Hawley says he won't 'bow down to woke mob' that tried to cancel his book

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Hawley says he won't 'bow down to woke mob' that tried to cancel his book

Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., on the left-wing pushback to his new book, 'The Tyranny of Big Tech.'

This is a rush transcript from "Life, Liberty & Levin," May 2, 2021. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.

MARK LEVIN, FOX NEWS HOST: Hello, America. I'm Mark Levin and this is LIFE, LIBERTY & LEVIN.

We have a great guest the entire hour, Senator Josh Hawley, and I want you to get to know Senator Hawley. He has a fantastic book, "The Tyranny of Big Tech." It's a very, very, very important book. It's coming out this coming week, "The Tyranny of Big Tech."

Senator Hawley, thank you for joining us. Before we get into the book, and we will, how would you describe yourself politically?

SEN. JOSH HAWLEY (R-MO): Well, thanks for having me, Mark. It's great to be with you. You know, I would say that I'm a conservative. I mean, that's the easiest description. I'm a constitutional lawyer by background.

I was a religious liberty First Amendment lawyer. I was Attorney General of the State of Missouri. So a prosecutor, I have a background as a prosecutor as well. So for all of those reasons, I really believe in our Constitution, I consider myself a constitutionalist, first and foremost.

I also consider myself a populist. I think that there's a rich, rich tradition that is rooted in our Constitution of saying that it is normal, everyday Americans, who are the best citizens, normal everyday Americans who ought to run this country, who ought to run this government and I think what we're fighting for today, is to make sure that it is normal everyday Americans who have a say in their government, have control over their government and that's a lot of what we're seeing with Big Tech. Big Tech wants to run this country, and we can't let them.

LEVIN: Now, the left likes to say their populists, too. And, and yet they like centralized, overarching, ubiquitous government. So just briefly, if you can describe the difference between your idea of populism and their idea of populism.

HAWLEY: Well, you put it well, you know, the left's idea of populism is to claim to speak in favor of the people, but in fact, to centralize power in the government, and in Big Business that they can control and align with, and this is one of the interesting features of our era.

We see these woke corporations, these mega corporations that are now increasingly allied with the left, and they want to project themselves into politics and they want to project their power in to politics. And the left is great with that. They love centralized power, whether it is centralizing the economy or centralizing government, they want our lives to be run by a handful of people in Washington, in Wall Street, and that they want those people to work together and tell us what we're supposed to do with their lives.

And I think that as conservatives and conservative populists, we say no, no. You know, who knows best about their own lives? The American people do. Who knows best about how to raise kids? Families do. Who knows best how to make decisions about their future? Individuals do.

And so when I think about conservative populism, it is the populism of the American framers, of our founders where our Constitution begins, "We, the People." Who should be in charge of the government? The people should be. Who should be in charge of making decisions about our families? We should be, ourselves, our parents. We, as parents, and we, as citizens.

I think that's the big difference between left and right. The left believes in the power of government, in centralized authority and power and experts. That's the other thing I'd add, Mark. The left, they love experts. They think they're the experts.

They want to have government by experts. They want to have economy by experts.

We believe in the value, the dignity and the wisdom of normal, everyday working Americans. And we think that they ought to be able to run their lives.

LEVIN: We saw what the experts got us: shutdowns and nursing home problems and all the rest of it.

Now Senator Hawley, I want to talk to you about January 6th. There has been a concerted effort to smear you, that somehow you were involved in instigating an incitement to an insurrection.

You are a constitutionalist, as you point out, and of course, what happens after all these electors come together, and they cast their votes. It goes to the archivist, and he or she sends it to Congress to count where people can raise questions. In fact, that's the whole point of the process. It's not a rubber stamp process, and others have done exactly the same thing.

Why don't you explain to the American people without interruption, what you did, what you were trying to do and why it was constitutional?

HAWLEY: Well, thank you, Mark.

You know, here's the thing. I believe in election integrity. I believe that we need to have a discussion in this country about election integrity. And what we see the left doing now, again, we're using these Big Corporations to try to bully states like Georgia, to try to bully states like my own, the State of Missouri where we have voter ID for instance.

