[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] As part of our special series on the U.S. presidential transition period, I’m sitting down with Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.).

In the next Congress, Johnson will become chairman again of the homeland security committee’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which has uniquely powerful subpoena powers to investigate crime and corruption within the U.S. government and beyond.

In this wide-ranging episode, we dive into the future of the Make America Healthy Again movement; what Johnson believes key steps are for the incoming administration to restore transparency, scientific integrity, and small government; and why Congress needs to retake its oversight authority.

“Our oversight authority is probably our greatest authority and greatest responsibility. ... We’ve got to fund government. But then once we funded it, we need to take a look at what we funded. … What we passed, did it actually work?”

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

*Big thanks to our sponsor for this episode Patriot Gold Group. Check them out here: https://ept.ms/3sr5LhH

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

Senator Ron Johnson: Thanks for having me.

Mr. Jekielek: You’ve been a supporter of a number of the prominent Trump nominations for the incoming administration. What do you see as the real promise of this administration?

Senator Johnson: First of all, the primary thing that President Trump promised in the campaign, in a macro sense, was he was going to focus on the working men and women of this country. What do they need to support their efforts? How can he limit the damage that the government does to those individuals?

Then, obviously, secure the border, make America great again, make America healthy again. I mean, those are all, from my standpoint, subcontexts of the overall effort is, you know, focus on the people that actually built this country and that we’re going to need to rely on to make America great again.

Mr. Jekielek: These are all big categories, right? But where do you see are the biggest pressure points, the biggest change that needs to happen? And is it even possible? Some people are asking this question.

Senator Johnson: If I have a mission as a U.S. Senator, it is to wean as many Americans off the concept that the federal government can solve their problems. The federal government is singularly incapable of solving problems. It creates or exacerbates more problems than it’s ever going to solve. Take a look at how it mismanaged the extracted earnings in Social Security and spent all that money. It’s gone, and now that trust fund is going to be depleted in the next 10 years.

The federal government was primarily designed by the genius of our Founding Fathers to protect and ensure our liberty and freedom, not crush it by over-regulation, over-taxation. That’s the main thing that President Trump is coming into office to do. That’s what DOGE is all about. Take a look at how the federal government is crushing the American people, the people that built this country, and how we can get the government off their backs so that they can do what they do best, which is utilize that freedom, which is the essential ingredient.

It’s what our ancestors used to dream and aspire and build and create this marvel of a country. How can we unleash the entrepreneurial spirit, the creativity, the work ethic of the American public, and create incentives for people to get off the couch, reengage in the workforce, and help us rebuild this country?

Mr. Jekielek: Let’s talk about a few of the candidates. You’ve been a big supporter of the Make America Healthy Again idea. That’s a great slogan that Bobby Kennedy, Jr. used to be the Health and Human Services Secretary. What actually needs to happen there?

Senator Johnson: We'll talk about this repeatedly as we go through this process, but I come from a manufacturing background where you’re solving problems all the time, And there’s just a very well-defined process you go through in solving a problem. It starts with admitting you have one, okay, which is oftentimes a very big step. The next crucial step is properly defining it. Once you’ve done that, now you need to start looking at the root cause.

What happens in Washington, D.C. is we generally start with somebody’s solution. It’s a completely flawed solution or it exacerbates the problem. We look at scores. We look at, you know, the political realities. Can you get this passed? Who’s going to vote for it? As opposed to, no, let’s go back to the basics.

When it comes to, Make America Healthy Again, you have to understand we have a problem. And I think the American people understand we do. You have this explosion in chronic illness. And again, all you have to do is look back in history and take a look at the stats, whether you’re talking about all the autoimmune, I mean, the obesity, autism. These things have exploded.

I’m almost 70-years-old now. You look back to when I was a child, I'd never heard of things like lupus or autoimmune disease or autism. I never heard of any of these things. The American people are asking the question, what has caused this? Now, people like Bobby Kennedy who have asked that question get ruthlessly attacked. You were certainly aware of the public event that I held at the end of September with Bobby Kennedy and Casey and Calley Means and a number of nutritionists that have social media platforms.

Of all the excellent testimony, I thought the best snippet came from Dr. Chris Palmer, a psychiatrist who does a lot of work on the impact of nutrition on mental health. His statement was, to paraphrase, they don’t want to discover the root cause. That’s a profound statement, but it’s 100% true. Because if we discover that something causes autism or something causes obesity or something is causing all this thing, that’s going to disrupt multi-billion dollar business models.

So those people who are engaged in those multi-billion dollar business models, they don’t want to discover it. They don’t want their ingredient or their activity to be implicated or proven to cause all these ailments, driving up our cost of health care. That is the basic definition of the problem. You have science that’s been corrupted, and you also have these federal agencies who are tasked with protecting public health, thoroughly captured by the companies that they’re regulating.

