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Washington, D.C. — U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) joined the Megyn Kelly Show. See below for highlights and watch the full interview here. 
 
On Doctor Fauci: 
 
“Well, I think like anybody in public office, they need to maintain that trust at any turn. You saw the answers right there and that segment leading in. It makes me very queasy to see a public official like Dr. Fauci, who is being relied upon by the President and by many people, is sort of the leading authority on what our country should do about it. He’s asked a very specific question, and that is, when these people came to you early on, did they tell you this looks like it might have come out of a lab accident or whatever? He says, well, that’s a personal attack and just refused to answer the question or address it frontally. If the answer to those questions were, there was suspicion early on we looked at it and everybody ruled it out, then he should have said that, but instead he wouldn’t answer that specific question. 
 
“So your question is about trust. I don’t know how you see an answer like that, where someone diverts into the realm of a political spin and leaves that feeling more trustful about what he’s saying on this or frankly, all these other things. And I say this with no great pleasure because I don’t think it’s good for our country to have a leading health official like Dr. Fauci to have such low credibility in the eyes of so many Americans at this point… 
 
“Dr. Collins is no longer in the post. He’s retired, and I imagine Dr. Fauci will retire fairly soon as well. How he remains in the post is pretty straightforward… he has established himself in the eyes of this administration, a Democratic congress and much of the mainstream media as a someone who cannot be questioned as sort of a czar over COVID, that any and that any sort of scrutiny and any sort of hard questions of him is denial of COVID, denial of this, that or the other, anti-science. So I think he’s positioned and insulated himself in a way that a lot of these people end up doing, and this is very common…  
 
“Science is very complicated and they know that. And so therefore, they believe that people in their position should not be questioned, because they don’t have the time to explain it to people. And if it’s an answer they don’t like, they simply tell you, ‘Listen, you don’t need to know because you wouldn’t understand,’ and that’s how they get away with it. As I said, he survives because he’s being protected.”
 
On Congress questioning Doctor Fauci: 
 
“Committees can structure their own rules, so let’s say Republicans were in charge in the House or in the Senate, there’s nothing in the law or the Constitution that says it has to be eight minutes or 10 minutes or 12 minutes… One of the typical strategies that’s used up here by veterans of Capitol Hill testimony is they just delay for time. You ask them a simple question, they go on a two minute rant. They know you only have five or seven minutes, and they never get to answering your question. And then if you try to interrupt them and get to the point, the chairman may interject and say let them answer the question. 
 
“So these are tactics that are used, and I imagine these are tactics. I’m sure [Fauci] went into this hearing knowing this was coming and had a game plan for it. And if he could just hold on for five or six minutes, he would survive that round of questions. And but I think the way to get around it is to have committees that basically say like they used to do. I mean, it wasn’t 20 years ago, you see the hearings or read the transcripts of the organized crime hearings. It was actually the council, even Watergate, it was the counsel on the committee. In many cases that was asking sort of deposition style questions of the witnesses and allowed you to get to answers. What we’re doing now is basically theatrical productions and people trying to figure out, ‘can I get a sound bite out of a five minute questioning round?’”
 
On finding the origins of COVID19:  
 
“I think there’s a significant amount of appetite moving forward, especially if there’s Republican majorities, I’m sure it’ll be accused of being a witch hunt by many in the press, but that’s irrelevant. What’s most important is getting to the truth. The administration is deeply tied now to Fauci’s success, they view it as their success. They’re too far down that road to turn back and abandon them now. That would hurt them. It would raise questions about why they didn’t ask these things themselves sooner. 
 
“And on the question of the intelligence community, actually the intelligence community’s assessment was that a lab leak is just as likely as it having naturally occurred, that it could have been either one. The intelligence community operates on certainty. And so the notion that somehow you’re going to have two scientists in China talking to each other, emailing each other, saying, ‘Hey, yeah, you know, that thing we’ve designed in the lab really went wrong.’ That kind of smoking gun is actually pretty rare in intelligence. What intelligence is valuable for is analysis, and that is, you don’t have to have every piece of evidence to sort of piece it all together and draw conclusions based on what you know about the world, about the people you’re analyzing, about the circumstances you’re analyzing. 
 