What the Democrats want to do in concert with the Big Corporations is get rid of our election integrity laws. They want to take over our elections and centralize that power in Washington, D.C., so what I said on January 6th is this. I think we need to have a debate about election integrity in this country and a debate is what I asked for.

Under the laws of the United States, during the election certification process, a Senator or a House Member can raise an objection in any state. You know, all of the state's ballots are counted there, as you said, and, and a Senator or a House Member, if there's two of them together raise an objection to any state, it triggers a debate in both Houses of Congress and that's what I said before January 6th. I was going to do it with regard to the State of Pennsylvania.

You had a State in Pennsylvania that didn't follow its own Constitution in the way that it did its balloting back in the November election, you had a Supreme Court in Pennsylvania that was a runaway partisan Supreme Court that intervened in the election, that intervened in the counting of ballots, you know, even our own Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas at the U.S. Supreme Court said that what happened in Pennsylvania was something he thought the U.S. Supreme Court should be looking at and reviewing and I agree with that, which is why I objected to the State of Pennsylvania to try to force a debate in the United States Senate.

You know, you pointed out, Mark that this is something that the law permits. You bet it does. The Democrats have done it in three of the last presidential elections. Every time a Republican has won, they've objected to 11 different states, which is their right to do under the law. You can trigger a debate doing that.

I objected to Pennsylvania. And I think we needed to have a debate on election integrity. I think we need to have one now on election integrity in this country, and I'm certainly not going to apologize for that.

LEVIN: No, you shouldn't because what you were talking about is Article II, Section 1, Clause 2, where the State legislatures are responsible for setting the election system in every state. And in Pennsylvania, my home state, what took place was that the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, which is a five to two Democrat-elected court is quite radical, like the court was in Florida in 2000 and they changed the election laws. The Governor changed the election laws. The Secretary of State changed the election laws. All statewide elected Democrats. You had a Republican legislature.

And so they didn't change those election laws to help Donald Trump. They didn't change those election laws to help Republicans. It was a power grab.

And so it was raised with the United States Supreme Court. I don't know what happened in the court. It looks like three Justices wanted to take it up. The other six didn't want to take it up. But it was a perfectly legitimate challenge brought to the United States Supreme Court where it is to be resolved. In an election case, ultimately, it's not even the Supreme Court. It's the United States Congress that resolves it under our constitutional system.

And the idea that you raise it and then they claim that you incited an insurrection is really from a party that unconstitutionally impeached the President twice, and sought to remove him from office with a criminal investigation. That's pretty precious.

All right, I'm glad you had an opportunity to speak to that. And I want to talk about your book, which is really quite fabulous. "The Tyranny of Big Tech."

Let's start this way. You begin your book by saying, hey, look, conservatives, we've never liked monopolies. We didn't like monopolies during the Industrial Revolution, and slightly thereafter and we shouldn't like them now because they smother liberty, they smother individuality. Go ahead and explain what you mean.

HAWLEY: You know, our framers really had it right, Mark. You look back all the way to our founders, they hated monopoly. They were deeply, deeply suspicious of it. They associated it with aristocracy.

So you know what happens when you get concentrated power. That means that the experts, the self-appointed experts, they try to run the show. The elites, they try to tell everybody else what to do. Of course, in their day, that meant the monarchy, but it also meant the aristocrats.

So the framers enacted all of these laws limiting the monopoly form, limiting monopoly power, states could only grant monopolies in very, very few instances at the time of the American founding, and our whole Constitution is meant to disperse power. You know, so it doesn't gather in any one set of hands.

So one -- no one small group of people becomes so powerful that they can run the country. That's what Madison called "faction." It's another word for "aristocracy." Monopoly is part of that.

Our founders didn't want monopoly power anywhere. Fast forward to the Industrial Revolution. We see monopolies growing up in the economic sector, the railroads and U.S. Steel. What did the monopolies try to do? It is what they always try to do, they try to take over the government. They try to project their power into the political sphere and override the will of the people and what we said then, a century ago, and by "we," I mean, conservatives and Republicans, they said we're not going to stand for it. We're not going to be told by a group of business people or anybody.

