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U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) joined The Adam Carolla Show. See below for highlights and listen to the full interview here.
 
On politics in California:
 
“It’s sad because it’s a beautiful place, but it’s basically like what happens when you take every woke and crazy idea that some professor at a college campus or some activist nutcase thinks is good, and you turn it into public policy. You say, ‘Let’s get rid of the police department, let’s not arrest people that commit crimes. Let’s provide these trailers for people that are homeless right there on the street in front of people’s homes. Let’s turn our schools into indoctrination camps. Let’s raise taxes to the point where you can’t live anymore. Let’s be a state that welcomes people coming illegally into our country and actually provide them benefits that citizens don’t have.’ 
 
“You take all these ideas that sound really good at the faculty club, and you turn it into public policy. And then you ruin a state that, frankly, 30 years ago was something that a lot of Americans wanted to be a part of, and there’s a lot of glamor attached to it. It’s sad and hopefully that’ll change. But all of this is going to take some time, and it isn’t going to happen as long as [Gavin Newsom] is the governor.”
 
On the new divide in American politics:
 
“I actually don’t think that [what we see in American politics now] is traditional partisanship. For the last 30 or 40 years, most of my life, American politics has operated within a consensus. There’s a left guardrail, right guardrail. We have different ideas and one side thinks taxes should be a little higher, the other side thinks there should be less regulation. But generally [we have] operated in this consensus. That paradigm has completely shifted. The Democratic Party has become the party of affluent progressives and Marxist misfit activists. They’ve taken over the party. 
 
“And so you have millions of Americans—many of whom have been Democrats, voted for Democrats, union members, what have you—but they’re working people and they’re like, ‘You know, I’d be a little liberal on some issues, but I’m not insane. I still have common sense. I still believe in things like reality.’ And they see a party that doesn’t just ignore them and their concerns, but prioritizes all of these ideas that belong to a small group of people that have a lot of power—the elite group of affluent people—but they don’t live on the same planet and their ideas don’t work for real people. In fact, many times these ideas aren’t just bad ideas. They hurt working people. They hurt everyday people. So everyday people are having their concerns ignored and their common sense constantly violated by the political party that that movement has captured. 
 
“Now, that hopefully will change too. I think we’re a stronger country when we have two political parties that disagree on a left-right spectrum but operate within the constraints of common sense and reality. We don’t have that right now. And unfortunately, the Democratic Party has been captured by this element that is just not the majority of the country.”
 
On radical influences in the Republican and Democrat parties:
 
“My last name is Rubio. So if they were setting policy based on the Klan in the Republican Party, I probably wouldn’t have won any elections…. 
 
“There are people throughout the American political spectrum that have all kinds of ideas, including people who claim to be Republicans, but I don’t agree with their ideas. And in some cases, I think their ideas might be dangerous. 
 
“But that’s not what we’re talking about here. What we’re talking about here is a Democratic Party whose donor base and activist base and, frankly, staff base—the people that work their campaigns—come from a different world. They’re generally more affluent, increasingly non-minority. Not that that is necessarily the issue. But they claim to be a party that defends the minority, but their views are largely the views of whiter, more affluent people that live in some bubbles around this country. These are people that $5 gas doesn’t bother as much. They have the luxury to prioritize some other issues. 
 
“For the people in the real world, the everyday people, small business owners, they’re trying to raise a family and work hard. They may have opinions on some of those issues, but there’s no way those issues will ever become a priority when you have 50, 60% of Americans now living paycheck to paycheck. It’s not just inflation. It’s inflation on the essentials. One thing is a flat screen TV [being] too expensive. I’m not talking about [that]. We’re talking about food, housing, clothing, gasoline, now back to school supplies. That’s the core there. 
 
“And we’re not even having a debate about those topics. That’s the bigger problem. The people who control Congress, [who] are Democratic leaders, that’s not the way they prioritize. For the last two years, they prioritized a fake voting rights crisis in Georgia. They prioritize social issues, transgender rights, all these things that may matter to some people, but they’re not the priority…. And that is where I think you start to lose touch with people.”
 
