Youngkin Joins Bloomberg to Discuss Key Issues Facing Virginia and America 

ICYMI: Governor Glenn Youngkin joined Bloomberg for a discussion with Annmarie Hordern on key issues facing Virginia and America. 

Youngkin discussed the blatant antisemitism on college campuses in the wake of recent testimony from Ivy League presidents, the success of Republican-led states, all-of-the-above energy solutions, and the failed leadership of President Joe Biden.  

ANTISEMITISM ON COLLEGE CAMPUSES 

Governor Youngkin: I will protect our First Amendment right until the day I die, and I actually swore on a Bible that I will protect and defend our Constitution. But that doesn't mean you can say and do anything you want, particularly when you are espousing horrific hate speech and talking about literally annihilating an entire group of people. This is wrong, and there has to be a very clear understanding that there's freedom of expression but when it incites violence and encourages, truly, the annihilation of people, it has to stop, and we need to be clear on this.  

And these college professors tried to suggest that there was some moments where you could justify extermination speech. There's no justification here. 

I do believe that there is a real justification for the Penn president stepping down, and I believe the other two should come under the exact same scrutiny. 

THE SUCCESS OF REPUBLICAN-LED STATES LIKE VIRGINIA 

Governor Youngkin: We have many states that are doing very well and other states that are doing poorly. And the reality, of course, is that it is the policies that are driving this.  

Let me just give you an example: Over the last four years, since before the pandemic, there've been about two and a half million jobs created in America up through October.  

Ten states account for 3 million of those 2.5 million jobs. Ten other states have lost a million jobs during that time period.

The winning states are bigger states like Florida and Texas, and Virginia has added 230,000 jobs since I came in.

And the states that have been losing jobs are the ones that we hear about all the time – California, Illinois, New York. They've had negative job growth since before the pandemic. This is just a stark reality of the tale of two cities of the American economy. 

Governor Youngkin: We don't have to just pick on California. We can pick on New York. We can say the same thing about Illinois.  

Pick the metric: unemployment, population movement, job growth. States that have commonsense policies that recognize that lowering costs, lowering taxes, having business-friendly environments work and the others don't. 

And in a world where we have the ability to move, businesses have the ability to decide where their next investment is going, they're choosing states that, long-term, provide the best opportunities. 

ALL-OF-THE-ABOVE ENERGY SOLUTIONS 

Governor Youngkin: Let's make sure we have reasonable energy policies. There’s a reality on energy which we've got to embrace. We can't begin to fund every offshore wind project on the planet. Because what we're seeing is ten of them have already begun to fail, or failed on the East Coast, because they're not economically viable. 

We need natural gas. We need wind and solar. We need nuclear. We need carbon capture. We're going to need hydrogen. We need all of the above in order to have a secure and reliable and, yes, increasingly clean energy future.

This is all about common sense. And when we see things move so far out of bounds that we can't even begin to explain why things are being done, we know we have violated the commonsense rule.

Let's get back into the land of reality. 

JOE BIDEN’S FAILURES AS PRESIDENT 

Governor Youngkin: I firmly believe that Americans - Republicans, Independents, and a load of Democrats, understand that we can’t as a nation afford another four years of Joe Biden. 

We have international chaos. A war in the Middle East. A war in Ukraine. Saber rattling and military aggression out of China like we didn’t see before.

We see chaos at the border, and no one can deny this. It is chaos on a humanitarian basis. It’s chaos from a drug flow standpoint. It’s chaos from a national security standpoint.  

We’re watching our economy and we're debating whether we're going to have a recession or not because we now have interest rates we've never seen before because they've had to be raised in order to combat the inflation that he unleashed. Everybody knew when you have unfettered spending to the degree that he did, we were going to unleash inflation. He didn’t seem to recognize that.  

And I do believe that, at the end of the day, the Republican candidate will beat Joe Biden. And I think Americans will vote that way. Because they know that the weakness that he projects around the world and at home has put America’s future at risk. 

We can’t have this again.  

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