It doesn't matter who it is. No small group, no group of self-appointed experts is going to run this country and so we enacted new laws that said we are going to continue that founding tradition: no monopoly, we're going to break them up.

Here we are today. My argument is, we need to recover the tradition of the American founders. We need to recover the tradition of the Republicans from a century ago and say, we believe in liberty, not monopoly and we're not going to allow a small group of experts, woke corporations to run this country.

LEVIN: In the case of Big Tech, they were given an advantage by the Federal government. It's not like they really believe in free market capitalism. What kind of advantage were they given?

HAWLEY: Well, now they've been subsidized from day one, Mark. They were given a huge immunity blanket. Here's the thing: most media corporations, publishing houses, any sort of platform, media platform speech platform is subject to lawsuits for libel and for defamation, and for other tort suits in court. And that's an important check.

If somebody says something untrue about you, you can go to court. If somebody takes what you say and edits it and publishes under your name without your approval, you can go to court.

These tech platforms have been effectively immune from suit and a vast majority of cases since the 1990s. Who gave them that special privilege? The Federal government.

So to your point about the free market, the free market hasn't really worked when it comes to Big Tech because the government has put a big thumb on the scale in favor of these tech platforms and that is how Facebook and that's how Google and that's how Twitter got so huge. They were able to take our information from us without our consent, they were able to track us all around the web, they're able now to censor us, to censor our comments, to censor our opinions, to censor the speech of the sitting President of the United States as they did with Donald Trump -- no legal accountability.

Can't sue them. Can't take him to court. Can't do anything about it. That's because the Federal government has given them these special privileges.

And this is why we see this monopoly power from Big Tech. It's just what you'd expect. It's government interference that has made Big Tech big and that is why I say, it's time to break them up. It's time to get real competition, and it's time to get power back to the people.

LEVIN: And when we come back, my question to you is going to be if we are going to defend free speech and then censorship; if we're going to stop Big Tech from getting involved in politics -- which we'll get to in a minute -- with these massive in-kind contributions, if you will and you're right about all of this in your fantastic book, how exactly do we even convince Republicans to do it?

And that'll be the question when we return. It is a great book, "The Tyranny of Big Tech."

We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

LEVIN: Welcome back, America. Senator Josh Hawley, you're new to the Senate and so you probably have some of these folks who have been around 30, 35, 40 years looking at you saying, oh, we got this young whippersnapper trying to stir the pot and shake things up and they don't like that.

This much I know just from watching the Senate over all of these years and watching conservatives and libertarians come forward and how they try and silence them.

So President Trump gives Republicans an opportunity to address this problem with this Section 230, which is the section of which you speak and they override his veto and they lead the charge. Is it because these people have been around too long? Do they not understand that Big Tech is supporting their opponents? I mean, what is this all about?

HAWLEY: I think that a lot of folks in Washington that includes unfortunately, a lot of people who call themselves conservatives don't really understand just how powerful Big Tech is, although I'll tell you what, Mark, after this last election, when Big Tech worked together to singlehandedly repress and suppress that Hunter Biden story, and then after they went on to deplatform President Trump and deplatform numerous other conservatives and shut down speech.

I mean, if you don't understand the power of Big Tech now, then you're never going to. But to your point, I just think that for so long, many conservatives and Republicans have just said, well, surely tech isn't that powerful. And they've also said that, well, if it's the result of the free market, then it must be okay. Of course, this isn't the result of the free market. Monopoly is almost never the result of the free market.

Again, our founders are right about this. Our founders said that anytime you get concentrated power, it usually means the government has interfered. You know, concentrated power, monopoly, aristocracy. That's a political choice. That's the result of policy and that's exactly what we have here.

And so I think part of what we've got to do, those of us who are saying we've got to break up the power of these tech companies, the power of these woke capitalists, these monopolist is, we've got to explain: government has interfered time and time again to help these people get big, get strong, get powerful, and now they're suppressing conservative voices. Now, they're trying to run our economy and to run our government and they will do all of that if we let them.

LEVIN: You know, Senator, as I see this, this is even worse than Standard Oil and the other companies at the turn of the last century. These companies are impinging on our unalienable rights today.