I come from the private sector. I have no problem with big business. I mean, big business has done all kinds of wonderful things. Big Ag culture has fed the world, okay? But because government grows and government over-regulates, these businesses naturally have to figure out, how can we survive in this environment of over-taxation and over-regulation?

They can go beyond that. They get smart enough to realize, not only can we survive in this, but we can turn that regulatory agency to our advantage and to the disadvantage of our competitors. When you’re turning it to the disadvantage of your competitors, you’re crushing competition. All of a sudden, the consumer gets crushed. So to me, the problem is the government. Government is power and power corrupts. That power has been corrupted and we need to uncorrupt it.

Eisenhower warned us about this in his farewell speech. The primary warning, the famous one, was against the military industrial complex, which we have not taken seriously. It has led us in all kinds of foreign policy debacles. But the second warning was government funding of science and research. He said it would produce a scientific and technological elite that would drive public policy like Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins who created what we saw during COVID.

But I would go beyond that and say it corrupts science. When you pay for research, you’re going to get the result you want. Fauci got the results he wanted, and he doled out billions of dollars for research. Big Pharma, they’re the ones funding the studies. They’re the ones that hold the data. Now, they’ve so corrupted the process.

For example, in the Pfizer injection, they’ve so corrupted the agencies, it was the FDA that went to court to delay the public revelation of the trial data for 75 years. Now, I’m sure Pfizer would have gone to court as well, but they didn’t have to. The FDA did it for them. The FDA should have been all about transparency. They should have been releasing that trial data as they were receiving it, so their experts could look at it, which I doubt they did, and that’s why they’re covering it up.

But the medical community could have looked at it and they would have said, whoa, hang on here there are more deaths in the trial group than there are in the placebo group. These deaths aren’t being reported on time. We now have evidence of myocarditis a few months into the general administration of these injections. But all that was hidden, and they continue to try and hide it. So again, it’s the corruption of science.

Bobby Kennedy’s first task is to bring integrity back to scientific research across the board. Then we need to end the corporate capture of these federal agencies and that corruption as well. That’s a big task because as we all know from COVID, those of us who were fighting that same battle, we’re up against powerful forces. These guys have all the money. They control the narrative.

Quick aside, and then I'll quit my filibuster here. I’m a private sector guy. I never would have thought I would come in on the side of banning big pharma from advertising. It’s free market means that’s their free speech. But big pharma is using those ad dollars to push the drug. You see those ads and you have no idea what the drugs are for.

You’ve had a bunch of happy people playing with their dogs at the beach or whatever. But you don’t listen to the unbelievably bad awful side effects of those drugs. There’s no way somebody trying to sell a product would run an ad like that to actually sell it to convince somebody to take it. The only reason they spend billions is to capture the narrative. That’s what they did during COVID, which is why they were able to sabotage early treatment.

I believe it resulted in the unnecessary deaths of hundreds of thousands of people lacking early treatment, things like ivermectin that worked. We have evidence of that. I think a lot of the American people saw it. A lot of people had their eyes opened. That’s why there’s such a great deal of support for Bobby Kennedy’s confirmation from the general public.

Now, again, the vested interests will come out of the woodwork and be relentless. The people that are captured by them in the media, whether they realize it or not, they’re doing their job as well. So that’s, I think, going to be one of the more challenging ones. But in the end, I think Bob Kennedy will prevail because the American people, in a completely non-partisan way, support what he’s trying to do here.

Mr. Jekielek: Is this like making the agencies great again or making the government great again?

Senator Johnson: No, please, no. Make government small again. Okay. You know, the genius of our founding fathers was they came from dictatorial monarchies, you know, totalitarian regimes. But they realized, you know, men and women, we’re not angels. You know, if we don’t want to live in anarchy and chaos, we need some governing authority. But they realized that governing authority would be, by and large, something to fear. It had to be limited. It had to be contained, which is, again, the genius. They’ve developed this system of government.

We have three branches that were supposed to jealously guard their own constitutional authority and power so that the other two branches wouldn’t eclipse their branch in terms of ruling the nation. They also created a Constitution that enumerated what the federal government could do. Unfortunately, particularly during FDR’s New Deal, the federal government busted out of those constraints, the enumerated powers. Now, the federal government is massive.

Congress, a bunch of wimps that don’t want to be held accountable, have willingly over the decades given their constitutional authority over the executive branch. So we don’t pass conscriptive laws anymore, or prescriptive laws anymore. We pass these frameworks with a really nice name, like Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. It’s like, here, administration, give us 20,000 pages. You fill in the blanks. You protect patients. You make health care affordable. Of course, they didn’t do it.