On why the Democrat Party neglects working Americans:
 
“[Everyday Americans], by and large, are not the people that are donating on ActBlue. They’re not the people that are protesting in the streets and threatening to burn down cities every time they don’t get their way. They’re not the people that are blocking traffic over climate change. They’re not the people that work these campaigns. They’re not the activist base that claims to represent underrepresented people. And that’s where the base and the energy of the Democratic Party has come from. That’s what has dominated it. It is dominated by people that are not at Home Depot. They live in the Upper West Side. They live in East Hollywood. That’s where they live. And frankly, they have enough affluence to make these things a priority.
 
“And then you have a corporate mainstream media that goes along with it, because many of the people that run that, not to mention corporate America, agree with some of those things. So they prioritize these issues. 
 
“You talk about transgender rights. I think every American is entitled to decency, to respect, to the basic equality under the law that we’re all entitled to. But 0.5% of this country is not entitled to change everything for the other 99.5% of the nation. And yet that’s the argument they’re making on that issue. 
 
“Along with the fact that it just ignores some pretty basic truths, some common sense. It hasn’t just changed policy, it’s changed language. The [Associated Press] and other major entities now refuse to write ‘pregnant women.’ They write ‘pregnant people.’ As of the time of this taping—I just checked right before I came on—according to the experts, throughout 5,500 years of recorded history, every person who’s ever been pregnant happened to be a biological woman. And maybe that one day that will change. But so far it has not. And so when we talk about ‘pregnant people,’ it’s a fiction. But the language has changed. 
 
“These guys have a brand new language. There are words I do not understand, like ‘Latinx.’ I thought ‘Latinx’ was a band or something, some club. I’d never heard that term in my life except from people in Washington. That is a problem.”
 
On the Democrats’ radical approach to crime:
 
“Maybe ‘Defund the Police’ was the beginning of it. But I think that the most damaging thing now…has been the rise of these prosecutors across the country who unilaterally decided not to prosecute entire categories of crime. It’s very simple, going back to common sense. If you will not arrest criminals, then they will be on the street. And the message that you’re sending if you don’t arrest people is: ‘We’re not going to punish crime. There’s no consequences for it.’ We start to look like the movie The Purge. Because you’re basically telling people these things you won’t prosecute. 
 
“Plus you’re releasing them. And one of the reasons why mandatory sentences—and I’m not saying that all is perfect—but [one of the reasons] mandatory sentences work is because they take people who have a proven record of and tendency to commit crimes, career criminals, and [they] put them away. You are removing the supply of criminals on the street. But if you’re arresting someone and immediately releasing them back into the street, and then after that you’re dropping the charges, you create not just an incentive and the capability of that person to create more crimes, but you’ve actually sent a message to a bunch of other people that there are no consequences for certain crimes.
 
“That creates the spirit of criminality that begins to spread in ways that are disastrous. Every day brings stories of something you never would have seen 10 years ago, but now you do.”
 
On Joe Biden’s collaboration with the far left:
 
“I don’t think that this is anything like what [Joe Biden] was 20 years ago when he was in the Senate. It’s also not the same party. So I think there’s two things. His campaign was that he was going to be a bridge between the past and the future, like a caretaker. He didn’t promise to be some revolutionary leader. He promised to basically be a guy who would bring everything back to normal, settle everything down as America transitioned from one era to the other. Instead, what he’s learned upon his election is his office is staffed by people from the new Democrat Party, the modern Democrat Party. 
 
“The activists that generate the energy in their party are insisting upon these things. You have people coming to you and saying: ‘We’ve got to listen to these people because they’re the ones that got us here. They’re the ones that knocked on doors or the people that gave us money.’ And so the first thing out of the gate is $1.9 trillion of spending, which even Democrat economists were telling them was going to ramp up inflation. If you don’t create more supply…, but more demand and more government money…, [you get] higher prices. That’s what happened. 
 