Freedom of speech goes right to the core of Republicanism, it goes right to the core of individual liberty. The first thing tyrants do around the world is they shut down speech, and now, you have surrogates for the Democratic Party and the left doing exactly this.

As you point out in your book, they sucked us onto these platforms. They use our data. We build businesses and communities and networks on it. And now, they seize upon us. They stick themselves on us. They give us Scarlet letters.

They censor us. They suspend us. They ban us. They don't do it to the left as much clearly as they do it to conservatives, and they have made Donald Trump -- they think they've made Donald Trump a non-entity.

As you point out in your book, we have never seen a power like this, have we, ever?

HAWLEY: No, that's right we haven't. And if you look back a century ago at the biggest monopolies in our country's history until now, the railroads, Standard Oil, you pointed out, U.S. Steel, you know, those companies, yes, they were really powerful. They had a lot of control over our economy. They had a lot of control over wages, but they couldn't control speech.

They couldn't control news. They couldn't control what we read or what we say to each other. They couldn't control a political speech. But these companies can, Big Tech sure can. Google and Facebook and Twitter, they absolutely can, and they want to, and they are doing it actively.

And again, just this last year really brought that home. You look at that Hunter Biden story, series of stories, "The New York Post" reporting about his laptop, about his investigation, the Federal investigation into the Bidens, it turns out, it is true. And yet, all of these companies get together and in the space, Mark, you remember how quick it happened. Within the space of literally minutes, Facebook and Google and Twitter have decided they're not going to allow this story to be posted on their platforms, which is effectively saying for millions of Americans who get their news from Facebook and from Google, they're saying that they'll never read it, they'll never be able to see it.

And those of us who wanted to share it or comment, not allowed to do so. It was an incredible intervention in our election, right at the height of a presidential election and they meant to do it. They didn't accidentally do it, they meant to do it. They want to have this power. And this is why we've got to stand up to them.

Either the corporations are going to be in control, either these woke experts are going to be in control or the people are. It's one or the other. It's not both end. It's one or the other and we've got to make sure it's the people.

LEVIN: The book is "The Tyranny of Big Tech." "The Tyranny of Big Tech." It almost didn't get published, but it's out there now if you want to get it, any major bookstore or amazon.com. It'll be on sale.

Well, it is pre-ordered now. It is on sale early this week.

Senator, I watch these Big Tech companies. I am very concerned about people who disagree with the establishment or disagree with the Democratic Party. For instance, if you post a comment that disagrees with Dr. Fauci, you're likely to get dinged. If you -- even if you're an expert from Stanford or an expert from Oxford or an expert from Yale or Johns Hopkins, if your viewpoint doesn't comport with a government, stated viewpoint out of the Federal bureaucracy, you're likely to pay a price.

And they say they have these third parties who help review these things. Now, these third parties are hacks. They're not objective people, so we have this massive censorship machine going on. Then you have a little Parler that's trying to start up, and they all collude, and they all get together as if they're all on the phone with each other and they jump. They cut them off.

They don't make their sales available. They take them off their store. They take them off their platform. And if little Parler doesn't come back and say okay, Apple, what do you want me to do? And Apple says, you're going to do this, this, this, this and this, you're not going to come back.

If this doesn't rub Americans the wrong way, I don't think anything well, even putting aside monopoly and business and -- who are these bullies? These liberal, if not left-wing bullies to be telling everybody else how to conduct their business? It's anti-American. That's the bottom line, isn't it?

HAWLEY: It is. That is the bottom line. That is anti-American. It's anti- free speech. It's anti-First Amendment. And the reason that the left is cheering them on, Mark, and make no mistake, the left is cheering them on. You hear the Democrats sometimes talk about these companies. They love the power that these companies have, they love it.

They love the power over speech that Facebook and Twitter have, and they want them to do more. The left wants Facebook to censor more. They want Twitter to censor more. They want Google to censor more.

So there is a strong alliance between the left-wing in this country and these mega corporations, and you know, here's part of the reason for that. It is that the left can achieve with these companies what they could never do with government, because the First Amendment would actually stand in the way, thank goodness, if it were government that were explicitly trying to censor us and tell us what we could say.

