WASHINGTON, D.C. — House Republican Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) appeared on Fox News Channel’s Fox & Friends to discuss how House Republicans will hold the Biden Administration and Big Tech accountable in the 118th Congress. Whip Scalise also called out the mainstream media for falsely labeling the Hunter Biden story as disinformation and slammed Big Tech CEOs for censoring conservative voices. Additionally, Whip Scalise emphasized the need to reverse the Biden Administration’s harmful vaccine mandate on U.S. service members.
Highlights from the interview:On the Biden Administration’s harmful vaccine mandate:“[Vaccine mandates have] been a problem for a while in our military. We’ve seen recruitment down dramatically – you’re talking over 25 percent or higher recruiting drop because people just don’t want to get the mandated [vaccine]. And so, it’s not helping in terms of what we need to do to focus on China, the real threats around the world, and it’s really posing long term threats to our military. So, as we’re doing the National Defense Authorization Act, you ought to be addressing the problems that our military is having, and this is one of them. “We want to get [those who were kicked out of the military over the mandated vaccine] back in. There are a lot of young people who go into service academies, and aren’t going into those service academies now either. These are the best and the brightest out of high school. You want to get those back in as well. And so we’ve talked to the military about getting a full assessment of all the people that were removed. Let’s get them reinstated. This ruined people’s military careers. Let’s get this addressed.”On the need to investigate Big Tech:“This is something we’ve laid down as a marker months ago. We told the Big Tech companies, save your documents. There are things we’ve been asking them for months, for over years, that they haven’t been sharing with us. And Elon Musk has been exposing what happened at Twitter – they’re not the only ones that have been doing this. But the Hunter Biden laptop story was probably the most high profile that we’ve seen of many other stories that were suppressed when the New York Post put the story out there. “Go back and look about two years ago, all of the mainstream media calling that story disinformation, saying it was part of the lies that are being told by the right. And it turned out to be a true story and they blocked the New York Post. I actually was able to question Jack Dorsey in a hearing that we had about this, and he admitted that they shouldn’t have done it. “The problem is, when you look internally, there were a lot of discussions, there were these ‘ministers of truth,’ and a lot of these tech agencies have them, and that kind of translation is somebody that wants to suppress conservative speech. And so all under the name of truth, they were shutting down stories that were true, because it might have hurt [President] Biden’s campaign. That’s not what they’re there for, that’s surely not what they were telling people on the outside and it’s going to get exposed.”On holding Big Tech accountable:“[Congressman] Comer, the incoming Chair of the Oversight Committee, has already started sending out some of these requests for documents. [Congressman] Jordan is going to be Chairman of the Judiciary Committee. He on this issue has been very vocal [about] what he’s going to do to hold Big Tech accountable. “But also when you look at Section 230, this law that gives liability protections – the Democrats are in charge right now. That’s going to change on January 3rd. And in fact, both [Congressman] Jordan and [Congresswoman] McMorris Rogers, she’ll be the Chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, they have a bill they’re working on to finally confront Big Tech’s abuses of Section 230. “It’s going be one of these things that we’re going to bring legislation on to finally confront the abuses that Big Tech has been having both with their platforms, but also with the laws that were giving them liability protection.”