Fox News "Sunday Futures" - Transcript: Interview with Sen. Ted Cruz

Interview

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BARTIROMO: Senator Ted Cruz joins me now with reaction to the White House's brazen censorship admission.

Senator, it's good to see you. Thanks very much for being here.

So, was this collusion?

CRUZ: It was undoubtedly collusion.

It's good to see you this morning, Maria.

It's striking. Since that interview that you just aired a minute ago, where I laid out that the Fauci e-mails really showed how big tech was in bed with the Biden administration, with the government, censoring on behalf of the government, there have been two significant developments.

Number one, Donald Trump filed a class-action lawsuit against big tech, against Facebook and Twitter and big tech, based on exactly the theory you and I discussed, that they were engaged in censorship that is unconstitutional, that is contrary to the First Amendment.

And the theory behind President Trump's lawsuit is exactly the theory you and I discussed.

Now, the challenge his lawsuit faces is the following. The First Amendment applies only to government action. The beginning of the first words of the First Amendment our,"Congress shall make no law." And so it applies to the federal government. It has since been incorporated and applied against the state government.

And so the argument that a lot of the talking heads put out immediately after President Trump filed his lawsuit is, they said, well, Facebook is not the government, Twitter is not the government, so this lawsuit will get thrown out.

Well, the Supreme Court has long recognized a line of cases that, when government uses a private company as a tool, as an arm to implement a government policy, in this instance, when government explicitly asks a private monopoly, censor the following speech that we disagree with, that that private company can be treated as a state actor.

And I got to say, watching Jen Psaki this week, it is amazing. I kind of wonder if Jen Psaki is on the payroll of Donald Trump, because her press conference strengthened President Trump's lawsuit against big tech. It makes clear that everything we thought about the Biden administration, about their willingness to trample on free speech, to trample on the Constitution, to use government power to silence you, everything we feared they might do, they are doing and worse.

And I think President Trump's lawsuit got much, much stronger this week.

BARTIROMO: Yes, I mean, we're going to talk with Mark Levin coming up in the program. And he said Psaki's admission makes Trump's big tech lawsuit a slam dunk, that she should be a defendant, she should go and testify in that suit.

CRUZ: So, let me give you an example, Maria, to understand it.

Imagine if the Biden administration went to, say, a private paramilitary organization and said, we're going to ask you to knock down people's doors and take their guns, and we're going to ask you to do this explicitly.

And then we're also going to pass a law to immunize you, so, if this private organization kicks down your front door, takes all your firearms, we're going to give you immunity for many civil liability.

BARTIROMO: Yes.

CRUZ: Now, nobody in their right mind would argue that private organization behaving essentially as storm troopers trying to confiscate guns, nobody would argue that that is not state action...

BARTIROMO: Yes, OK.

CRUZ: ... and that that doesn't violate the Second Amendment.

What the Biden administration is doing with Facebook and Twitter and Google is the same thing. They're going to monopolists and saying, you are our tool to censor views we disagree with.

BARTIROMO: Yes.

CRUZ: And, by the way, what's ludicrous is, they have been censoring views that we now know are true.

BARTIROMO: Exactly.

CRUZ: For months, they were censoring, for example, where the virus originated.

BARTIROMO: Oh, we have a whole list of them, yes. Right.

Hold on. Hold that thought, Senator. We have got a whole list of them. I want to talk more about this and other subjects when we come right back.

We're talking with Senator Ted Cruz. Stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BARTIROMO: Welcome back.

We are back with Texas Senator Ted Cruz.

Senator, we were just going through all of the censorship that we have been seeing. It's really disturbing to me that Facebook and all these other social media companies are censoring information that's actually true.

They really are letting down the American people, right before the election censoring the Hunter Biden story, banning The New York Post from Twitter, and then going on to censor early treatments of COVID. We had on Senator Ron Johnson and Dr. Pierre Kory, who went through things like ivermectin, which was off-patent, and nobody was making any money on it because it's off-patent.

But it actually could have been a very important treatment for early days of COVID. They took all of those posts down. They wouldn't allow you to talk about hydroxychloroquine. I mean, this is not just censorship for politics. They're actually letting the American people down in so many ways.

Why? Is this the Communist Party's influence?

CRUZ: Well, listen, you're exactly right that the censorship has been over and over again silencing things that are true.

