CLAY: We are joined now by Senator Ron Johnson of the great state of Wisconsin. And, Senator Johnson, I’ve been watching some of the videos that you’ve been putting out surrounding this Hunter Biden scandal. And so pretty simple question for you right off the top. Based on what you have seen, the evidence that you have seen surrounding Hunter Biden’s behavior, do you believe he should be charged with felonies for that behavior?

SEN. JOHNSON: I’m not a lawyer. I’m not a prosecutor. So, it’s not really my job to really determine the legality of it. Just from the standpoint of tax law, I would think probably most American citizens would be, you know, in deep trouble with the IRS at a minimum. But regardless whether it’s legal or illegal, what this has shown is not only corruption within the Biden family, okay?

It’s shown deep corruption in our federal agencies, law enforcement, intelligence agencies, also deep corruption in our news media. This is serious business here. It’s way beyond just the national security threat with the fact that our president is compromised because of this vast web of foreign financial entanglements — which, by the way, Senator Grassley and I tried to warn people about that.

It was widely ignored by the media, and there’s part of that corruption I’m talking about. And, of course, in particular those 51 former intelligence agency officials that came out with their letter that said it has all the earmarks — that Hunter Biden has all the earmarks — of a Russian information operation. Their letter was a disinformation operation. That was disinformation right there designed to really interfere with the election.

What they did, what those 51 intelligence agencies operatives did as well as the complicit media, they interfered in the 2020 election to a far greater extent than anything Russia ever could have hoped to accomplish. People need to understand the severity, how egregious their conduct was.

BUCK: Senator Johnson, speaking of election interference, as we know, the social media platforms pushed that Hunter Biden story out of public view, suppressed it with everything they had. I’m sure you’ve seen the news about Elon Musk taking a big stake in Twitter and now as of today it’s announced he will be on the board. Do you think that this is going to bring about major change and are we actually gonna start to have a digital public square where people can really share ideas?

SEN. JOHNSON: Well, that is an interesting move. I’ve never met Elon Musk. He seems to be a pretty intriguing individual, to say the least. You know, obviously brilliant in so many different areas. So he certainly has been pushing for freedom of speech, for transparency, and so I look forward to seeing what kind of impact he’ll have on Twitter. All I can say is, I obviously use Twitter. You kind of have to. Most of the comments coming back at me are just nasty. (chuckles) So —

BUCK: You’re not alone there, Senator. You should see the mentions that Clay gets. Clay’s mentions, my mentions. You know, if I tell you somebody, “I don’t like soy milk,” all of a sudden everybody is telling me to go jump off a bridge with a lot of expletives.

SEN. JOHNSON: Yeah. My wife —

CLAY: Do you check yourself, ever, Senator? Like, I’m always curious, like, you’re obviously one of a hundred senators. Do you ever go into the mention like late-night and just scroll through and read what people are saying, or do you try to mostly ignore it, and just use it as a megaphone to share whatever you think and not really pay attention to what’s comes back?

SEN. JOHNSON: Yeah, I’m not a real masochist from that standpoint. My wife does pay attention to it. That’s why I say, she goes, “Why did you do that? Why do you use Facebook?” Everything’s like 99.9% negative and nasty, you know. Again — by the way, is that just — is that just the liberal mind-set? I always view conservatives, we’ve got a got a sense of humor.

I listen to your show. We actually laugh. We laugh at ourselves. We laugh at life. We love life. Liberals just seem to be just angry and nasty, and certainly that’s how they come across on social media, like, no sense of humor at all, just perpetually angry.

CLAY: Speaking of which, this is actually funny, not intentional. I’m sure you saw it. I think it was Jennifer Rubin had a Washington Post editorial where she said (summarized), “Oh, you know what? The economy is great except for inflation,” and I know you. You’re in Wisconsin. You got a lot of people that are dealing with high gas prices, soaring inflation.

What are your constituents saying? Not the ones who are screaming at you on Facebook and Twitter, but the ones that you actually meet face-to-face about the inflation challenges, gas prices, what you’re seeing on the ground all over Wisconsin and, frankly, around the country as well?

SEN. JOHNSON: Well, first of all, businesses, their number one complaint continues to be they can’t hire enough people. So that just certainly sparks the supply dislocation.

BUCK: But, Senator, why is that? Why are they having trouble? You talk to the business community. I just want to know. Why are they saying they can’t find people? I think people need to hear this. Why can’t they get the workers they need?

SEN. JOHNSON: We’ve really had a worker shortage, particularly manufacturing for quite some time. First of all, we tell all our kids you have to get a four-year degree, so you don’t have people wanting to I guess dirty their hands in manufacturing. They don’t want to build things anymore. That’s one problem. We just don’t have a high enough birthrate to produce the increase in our labor force that we’re gonna need to grow our economy 3%.

We need a functioning legal immigration system. So we just don’t have enough workers but it’s being exacerbated by tell me policies. Printed all these dollars, right? The Fed has added $9 trillion to its balance sheet — which means that’s how many dollars they printed — chasing too few goods and we’re spending those dollars on programs making it possible for people not to enter the workforce.

