Doug Burgum: Bernie Sanders should pick up and move to France

Governor, you probably heard what Edward Lawrence said. Do you have a thought on this business? Nippon Steel has a much higher bid than Cleveland Clips or other companies for U.S. Steel. But what do you think about this? Well, Japan is our ally. Japan's got a fantastic record of owning assets in the United States and being a great partner in those communities with those team members, with the members that work at those, whether it's an auto plant manufacturer, I don't know what Biden administration is screaming about here. I mean, I think the sad part is, I mean, we're talking a $14 billion offer on an $8, $9 billion market cap company. There's tech companies that no one, people have never heard of that have got two or three times that. It's just sad that the unions and others involved in this thing have allowed U.S. Steel to be run down to such a small little, small little company from a market cap standpoint. We need investment. If Nippon is going to invest in U.S. plants, this isn't like they can pick up and move the steel plants. If they're buying it and they're spending that kind of money, they're going to be investing in our country. And we need to have domestic steel production. That won't go away if we've got one of our best allies investing in that company. Yeah, indeed. Governor, let me switch. I want to talk about, we've talked about TikTok before, but now the issue is growing after the House vote and it's in the Senate. My friend Steve Mnuchin, former Treasury Secretary, wants to buy it. He says it's a national security threat owned by ByteDance and he believes it should become an American business owned company. What do you think? Well, I think there's two things. People are getting confused between the platform itself and the algorithm. There's some folks, you know, now Democrats, they want to ban the platform. They want to make it go away. I'm sure that's because, you know, Biden's poll numbers are dropping with the youth. And a lot of the youth are turning off on Joe Biden and he knows that they're getting their news. It's a news platform. So he wants to ban a news platform that's saying things that he doesn't like. If we want to start regulating social media companies, we should be regulating all of them and making sure that we're in, we've got free and fair speech going across all of them as opposed to picking the one that he doesn't like. But as far as national security, President Trump, you know, he helped take care of this when he was in office. No one's been tougher on China than President Trump. And under President Trump, data security for Americans is going to be secure. He insisted that Oracle manage all of the TikTok data in the United States. And it is here in the United States. So if people don't like the algorithm, you know, they should focus on working on the current owners or the new owners on the algorithm to make sure that's fair. But we shouldn't be banning a platform that is so popular in the country right now. But ByteDance, as you know, is essentially like any big Chinese company. It's an instrumentality of the Chinese government and the Chinese Communist Party. It's written into the various corporate covenants. When they get a call, they have to answer the call. So with the optimal position now, China doesn't want to sell ByteDance. That's going to complicate everything. But in optimal terms, I mean, isn't Mnuchin right? Wouldn't it be better for a U.S. group to purchase TikTok, you know, try to move the algorithms in the right direction or change them and most of all, get it out from under the CCP? Well, absolutely. If we had U.S. ownership of that company, everybody would feel better about it not being used as a weapon of espionage, as I've said with you before. I mean, we're in a Cold War with China, we're in a cyber war with China. This would be one way for us to take a step forward if we had U.S. ownership. But it doesn't stop there. If you've got Meta and other people suppressing information in 2020 ahead of the elections, we can't just have all the focus around TikTok. We got to look at all the platforms and the role they're playing as basically news media and whether it's election interference or misinformation, got to look at look at all of them. Yeah, no, I agree with that. Another subject. I don't I don't. North Dakota is sort of near California. Not exactly, but it's kind of out there on the on the left side of the of the map. Gavin Newsom, Governor Gavin Newsom's got this great new plan. He wants to bill ratepayers based not on how much electricity they buy, but on how much money they make. This is a novel approach. You make more and you pay more. It's not a carbon tax. It's not anything related to electricity or climate. He just wants to raise taxes on the middle class as well as wealthy people. Now, I don't guess a sensible state like North Dakota would do that, would it? Not a chance in the world. And it's just amazing to me. This is another almost unconceivable. This is like a if you'd have told me if I'd have read this on Babylon, the satire page, I might have thought that's where it belonged, because this is crazy. I mean, already they've got the highest electricity rates in the country, 25 percent higher on average in California than anyplace else. And among the lowest reliability, they already have that. And then they're trying to increase the tax on wealthy people and turn electricity a core a core thing that everybody needs to operate every single day. They're turning that into a class warfare between rich and poor. They'll just keep driving more people out of the state. And that's what's happening right now. And people are voting with their feet. They're voting with their pocketbooks. They're leaving California. This will just accelerate the number of people that are leaving and won't do anything to help us have low cost, reliable energy, which, of course, North Dakota, a huge energy exporter. We're delivering it here. We're on the path towards having low carbon, reliable, low cost energy. You achieve that through innovation, not through regulation. California and the federal government tries to solve every energy problem with regulation. We need innovation. That's what we had under the Trump administration. And that's why it's so important that President Trump win again in November. One more governor and a Kudlow half a minute, a Kudlow half a minute, sir. Senator Bernie Sanders wants people to work less, but get paid the same or more. What do you think about that one, Governor Bergen? Well, if Bernie Sanders, I think maybe she's pick up and move to France. I mean, we've seen when you have reduced work weeks, what it does. You know, I was a corporate executive. We had people in working in 120 countries when France passed some of their their labor laws to reduce work. We said fine. And we just moved the headquarters to Belgium and moved out of France. They lost jobs. We lose jobs in America with with they start trying to have a 32 hour workweek. It's anti worker. It's anti American. All right. Governor Doug Bergen. We appreciate it, sir. Thank you ever so much. Cover the waterfront.