But when they use -- when the left uses these mega monopolies to do it, well, then it is fine. And that's why they go out there and say, oh, the First Amendment doesn't apply to Facebook. The First Amendment doesn't apply to Google, so censor away, and they want to combine the power of government and the power of these corporations. And, boy, is that dangerous for free speech.

We haven't even talked about the dangers to competition. You know, it is a huge danger to competition and innovation, the things that we, conservatives, free market people believe in. But to speech and to our basic democratic principles, I mean, think of it this way, if the American people can't decide, if we can't decide what we want to read and not, if we can't decide what kind of news we want to see, and if we can't talk about it together. If I'm not allowed to share what I want to share in terms of, I think you ought to read this news story. I want to comment on this.

If there's some sensor out there who can help effectively shut me down anytime I express a contrary view, how is our democracy going to survive? And I think that's the challenge we face right now.

LEVIN: The book is "The Tyranny of Big Tech" We've got a lot more to cover.

We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

JILLIAN MELE, FOX NEWS CHANNEL CORRESPONDENT: Hello and welcome to "FOX News Live." I'm Jillian Mele.

Authorities say at least three people are dead after a boat that may have been part of a human smuggling operation capsized in Southern California. It happened just off the coast of San Diego this morning.

The Fire Department says 27 people were taken to hospitals with varying degrees of injuries. Officials believe everyone on board was accounted for, but crews continue to search for other possible survivors.

Meantime, new details are emerging from Saturday's deadly shooting in Green Bay, Wisconsin, which left three people dead including the gunman. Police are saying the shooter was after a specific victim, but upon realizing that person was not at the casino that night, the shooter then opened fire on co-workers and friends of the target.

Law enforcement also say they are still in the early stages of their investigation.

I'm Jillian Mele. Now back to LIFE, LIBERTY & LEVIN. Have a good night.

LEVIN: Welcome back. Senator Hawley, the Biden administration, the Democrats in Congress are completely out of control. They are massively increasing the size of government. We've never seen anything like this in our history. Massive deficit spending. Massive use of law enforcement in ways that concern me enormously.

They are pushing critical race theory, critical gender theory. The borders are wide open by design.

You see so many of our institutions being devoured by this radical agenda. You see so many people being crushed or closed down and institutions -- as a result of this radical agenda. And yet, we thought, I believe that the social sites that Big Tech would be the answer to some of this. In other words, you have Big Media and here you have this brand new technology where people can communicate with each other, where we can challenge Big Media, where we can challenge the iron fist of centralized government.

And here we have elections where they basically have in-kind contributions to the party that supports the state.

So let me ask you this question. I really do view these as in-kind contributions. You have Zuckerberg spreading around hundreds of millions of dollars to bring out the Democratic vote in Democratic strongholds. You have them, as you said, shutting down the Hunter Biden story, shutting down other stories, too. They're trying to intimidate even if they don't whack you. They're trying to intimidate people against giving their opinions and so forth.

We're not talking about the Klansmen. We're not talking about neo-Nazis. Although, Marxists are welcome. That's apparently the case. But you get the point.

So the Federal Election Commission, the S.E.C., the antitrust division, what are they doing? They all sitting on their hands?

HAWLEY: Yes, they have been sitting on their hands and that's part of the problem, Mark. It is that you've got the Democrats, they're happy, once again, to have these big companies out there doing their bidding, and so long as they do their bidding, so long as Facebook continues to censor conservatives and to promote Democrats, then they're basically fine with it, and they will be content to slap Facebook on the wrist every now and again, just to make sure that Facebook understands that the left can bring down the hammer on them if they don't do what they want.

But you mentioned just what these companies have done, what they did in the run up to the last election. Yes, they suppress those news stories and I think that that's an in-kind contribution, too, and I asked the Federal Election Commission to investigate whether Facebook and Twitter had basically contributed to the Biden Campaign by suppressing for days and weeks on end the Hunter Biden story.

But we also saw these big corporations and not just the Big Tech ones, we saw these big corporations work together to try to change our election laws in the months before the last election. And now they boast about it. They said, "Oh, we were saving democracy" going around state by state trying to get election laws changed in state after state in a way that they thought would favor Democratic candidates.

