← The Charlie Kirk Show
Loading summary
Transcript124 lines
- [00:00]
Charlie Kirk
Hey everybody. Happy Monday. Usually I do an Ask me anything episode, but things have been a little bit different this week. I wanted to join my friend Wilt Chamberlain, one of the smartest guys I know, a strategic and analytic thinker. To this Ask Me anything episode where I ask Will about what's going on with the Georgia loss, the chaos on Capitol Hill and President Donald Trump getting deleted from Twitter and Parler getting attack from three different multi trillion dollar companies. That and so much more. This episode is brought to you by Express VPN. ExpressVPN is how you fight back against Big Brother and Big tech. Go to expressvpn.com Charlie it's expressvpn.com Charlie. If you want to support this program, go to charliekirk.com Support Will Chamberlain from Human Events is here. Buckle up everybody. Here we go.
- [00:57]
Charlie. What you've done is incredible here. Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.
- [01:01]
Will Chamberlain
I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
- [01:04]
Charlie Kirk
Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
- [01:08]
Unidentified Supporter
I want to thank Charlie. He's an incredible guy. His spirit, his love of this country. He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point usa.
- [01:18]
Charlie Kirk
We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives. And we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country. That's why we are here.
- [01:30]
In our fast paced world, it's tough to make reading a priority. I totally get it. At least it used to be. @thinker.org, T-H-I n k r.org they summarize the key ideas from new and noteworthy nonfiction, giving you access to an entire library of great books in bite sized form. Read or listen to hundreds of titles in a matter of minutes. From old classics like Dale Carnegie's how to Win Friends and Influence People to to recent best sellers like Jordan Peterson's 12 Rules for Life. I can tell you Thinker has helped me understand big ideas very quickly and quite enjoyably. So if you want to challenge your preconceptions, expand your horizons and become a better thinker, go to thinker.org that's T H I N K R dot org to start a free trial again, that's thinker.org Charlie T H I N K R dotorg
- [02:19]
hey everybody, welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show. In place of an Ask me anything, I'm going to ask Will anything. And this will hopefully be a weekly episode. Will Chamberlain, head of Human events, does some great work and he is very smart and I really wanted to talk to him for a variety of different reasons. But, Will, this was one of the worst weeks ever.
- [02:40]
Will Chamberlain
Yes, I would agree with that, Charlie. It's been, I mean, you know, one after the other of really terrible events. I mean, the losing the Senate races, the riots on the 6th, and the massive escalation of big tech censorship. I can't think of a worse week this year for the conservative movement. The only one contesting. That would maybe be the week of the election, but even so, still very, very bad.
- [03:02]
Charlie Kirk
Yeah, I mean, it set us back dramatically. So I want you just to take the floor, unpack. How are you analyzing these things independently? I want to get to tech in a minute, but first, just. Can you help unpack Georgia and most specifically the riots. I have deleted Twitter from my phone. People don't believe me, but I actually don't have the twitter.com app and people. That way I can think more clearly. And I have been out of touch of how most conservatives are kind of talking about this. I've been reading some opinion papers. I would imagine there's widespread condemnation. I know there are some people that are still kind of in the camp of trying to justify what happened, but I'm in the complete belief of complete and total denunciation. Where are we at here?
- [03:50]
Will Chamberlain
Yeah, I mean, I don't see anybody really justifying it except some very, very fringe people. It's clearly. This is not what we do. We don't riot. This is not the right style. Even if there was somehow some preposterous ethical argument in favor of it, the right doesn't have the institutions to do it. I mean, compare that to the left. They have things like the National Lawyers Guild and all these grassroots organizers who are there to back up people who riot. They write down the number of the lawyer they're supposed to call to get bailed out. So it's just a terrible strategic mistake and also just horribly immoral. So we shouldn't do that sort of thing. I think from my perspective, Georgia is a serious disappointment. I think in many ways, we kind of suppressed our own turnout by not doing well enough in terms of explaining why people needed to get out and turn out to vote, even in the face of questions about election fraud. I don't know that we did a great job of that. I think we probably suppressed our own turnout a little bit. And the Democrats were super motivated, and it's really cruddy to lose that. And then to top it all off, massive big tech censorship. I've spent the last two years Preaching that we needed to be more aggressive, regulate, always on the bleeding edge of this issue. And I got so much pushback on. Well, they're private companies, we should let them do what they want. And entrepreneurship is the way to solve this. And I feel like I have been proven decidedly right and I'm not happy about it.
- [05:23]
Charlie Kirk
Yeah, I mean, I've never wanted to be wrong about something more. But Will, it was no coincidence that we lose the Georgia runoffs mostly because of apathy. And there was probably, you know, some shenanigans baked into it. But we just know how many human beings showed up in certain areas, like how many they walked the door on election day. And that number was down.
- [05:44]
Will Chamberlain
Right.
