Exclusive — MI Senate Candidate Mike Rogers: Democrats Want to ‘Permanently’ Make China a ‘Winner in Our Transportation’

Democrats want to “permanently” make China a “winner in our transportation,” Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers said during an appearance on Breitbart News Saturday, discussing what is at stake in the upcoming election — particularly in his state of Michigan.

The Senate hopeful, a former congressman who served as chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, identified some of the challenges Democrats are facing in this year’s election, and the conversation inevitably touched on the left’s push for electric vehicles (EVs). He suggested voters are frustrated with government attempts at mandating them and “creating the environment in which you won’t be able to buy the kind of vehicle that you want in Michigan.”

Rogers said that type of mandate flies in the face of the lifestyle of many Michiganders who go up north to trout fish, visit their cabins, or engage in other recreational activities.

“I mean it’s a big deal, right? Well, getting up there, you’ve got to — sometimes you’ve got to haul a boat,” he said. “What they’re mandating is saying, ‘You’re not going to have that lifestyle anymore.’ The government’s … saying, ‘No, you don’t get to have that. We’re gonna make you drive a car you don’t want to drive and probably won’t work for your family.’ If you’re a mom trying to get your kids to both, you know, a volleyball practice, a basketball practice, and a debate event at school, an electric car don’t [sic] work for you,” he said, adding that these people have “misread even autoworkers.”

“Forty-percent less labor, and what they’ve done is that they’ve basically mandated you have to buy a product that completely advantages the Communist Party of China,” he said, noting that “85 percent of that car has to be processed in China — 85 percent of the electric system and the battery system.”

“So what you’re saying is you’re permanently going to make China a winner in our transportation, you know, one-seventh of our economy,” he said, noting that this simply “defies logic.”

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He added that the government — President Biden and Governor Gretchen Whitmer (D) — “paid $3 billion for two battery plants basically up in the north in Michigan, that by the way the community didn’t want, and that $3 billion dollars — big chunk of that goes to China and China technology and China engineers coming to Michigan to build these battery facilities.”

“Why on God’s green Earth are we giving U.S. taxpayer dollars to the Communist Party of China, who tells us that they want to dominate the world economy by 2035?” he asked, adding it is bad for national security, personal security, and personal economics.

“This thing is a disaster, and they are a disaster,” the Senate hopeful added.

Breitbart News Saturday airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 from 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. Eastern.