“Then they pivoted to this voting rights issue. Again, another thing insisted upon by the radicals in the Democratic Party. And then he went as far as to do something really uncharacteristic of Joe Biden throughout his career, [which was] to accuse everyone who opposed that law of being no better than George Wallace and the Jim Crow-era leaders of the 1960s. Really outrageous, over-the-top stuff. 
 
“From there, he proceeded to try to pass Build Back Better, which was basically a hodgepodge of every far-left pipe dream, all thrown and cobbled together into one bill. Even now, this bill [they] are putting forward cynically—they call it the Inflation Reduction Act, it isn’t—it raises a bunch of taxes on a lot of people that aren’t rich and businesses that aren’t big. And it’s going to use it to fund a bunch of Green New Deal projects, not to mention tackle urgent issues like racist highways and more trees…. [And it will] subsidize these electric cars that most Americans will not be driving any time in the near future.
 
“Meanwhile 96, 97% of the automobiles in America get no help as a result of this. All of it because [Joe Biden] is now the head of a modern Democratic Party. And from a staffing activist perspective, they are all from the far left. That Democratic Party [of the] 80s, 90s is gone. It’s just not there anymore.”
 
…
 
“I think people [have a] right to believe whatever they want, and we have a republic to work out those differences. But these [far-left Democrats] want to change the concept of true and not true, right and wrong. What words we can use, who’s allowed to speak, and what you’re allowed to say. They even want to change [what comedians are] able to tell jokes about, which defeats the purpose of comedy. The only people that you’re allowed to offend are Trump supporters and white men. It’s not going to be very funny after a while.”
 
On Cuba:
 
“Here’s the way I would describe Cuba. They signed up for an economic model that doesn’t…just not work, it’s really catastrophic. There’s no other country in the world—not even Venezuela, which is really more of a corrupt narco-state than it is a Marxist one—they’re the only people still following this Marxist textbook, which clearly does not work, but they can’t abandon it. 
 
“They don’t want to be a prosperous country. They just need to provide [a] level of prosperity just high enough for their people to be happy and calm and not be angry at the government and not have everyone leave. But they can’t. They’re going to have to open up their economy for that to happen, but the reason why they don’t want to open up the economy is because when you open up the economy, you begin to lose control over people. They may not have much, but if everything you have is provided by the government—your education, your limited food, your medicine, and everything you have—you depend on the government for it. And they have a tremendous amount of leverage over you. 
 
“That’s what’s happening now. They had hoped that this opening with Obama, [which] proved to be a disaster, would allow them to create a little bit of economic activity, but that they would control [it]. It was never designed to advance [everyday] people’s lives. ‘Let’s just make sure they eat enough so they don’t protest, then they don’t all leave.’ Well, none of that has worked out. 
 
“That’s been exacerbated by COVID and the loss of tourism. Russians are a big part of their tourism. They’re not traveling a lot these days, Russians. So the result is that they’re in a total catastrophe. 
 
“Here’s something most people don’t realize. A significant percentage of the people who are presenting themselves at the southern border and crossing are Cuban. They go to Nicaragua, which allows them to travel without a visa. And then they make that trek towards the border. And already this year alone, for seven months of this year, almost eight months of this year, more people have come to the U.S. illegally from Cuba…than did throughout the entire Mariel boatlift, which was a traumatic moment in the early 80s. 1–2% of the country has left just in the last year…. And these are the people that are young and healthy enough to survive a journey such as this. 
 
“It’s perhaps the most difficult time in Cuba’s history, even worse than when the Soviet Union collapsed. And they just have people there that are incompetent. You can be incompetent or you can be a Marxist, but if you’re an incompetent Marxist, that’s a disastrous combination.”
 