- [05:44]
Charlie Kirk
So I'm very open minded when it comes to mail and ballot stuff. I'm sure that all of that. But you got to bake that in. Right. It's a contest in its own isolated, kind of like you're not going to fix the signature verification ahead of the January run up, so you just give up. That was the answer a lot of people had and that is so unbelievably foolish. And then you just basically gave cover fire to these multi trillion dollar companies. And so in one week, let's look what happened in one week. We lost the United States Senate, we lost the US Capitol Building, and with it, I think years of hard earned credibility the conservative movement had gained to show that we were successfully repudiating radical fringe voices and also to show that we were the peaceful ones. And we'll get into if there were other agitators and stuff. I think there's evidence to show that there were some bad actors there. But Will you and I both know too, based on the arrest records, there are people that call themselves Trump supporters that were there too. Let's not fool ourselves. And then, as if that wasn't enough, the red terror on social media has now been completely implemented. The president, they took the President off Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, Twitter, Shopify, Spotify, as if they wanted to just cut him off from listening to music. And then on top of that, the parlor thing, which I want to get to. And so this week was probably one of the most destructive and difficult weeks if you just look at it from an infrastructure standpoint. Right. Yeah, that I can never remember.
- [07:23]
Will Chamberlain
Right. Like we found, you know, after November, I thought, okay, like it's a bad outcome, a very bad outcome to lose the presidency, but it's not catastrophic. We didn't lose the Senate because we didn't think, oh, we're gonna lose the runoffs. Like we were ahead in the November election and both of the runoff elections, if you added up all the Republican votes versus the Democrat votes, but we managed to lose those seats. And it's just really distressing from a pure political power perspective, but also in terms of our credibility, like, you know, people would ask me like, why was the security so lax? And I think one of the reasons is we, you know, Trump supporters and the conservatives had built up a lot of credibility with Capitol Police. We'd held a lot of protests and they were always peaceful, like completely peaceful.
- [08:05]
Charlie Kirk
That's a really good point.
- [08:07]
Will Chamberlain
Yeah. And now, I mean, now that's gone. I mean they, no matter what, they would have defaulted to the assumption that Antifa were the real violent fanatics and didn't, wouldn't have expected Trump supporters to just overrun, you know, a modest police presence. But that's what happened.
- [08:22]
Charlie Kirk
And there were some agitators and some people that were part of, you know, BLM stuff that was peppered in throughout that.
- [08:27]
Will Chamberlain
Sure.
- [08:29]
Charlie Kirk
But just to blame it solely and simply on that, I think is not a correct characterization. I just, I don't think that's right.
- [08:39]
49% of Americans say their top New Year's resolution is to save money in the next year. Well, let's check that box right now. When your Family switches to PeopleTalk from AT&T, Verizon or T Mobile, you could save over $800 a year. That's real money every single month right in your back pocket. And you don't have to sacrifice coverage. PearTalk is on the same network as one of those big carriers, but they charge you half. That's right. No gimmicks, no fluff added to your bills. Which is why peertalk is the top rated wireless company by consumer affairs right now. Get unlimited Talk, text and 2 gigs of data for just 20 bucks a month. And if you go over on data usage, they don't charge you for it. Grab your mobile phone, dial £250 and say Charlie Kirk. When you do, you'll save 50% off your first month. Again, dial £250 and say the keyword Charlie Kirk. PureTalk is simply smarter wireless.
- [09:31]
And so then the riot, whatever you want to call it, the chaos on the Capitol Hill happened and then the left. I think there was a couple different reactions. I think some of them got angry and then some of them got in some ways very excited. Cuz they finally were able to do what they wanted to do for the last couple years. Which is the most comprehensive social Media cleanse in American history.
- [09:55]
Will Chamberlain
Right, I agree.
- [09:56]
Charlie Kirk
And so let's go through this piece by piece. The President's no longer on Twitter. How are we. What are we supposed to make of this?
- [10:04]
Will Chamberlain
I mean, it's a dramatic moment for the country. It is indicative that if the President doesn't have protection on his Twitter account from arbitrary banning, then none of us do. All of us are basically on these platforms with the sword of Damocles hanging over our account. No matter how much work we put into them, years we spend on the platform, reputation and credibility we've built up, that's all at risk. And it's also a dramatic. It's a loss of a major communications platform and tool for the conservative movement. I mean, that Twitter account, in many ways could make or break conservative candidates in congressional races. It could make conservative. It could keep conservative legislators in line, afraid of what would happen, of the consequences of a tweet from the President that criticized them. And it was a rallying cry for the conservative base generally. It's not good for us to have lost. I mean, it was the sixth biggest account on Twitter and probably the most engaged with. I don't know about the numbers there. It's a big loss to our movement because we have Fox News, but the left has all the major networks and MSNBC and CNN losing big social media accounts like that is a loss for our movement generally.
- [11:26]
Charlie Kirk
What are we supposed to make of this? And then I want to get to the next point, which is the parlor thing, which is arguably even more dangerous, which is hard to believe.