“And it’s been my consistent view that the likeliest thing that happened here was that they were conducting risky experiments in an unsafe lab. Something went wrong, they’re in a totalitarian regime where bad news being reported is not rewarded, the way bad news about Chernobyl was not rewarded in the old Soviet Union. And so no one reported it. This thing got worse and the Chinese government itself, although they obviously were funding and involved in this, their highest leaders may not have known early on where this came from, and they’ll never tell us, and will never admit to that error. But I think that’s the likeliest scenario here, and whether we’ll ever have a smoking gun is a different question. That’s a harder thing to find.”
 
On whether a worldwide moratorium should be imposed on gain-of-function research until a full investigation into the COVID-19 pandemic is completed:
 
“You can go back pre-COVID almost a decade to a lot of debate and scientific communities about why gain of function was very dangerous. And you know why all of this is relevant? [It’s relevant because] in China and in different parts of the world, there’s all kinds of research going on — not just gain of function research, but research about how you can genetically alter human beings so that they can operate on less sleep or are smarter… smarter in terms of battlefield acuity and things of that nature. 
 
“…I can tell you this — any time you start messing with things like people’s DNA and trying to alter the way the brain works in human beings, that can lead to the creation of Frankenstein monsters. Not literally, but sort of unanticipated consequences. Gain of function is something like that. 
 
“Gain of function is basically there’s this virus out there among animals, it’s not infectious in humans, but it could evolve to become infections in humans. So let’s try to predict how it would evolve, let’s make it evolve that way, so then we can come up for a cure and a treatment for it. What happens, though, is if someone gets infected after they’ve done that, now all of a sudden you have introduced a virus into the human population that mankind has never seen, our bodies have no defenses for, and people start to die. 
 
“I’m not saying COVID is not bad — COVID has been very bad, especially early on when we didn’t know a lot about it, we didn’t know how to treat it. But I think most epidemiologists you talk to will tell you there are other viruses out there among the animal population that if they ever became zoonotic, if they ever transferred over into humans, would be far more devastating. This is not even close to the worst possible virus that could one day potentially cross over. And if they’re messing around with that and we have an accident with those sorts of things, we’re talking about a very different situation here. 
 
“So this is very relevant. We shouldn’t be funding it. But more importantly, I think there should be a global crackdown and condemnation on it because it has a global impact. This will not be contained to whatever country is doing it.”
 
On the Democrats’ push to federalize elections: 
 
“The first thing I would say is that even some Democrats were sort of embarrassed by… how far [President Biden’s] speech [in Georgia] went. Almost overcompensating, I guess, for [his] failures… [T]hat kind of hyperbole actually backfires because people look at it and shake their heads. 
 
“I will tell you that most of the people I’ve talked to on Real Earth – you know, not the Washington bubble – didn’t even know that speech happened. They didn’t even know that this was happening. It doesn’t make it unimportant because [Democrats are] trying to change the election laws and have a federal takeover. But I think your point is…if you went and asked people in this country, ‘What are the top 10 things on your mind?’ This wouldn’t even be on the top 50. Because it’s easier than ever to vote in America. It just simply is. And the numbers bear that out. 
 
“So there’s two things at play here. I think the first is a desire for power. They certainly view this as the perfect issue in which to break the filibuster. If there is no Senate filibuster, they not only can pass this voting bill, they can pack the Supreme Court, they can make D.C. a state, there’s all kinds of things that they could do if there [was] no filibuster. And so number one, it’s about that. 
 
“And I think number two, frankly, is about politics. I think Chuck Schumer is afraid to get primaried in New York. AOC has not ruled out running for Senate against him. I think a lot of Democrats, particularly Chuck Schumer in a state like New York, see that over the last few years you had long-time incumbents taken out by people from the far left, and they’re concerned about it. Maybe he thinks he’s still going to win, but he doesn’t want to go through that process. There’s a tremendous amount of pressure coming from the base of the party, particularly radical elements of the base. And this month just happens to be the turn of those who are out there saying that there’s some sort of, as you called it, Jim Crow 2.0, which is absurd. Most Americans will tell you it’s absurd.”
 