On the Democrats’ handling of the border crisis:
 
“‘Fences don’t work and the National Guard doesn’t work.’…That was their argument when Trump tried to do it. ‘Don’t send the National Guard, that’s not what their job is. We don’t need a fence, it doesn’t really work.’ On January 6th—it was a terrible day, no doubt about it—what did they put up around the Capitol? Fences. Immediately, within 12 hours, there were fences around this place. And for a month and a half, we had National Guard [troops] from all over the country sleeping here and on full-time duty here. So I guess fences and National Guard don’t work on our border, but if the Capitol and the people who work here feel threatened, it does work. 
 
“The second thing about the border is pretty simple, and that is if people believe that, if they get in, they’re going to be allowed to stay, they are going to come. And they believe it because it’s true. These are human beings. They respond to incentive and word of mouth. 
 
“This is not a theory. I didn’t read about it in the latest edition of some magazine. I know people who have relatives that are coming illegally. And the reason is simple. They know that if they come across the border and they turn themselves in, they will be processed. They will be given a notice to appear at some future court hearing, and they will be released. They will be handed over to some charity, and that charity will give them a cash card and will transport them to the city where their relatives are. And then they’re gone. And people know it. These people call back home and they say, ‘Hey, we made it,’ and more people will come. So it is very simple. They believe that if they come in, they’ll be allowed to stay. 
 
“And there’s the perception [of openness]. If Trump was hard on the border, Biden said, ‘I’m gonna do the opposite of Trump.’ The word got out in every country where people wanted to come here, that it was going to be easier to come, and if you came here there was actually going to be some change in the law in the future that would allow you to get legalized. It created an incentive for people to come. That’s what’s happening.
 
“If we announce tomorrow, ‘Anyone who wants to come to America can come,’ at least 100 million people will try to come. That’s the starting point. So we have to have a system that decides who can come, when they can come, and how they can come. And if you follow that process, we will always be a country that welcomes immigrants through a process that Americans have decided is good for our country at that time in our history. But if you don’t follow that process, you shouldn’t be allowed to stay. And some of these are very sad stories. But like every country in the world, we have to deal with it.
 
“You ask what’s the endgame for Biden? He doesn’t have one. The problem is there are activists in that party who believe we should not have a border. They may give lip service to it for political purposes, but they think borders are artificial, that we’re all citizens of the world, and that people should be able to live wherever they want. That’s [what] they truly believe. Some of them argue that openly, and that’s why they talk about abolishing [Immigration and Customs Enforcement]. And even others will say, ‘I believe we should have immigration laws, we just shouldn’t enforce them,’ which is the same as saying, ‘Let’s not have [a border].’
 
On Hispanic voters’ shift away from the Democrat Party:
 
“I’ve said this for a long time: For most Americans of Hispanic descent, their primary identity isn’t their ethnicity. It’s a big part of your identity. It’s a big part of my identity. You know, we celebrate Christmas on the 24th, not the 25th. We eat a roast pig on the 24th. The music people might listen to is different and so forth. But their primary identity is they’re a worker, they’re a parent, they’re a husband, they’re a wife, they’re a neighbor, they’re a small business owner. That is their primary identity. 
 
“And they’re the ones paying the price [for illegal immigration]. It’s their hospitals that have long waits when a lot of people come into a place. It’s their schools that get overcrowded. It’s their labor markets that get flooded and that they have to [compete in]. It’s their communities that get destabilized and social services that get overrun. These people aren’t coming to this country and moving to Beverly Hills. They’re not coming to this country and moving to the Upper West Side of Manhattan, or they’re not moving to the Hamptons in the summer. They’re moving into Hispanic communities that immediately pay the price for this chaos. 
 
“And on top of that, [Hispanics] care about the things that matter to everyday people: the price of gas, schools trying to turn their sons into daughters, this notion that we can tax our way into prosperity, and how much it costs to buy clothes. And all of those things are being ignored by the Democratic Party. That’s why I think you’re beginning to see this change in voting patterns. It’s not because they’re Hispanic, it’s because they’re working-class.”
 