- [11:36]
Will Chamberlain
Right. What to make of it? I think it's a realization that the sort of. I talked about a public private partnership of censorship as being the big threat. Right. Because the government on its own can't censor you. Private companies can. And if government officials are encouraging private companies to censor, and the private companies are so inclined, then they work together, and that's a nightmare environment for our ability to speak. That's what you saw, right? It's Michelle Obama going and a bunch of liberal activists going to Twitter saying, please censor these people. That encourages an internal employee revolt at the company to push for censorship. I think we saw a News report about 100 or so employees demanding Trump be banned, and then the consequence, the banning of one of the biggest accounts in the country, in the world. So that public private partnership is there. We're going to have to deal with it for the next four years, probably. We don't really have. We have limited power bases with which to attack it. And thwart it. I mean, hopefully we can do things at the state level to put a wrench in the gears, but there's, you know, we are going to have to deal with that. And that's going to put us, you know, like everyone on our side. It's going to mean a lot of discipline. Like we have to be disciplined because, you know, I'm a. We can get. It sort of falls onto the parlor point. Parler is not the solution to this problem ultimately. And this week's events bear that out, too. Ultimately, we are going to need to fight for our right to be on major social media platforms. And that's going to. I see us in sort of face of. Again, the analogy is difficult because the problems we're facing are not as dramatic as the ones faced by the civil rights movement. But it still needs to be conceptualized that way, as though we're facing systemic private discrimination against conservatives. And the proper remedy for that is ultimately going to be a movement that pushes for changes in the law.
- [13:32]
Charlie Kirk
Yeah, and I like that term power base, because that's exactly right. And that's what was so unfortunate about losing Georgia and what all these people that were calling for a boycott of Georgia were too. They were too stupid, if I may say. Or they just didn't care because they go, they're all a bunch of rhinos. I say, wait a second. I sent this email to one of our listeners@freedomarliekirk.com she said Loeffler and Perdue were RINOs. First of all, that's not exactly right. Perdue is actually a generally conservative senator. I disagree with him on certain things I say. But here's the best answer to that, that we never made the argument. Do you want Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz to be in the majority or the minority? It's that simple. Do you want the good guys to have majority power or minority power? Because that actually swings and we were just unable to communicate that. So now they look, we lose Georgia. And the tech company said this is our chance. And they're almost doing this light will, as if they're never going to. They think we're never going to get back into power, which is the scariest thing. They almost are doing this with so much confidence that we are going to wipe you out and you're never going to rise again.
- [14:38]
Will Chamberlain
Yeah. I mean, I hope they're wrong. I think they're wrong. I mean, there were positives that came out of November. I think there's plenty to rebuild with. And it's not like Joe Biden's gonna be 81. Kamala Harris is not popular. These are people who are beatable in any normal political environment. So I think they're making a bad bet. There also is the fact that the liberals have made no bones about the fact that they want antitrust investigations of these companies and antitrust prosecutions and to change antitrust law to punish them more. I think we should be. I don't know why we would want to stand in the way of that. I mean, what have these companies done?
- [15:17]
Charlie Kirk
I think they use that, though. Well, I think they've been used. Some of them, the activists, the smart ones, are using that as a threat to get to. To get the censorship they want.
- [15:25]
Will Chamberlain
Right? That's true. And I mean, that's also what we could have done. We could have been threatening much more aggressive things, just get them to stop censoring, or we could have put in place laws to protect ourselves. I think in many ways that's the big missed opportunity here. We did have power at the right time. If we had gotten our act together and realized what needed to be done. Although it was difficult. I mean, the censorship really ramped up after 2018 when we lost unified control of the government. So I don't want to be too harsh on everybody, but I've talked about before going forward, I think it's just this has got to be like, you know, how Grover Norquist made it. If you're a Republican, you have to be for tax cuts. You're not for tax hikes. Going forward, you have to be for protecting your conservatives on social media. And if you're not, what use are you? I mean, it's a very basic thing,
- [16:12]
Charlie Kirk
and how we're going to achieve that. I'm not totally sure I want to unpack that with you, just from a pragmatic perspective, but I want to get to this parlor thing because it's super creepy, and I don't use that word lightly. And it's really important that people understand this. So I know the founder of Partner John. I've known him for years. I was one of the first Parler accounts. In fact, Candace Owens and I were literally. My people say, Charlie, what's your handle on Parler? It's Harley.
- [16:39]
Will Chamberlain
Yeah, I'm ill. I was there early, too.
- [16:42]
Charlie Kirk
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I just. Because I said this thing's going to take off. I want to be there. I like John. I can never pronounce his last name. Massey or Mates. Good guy. I know some of the investors in Parler I've been cheering them along. I've been posting periodically. I think they'd admit that at times their app can be a little buggy and they're still trying to figure it out, and they're not as capitalized as they'd like to be. And that's all fine. They're working on it. Dan Bongino's really helped drive a lot of traffic to it, and God bless them for that. But what's been the most interesting thing over the last 72 hours is that, remember the libertarians told us, well, we'll just go create a competitor. That's what Parler is. Right. So they create a competitor. But because of the current tech infrastructure, how do you get your competitor out there? And this is where the libertarians have just been so wrong. Oh, you put it on the Google App Store. Okay. You put it on the Apple App Store. Okay, well, where am I supposed to host my app on AWS? Amazon Web Services. And in a sequence of 72 hours, three companies, two of them have a market cap over a trillion dollars and the third has a market cap right around $800 billion. Decided to go one by one by one. Actually, no, they're all over a trillion now. I'm sorry, I was thinking of Facebook to make it so Parler can basically cease to exist. A competitor that's probably valued at most. At $50 million. At most. Right. And they're still figuring themselves out. $50 to $75 million. Three multitrillion dollar companies. Go, you can't exist. Go from there, Will.