From my standpoint, Congress has willingly given up a lot of its constitutional authority. We don’t have three co-equal branches of government anymore. The executive is probably the most powerful, combined with the courts. Congress is just a shadow of itself. We’ve let our oversight authority atrophy. We don’t enforce it. I intend to if I have support for my conference.

Mr. Jekielek: Let’s talk about that because this is something that isn’t discussed as much as we’re looking at these various cabinet appointments. What does Congress need to do to play its role, as you’re describing it?

Senator Johnson: We need to really understand that our oversight authority is probably our greatest authority and greatest responsibility. Yes, we’ve got to fund the government, but then once we’ve funded it, we need to take a look at what we funded. Did what we passed, did it actually work? Again, I'd be a big proponent of splitting the appropriation process in half or maybe even thirds and appropriate either six or four accounts a year and then spend the next two or three years, or the next year or the following year, doing oversight over what we appropriated. That would be a rational system here, okay? But we absolutely have to do far more investigations. We have to take that oversight capability seriously.

I will become chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. It is the premier investigatory subcommittee of Congress. We have the strongest subpoena authority of any committee or subcommittee in Congress. The House has theoretically the same, but they generally have to go through the Speaker’s office. I don’t. I decide to issue a subpoena. I notify the chairman of the full committee, which I used to chair, and then I just issue the subpoena. But that premier investigatory body has a huge budget, so I have five staff. I have five investigators. Now, they’re good. They do a lot of really good work, but it’s only five investigators to do oversight investigations on a federal government that spends almost $7 trillion and employs a couple million people. It’s literally a joke.

Mr. Jekielek: Can that be changed?

Senator Johnson: I hope so. But again, as you well know, my areas of concentration have not really been all that particularly popular with my colleagues. For example, I couldn’t get the support of all the Republicans on my committee when I chaired the full committee because I had to get a vote to get a subpoena to subpoena the Bidens. That was viewed as too political. I was accused of, in public hearings, of misusing committee funds with my investigation of the corrupt Biden crime family.

Now, had we been able to pursue that, had I gotten those subpoenas, had we gotten the documents we needed, history might have been changed dramatically. We probably wouldn’t have an open border. Joe Biden probably would not have won the election. We would have obtained the Hunter Biden laptop well into 2020. Remember, MacIsaac, when he turned that over to the FBI, on the way out the door the FBI said, it’s our experience that people don’t talk about these things. Don’t get hurt. Don’t get in trouble. I’m paraphrasing here.

When Senator Grassley and I issued our report at the end of September. You don’t need more evidence in terms of corruption in the Biden crime family. These millions of dollars coming in for only one purpose, you know, political influence, political corruption. John Paul MacIsaac offered us that laptop the day after we issued that report. He finally felt safe enough to offer that computer because he took the warning from the FBI seriously.

Now, because we had obtained an unsolicited briefing by the FBI saying we were targeted to Russian disinformation in August. That was a pretty odd story to us. It’s like, that could be a Russian plant. Who knows what’s on that? So we did our due diligence. We’re very thorough investigators. We did our due diligence. We went to the corrupt FBI. We said, what do you know about this? Is this stolen property? What do you know about it? Mum was the word. They gave us the runaround for weeks.

Even though they had that laptop, they had authenticated it, they wouldn’t tell Chairman Grassley and Chairman Johnson. They wouldn’t tell us, we’ve got it, we took possession of it in December, it’s authentic, there’s no problem in you accepting that, okay? That’s what they should have told us the day we contacted them. They didn’t, so MacIsaac got impatient and gave it to Rudy Giuliani’s attorney. He turned over the New York Post and the rest is history.

The most important part of that story is the fact that Anthony Blinken, our current Secretary of State, working in the Biden campaign, used his contacts in the intelligence community, former Deputy CIA Director Mike Morell. Hey, can you help us out here? Can you write a letter and cast doubt on this Hunter Biden laptop? That’s where that letter, signed by 51 former intelligence officials, said that that laptop had all the earmarks of a Russian information campaign.

That letter was a U.S. Intel information campaign and it worked. It was the greatest example of election interference in my lifetime. Thoroughly corrupt and changed the course of history. So you would like to see proper oversight over the FBI going forward.

Mr. Jekielek: Please tell us about the confirmation process for Kash Patel.

Senator Johnson: I had a conversation with Kash, and obviously we worked with him when he was working at the Director of National Intelligence Office. He helped us get documents, but we couldn’t get all of them. Kash is very intelligent and says he wants to concentrate on fulfilling the agenda, fighting crime, restoring integrity to the FBI, which means probably decentralizing it again. What has led to this corruption is they took all these decisions that used to be run at the branches, independent of political influence here in Washington, D.C. They moved people and the decision-making process to the political leaders of the FBI in Washington, D.C., so that corrupted the process.