On how Democrats misunderstand Hispanics:
 
“I think [Democrats] confuse a labor leader or an immigration rights activist with the Hispanic community…. They think people who are the face of the immigration rights movement, or claim to be the face of the immigration movement, are somehow representative of the broader community. My parents were immigrants. My wife’s parents were immigrants. I live in a community in Miami-Dade County…[where] all my neighbors are [immigrants]. And at the end of the day, I know this experience firsthand. And there has to be a process for people to come here. And I would add this: [the average Hispanic voter] is also a working-class voter. 
 
“A real world example of it is—speaking from personal experience and Hispanic background—one of the most tragic things that can happen in a working-class Hispanic family is that a son or a daughter grows up, goes away to school, gets married, and doesn’t come back, and you only see them a couple of times a year. That’s like a catastrophe for them. They want their kids to succeed. They want you to find this great job and pursue your dreams. But why can’t you do it here in Miami? Even though in Miami we don’t have the space industry, we don’t have Silicon Valley or what have you, and that’s what you want to work in. So what’s happening is, as people are finding, their kids are growing up, they’re getting upwardly mobile, going to college, graduating—they can’t afford to live with them. They can’t live there because the cost of living has gotten so high, and they have to move away.
 
“That’s the kinds of things that [Hispanic] people worry about on a daily basis. You want your family close to you, that matters to them. The fact that you don’t see your kids every day or every weekend is unthinkable. It’s your support network…. I know people that are working-class, and they can afford all kinds of things because they’ve made some money, but they’re working-class in their values. And the only people who [they] leave their kids with is a cousin or an aunt or their grandmother to watch their kids. And if somebody in my family can’t watch your kids, you’re not going on that trip. That’s a very working-class thing. And when you force people to move away from their family, it really makes it hard on them. And that’s happening in a lot of parts of this country where the cost of living for a lot of young people has become prohibitive. They cannot start families. They can’t afford to live in these communities. They have to move. And that’s part of the anxiety.”
 
On the future of American politics:
 
“I think it’s impossible [to predict the politics of the future]. I’m not trying to be evasive. The politics today is so dynamic. The world is so dynamic. If I had been sitting here with you…[in 2014], and I would have said…: ‘Donald Trump’s going to be president and we’re going to have this global pandemic that’s going to shut everything down. And…on January 6th of 2021, [the Capitol is] going to be breached by people unhappy with the election result.’ And I can go on down the list: ‘And we’re going to live in a country where words have been changed and you can no longer use certain terms, where suddenly we’re going to see in sports men…competing against young women and winning and everyone’s pretending like there’s no difference there.’ You would’ve said: ‘That’s not possible. Not in eight years. That cannot happen.’ That’s what’s happened in just the last eight to 10 years. That’s how much the world has changed.
 
“And I think you’re going to see more of it, because what’s happening is that an era is ending. This post-Cold War era where everyone was told history is over, the Soviet Union collapsed, everyone’s going to become a democratic republic with free markets and [it’s] going to make everything perfect, that didn’t work out. And now people are realizing countries actually have national identities. Like the Chinese. They care about the free market—as long as it’s good for China. Because they’re nationalists about China. Many countries around the world are starting to figure out: ‘This free market stuff doesn’t work for us. It works for us—except if we really need something and don’t know how to make it, and the people who know how to make it won’t send it to us.’ The world is being reimagined…. 
 
“I hate socialism. I think the free market is generally the right response to all of this. But there are some things countries have to be able to make. And if you get rid of these things and you stop creating the jobs, not only are you dependent on a foreign country, you leave a lot of people stuck with no good jobs for them to have. They’re not, at 49 years of age, going to learn how to code and move to Silicon Valley and go work for a tech company. That creates societal upheaval. 
 