- [18:19]
Will Chamberlain
I mean, there's. It puts the lie to the build your own Twitter argument. Right. Everything we've been saying about how they're monopolies. Well, they have oligopoly. They have an oligopoly. I looked up, I was curious, okay, how much of the mobile operating system share do Google and Apple have? Because it seems like a lot, just intuitively, the number is 99.8% in the United States. You don't even know, you know what the third one is? It's Samsung. You've never heard of the Samsung store, but they actually have their own little OS that has like 0.1% of the American market. 99.8%. And four years ago, 80. Even four years ago, 80% of social media consumption was on mobile. So if you have a social media app that isn't on mobile, it's done already from conception. It won't be competitive. It's doomed to obscurity. And so if Google and Apple act in concert, they can make any social media app disappear and be not commercially viable. There is no way entrepreneurship can solve that problem in the medium term. There is no way. Building your own.
- [19:22]
Charlie Kirk
Exactly.
- [19:23]
Will Chamberlain
Right, yeah. There's no way. That is, I mean, now there's an antitrust issue. Right. If they're collect, you know, if they're acting in concert, in restraint of trade, there might actually be, under current law, some antitrust claims.
- [19:35]
Charlie Kirk
I've said this all along, that the discrimination route is never going to pan out well for us in the courts go after how these companies are trying to stifle competition in the market. There's lots of law around that, right?
- [19:46]
Will Chamberlain
Yeah. Under current law, I would agree with you completely. Right. We don't have the law written now to win in discrimination, save for maybe in like some state courts where there's like.
- [19:55]
Charlie Kirk
And we need to, we need to pass those in the state legislatures quickly.
- [19:57]
Will Chamberlain
Right, right. Like, we need, we need to change the law as it goes. As regards discrimination, under current law, antitrust is, is the best available alternative. But even then, I mean, antitrust, there's a lot, you know, antitrust law has been, you know, largely due to the conservative movement, been shaped in a way to be very favorable to the larger
- [20:13]
Charlie Kirk
companies because they used to be on team, right?
- [20:15]
Will Chamberlain
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
- [20:17]
Charlie Kirk
And so the parlor thing, I know they're scrambling over there, they might go to Rackspace. And so just so everyone understands kind of what happens here. So if you're going to build an app, you actually need servers to do this. You need physical servers. I know this is a hard thing for some people to understand. They say it's all up in the cloud. Like, no, no, no. The cloud's actually in some like, rural facility in Utah. Okay. That's where your social media account is. And so Amazon, in the late 1900s, 1990s, I should say, they were not a very valuable company. But Bezos bought something called merchant.com and they wanted to actually create what is now called Shopify. And in 2000, they slowly realized that most of the infrastructure for the Internet hasn't been built yet and that they just started buying up server space wildly and it really wasn't successful until 2013. Now what happened in 2013? What happened in 2013 was the app explosion, right. Uber, Snapchat, these super data intensive apps started to come on and they needed places to be hosted. I mean, way more intensive than just traditional websites. Right. And so, but Amazon was sitting there with this web service where they actually helped other companies grow in the early 2000s. And now half of all exterior web services on servers is done through Amazon Web Server. And they are the gold standard. There's Microsoft, and then they call it a lude or something. There's Google. Facebook has their own servers. But the gold standard is Amazon. Right. And it's cheaper. They're able to do it quicker, better, faster, cheaper. And everyone celebrated this, myself included, a couple years ago. Like, how awesome is this? You can do your own thing. And you were the first one to really warn about this alongside other people. Like, well, hold on a second. What if Amazon gets taken over by a bunch of French Revolution types and they say, cut off the server space, where do you go then? And everyone kind of laughed at it and I didn't take it seriously. And so Parler, the entrepreneurs are like, oh, let's go use Amazon Web Services. Right? They're never going to kick us off. I mean, come on. I don't even think it crossed their mind till recently. And then they get the app out to the Google Store and the Apple App Store. And I'll be honest, Will, two weeks ago, I don't even think that getting dropped from Amazon Web Services was a threat. I mean, this is. I have not heard of them do this for anyone.
- [22:36]
Will Chamberlain
Yeah, neither have I. Not for the wet. I think maybe they did it for Gab. I don't know.
- [22:40]
Charlie Kirk
I think maybe. Maybe. Right, But Gab I think is now on Rack space or something.
- [22:45]
Will Chamberlain
Yeah. And I don't know, like, I mean, maybe we. I think everybody needed to take that red alert more seriously that like, once, if it can happen to them, that it will creep. Right. Like assume. Because, you know, people would always make, oh, well, that's a slippery slope. They won't do that. I mean, how slippery has that slope proven to be? You know, we were.