And now of course, you've got these same corporations who are trying to bully states like Georgia, and many other states across the country who want to enact election integrity measures. It's just -- it's really unbelievable, but in a way, it is predictable. Because once again, when you allow a monopoly power to gather up, then every time it's happened in our history, every time the people who have the power try to use it to push their own agenda to try to install their own politics and that's what the left is doing right now. They're using this monopoly power to try to run over us and run over the American people, and we can't allow it to happen.

LEVIN: So you see the corporatists, not capitalists. You see the corporatist, the crony capitalists, led by Big Tech, but certainly, you're right, clearly not just Big Tech, they're all bragging, they're all signing petitions and so forth.

You see what's happening with Big Government, it's getting bigger than anything we could have imagined. In fact, they're attacking capitalism more than the Communist Chinese attack capitalism. It's an amazing thing.

And then you have these Federal agencies, they really aren't doing their jobs. They're not even taking a look at what these big corporations are doing and wanting to do. And you have said, you know what, it's time for new politics. It's time for a new Republican Party. It's time for new politics. What do you have in mind?

HAWLEY: Well, for one thing, it's time that we actually restored some competition in our markets. You made a great point a second ago about corporatism versus capitalism.

You know, capitalism means free market, it means free competition. It means that you can start a business and have a shot. It means that if you're a worker, you can get a fair wage, you can go out there and compete on a playing field with other people. And you can use your talents to the best of your abilities and get compensated for it. That's capitalism. That's not what these companies want.

They want corporatism, which is where they get the handouts from government. They get the special deals with government, they get to set our trade policy, by the way, which means that they benefit and nobody else does. They get their sweetheart deals all around the world. They don't pay any taxes in this country. They don't invest in this country, but yet they get all the goodies from taxpayers.

That's what these Big Corporations led by Big Tech, that's what they want.

And I think as Republicans, we need to say, "Enough of that." We're not going to be ordered around by these corporatists anymore and we're not going to let them tell us that this is what the free market is. This isn't a free market.

We need to get back to free, robust competition. We need to cut these monopolies down to size and we need to get power back in the hands of the American people. That's what I mean by new politics. Put the people back in control, give working people in this country a say and a voice again.

And the way that you do that is you take power away from these folks who have amassed it by making them play by the same rules as everybody else. Let's have some good old fashioned competition.

LEVIN: All right, when we come back, my question to you is: these corporatists, they do have a big friend, it is called Communist China. What are we going to do about that?

The book is "The Tyranny of Big Tech."

We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

LEVIN: Welcome back, Senator Josh Hawley. The book is "The Tyranny of Big Tech." First of all, "The Tyranny of Big Tech." Are you getting any pushback yet? I mean, the book is coming out in the next day or two, you getting any pushback from Big Tech or Big Tech supporters about your book yet?

HAWLEY: Oh, you know, absolutely. We've seen it going back to January. As you referenced, Mark, I mean, Big Tech and the corporate media tried to cancel this book.

There was actually a Twitter campaign -- a Twitter a petition, I believe, it was a petition that started on Twitter that said to the corporate publisher, you've got to shut this thing down. You've got to cancel this thing, and I'm just grateful that there are still independent businesses out there, independent publishing houses, who are willing to say, we're not going to be cancelled, we believe in free speech.

But Big Tech has been trying to shut me off, to shut me up, and to shut me down for literally years now. This book is just the latest example.

But I refuse to be cancelled. I refuse to bow down to them. I refuse to bow to the woke mob. And I'm certainly not starting now.

LEVIN: Well, maybe they're getting a lot of their technical information from the Communist Chinese, whom they seem to like. Big Tech and Communist China, they make a lot of money over there. Apple makes a lot of money over there. These corporatists make a lot of money over there.

So they're busy signing petitions here, about the Georgia legislature and voter reform laws that are legitimate laws, while the Communist Chinese are rounding up two and a half million Uighur Muslims in their concentration camps.

Do of these -- some do, but a lot don't -- do some of these corporatists, they completely lack a conscience? I mean, how do you do business with countries that have prison camps and sterilization, assembly lines and rape and are slaughtering people? How do you even think about doing business with a country like that?