What Kash wants to do is go back to an FBI that has greater integrity, a single system of justice, not a dual system. And from a standpoint of looking back, which we have to do, just open up the information, provide congressional committees with the information we need for our oversight attempts. And as we do that oversight, if we see criminal behavior, we can refer that criminal behavior for potential prosecution to the Attorney General.

That’s a very common sense approach. It certainly delivers on President Trump’s promise when he said, no, our retribution will be a success. He’s not looking back. Look what he did when he won first one in 2016 and 2017. He announced, listen, we’re not going to prosecute Hillary Clinton, although I think he could have successfully. What she did was a crime. I was investigating it.

The minute President Trump said, no, we’re not going to do that, that’s what they do in third world countries, we’re moving on, I moved on. We dropped our investigation, although with my five staff members, we’re the ones that uncovered all the editing of the James Comey exoneration memo, where they turned grossly negligent, which was a criminal term, to extremely careless. Comey actually wrote a memo that was very incriminating. It would have been very hard not to prosecute her.

Anyway, that’s the approach. That’s just going to be true for Bobby and Pete Hegseth—they’re looking forward to it. They’ve got a big mess to clean up, and they’re going to clean it up. When it comes to looking back and holding people accountable,they’re going to pretty well rely on providing us documents, opening up their agencies, making them transparent, which is what the American people should expect, and then have Congress do our oversight work. I just need resources. So write to your senator and say, provide Senator Johnson with the resources he needs.

Mr. Jekielek: It would take a vote of the Senate to strengthen the investigation subcommittee.

Senator Johnson: Yes, we need resources. I understand how the public is not a real fan of Congress. I’m not a real fan of Congress, okay? But we actually do need funding if we’re going to do these things. I can’t, as an investigatory body, compete with, let’s say, the Mueller probe, where they spent, what, $30 million, $40 million exercising their lawfare? How much did Alvin Bragg spend? I mean, all these other agencies, executive agencies, it’s just got millions pouring out.

We’re pretty constrained. I get less than a million dollars for my subcommittee. Now, when I was chairman, I gave Rob Portman, who was chairman of the Supreme Subcommittee, a million bucks. When I became the ranking member, I lost the chairmanship. We lost the majority and I was termed out of the chairmanship. Gary Peters didn’t want me to continue my investigation, so he dramatically cut back the amount he allocated. Rob Portman didn’t have to follow suit, but he cut the budget of PSI. It hasn’t been restored by Rand Paul, but hopefully Rand will.

Mr. Jekielek: You were talking about how power is inherently corrupting. Could it be possible that these agencies will actually ask for oversight? Because it doesn’t seem like something that would normally happen.

Senator Johnson: Oh, no, that’s one of the reasons I’m very enthusiastic about these nominees, is that they are asking it. As I’m meeting with them, we’re talking about, you know, what’s going to be our strategy. Now, I’ve said publicly what President Trump really needs to appoint or nominate is the Secretary of Information Extraction. You know, as I’m talking to these people, if I have one concern is they may be a little bit too optimistic of how capable they will be of providing this information. I went down to Mar-a-Lago a couple of springs ago before President Trump was our nominee, really trying to determine, did he have a full grasp of how his first term was sabotaged, undermined from within? I think he does.

You’re seeing that being reflected now in these appointments. Of course, the establishment here hates this because these people are articulate fighters. That’s what they don’t want to see in these agencies. Trump needs people who can articulate what they want to do in these agencies that are willing to fight for it. There aren’t going to be tender flowers and wilt when they start getting criticized by the establishment, which is the legacy corporate media.

Mr. Jekielek: Across the board, the president is choosing strong communicators for these roles. Do you agree with that?

Senator Johnson: Yes, and he needs them. The establishment is going to look at, well, he doesn’t have a background in X, Y, or Z. He can hire the expertise in X, Y, and Z. What you need at the top of these agencies are people who, again, have the willingness to fight, have demonstrated their willingness to fight, but can also articulate what it is they need to do. You’ve got to win the political argument. One of the greatest things that this Trump administration has going for it is the alliance now with, for example, Elon Musk.

Conservatives, we’ve never had the vast bulk of the media telling the truth, or certainly not promoting what we’re trying to promote. We’re always in conflict with the media. They’re always doing everything they can to pick apart anything we want to do. Now, for the first time, it’s going to be, I think, promoted what we need to do.

The fact that we are $36 trillion in debt, that the deficit is almost $2 trillion, that we’re spending $7 trillion and so much of it’s being wasted. So now you’ve got an advocate like Elon Musk, who is, from my standpoint, a genius at organizing and efficiency. In the conference, I’ve quoted his idiot index. Again, I come from a manufacturing background. This really resonates to me.