So we’ve got somewhere between five and 10, 11 million jobs unfilled. Every time I hear, you know, the month end jobs report, you know, X-number of jobs created? No. That’s the number of jobs filled. We still have millions of jobs going unfilled, and again we’re paying people through these programs; that makes it easy for them just to stay on the sidelines.

So it’s literally a triple whammy. You engage in a war on fossil fuels, you cancel things like the Keystone XL pipeline which a shot across the bow announcing their war on fossil fuels — in other words, their desire to increase energy prices. You increase energy prices, print way too many dollars chasing too few goods and you encourage people not to enter the workforce having even fewer goods. Triple whammy. It didn’t just happen that’s Democrat policies, and I hope Americans are paying attention.

BUCK: Speaking to Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin. Senator, you may have seen. I think it’s Deutsche Bank is the first major U.S. bank to forecast a recession next year, and billionaire investor Ray Dalio is saying he expects the Biden administration is gonna send America back to the 1970s and a period of stagflation. Recession, stagflation, these are things folks don’t want to hear. Do you think that’s where we’re heading, and do you think there’s anything can be done to avert those things?

SEN. JOHNSON: Well, check the audio sound tape. I’ve been predicting stagflation for well over a year. When the Democrats passed their partisan $1.9 trillion “covid relief package,” and don’t even spend $700 billion of it till the out years. I’ve been warning about having the witch’s brew of ingredients create stagflation. I’m talking to businesspeople on the ground.

I started a business in ’79, the end of Carter stagflation, where price increases were not only expected, they were readily accepted. And then for the next 30 years, it was like pulling a teeth getting a price increase. Over the last year, it’s again price increases are expected and accepted. People are ordering things like construction supplies.

They don’t even know when they’re gonna get it; they don’t know when they do get it what the price is gonna be. So this is an awful situation for businesses to grow. So, no. I’ve been concerned about stagflation. It doesn’t surprise me people are essentially predicting recession, but it shouldn’t be this way! There is so much pent-up demand. There’s so much money sloshing around the economy.

You know, savings are up tremendously, like last time I saw, something like 1.6, $1.7 trillion in increased savings. There’s no reason for this economy to go into recession other than really bad economic policies, overregulation, threats of over-taxation and just again, increase in the cost of energy. This doesn’t just happen. It’s caused by really bad Democrat policies.

CLAY: Speaking of bad Democratic policies, the worst bureaucrat in the history of American civilization, I think, Dr. Fauci, recent said that he thinks we may have to bring back masks. Your reaction, you Senator Johnson.

SEN. JOHNSON: Well, what I thought was real interesting what he just recently said, they dug up the video where he’s admitting that the best way to become immune is to get infected.

CLAY: Oh yeah.

SEN. JOHNSON: And yet he denied the benefit of natural immunity for how many years? But listen. I don’t know why anybody would listen to Anthony Fauci or, quite honestly, anybody in our federal health agencies, which is really sad. We really ought to be able to rely on them to have integrity, but they haven’t been honest, they haven’t been transparent.

But you look at his mismanagement of our covid response: 975,000 dead Americans, six million globally, the human toll of the economic devastation of these very ill-advised, widespread shutdowns, what we’ve done to our children. What we’ve done to our children: A year’s lost learning. I think I know what you guys think of masks. But I’ll tell you one group of people that masks will never work on: Children. Have you seen them wear them? They’re on their chin, on top of their heads. We knew that from the start and yet in New York they’re stale making, what, 2 to 4-year-olds wear masks?

CLAY: That’s right.

SEN. JOHNSON: This is a travesty and it’s all been brought to you by people like Anthony Fauci. He is the lead cheerleader for this miserable failure of a covid response. So, you know, God, I hope people stop listening to him.

BUCK: Senator, before we let you did go — we’re speaking to Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin — some optimism if the folks listening across the country. We’re in a midterm election year. What is your optimistic case?

SEN. JOHNSON: That we take back the Senate and the House, and we have to. We just have to. We have to stop the Biden agenda and then we’ve got to develop our plan. We’ve got a list our top three to five priorities and what we will do if we win in 2022, and we actually have to craft the legislation so we have it ready. This I think requires transparency on the part of Republicans.

We need to be very up front: This is what we will do if you give us the governing power so that when we have those governing powers. Not like what happened with Obamacare. We actually are able to implement it, but we have a mandate to do so. So I completely support people like Rick Scott, who listed out his agenda. I would like to have one coming from Congress, the House and Senate together, Republicans.

This is what we would say do; and hopefully we’d have a presidential candidate who would embrace a very common-sense agenda starting with energy independence, and we stop this out-of-control deficit spending. We have reasonable regulations; we have a competitive tax system. There’s four of them right there, okay? That ought to be an agenda we should be able to win on and then implement, if elected.

BUCK: Senator Johnson of Wisconsin. Thanks so much, sir. Good to have you on.

SEN. JOHNSON: Stay well. Take care.