HAWLEY: I think it's because these corporatists believe and Big Tech believes that what's good for them is moral and what's good for them is right. And if they want to do it, it must be the right thing. That's on the same basis that they tell us that they know best about how to run this country because whatever their views are, are absolutely right and legitimate. And if you disagree, you're backwards, you're retrograde. You're a bigot. You fill in whatever name that you want. That's their view of things.

But you're absolutely right about China. Big Tech benefits big time from China. Apple produces many, many of its component parts and goods over there in China. It has critical supply chains in China. And why? Because it's cheap for them, because it's profitable for them.

They are willing to sell out American labor in order to go over and take advantage of exploited labor and sometimes, some cases outright, slave labor. And you look at Google and Facebook, they have both worked overtime to try to get into China. Both Google and Facebook were willing to censor their speech, censor American speech, censor the news at the behest of the Chinese government, if the government, if Beijing would allow them to come into China, and to operate there it is. It's unbelievable.

But it just goes to show you what they really care about at the end of the day is their own power. These companies want power and they want to tell us in America, what we can say and do while they're building their power around the globe.

LEVIN: It is so shocking to me what's going on in Communist China, they are our enemy. They're not our adversary. They're trying to overtake us.

They're trying to cut off significant geopolitical areas to us, military areas to us, withhold material from us. They've made it abundantly clear that they intend to jump over us in every respect possible. They're threatening us in the South China Sea.

They've destroyed Hong Kong. Now, they have their eyes on Taiwan. And these companies just keep playing along, rolling along. They're so unpatriotic, not all of them, but the ones that are doing it are unpatriotic.

I think about World War II, I think about all these fascistic and Marxist regimes in the past, companies would never do business with them. What has changed since 70 to 80 years ago and what's going on today, do you think?

HAWLEY: Well, I think these companies don't see themselves any longer as American companies. They don't really believe in America, they're globalists. And they believe that we should have a global order. They believe in the global economic order that they want to run, you know, whatever that means.

They want to be in charge of this global agenda and a global world and that's what they're most committed to. And so, you look at Facebook and you look at Google. Yes, they're nominally based in the United States, but they will tell you, they see themselves as global citizens. Their agenda is to have global influence and global power.

And at the end of the day, we've got to say to them, listen, to your point, China is not our friend, China is our enemy. And they need to pick a side, either they're going to be with the United States, these companies, or they're going to be with China and either they're going to be with American democracy and allow the people to rule or they're going to continue to try this heavy handed authoritarianism at home, which is really what they're doing with their suppression of speech, with their suppression of political viewpoints that they don't like, and that's why we've got to stand up to them.

LEVIN: The book is "The Tyranny of Big Tech." You can get it anywhere, amazon.com on Tuesday, it'll be in every major retail store in America.

We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

LEVIN: Welcome back, America. We have Senator Josh Hawley, "The Tyranny of Big Tech" is the book, it's a great book. I hope you'll grab a copy.

Now, Senator, you do talk about in your book, there's things that we, the people can do. We don't have a lot of time left, but what are some of the things we, the people could do?

HAWLEY: Well, number one, we can't allow Big Tech to tyrannize our homes. You know, I am a husband, I'm a father of three small children. I think one of the most important things parents can do is take control of those platforms, those phones, those computers, those tablets in your homes, and turn them off. You know, don't let your kids be on them all the time. Don't stay on them yourself all the time.

You know, take back control of your life so that not every piece of your life isn't involved with or on social media or these tech platforms. The more that we live our lives off of these devices and off of these platforms, the less control they have over us, number one.

Number two, we've got to break them up. I mean, at the end of the day, these are monopolies we have to break them up and this is what we need to do together politically. We've got to insist that we go after these big companies and break them up, restore competition and until we get real competition, Mark, back in our market, until we break up their power over our speech, over our lives, over our kids, we are going to be in danger and American democracy is going to be in danger.

So, we've got to take back our family life, we've got to take back our daily lives, we've got to say you can't run my life and I'm not going to live my whole life online. But we've also got to go after them and say, we are going to make you play by the rules, free and fair competition, break them up.

LEVIN: And there are other alternatives out there, there's smaller platforms where you won't necessarily have a hundred million or three billion people out there, but you can contribute to their growth, you can contribute to their support by searching them out on the internet, and so forth, oddly enough.