This is the idiot index. He'll take a look at a product and say, what is the raw material cost of this product? Let’s say, this thing costs 10 bucks to make and sells for $100. The idiot index is 10. You take the selling price vs the raw material cost. The higher the idiot index, just as an engineer, the greater opportunity for dramatically decreasing the cost. That’s what we do here in America. We make things more efficient. You know, 100 years ago, what, maybe half of America was involved in agriculture. Now it’s a single digit percent. That’s called progress.

Now, I bemoan the loss of the family farm. We want to maintain that tradition. But we ought to celebrate the fact that we’re not saddled with half of our population just figuring out how we can feed ourselves. We’re a very small fraction of our population feeding the world. The rest of us now can create all kinds of really great products and services that we all value.

Mr. Jekielek: How do you react to Senator Warren’s assertion that there’s too many conflicts of interest on Elon’s side with respect to the future administration?

Senator Johnson: The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau [CFPB] is her brainchild. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court didn’t agree that it was completely unconstitutional. She’s a nice person to greet in the hallway, but her ideology is not what America wants to adopt.

Mr. Jekielek: Are there possibilities of conflict of interest?

Senator Johnson: Who doesn’t have a conflict of interest? Literally, who in the world doesn’t have a conflict of interest? I think they need to be exposed. Be transparent about the conflict. Be transparent about it. For example, with campaign finance, I would allow unlimited contributions to a campaign, so it’s accountable, but it had to be revealed immediately.

As a candidate, you want to accept a multi-million dollar contribution from one person, my guess is that'd be not working to your advantage in a campaign. The public would know about it. You know, that’s far better than the system we have right now where those multi-million dollar donations are going to the campaign committees where the real corruption occurs. It’s not the five or ten thousand dollar donations to individual members that really cause corruption, it’s the million dollar, the multi-million dollar donations going to the Senate Leadership Fund, and the Democrats are equivalent.

Those are the people that are at the table when these 1,500 page or 2,000 page bills are being written. I’m not at the table. I don’t get to see these things until we’re going to vote on, like the CR of 1,500 pages that we’re going to be voting on in the next couple of days. I have no idea what’s in it. We'll get a summary, but the Corporate Transparency Act or whatever that thing was called that was slipped into an NDAA. It’s an awful piece of legislation apparently. I’m hearing in this CR we will delay its implementation by a year. Why don’t we just repeal it? It’s awful and has been overruled by the court.

Mr. Jekielek: Why is it awful?

Senator Johnson: It will impose a regulatory burden on business and be crushing. Nobody will comply with it. There’s no reason for it. It’s such a government overreach, which is what the court ruled to stop its implementation. Congress ought to recognize that we slipped it into one bill. Let’s slip its repeal into this one.

Mr. Jekielek: Well, the question I have is this. I mean, from everything I’m hearing and everything I know about you, you’re a champion of transparency. But this Transparency Act isn’t about transparency. That’s what you’re saying.

Senator Johnson: No, that is intrusive. Transparency in government, not ordinary citizens. Again, we have constitutional amendments protecting us against unreasonable search and seizure. I would consider this an unreasonable search and seizure where you’ve got to disclose all these things to the public. You’re a private citizen. You’re running a private company.

Your fellow citizens don’t need to know everything about your business. That’s an unreasonable search and seizure. No, transparency is about government, what government is doing. We need to be transparent. So again, what the government is forcing is unconstitutional transparency on its citizens.

But at the same time, we’re not going to give you the information on how we arrived at that decision. We’re not going to give you the data that we’re forcing that farm to give to us. We’re going to go to court and we’re going to delay the disclosure of that for 75 years, well after we’re dead and gone. So no, it’s transparency in government, not forced unreasonable search and seizure of the American public.

Mr. Jekielek: I became familiar over the past few years with the concept of subsidiarity and governance. Basically, it is the idea that you give the governance of any issue to the smallest possible unit that can handle it. Trump has said 10 regulations must be removed for any new regulation to be added. That’s to up the ante.

Senator Johnson: Yes, we had the one in, two out rule. He exceeded that. At one point, his administration achieved something like one, 22 gone, for every one in. I can’t remember the exact figure, but it was massive. And it was, to my mind, a derogatory effort. Again, that doesn’t mean to remove all regulations. There are things the federal government should do. But because they do all these other things, they do what they should do very poorly, or they don’t do them at all.

The vision of our Founding Fathers was a federated republic of sovereign states, close to the governed, where it’s more accountable, it’s more efficient, more effective. The education for our children ought to be occurring at the local level, as much as possible funded at the local level. And from my standpoint, the only role the state ought to play in that is making sure that the funding is equally distributed so all children have an equal opportunity in terms of good education.