- [23:02]
Charlie Kirk
It's not a logical fallacy.
- [23:03]
Will Chamberlain
Yeah, no, yeah, that's a good point. Right. I always, like, people always say it's a fallacy. It's like, no, it's a prediction. Predictions are not fallacies.
- [23:11]
Charlie Kirk
It's a predictive measure. Actually. We know where this is headed. And so the issue now is Parler, which is supposed to be a competitor and was having massive amounts of traffic coming to. To it might collapse at any moment because they don't have server space. I think Amazon is granting them a couple days to go find new servers. It's not that simple. Yeah, the migration, the replication, no one really knows what's going to happen at this. I've been talking to some programmers. They're like, yeah, the whole thing could just like fall apart or just, you know, someone with 4,000 followers could just end up having 400,000 followers. Like no way. The whole thing can get messed up in that kind of a migration. Right. And so that's not easy at all. And so the question is then what do we do about this? The President has now been completely kicked off of all these platforms. I'm starting to try to. I went on an investigative hunt, Will, in the last 24 hours of any entrepreneur that's trying to create any wacky thing to either create hardware or servers. And quite honestly, I should have been doing this four years ago, but I was too busy building Turning Point. But where were our VCs going out and doing this four or five years ago. Right.
- [24:21]
Will Chamberlain
I mean we just, we assumed it wasn't necessary, people. It had never been to happen before. You know, we assumed that they wouldn't discriminate this badly. We were wrong. Or you know, I mean I was, you know, I predicted some of these things. I didn't predict all of them. Right. Like, you know, I thought, I never thought that Parler would get kicked off these, the Google and App Store. I didn't, I didn't assume that is,
- [24:41]
Charlie Kirk
that is unbelievable to me.
- [24:42]
Will Chamberlain
Right. Like, and my analysis was always, I mean I always saw an issue with Parler, like once I started using it and the alternatives had some issues to them. One of the big issues I thought, especially with Gab, was their incentive structures messed up with regards to the conservative movement writ large because they do better when we are getting more censored, which is not ideal. And I think Gab's leadership at one point was actually pushing to try and get people blocked on Twitter so that they could route over Gab. And I always thought it was more important. We didn't want to fight to be segregated in our own second rate social media services. I thought we should always fight to be where the debate is happening, where everyone is, and fight for our right to be a part of that. But I still didn't predict even the hint of competition from Parler and bam, they're just off of everything. I didn't see that coming. But it definitely means.
- [25:34]
Charlie Kirk
Well, what this does show me Will, is that the Shopify things really, really scary too is they're not going to stop. And they already kind of showed us the payment processors, the banks. That's the real one. That's gonna be very interesting. The banks, the banks are gonna say you can't do business, you can't hold lines of credit if you are associated with a certain ideological viewpoint. That's coming. Now let's take a step back. What is the justification, though, that Google and Apple are making to get rid of Parler is that there was legitimate death threats on their platform. I'm just trying to understand it to build out their argument.
- [26:09]
Will Chamberlain
They're not. It's either. I think they have moderation policies at Parler about violence and inc. And unlawful content. Right. It's not a complete free for all there.
- [26:18]
Charlie Kirk
It's not Reddit. Well, Reddit moderates, but it's not 8 chat.
- [26:21]
Will Chamberlain
Yeah, exactly. And so then I think. I guess the argument then is, well, you're not doing enough to enforce your rules or they're not strict enough. Right. But I mean, you think about it like. And everybody's pointed, like, look at Lin Wood. He's still on par. He's still on Parler or whatever, and he's saying these horrible things. Lin Wood was on Twitter a week ago saying crazy stuff then, too. I mean, there's.
- [26:43]
Charlie Kirk
So he could affect the Georgia runoff, Right?
- [26:45]
Will Chamberlain
Yeah. I think I tweeted something along the lines of, he was kept on the platform just long enough to lose us the Senate seats.
- [26:52]
Charlie Kirk
Yeah. To be helpful and then get him off.
- [26:53]
Will Chamberlain
Right. But there's a clear double standard in the way that they're treating these companies. Right. Twitter and Facebook and YouTube have all sorts of horrible content. They do work to try and eliminate it, but they have all this horrible content. I mean, I guess. And all of a sudden to just unilaterally aside, out of nowhere, while Parler's efforts are not good enough, you have 24 hours to fix them. I mean, it's arbitrary. Yeah. On a weekend. Right. On a Friday. And like, in the middle of the biggest traffic spike they've ever had. I mean, like, if they're actually. If they were making this request of them in good faith, they would be a little more patient than just a
- [27:26]
Charlie Kirk
unilaterally suspicious 30 days or something. Right. Or something like that.
- [27:29]
Will Chamberlain
Yeah, but it's not a good faith. It's an effort to, like, quiet the liberal activists in their own companies, get rid of a competitor. Like, it's not done in good faith.