 
“There’s a pattern in politics. What happens is you win an election, you have a 50/50 Senate, a very narrow majority in the House, but your base, the most radical elements, the people who give you $50 a month online, who knock on doors, who make the phone calls, who, if they’re not energized, you have no chance of winning elections. Those people think we have a mandate. And they say, ‘Okay, you won. It doesn’t matter if you won by one vote or one point or you won by 20, you won. And now we expect you to do all the things you promised.’ And so they go out there and they try to do these things and they’re not going to pass, but they’re angry at them and they’re saying, ‘Well, at least try. You have to at least try.’ 
 
“It happens in politics. It happens to both sides in some cases. You know you’re not going to win something, but if you don’t at least show you’re fighting, then your base gets really angry at you. Then they get turned off, they won’t show up, they won’t give money, and you get destroyed because you can’t win an election these days if your base is not energized. So that’s what this is about. 
 
“It’s not just about Chuck Schumer. Personally, think about how selfish this is. This may – he thinks – help fend off a primary challenge. But he has all these Democrats running in states that are somewhat vulnerable, and they’re being put on the spot on this thing. And they’re going to have to go out there now and take positions on it and [it is] dividing his own conference over that. But it’s all a base play, because they have to be able to go to the base and say, ‘We tried, we fought. But these two guys over here and the racist Republicans wouldn’t let us move forward.’ And that’s what this is. It’s as simple as that.”
 
On January 6th and the hypocrisy of the left during the Summer 2020 riots: 
 
“My opinion is what happened on January 6th was a terrible thing. Crimes were committed on that day and the people responsible for that should be charged, be put on trial, and if convicted, [they] should serve sentences for it. I continue to believe that. I believed that from the moment it started. 
 
“I don’t care who you are. I don’t care what your banner is. I don’t care whose side you’re on, who you voted for, or whether you agree with me on issues or not. You can’t do what happened on that day. You can’t do it in the Capitol and you can’t do it in the 700 different riots that took place in the summer of 2020 across this country. You cannot do it. Those are crimes that need to be prosecuted and people need to be put on trial and hopefully convicted for it. That is separate from the argument that somehow this was an orchestrated effort to overthrow the government of the United States of America. That is just not true, and we were nowhere close to that. That was not going to happen.
 
“I think what happens is when you exaggerate these things, you lose credibility. When you lose credibility, then we lose the ability to analyze these things for what they truly are. In many cases, you sort of empower the worst elements. 
 
“If you go around calling everyone a racist, that becomes just a throwaway line, and then you really can’t call out the people that are racist and doing things that are race based as a result of it. And it’s the same thing with [January 6th.] Most normal people are able to say what happened on that day was wrong and it shouldn’t have happened. But it also isn’t an equivalent of Pearl Harbor, where the U.S. was pulled into a world war that ended up killing three percent of the global population. These are stupid things for people to say, particularly a vice president of the United States as an example.”
 
On the Democrats’ attempts to federalize elections: 
 
“If you want to get noticed in American politics today, you say things like [the Democrats do on television.] The more outrageous, the more noticed you’re going to get. There are some people that are going to applaud it or at least treat it as a serious statement. I think it’s poisonous, toxic, nasty. I don’t even have the words to describe how ridiculous that assumption is. 
 
“It goes back to the point I made earlier, and that is, this now, [labels] like traitor, racist, or bigot have become throwaway lines. There are bigots and there are racists in this country. There are bigots and racists on the entire planet Earth. It’s one of the sins that bedevils mankind, and we should reserve our anger for the ones that are really that and are motivated by that.
 
“When you start calling everybody that and every issue is the basis of that, then you can no longer raise that issue. In essence, you almost give cover to the people that are actually racists and bigots. I think that this sort of language that we just described, it plays really well among a certain core constituency that watches CNN or MSNBC, or lives on Twitter, gives money to their campaigns, but to the overwhelming majority of Americans, particularly the ones that are paying attention, because most people aren’t, they would look at that and say, this is a bridge too far. 
 
“I think sometimes we forget that the common sense of real people is still there, even if the people running the country sometimes seem to be out of their minds.”
 