What roles does the federal government have in that? I suppose there could be some disparity in states, rich states versus poor states, and maybe there could be some leveling there. But otherwise, there should not be a Department of Education. I hope that is one promise that President Trump delivers on, ending the Department of Education. But again, our form of government was supposed to be most governing occurring in the states and the federal government doing only a very few things that are enumerating the Constitution.

That’s why I have in my office stenciled on the wall the Tenth Amendment, which is impossible to memorize because it’s written in 17th or 18th century prose, but it basically says the Constitution grants governing authority primarily to the states or to the federal government only as enumerated in the constitution very limited the rest of governing authority should occur in the states but the power resides in the people you know so in the end subsidiary you know we are the sovereign each individual citizen.

The federal government was formed primarily to ensure our freedom and protect our freedom and protect us with secure borders and defense of the nation. Local government and state government is there to actually protect our persons in terms of law enforcement. Most criminal penalties should be state penalties. We’ve criminalized way too many things at a federal level. It shouldn’t be involved that way. Leave it up to the states.

Mr. Jekielek: At Epoch Times, we’ve been covering the Chinese Communist Party’s attempts to silence its critics here in America. This goes under this rubric of transnational repression. The Biden administration is actually trying to tackle that somehow with some new approaches. How should the government fit into it? I'll give you a few examples.

One example is a young woman from Hong Kong who got asylum here in America who has a bounty on her head. And it kind of lives under that rubric. We have all sorts of examples of what appears to be lawfare and utilization of media by the CCP against Falun Gong. We have a whole bunch of different examples of this happening on the Chinese side, and other nations as well. What role should the government have in this sort of scenario?

Senator Johnson: Again, it needs to protect the citizens of this nation and people that are under its governing authority. And that includes people that are here legally. You know, we have laws against vigilantism. You can’t be a vigilante and take the law into your own hands. So that means China can’t send in its operatives here to enforce its laws. So those operatives, we should find them and arrest them. And then in our foreign policy, be very blunt in terms of, got to knock that off. Quit stealing our stuff. got to knock that off. You know, quit stealing our stuff. Quit sending over your extra legal vigilantes here. You can’t do that.

Again, China is a problem, but the Chinese people aren’t. Our foreign policy has lost sight of the type of diplomacy we need to engage in, in terms of recognizing and respecting the people of these countries and pushing back against their governments that are doing things that are harmful to the world order. Now, the same, we can’t impose our will. I mean, at certain points, say, okay, that’s, okay, you’re the governing authority of that nation.

We need to respect that. We’re not going to go to war because you’re not doing things the way we want you to do. We certainly can in world trade organizations and have alliances with other people that want to engage in free trade and will push back against people who are violating trade agreements that are using industrial engineering and state power that are destroying industries and the rest of the world. I mean, that’s a problem. That’s one of the real problems we have with China is they’re investing massively in things like, for example, steel production is probably the best example, destroying steel industries throughout the world.

We all need to be able to make steel. We can’t rely on only one being able to. So that’s a difficult issue to deal with. That’s probably the best use of a terrorist in as intelligent a way as possible, because terrorists are a real double edged sword. There’s a cost to implying them.

Mr. Jekielek: You have certainly been briefed on this whole Salt Typhoon hack, how the Chinese regime has open access to our telephone networks? It is to the point where we have to use encrypted apps to not be listened to by the Chinese, but that’s not an act of war, apparently.

Senator Johnson: China is a real problem, and there’s no equivalency here whatsoever. But in using all this technology, we are giving up our privacy in a massive way, whether it’s to the Chinese government or whether it’s to Google and to Amazon and everybody else. It’s kind of the deal we’ve done. Now, if you want your privacy, don’t use the technology. But very few people don’t want to avail themselves of that.

I’m saying keep your nose clean. Certainly, I try to use this. Don’t put anything in a text or an email that you wouldn’t want splashed on the New York Times. I try to be careful that way. There is not an easy solution here, okay? There just isn’t.

Nuclear power is a wonderful thing until it’s turned into a nuclear bomb and destroys civilizations. Technology is like that. There are marvelous benefits to technology. There always seems to be a dark side and a very destructive downside. A question for civilization is how do we utilize technology where it doesn’t destroy us? That dates back to the wheel, when they started using the wheel for these machines of war. It’s that same conflict. It’s just ramped up to higher and higher tech.

Mr. Jekielek: With this extreme violation of privacy and security, the future president’s and vice president’s lines were exposed. Might a reaction be to put some holes in that great firewall of China that prevents the Chinese people from getting all sorts of information that the regime doesn’t want to see?