- [27:38]
Charlie Kirk
Yeah, but like, what? Here's. Here's where I want to think strategically with you, though, Will. Is that absent, you know, a mass, like all of us just disappearing, there's still 65, 70 million of us, and you can't go on parlor. The president missing on Twitter is really something that people are gonna are noticing and talking about and stunningly people like Sam Harris are supporting it. I just, I'm just blown away by this. But what is the strategic plan? Is it kind of we need to now all of a sudden build our own hardware? We need to now build our own server space? What is the strategic plan? I'm talking more just on the non political side. We can get to the political side in a second. I'm talking about are we going to be able to exist in a free society?
- [28:26]
Will Chamberlain
Well, I mean I think the, those alternative plans are just all pretty abysmal. I mean the amount of work it took to build up to what Amazon has, as you're describing as a 20
- [28:38]
Charlie Kirk
year project losing money for 15 of it.
- [28:41]
Will Chamberlain
Right. And billions and billions and billions of dollars. And to come up with a completely adversarial set of corporations while fighting against these massive Goliath monopolies that already are in power and by the way will have the assistance of the federal government which will be doing their bidding too. Probably especially to squash the like conservative alternatives to everything. Yeah, I mean we can't. Like if these companies were able to do that just by snapping their fingers, what are they able to do to any fledgling competitors with the assistance of the federal government?
- [29:15]
Charlie Kirk
And here's an idea I had. It's like a state like South Dakota floats a 10 year note to basically interest free build servers. If you migrate your business to it. I'm not kidding. That's the type of stuff we need. We need to start thinking super creatively. Right?
- [29:30]
Will Chamberlain
I mean, yeah, yeah, sure. I mean we should.
- [29:33]
Charlie Kirk
Or Texas, Texas floats a multi billion dollar note and is like, you know, this baby. It's like tiff money, right? They'll get the money back and over a decade they're going to say we're going to have server space and you can rent it from us, but we're going to float the front of it. Like we're going to front the cost and it's going to be, it's going to be the state owned by the state of Texas for free. You know, whatever you want to do with it. We're just not going to kick you off, right?
- [29:59]
Will Chamberlain
Yeah.
- [29:59]
Charlie Kirk
And it sounds wacky but like what else? What other. I mean I'm writing a piece for Human Events right now and obviously it's a distress signal to Elon Musk. Dude, no, that's the piece. It's an SOS call.
- [30:13]
Will Chamberlain
I don't know, I don't know how liquid he is. I mean we'll see if he wants
- [30:16]
Charlie Kirk
to do it, I think there's plenty of people that will buy Tesla stock right now.
- [30:19]
Will Chamberlain
That's true. Tesla's doing good. That's right.
- [30:23]
Charlie Kirk
I think that the liquidity could magically appear is the point I'm saying.
- [30:26]
Will Chamberlain
Yeah, I mean you think about. It's a big thing to decide. You want to be adversarial. One of these entrepreneurs wants to be explicitly adversarial to the existing tech companies, plus the existing and plus the federal government.
- [30:38]
Charlie Kirk
Thiel and Elon could do it.
- [30:40]
Will Chamberlain
They could, but oof. It would be. It's really challenging. But I think, yeah, I mean we should. At the state level that should be done. We should also be thinking about local level legislation and trying to enforce consumer protection legislation. There's arguments to be made that the representations made by Twitter and Facebook to users were fraudulent and that you could sue them under consumer fraud statutes. I don't know. State law is trying to make it so their state users have a right to be on these platforms. They probably conflict with 230, but you got to try it. I mean we're not in a great position. And I still, I ultimately think the solution to collective, mass, collective private discrimination is ultimately federal law making that discrimination illegal. I still think that's, you know, that's the end goal that puts an end to this nonsense. And I hope the private efforts work. But I think that like, you know, I'm going to spend my time, I'm not going to spend my time in the private efforts. I'm not a business.
- [31:43]
Charlie Kirk
No, but I'm saying that we have to at least talk about them and ask for them. Sure. Because absent the private efforts, in my opinion, we're going to keep on coming up against this problem, which is are you in power and if not, you can't communicate to people.
- [31:56]
Will Chamberlain
Yeah, that's true. That's true. It's a very scary thing. And you know that like, I mean, hopefully, and hopefully these 20 year projects work, I think. I mean, I'm all for starting them up and doing what people think is necessary to just basically have states subsidize the creation of a competing infrastructure for their users.
- [32:18]
Charlie Kirk
I never thought I'd say that.
- [32:20]
Will Chamberlain
Yeah. What else are you going to do? Because it's not just a problem here too. I don't know if you follow Balaji Srinivasan on Twitter, who is brilliant. You totally should. But he was making the point about how if you're a foreign government and you see that Twitter took off Donald Trump, why do you Think Twitter wouldn't take off your leader and then can you as that government trust, let yourself be held hostage by an American corporation social media apparatus? So maybe the Indian government says we need our own national social media monopoly platforms that we have control of that our people are never going to be kicked off of. That also is a potential threat to Twitter and Facebook and might get them to change their ways in the sense of. Because if the Indian government say, decides to say, not only is this going to happen, but we also mandate that every single mobile phone sold in India comes pre installed with the India government social media apps.
