the choices. Let's let them choose what's best for them and their kids and trust them to do that. And I think that's the kind of focus we should have while promoting work. I mean, we've got to make sure, again, that we are rewarding folks who work and have a job, but also rewarding families who stay together.

who have kids and who want to make those kind of decisions about how to raise their kids.

A couple of foreign policy questions quickly. First on China, the Biden administration obviously had this early clash with them in Alaska that was, I think, embarrassing in a lot of different ways, but also seems to me a consequence of the rhetoric that has been used on the left for quite a while. In terms of their policies at the moment, they seem to be continuing several of the Trump administration policies on China, on tech, on

drone components and sanctions related to the concentration camps and the like. I know that you care a lot about China and Hong Kong. What is your view of the early days of this Biden administration? And do you think that they are going to dramatically shift away from the policies of the previous four years on China or that they've been boxed into a certain extent by the awareness of the American people and the priorities that they've

I think the early going is not encouraging. I think what you see is some talk out of the Biden administration, but their actions actually suggest a weakening of the focus on China. And you take Afghanistan, for instance, just this week, the Biden team has been in full walk back mode.

the exit of the Afghanistan war, you know, they have been talking about, well, we may need to keep troops there longer. Well, we may, you know, so it's once again, you know, all the talk about, well, yeah, we're going to get out of Afghanistan. We're going to get out of Iraq. And then they don't do it. And what you hear from the Biden team is, well, we need to focus more on our allies in Europe and we need to keep troops in Afghanistan and we need to prop up the regime in Iraq. And we need it's basically we need to do more everywhere, which means that we won't be focused on the

biggest national security threat and economic threat to our country, which is China. So it's about prioritization. And what you see so far in terms of their priorities are they're not really prioritizing China. They throw it in the mix, you know, oh yeah, China too, but they are not taking the steps to actually get tough on China. And you're right about the Alaska meeting. That was embarrassing for the United States. I mean, really embarrassing. And I'm worried it'll be a

like a Khrushchev-Kennedy moment back in 1961 where Khrushchev famously confronted Kennedy and pushed him around. And Khrushchev took away from that meeting that he could just push the Americans around. And it emboldened the Soviets for years. And I'm worried that the Chinese were trying something similar. You know, let's see how the Americans react. And the Biden team pretty much just sat there and took it.

And I that this is a dangerous path that we're on. So in terms of our foreign policy, listen, these adventures, this this this liberal imperialism that even these conservatives, the neocons have embraced and have pushed for. This is all fundamentally mistaken. It's just of a piece of this of this larger globalism agenda. We need to stop all of that. What we need to focus on are the actual threats to this country.

China is a real security threat. We need to focus on that. They're a real economic threat. We do not need to be in the business of building a liberal global empire overseas. That has never been our tradition in this country. We shouldn't make it that now. And I think many of the decisions...

On both left and right, the last, again, 30 years have been very mistaken in this regard, and it's time to change course. Vice President Kamala Harris is now the point person on the southern border. Our relationship with Mexico over the past couple of years has been surprisingly good under AMLO. And, you know, the basic approach being as long as our border remains secure, we'll let you do kind of what you want. But you that

needs to be something that is the priority. Now, obviously, you have an administration that has shifted away from that. What do you expect our relationship to be like with Mexico going forward? What do you think ought to be the solution on the border? And do you think that the Biden administration has any kind of plan or have you been given any indication that they have any kind of plan to deal with this current crisis? I don't think they have a plan and their policies have created the crisis.

I mean, so it's not really that hard. They just need to take what they're doing and do the opposite because they're the ones who have gotten us into this crisis. And what I say, what I mean by that is President Trump had hit upon a series of policies that had taken border crossings, illegal entries down to minimal levels. And the core of it was you allow people to apply for asylum and.

and then they stay in their home country while the asylum is processed. Or if that's not safe, then they stay in a safe third country. And the Trump administration had negotiated agreements with various Central American countries to allow that to happen. What's Biden do? Comes into office, tears all those up, says, come on to our border.

predictably there's a huge surge where we don't have facilities for all of these folks especially the young children so now they're living in unsanitary conditions and now they're just releasing them into the interior of the country so we're right back to catch and release which only emboldens the cartels

who, of course, charge a fee for everybody who goes across the southern side of that border. So the cartels win big, the human smugglers win big, the drug traffickers win big, and the American people have to deal with the chaos. So Biden needs to admit he is the problem here. He is the one who's caused this with his policies and reverse course and secure that border.