Senator Johnson: Don’t accuse me of moral equivalency here, but my guess is we do a little bit of snooping ourselves. We need to be honest. We need to retrospectively look at the results of our foreign entanglements, our foreign policy, our wars. Go back and take a look at, let’s say, Vietnam. What was the goal there? What did it cost in human life for Americans as well as for the Vietnamese and Asians and everybody in Southeast Asia? What did it cost to all sides? What was the result?

I think you'd find out that, you know, boy, that was a war we never should have involved ourselves in. And they just keep moving forward. I mean, right now you take a look at Ukraine. I’m all for people seeking freedom. I certainly understand those Ukrainians that would rather orient themselves to the West. But to be honest, a lot of Ukrainians would rather be part of Russia, and we didn’t recognize that reality. We used our enormous influence to pretty well foment the revolution of dignity. At the time, we were not briefed properly by the State Department.

As a U.S. Senator, you don’t really understand the true divisions occurring in Ukraine, so you’re all for the freedom-loving people. The result of that has literally been the destruction of Ukraine and pushing us toward, what, 90 seconds from midnight on the doomsday clock, closer to World War III and nuclear holocaust than I think we’ve been during my lifetime. That’s not a good thing.

Take a look at the disaster that is the Middle East. There has been the destruction of totalitarian strongmen, sure. But now what do we have? Now we have chaos. We’ve destroyed so much. There’s been so many lives lost. It’s not a success.

I’m pro-America. America’s a great country because Americans are good people, but that doesn’t mean that American leaders haven’t led us in some really bad ways and produced some horrible results that don’t get reported on. We need to take a very realistic view of what we have engaged in, what were our goals, what was the result, and right now I think you have to take a look. I don’t see how any unbiased observer could take a look at the current state of the world and say, you know, hey, the foreign policy we’ve been pursuing for decades under both Republican and Democrat administrations hasn’t been basically a miserable failure.

Take a look at the promise we had. People were writing about the end of history with the fall of the Soviet Union. Why didn’t we just accept Russia, try and integrate them as much as they wanted to be integrated into the West, but we just had to keep pushing them and pushing them and pushing them? It’s true.

Gorbachev and Secretary Baker sat down and I’ve seen the readout of their discussion in Berlin. It was certainly implied we weren’t going to move NATO one inch to the east. We’ve moved it hundreds of miles.Then the final straw, which was very well recognized, this was the red line for Putin. We just blew it off. We just ignored it by having NATO in Ukraine. And so he reacted.

Now, Ukraine is a great deal destroyed, and hundreds of thousands of lives lost in Ukraine and with Russian conscripts. I take no joy in that. This has been an utter disaster. Trump is probably the least likely person to get us into war. And the example I use is, I asked him about this because I heard the story was not quite right.

But remember when they downed one of our drones. If you remember the time, there was the drumbeat of war, we can’t accept this, we have to retaliate. We were basically at the 12th hour of retaliation when the president finally intervened and asked, OK, hang on here now, what did that drone cost? The answer is a couple million bucks. OK, how many lives are going to be lost? It’s a few hundred.

Then President Trump very appropriately showed leadership. He said, I don’t think a couple million dollar drone is worth that loss of life, and he pulled us back from the brink. Then I told him that was the moment that I truly supported what you’re trying to do here.

Again, I don’t agree with anybody 100% of the time. I disagree. But that was the moment I thought, okay, no, this is a guy that I can trust being commander in chief because he wants to keep us out of war. Bobby Kennedy talks about his uncle. The number one goal of an American president is to keep the peace, not involve us in war after war after war. The overall message of the Trump campaign was, focus on the needs and the desires of the American people who work and that have built this country.

Part of that desire is don’t send us off to war. Don’t endanger our children. Keep us safe. Don’t have the world engulfed in flames and get us closer to a nuclear holocaust. Step back from that. It just takes a completely different outlook from what most of Washington sees. We have Mitch McConnell right now saying that we need to be, what is it, preeminent? We got to spend 5% of our GDP on defense.

Listen, in normal times, that’s an unreasonable percentage, but these aren’t normal times. We’re $36 trillion in debt. Also, what are we going to spend it on? I’m all for spending money on the defense of this nation to make sure that nobody would ever attack us. Do I want to spend money on platforms so we can project our power stupidly and actually create greater insecurity for this nation? That’s the whole purpose of a retrospective look. We have what we’ve done, not only accomplished the goals we set out, not only created so much destruction, cost us trillions, has it actually made us less safe? I would argue it has. I don’t feel more secure today.

Mr. Jekielek: You’re hoping this is the assessment that’s done as part of the work of the incoming administration?

Senator Johnson: Yes, and that’s why I think there’s always been such resistance to Trump. He is such a threat to the established order of this place, of the military industrial complex. Remember I said, you know, Eisenhower warned us about that. We haven’t heeded that warning. And we haven’t heeded the warning about government funding of scientific research. We certainly haven’t heeded his warning about plundering our children’s future.