- [33:13]
Charlie Kirk
Which they could do.
- [33:14]
Will Chamberlain
Which they could do. Right. That's a billion users or half a 500 million or whatever like that. Yeah, like that.
- [33:20]
Charlie Kirk
Not a lot of purchasing power, but yeah, right, right.
- [33:23]
Will Chamberlain
Even so. But I mean from their perspective, that's a lot of, that's a user base that Twitter or Facebook would want on their platform. And Poland did something interesting. I think he made a report on this, but I saw it today. They put in place a law that's a law that I've been advocating for a while. The one that's if you have lawful speech banned on your account, you can walk into a court, get an injunction and get fees.
- [33:43]
Charlie Kirk
Are you serious?
- [33:44]
Will Chamberlain
Yeah. They're going to pass. They're pushing a law like that. I don't know if they passed it, but I was joking. I said on Twitter, I was like, they have to be following my account because this is literally what I said six months ago. And I had some Polish MP come up to me, he's like, yeah, we follow your account.
- [33:58]
Charlie Kirk
That's so cool.
- [33:58]
Will Chamberlain
Yeah, yeah.
- [34:01]
Charlie Kirk
It's kind of funny to see some of these Eastern European countries all of a sudden be the flagships for freedom. It's just, who'd have thought, ridiculously ironic.
- [34:12]
Look, when running a very big business, HR issues can kill you. Or small business wrongful termination suits, minimum wage requirements, labor regulations and more. And HR manager salaries are never cheap. They're an average of $70,000 a year. Bambi, spelled B A M B E E was created specifically for small business. You can get a dedicated HR manager, craft HR policy and maintain your compliance, all for just $99 a month. With Bambi, you can change HR from your biggest liability to your biggest strength. Your dedicated HR manager is available by phone, email or real time chat from onboarding determinations that customize your policies to fit your business and help you manage your employees day to day, all for just $99 a month. Month to Month. There are no hidden fees. Cancel anytime you didn't start your business because you wanted to spend time in HR compliance. Let Bambi help. Get your free HR audit today. Go to bambi.comkirk right now to schedule your free HR audit. That's bambi.comkirk spelled bam to the bee.comkirk
- [35:15]
so let's talk strategically here, Will legislatively and politically. Somebody called me last night and someone I really trust, they said, well Charlie, so where do we go from here? I say, well, we now have to take in some ways a completely defensive posture legislatively. And I say here's what success looks like in two years. Legislatively, no new states added to the United States of America. And there's a great counter argument I have that I'll share with you in a second. The Electoral college is not abolished. HR1 is not passed, which is universal mail in voting. And there's one other one that I had that I can never remember that they want to do. I'll think of it in a sec. There's the Electoral College. No new states. Oh, court packing, of course. And no additional seats to the United States Supreme Court. I think that we have to now focus on them not changing the infrastructure of actually how our country operates so we can never win again. What do you think?
- [36:11]
Will Chamberlain
I think that's exactly right. It's the reason I thought it was so important to win the Senate races. The book that I read that scared me. I read it back in, I think two years ago was it's time to fight dirty by some Democrat political scientist and he just lays out all these ideas. That's where all this stuff comes from. Basically restructure the federal government and our election system to massively advantage Democrats. And I think that's gotta be the legislative goal. Keep Joe Manchin up to his word when he said he's not gonna do any of that stuff, you know, cinema who John Tester, like do whatever he want. Mark Kelly. It's gonna be a real challenge because it's in their party's incentive to do these things at the end of the day. Like there's a there and their electoral incentive to do these things. So I worry very strongly about that and I think you're right that that's the near term legislative goal. Right. The near term legislative goal is don't let them make our job harder in terms of winning elections.
- [37:09]
Charlie Kirk
Well and out of that whole list, the one that is going to be the one that I think that they're going to push is the addition to states I think they're going to add D.C. as a state as one of their top priorities. And a counter argument should be, well, then why do you need your own statehood? Why can't you just break apart into Delaware, Maryland and Virginia statehood?
- [37:30]
Will Chamberlain
Sure.
- [37:31]
Charlie Kirk
And that's a counter argument they can never answer. And of course liberal states will gain a little population and maybe a congressman, but it won't add new senators.
- [37:40]
Will Chamberlain
Right. Like maybe the counter argument should be make the federal district smaller and include just the Mall and the seat of government. And that's exactly right.
- [37:47]
Charlie Kirk
Yes. And then let the other parts, you know, have Virginia take over the other parts or something.
- [37:51]
Will Chamberlain
Right. Maryland probably. Maryland's probably a little easier because Virginia is sort of across the river.
- [37:57]
Charlie Kirk
But you know, if that's all, if we get to that place. Right. Where they're like, well, you have all this representation without, you know, we. All this taxation representation, like, hold on, then why is it you want your own statehood? Like, what is the identity exactly of Washington D.C. something, by the way, the founders rejected completely in the Federalist Papers. Explicitly.