 
On the Beijing Olympics and companies that continue to be silent on China’s crimes:
 
“Nike, and other [companies] that are out there, I’m not sure if Nike is a sponsor, but I’m sure they’ll be very involved in advertising around it, because of the athletes that are performing. 
 
“What happens with these companies is they are very quick to call for a boycott of a state, put up billboards, and run commercials about how terrible the United States of America is or how terrible some decision that was made by elected representatives of the American people are. 
 
“[Companies] won’t say a word about China though, and it’s not just about the Olympics, it is in general. This is true all across the board. That kind of hypocrisy needs to be called out. 
 
“I doubt you’ll see any of these companies step forward because if they do, the Chinese will shut them down, and that would cost them billions of dollars. [It may] get the CEO fired as a result of it. I don’t have a lot of hope we’re going to get a response from [companies sponsoring the Beijing Olympics.] But I think it’s important to continue to call out this hypocrisy.”
 
On the Supreme Court decision to strike down Biden’s vaccine mandates:
 
“It’s always important to remind people that the Supreme Court’s job is not to tell us if some policies are a good idea or a bad idea. Their job is to tell us whether it’s constitutional or not. Does the federal government have the power to do this? 
 
“I think [it’s clear,] and most people [agreed] [the Biden Administration] did not have the power, and I think the administration knew they did not have the power to do the broad vaccine mandate using OSHA. OSHA was not created to go into businesses and tell them they had to put this in place.
 
“I have not read the opinions or any of the writings with regards to either of the decisions. I’d like to dig into that before opening on what [Justices] Kavanaugh and Roberts’ rationale was. 
 
“I don’t think the Biden Administration ever thought they would win a legal challenge to [the mandate]. I think their view was, ‘Let’s do it, and if the Supreme Court upholds it, fine, and if they don’t, then they don’t. We can just say a lot of people are going to die because the Supreme Court made a bad decision. 
 
“I think it’s really important to remind people that the job of the court is not to make policy, but to interpret and apply the Constitution. That’s what their job is. I think that’s what they were trying to do here. And I think they reached the right decision, at least on the OSHA piece…
 
“I think there is accountability, and it’s being reflected today in the public polling and [will be reflected] in November in the elections. That’s where the accountability is going to be. 
 
“Yeah, you’re right that no one’s being hauled off to jail, no one’s being prosecuted, no one’s being fired or losing their job. But there’s no doubt that Joe Biden and his party are paying a tremendous price—in the public polling you see now, but ultimately, I believe, in November—because of any of these things that they’ve done.
 
“And if you look at the debacle in Afghanistan, it almost perfectly coincides with the beginning of this dramatic and precipitous decline in [Biden’s] approval ratings. So their accountability here is ultimately in the hands of American voters, and I think you’re going to see that play out in November.”
 
On how identity politics has left ordinary Americans behind:
 
“Look, if you’re a mother or a father, if you’re a small business owner, if you’re just a worker trying to get ahead, if you’re a parent working really hard so your kids will have a chance at a better life, like my parents did, your number one identity is father, mother, worker, small business owner. It’s not Hispanic. 
 
“When my dad woke up every morning before going to work, he didn’t look in the mirror and say, ‘Good morning, Hispanic American.’ He woke up in the morning and he acknowledged, ‘Today I’m going to go out, I’m going to work really hard to provide for my family, so one day my kids will have the chance to do the things I never had the chance to do.’ That is the primary identity, not just of Hispanic Americans, but of millions of Americans, irrespective of what their race is, or where they came from, or what their ethnicity might be. I think that’s been forgotten in all of this. Inflation is hurting a Hispanic small business owner the same [or more, in many cases,] as it’s hurting … a non-Hispanic small business owner. And I think that we’ve forgotten that in American politics. 
 
“There are people that talk about politics or are involved in politics who think people’s primary identity in this country is their race or their ethnicity. And it is not. The primary identity of most people in this country is that they’re a spouse, they’re a husband or wife, they’re a father, they’re a mother, they’re a small business owner, they’re an employee somewhere, they’re a student. That’s their primary identity.”