There were four warnings. I just gave you three. The last one was probably the most prescient. He said, we cannot allow global society to descend into a state of dreadful fear and hate. That’s where we are, right? I mean, isn’t that what drives all these policy decisions is we create a boogeyman, you know, you scare the American public, you know, there’s some external threat, so we can build up our military for the benefit of the military industrial complex, we go to war, read the novel 1984.

That was all about, you always had to be at war, you always had to, you know, rev up your population, you always had to be fighting something, you. You’ve got to fight climate change because CO2, a trace element that mankind is responsible for a fraction of what’s naturally occurring. We have to be afraid of a buildup of CO2, spend trillions of dollars,even bend the curve down. Again, it’s all creating fear and then hate. That’s what identity politics is about. That’s what critical race theory is about, because if you get people to hate each other, you divide and conquer.

Again, people should go back, it’s 15 or 60 minutes long, and listen to President Eisenhower’s unbelievably prescient and wise farewell address. Military deaths are complex. Government funding of science and research. Don’t plunder. Don’t mortgage your kids’ future. And step back from this dreadful state of fear and hate that we have in the world today.

That’s what I hope Trump can do. He gets criticized. He’s dealing with tyrants. Those tyrants are in charge of China and Russia and Iran and North Korea. I'd rather be talking to them than pushing them to the point where they have a misunderstanding of what our intentions are, where they end up hitting the button before we do. That’s the threat. We’ve got to step back from that.

Mr. Jekielek: In his first term, President Trump demonstrated this idea of peace through strength, of acting very decisively and projecting American strength when necessary.

Senator Johnson: Let me talk about strength, though, because the first element of strength is economic strength, prosperity, a strong country, a unified country. That’s why for years, I’ve been quoting Lincoln, that a nation divided against itself cannot stand. This division has been sown by both sides, but primarily by the Left.

Again, critical race theory, identity politics, the whole issue of transgenderism, where did that spring out of, okay? It was all meant to divide us. A divided nation is a weak nation. A nation that’s $36 trillion in debt is a weak nation, okay? A nation that opens up its borders to all comers, including people who really threaten this nation, our adversaries coming into this country. That’s a weak nation.

That’s why the world’s in turmoil today. When America is weak, the world’s a dangerous place. But it starts and almost stops with economic strength and then using the economic strength to help other nations create opportunities for their citizens. I’m not opposed to importing products from people to help them create wealth for themselves.

Now, I appreciate the fact that China’s lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. That’s a good thing. It’s not a bad thing. Now, they have to play by the rules. When we’re an engine of economic strength that helps drive the rest of the world to greater prosperity, that’s how you achieve peace. So you have to take the broader picture here.

I don’t want us at loggerheads with everybody. What we’re trying to do is, how can we figure out how to get along? How can you recognize the other person’s perspective? China has a huge demographic problem now. They still need to lift millions of people out of just abject poverty. That’s true around the world. What can we do without harming our own American citizens, but how can we generously try and help build that prosperity to benefit us?

Again, this should be a win-win situation. This doesn’t have to be a win-lose type of thing. So look for those win-win situations, but have, again, have the broader perspective of peace through strength starts with economic strength, national unity, and don’t rely so much on our military prowess.

Mr. Jekielek: Senator, something you said earlier about communicating with the people of nations, especially dictatorships, I think there’s something, I guess, very significant there in the vein of exactly what you just talked about. A final thought as we finish up?

Senator Johnson: Again, I think America is a great country because Americans, by and large, are good people. And to the extent that even when our government or our leaders are potentially hostile to a nation, I think where there’s free information, it’s very difficult to suppress all free information. I think most people in the world do recognize that Americans are good people. We’ve done so many good things. We’ve been so generous. Let’s embrace that.

Let our leadership in the world be driven by the principles that made this country great. Our love of freedom and our desire to allow other people to have the same kind of freedom, the same kind of opportunities, the same kind of prosperity that we enjoy because of that freedom. That’s how we need to lead in this world. That’s why we’re a shining city on a hill. Not because we’ve got the biggest missiles and we can threaten people, we can take out governments with a massive strike. People respect us because, again, we’re good people.

This model is based on the essential ingredient of freedom, it’s working. It has worked. It’s worked around the world. There are so many more democracies. There’s so much more freedom today than there was 100 to 200 years ago. That’s because of the example we’ve set. Let’s set that example and lead by soft power. Adventurism and trying to impose our will on other people is not the solution. Let’s lead by example.

Mr. Jekielek: Senator Ron Johnson, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show.

Senator Johnson: Thanks for having me on.