But I do think you're right, this is a role for government, because when people are attacking our fundamental liberties, and that's the bottom line here: free speech, really freedom of association when you consider these platforms, having duped us onto these platforms, stealing our data, becoming billionaires using our data, attracting us providing that information to God knows whom, and then treating us like we're in third grade, giving us Scarlet letters and censoring us and suspending us and banning a President of the United States, a former President of the United States, as if to completely dehumanize him? Who the hell do these people think they are?

When I watched them testify, Senator, I'm saying, who are these nerds? How did they get this power? They are billions and billions of dollars' worth, they have all this power. We gave it to them. Isn't that your point?

HAWLEY: Right. That's my point. We did give it to them. We've got to take it back and we can do it. And that's what we've got to do, Mark. We've got to take back this power for the American people and for our Constitution.

LEVIN: "The Tyranny of Big Tech," a really gutsy book, a very important book, substantively, I hope you folks will get your copy. It's at amazon.com and any major retail outlet.

Senator, stand strong, you have tens of millions of people who support you and God bless you, sir.

HAWLEY: Thank you, Mark.

LEVIN: We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

LEVIN: Welcome back, America. You know, there's precious few real patriots in Washington, D.C. Josh Hawley is clearly one of them.

But when I watched this hundred-day speech that Joe Biden gave, it reminds me of these communist regimes. They have these phony dates and marks, you know, five-year plans, 100-day speeches and so forth.

As I listen to this man ramble on about our faults and our imperfections and how he is going to fix us all and how he is going to save us from ourselves. I thought to myself, my God, do I miss Donald Trump? We have vaccines that have saved millions of people, thanks to Donald Trump.

We had a secure border, thanks to Donald Trump. We had cheap energy, thanks to Donald Trump. We had low inflation, thanks to Donald Trump.

He was pro military, pro-law enforcement, pro-family, pro-American worker.

What else? He understood that America isn't made up of systemically racist people. America is made up of systemically fabulous people, men and women of all backgrounds and diversity and tens of millions of people all around the world who want to join us.

Donald Trump understands the private sector. This is where we get inventions and growth and opportunities and jobs. It comes from we, the people, not them, the government.

You know, I got to thinking, in Donald Trump's first year of business, first year of business, he had more business and private sector experience than Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Kamala Harris and Chuck Schumer all combined. They have no private sector experience, not even at a 7-Eleven. Nowhere.

You listen to this Joe Biden speech. You've got to come to hate yourself, hate your fellow men.

But for government, more programs, more spending, more debt, more redistribution of wealth, more class warfare, more oppressed and oppressor. But for a government, we are a very bad people. And yet you listen to Joe Biden, he is a bit schizophrenic.

On the one hand, he says, you are systemically racist; on the other hand, he says, "We, the People," we can do these things, we can do these things.

His speech was written by a fifth grader, I think, and not a very intelligent one as a matter of fact.

Ladies and gentlemen, we are facing something we've never faced before, certainly not at this level, and not since the Civil War and that is the enemy within, people who hate this country. You didn't hear a single inspiring thing from Joe Biden about the American people, about our history, about our Constitution, about our unalienable rights. The words "individual liberty" never passed his lips, private property rights, entrepreneurship, free market capitalism, never. Not once.

Why? Because the man has been in Washington 50 years, and most of the people jumping up like clapping CEOs on the Democratic side, they have been in Washington forever for the most part, too.

The fact of the matter is, it's not just domestic, it is international.

Donald Trump, I was thinking, the first hundred days, Joe Biden. Donald Trump, the Abraham Accords, all the peace that was breaking out of the Middle East, completely undermined by Joe Biden.

Joe Biden is giving aid and comfort to the regime in Tehran that wants nuclear missiles that can aim and hit our country. Joe Biden who has backed off from the Communist Chinese. He is a pushover as far as they're concerned.

One enemy after another. They're the ones who are happy with Joe Biden's first hundred days. Not me. Not if you love this country, not if you believe in our capitalist system and the American people.

See you next time on LIFE, LIBERTY & LEVIN.

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