Prior to the global pandemic, there was already concern about the animized nature of the American people, that their institutions had crumbled, that they had less and less faith in them. That seems to be something that's only been exacerbated by the past year. How can we deal with that and face that problem going forward?

Well, that's really the question, the great question of our age, I think, Ben, is rebuilding the fabric of our life together. And I think that starts with rebuilding our family life together and our neighborhoods and communities. And this gets back to, I think, how we've got to integrate our Republicans, our social agenda and our economic agenda. We've got to have, we've got to be for each.

Jobs that a working person can support himself or herself on and their family and we in the end in the places where they live. So we've got to pursue economic policies that will give working families real opportunities to to get married, to have kids, to raise that family, to contribute to their community and to do it in the place they want to do it to not have. It's no answer to say, oh, yeah, well, if you want a job, sure, you need to pick up and move to New York City.

You know, people in Missouri where I grew up and the small town where I grew up and others like it across my state, they want to stay where they grew up because that's where their family is and their networks in their community. That's wonderful. We need to pursue policies that allow those folks to have an opportunity to flourish there, to be able to support themselves and their families there. If we do that, then we give ourselves a chance to rebuild those other institutions of working class and middle class life, our churches, our schools, our neighborhoods.

But we've got to integrate our great belief in the family, in the neighborhood, in the church. We've got to integrate that with our economic policy and put those together. And I think that that's the big challenge of our day. Thank you so much, Senator, for taking the time to join us. Thanks for having me.

So that was an interesting discussion with Josh Hawley. I hope that it was enlightening in a number of different ways about the way that he sees America and the world. I wanted to share with you something that I found interesting in terms of a read this past week and encourage you to check it out. John McWhorter, the Columbia University professor.

who is an author and an accomplished speaker on a number of different topics, has been rolling out in his Substack newsletter excerpts from a new book that he has written on the elect. The latest edition of this is The Elect, the Threat to a Progressive America from Anti-Black, Anti-Racists.

You can find it at johnmcwarder.substack.com. That's M-C-W-H-O-R-T-E-R, McWarder. And there you'll find it for free. There's also some paid content that's behind the paywall that I would also encourage you to check out.

He writes in part in this excerpt from his upcoming book, in between the world and me required reading for millions of undergraduates nationwide for years now, Ta-Nehisi Coates states that he has no, that he had no sympathy for the white cops and firemen who died at the World Trade Center on 9-11. They were just menaces of nature. They were the fire, the comet storm, which could with no justification shatter my body, unquote.

Good writing, the reporter writes, but Coates wrote this of people with families, spouses and especially children never saw daddy again. Even in view of the relationship between cops and black men, which surely informed this pitilessness in Coates, the numbness to personal grief, the dehumanization of the family members, those people left behind amidst a titanic and unusual tragedy was stunningly cold.

It was unexamined and irresponsible for someone billed as a public intellectual. Yet the white punditocracy at most tis-tis-ed for it.

In our society where a person can be roasted as a moral pervert and fired for wearing blackface makeup as a joke, the Washington Post employee, or for criticizing one and a half Asian celebrities while white, Alison Roman, Coates was allowed to say that those white public servants deserve to die but continue to be celebrated as America's lead prophet on race.

the only reason for this pass given to coates was condescension brute denigration word chosen deliberately of a black human being to not hold coates responsible for the horror of a judgment like that imagine it coming from for example john lewis

and to even assign the book containing it to impressionable young people nationwide is to treat him as someone not responsible for his actions. It is to treat Coates as a child. He is being patted on the head the way Benny Hill did to a bald little Jackie Wright. Pat a pat pat. You're cute.

John McWhorter is someone who doesn't hold back when he is sharing his views on the nation and the state of race discussions in the country. I encourage you to check out his newsletter at johnmcwhorter.substack.com.

I'm Ben Domenech. You've been listening to another edition of the Ben Domenech podcast on the Fox News Podcast Network. For more of this podcast series, you can go to foxnewspodcast.com. Please rate and review this one wherever you download your podcasts. We'll be back next week with more. Until then, be lovers of freedom and anxious for the fray.

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