They banned, for example, any arguments that the coronavirus originated in a Chinese government lab in Wuhan, China. It now appears the overwhelming weight of the evidence suggests that's, in fact, where it originated, in a Chinese government lab.

You mentioned The New York Post. As you know, I do a podcast every week called "Verdict With Ted Cruz." I just filmed a podcast about an hour ago where I sat down with the editor of the editorial page of The New York Post. And we talked about their story in the fall of 2020 about Hunter Biden's laptop. They broke that story.

And big tech silenced it, took it down. And we now know that story was true. You covered at the top of your show how that story was true. And I got to tell you that the New York Post editorial page editor told me that, even when he tried to direct-message the story to other people -- people were asking,"Hey, what's the story?" -- big tech would block his direct messages, because they wanted to silence a story.

The only justification for silencing the story is that it hurt Joe Biden and it helped Donald Trump. And big tech was behaving as the partisan enforcers to try to skew an election. And they did, in fact, skew an election. And they're continuing now to censor information if it disagrees with the official government line.

I got to say it's the same thing you see happening in a communist country like China, in a communist country like Cuba, where, if there are facts that are contrary to the government orthodoxy, the dictatorship prevents you from sharing the facts. Big tech is doing the same damn thing here in the United States.

And it is a frightening threat, not just to free speech, but for the ability of the American people to learn the truth on a host of issues.

BARTIROMO: Yes, I'm very disturbed.

I want to get to Cuba. I know that you have witnessed the effects of this communist regime firsthand with your father and your aunt.

But, first, on China, I mean, Joe Biden says he's the one leader that knows Xi Jinping best on the world stage, and that Xi Jinping truly believes he's going to acquire America and overtake America within 15 years.

I mean, they're following our political debates. They're piling on. Do the progressives understand the dangerous situation they're putting this country in, that the CCP has goals, their Belt and Road Initiative, their civil-military fusion? They want to overtake the United States.

Is the Biden administration enabling it with all of this censorship?

CRUZ: So, unfortunately, they are.

And one of the sad realities today is, the Democratic Party is structurally pro-China. The Democratic Party today is funded by -- their biggest funders are big tech. And big tech is in bed with the Chinese communists. Among the biggest funders of the Democratic Party are the giant corporations.

And many of the giant corporations, the Fortune 50 and Fortune 100, are in bed with the Chinese communists. And you look at the Biden administration just six months into it. Joe Biden named as his U.N. ambassador an individual who last year gave a paid speech for a Confucius Institute paid for by the Chinese communist government praising the Chinese communist government.

Just a couple of months in, the Biden administration reversed the State Department policy. And they now ban Taiwan, any Taiwanese official from displaying a Taiwanese military uniform, from displaying a Taiwanese flag on U.S. government property. Why? Because it offends the communist government overlords in China.

And I got to tell you, we really saw just how pro-China today's Democrats are in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where we were debating Joe Biden's Green New Deal executive order. I introduced an amendment that said, all right, you can't buy electric cars from the region in China where the Uyghurs are being held in concentration camps, are being tortured, are being murdered.

BARTIROMO: Yes.

CRUZ: You can't buy electric cars that were made with Chinese slave labor. And every single Senate Democrat on the committee voted no, because they're much more committed to their radical environmental agenda than they are to not funding slave labor from the Chinese communist government.

BARTIROMO: Unbelievable.

Senator, you have got a lot of people behind you. I know you're going to be speaking at the Turning Point USA Student Action Summit this afternoon. We're going to be covering it on FOX Nation. So we look forward to those comments.

Before you go, real quick on your colleagues in Texas blowing off their work, getting on a flight, so that they don't have -- they don't give the Republicans a quorum with their new voting laws in Texas.

Now we understand some of them have COVID. Real quick on that.

CRUZ: Listen, what they're doing is a political stunt.

I think it is sad just how much today's Democratic Party has decided that voter fraud is integral to helping them try to win elections. This political stunt is going to fail. It is clear -- there is clear legal authority under the Texas Constitution to arrest legislators who flee the state trying to defeat a quorum.

The governor has rightly said he will call special session after special session.

BARTIROMO: Yes.

CRUZ: These guys are going to come back to Texas. They will get arrested. They will get physically put on the floor of the legislature.

And I believe the legislature will do its job and pass commonsense election integrity laws.

BARTIROMO: Unbelievable.

Senator, thank you. Thank you so much, Senator Ted Cruz.

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