- [38:18]
Will Chamberlain
Right. And you can make a pretty compelling argument that it's unconstitutional actually to make D.C. a state that I agree that like without a constitutional amendment, because it lays out the federal district there. And I mean, there are really good reasons to have a federal district. Like think about when Rand Paul and other senators were walking home from a White House event and were attacked. The idea is that when a state government might be obnoxious or antagonistic towards the federal government, so it should have its own place that it runs. If we're talking about what ideal policy is, it's to take away D.C. home rule and take away the power of Muriel Bowser and return it to Congress. That's what should be done.
- [38:53]
Charlie Kirk
Yes. So the other one is packing the courts. Do you think realistically they'll be able to do that?
- [38:59]
Will Chamberlain
No, I don't think so. I don't think Joe Manchin will be down with that. And I think that needs more than I think they'd need. They'd need a bigger majority to try and push that through. I think you'd see some of the institutionalists in the Senate push back on that. So I think, I think we're going to be okay. But I didn't never wanted to be in a position where that was even a possibility.
- [39:18]
Charlie Kirk
Yeah. And then the Other one is HR1 packing Universal Mail in voting, which is going to be one of their big ones.
- [39:26]
Will Chamberlain
That's going to be really hard. I think they might. I mean, we would have to filibuster that. Right. We'd have to filibuster. And that should be just general. The general idea. Like we are not going to tolerate any federal meddling, oddly enough, any federal meddling in state elections, especially to liberalize mail in voting, which is so vulnerable to fraud. And I mean, we have to fight hard on that. Push Manchin not to be willing to get rid of the filibuster for that. Like, you know, I think we have to really be smart and pick our spots, do a little better than the Democrats did in how they use the filibuster. Like we should. Basically. We should. Basically the filibuster needs to be for the structural changes for the government. Right. Like that's what we need to preserve it for. That's what we need to fight on. Like we're going to be a little more. I mean, if we're fighting on every single issue tooth and nail, the filibuster bill, just eliminate it and then we're screwed forever. So we really have to be careful with when we use it.
- [40:17]
Charlie Kirk
Well, I don't know if Manchin will vote to eliminate that. I'm not convinced of that.
- [40:20]
Will Chamberlain
Neither am I. But I worry, you know, I worry about what happens if, like, we just. I could see a world in which senators are super obstructionist. Right. And wanting to use the filibuster for every legislative proposal and every cabinet official. And every cabinet official.
- [40:36]
Charlie Kirk
And then that'll just tick them off.
- [40:37]
Will Chamberlain
That'll just tick them off. I think we. Cause we have to realize, like, what the. You know, we didn't use our power particularly well in terms of trying to set the table for ourselves. I mean, if we really tick them off. Because the filibuster has been weakened enormously. Right. No longer for Supreme Court justices, no longer for cabinet appointees, no longer for appellate court judges. I feel like we're really close to losing it for the legislative branch. And so we have to be careful with how we use it.
- [41:07]
Charlie Kirk
Yeah. And that's. The Democrats want to abolish the filibuster immediately and get to 50 on all of their pet projects.
- [41:14]
Will Chamberlain
Right. That's what they want to do. They have the slightest of slight majorities and they don't care. They want to use that to impose their will on us.
- [41:21]
Charlie Kirk
So in closing, will this week has been a horror show. What gives you hope?
- [41:25]
Will Chamberlain
What gives me hope? I think in general, there's still a lot of intelligent, talented, passionate Trump people on the conservative side of the aisle. I think we now know what needs to be done. It's no longer a debate anymore about what to do that we need to regulate Big Tech. I mean, I felt the frustrating thing was having to persuade my fellow conservatives. It's like these people need to be regulated. They're going to destroy us otherwise. Otherwise? Yeah, we're already there. People agree. And so I think, and ultimately I don't think the Democrats are as strong as they want to be. I mean, with a 77 year old president who will be 81 as an incumbent and a very unpopular vice president, I think if we learn the lessons of the Trump era, we can come back in four years and take the federal government back and do the right thing for the conservative base.
- [42:22]
Charlie Kirk
Yeah, I have hope in the sense that the Democrats almost always overshoot, almost always by default. And also there's 74 million of us. That gives me hope. And some will be intimidated and some will get despondent. But I also think some people are, I'm talking about the true classical liberals are going to be very scared of what these people wanna do to our country.
- [42:44]
Will Chamberlain
Agreed.
- [42:45]
Charlie Kirk
And now it's time to build new stuff. Humanevents.com Will we have to do it again soon? Thanks.
- [42:50]
Will Chamberlain
Absolutely. For sure.
- [42:52]
Charlie Kirk
Talk to you soon.
- [42:53]
Will Chamberlain
Thanks, bye.
- [42:57]
Charlie Kirk
Thanks so much for listening everybody. Email us your questions freedomarliekirk.com if you want to support us, go to charliekirk.com support and as always, I encourage you to get involved with Turning Point USA where we play offense with a sense
- [43:11]
of urgency to win America's culture war@tpusa.com
- [43:16]
thanks so much for listening everybody. God bless.