NOTICIAS

Washington D.C. — U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) joined Good Day Orlando to discuss Disney, Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, inflation, and immigration. See below for highlights and watch to the full interview here.

On Governor DeSantis’ decision to strip Disney of their tax-exempt status: 
 
“I don’t think Disney is immune from any criticisms that it receives, and, frankly I think it should always be questioned about whether they should have anything special, like being its own county… At the end of the day, you have a company that decided to…damage the state of Florida by lying about some bill the Florida legislature passed. 
 
“[Disney] seems to be willing to use its corporate power to speak out against the decisions of democratically-elected legislators in Florida but has no problem doing business all over the world in places that are very repressive. For example, Disney cruises go to all sorts of countries around the world where, frankly, homosexuality is criminalized, and yet they have no problem doing business with those governments. So that hypocrisy is always going to shine a spotlight on you and question whether you should have any special benefit from the state that you’re damaging with your lies. 
 
“But this is a complicated law that was written a long time ago, and I’m sure that extricating the state from it is not going to be easy. I imagine they’re going to have to pass other legislation to deal with the impacts that it could have, and it doesn’t take effect until next year. We’ll see what happens.”
 
On Elon Musk’s financial acquisition of Twitter and his promise to return free speech to the platform:
 
“The problem here is…that all the banning seems to be going in one direction…. Anyone who comes from the right of center, who has conservative views — if you’re a Republican, if you’re a conservative, if you’re a supporter of Donald Trump — your chances of getting banned, your chances of being silenced are substantially higher than anybody else’s. And I think that’s really the problem here.
 
“So you’ve got a situation where you have a private company, but they [have] also become sort of the new town square. These private companies, in many ways, are like utilities now. The amount of power concentrated in the hands of Facebook, Twitter, Google…, Apple, and Amazon, make[s] it a situation unlike anything we’ve ever seen. They have the power to squelch news stories, to destroy people, to silence views, to determine what’s true and what isn’t, even though they’re proven wrong later on, and there’s no recourse for it. And so I think there’s a lot of concern about that. And I think the meltdown you’re seeing is people that are afraid of losing the power to decide who gets to speak and who doesn’t.”
 
On the effect of China’s COVID lockdowns on inflation and the supply chain:
 
“We’re going to have another supply chain crisis because China is locked down. China is doing a COVID-zero policy, which is what I believe some leaders in America would have forced on us had we not had a democratic form of government, a republic that prevented them from doing it, and leadership like we’ve had in Florida to prevent that from happening. 
 
“But we depend too much on China. It’s very simple. We buy too many things that are made in China instead of made in the United States, and if not America, in Honduras or Guatemala or Haiti, in the Western Hemisphere, or even Japan for that matter. But we buy too many things from China. It gives them a lot of leverage over us. Today it’s because of a pandemic, and tomorrow it’ll be because they cut us off, because they’re about to invade Taiwan and they don’t want us to intervene. 
 
“I’ve been talking about this for a long time. Before the pandemic, [in 2019,] I issued a report from the Small Business Committee…that said we were dangerously dependent on China for things like medicine and high-tech components. We have got to have a strategy to get away from it. I’ve offered concrete ideas to do it. So far, the Biden Administration isn’t very interested in it.”
 
On the Biden Administration’s ongoing border crisis:
 
“Not only should [Title 42] remain in place, but we have to begin to enforce it. 
 
“Our border is being overrun. It’s as simple as that. This administration and the radical left wing that controls this White House are inviting people to come here illegally by demonizing border officials, by not building the wall, by telling people they’re not going to deport anybody who comes here, and by offering benefits via non-government organizations who, when you come here illegally, provide you [with] benefits…. That has to stop. We are being overrun. 
 
“I’m not against immigration. I support immigration. But it has to be legal and through a normal process, not this chaos. Because this chaos means our border is being overrun, not just by people — 7,000 a day — but by drugs. They are flooding our country with fentanyl. We have to stop this.”