“That’s a long answer to a short question. The bottom line is, I don’t know [what the future holds]. I don’t know, other than to tell you that…the Democratic Party…[is] going to have to go through some painful losses to be able to reinvent themselves. And I tell Republicans all the time…, we should not assume [our newfound popularity is] because people love us and agree with us on everything. What we do have is an opportunity to create this new American consensus behind a new American majority of people who just want government to make common-sense decisions that are focused on the priorities that matter to them. And one of those, I think, is to return as much power as we can to the place where it belongs, and that is to local governments and state governments, because those are leaders you can influence on a daily basis, as opposed to someone far away in Washington that’s never even visited your community, much less represented it.”
 
On January 6th:
 
“If people committed crimes on that day, they should be charged for it. At the end of the day, whether some people have been overcharged or undercharged, I don’t know. I don’t know the details of every person that came here. But we have rules. We’re a law and order country. We believe in rule and equality under the law. And you’ve got to follow those rules. And it is simply illegal to storm into the United States Capitol and try to disrupt the function of government. It’s called chaos and anarchy. And I don’t care whose side you’re on, I’d be against it. 
 
“The difference between me and some of my Democratic colleagues is they wouldn’t say the same thing in the summer of 2020, when there were people burning places in the streets and people were dying and police cars would be set on fire. Over 1,000 police officers were injured. And people died. It was one of the largest losses of property in American history with the arson and all that sort of thing. They weren’t saying it for that. They had no hearings on that…. In fact, we were told that that was what happens when people are unhappy, and that that was the language of people who were desperate…, treated unjustly. 
 
“It just wasn’t so. There were people marching during the day, and I didn’t agree with what they were saying about ‘Defund the Police.’ But the people that were showing up at night were a totally different group. These were anarchists, fascists, haters that hate America, and they were trying to burn places down and harm people and nothing was done about it…. I’m against political violence. We have a republic and we have elections to decide these things. And I’ll say it no matter whose side you are on and who you voted for. The other side won’t do that.”
 
On how Democrats ignore left-wing political violence:
 
“They’ve gone around for two years talking about how evil these people on the Supreme Court are. Some of them are being accused of being the…American Taliban equivalent. So a guy gets on an airplane and flies halfway across the country with the clear intent of murdering Justice Kavanaugh and, now we learn, at least one or two other justices, to fundamentally change the court. It was a news story for a day, a day and a half, but we haven’t had the obligatory CNN two-hour special investigation report, documentary. 
 
“I’m talking about an assassination, a targeted assassination. Nothing. We heard about it. It was recorded barely. And then it’s been talked about a little bit, but it has not dominated the news. And I think that’s a very significant thing that happened. 
 
“And we still have people once, twice a week outside the homes of Supreme Court justices protesting. Not only is it illegal to try to influence and intimidate a judge into making a decision, but it’s also a nuisance. And the governor of the state of Maryland has allowed it. It continues. And now even the neighbors who are pro-choice are complaining about it because these are nasty people saying terrible things and kids can’t go out. 
 
“It’s that double game. There’s two rules. If you’re on the right, or what they identify as the right, then these things are deserved and they’re not going to condemn it. If it’s on the other side, then they’re not going to say much about it or ignore it or in some cases justify it. I think people see through it. I really do. I think people see through it. I can’t describe to you how powerful the bubble that the force field in Washington is. These people live here, they work here, and they think the rest of the country is thinking, talking about what we’re talking about and focused on what they’re talking about right now. And they think that their positions are majority positions and their priorities are majority priorities. They are not….”
 
On what it means to be part of a nation:
 
“What I think we’ve lost is the concept of what a nation is. At its core, what a nation is, is people who maybe don’t agree on everything, but the one thing they agree on is they agree to live together under the same rules. And they have a process for deciding what those rules are. And they may not be 100% where you want those rules to be, but you have a process. And as long as your voice is heard and you have a chance to influence it and maybe change it in the future, you agree to live under the same set of rules. 
 
“Where you lose a nation is when one group says: ‘Well, we believe that we should be a people who all live under the set of rules that I decide