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Sept. 8, 2020 - The Charlie Kirk Show
54:38
Corporations Vs. America
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Corporations Versus America 00:14:37
Thank you for listening to this Podcast 1 production.
Now available on Apple Podcasts, Podcast 1, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Hey, everybody.
Are corporations on the best side of our country?
Sometimes conservatives dodge this argument and this discussion.
We dive right into it.
Corporations versus America.
This episode is made possible by those of you that support us at charliekirk.com slash support.
Please consider going to charliekirk.com slash support.
It helps us hire more staff, do more episodes, have more guests, and explore very big and bold ideas at charliekirk.com slash support.
As always, you guys can email me your thoughts, freedom at charliekirk.com, freedom at charliekirk.com.
Corporations versus America.
Buckle up, everybody.
Here we go.
Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campuses.
I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
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.
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.
I love free markets.
I got my start reading the brilliant texts from Milton Friedman at Adam Smith.
And for any younger listeners out there, I highly recommend that you guys check out Milton Friedman's incredible work on capitalism and freedom and an inquiry into the wealth of nations by Adam Smith.
I have and still to this day amazed by the price system, the flow and balance of supply and demand, the invisible hand, and the miraculous innovations made possible thanks to the free marketplace.
However, markets should always serve people.
We should not serve markets.
Like all things, our system should be set up to protect God-granted rights of speech, property, liberty, and assembly.
Whenever any person, system, idea, or institution no longer is protecting the American way of life, they deserve criticism.
We should be unafraid to call them out and clearly state why.
In 2012, Mitt Romney famously remarked, Corporations are people, my friend, when he was running for president.
Play tape.
To make sure that the promises we make in Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare are promises we can keep.
And there are various ways of doing that.
One is we can raise taxes on people.
Corporations!
Corporations are people, my friend.
Of course they are.
Everything corporations earn ultimately goes to people.
Where do you think it goes?
Oh, it goes in their mind!
Huge businesses!
Huge businesses!
So number one, so number one, you can raise taxes.
Now, mind you, this used to be the idea of a multi-week story and scandal.
It just kind of goes to show how politics have changed so much.
This used to be something that would consume the entire news cycle for weeks on end.
I vividly remember defending Mitt Romney and his statement.
I remember I was repeating a typical widely held view that corporations are staffed by people, they are meant to serve people, and therefore there's no such thing as a corporation.
There's just people.
Now, the defense I remember articulating was, of course, true, but it was somewhat politically silly, to be honest with you.
Looking back eight years ago, similar to today's political landscape, those of us that were conservatives, we always felt the need to defend Mitt Romney because of how terrible Obama was.
Mitt Romney, of course, lost in a rather decisive fashion.
But his pro-corporate stance on basically every single issue was basically unchallenged and held by every single Republican in office.
That is, until a billionaire from New York came down the golden escalator and jolted the entire American political system.
We are getting ripped off.
I'm so sick of losing.
We can win again.
You guys know all these mantras that President Donald Trump mentioned time and time again.
Trump disrupted the entire conversation, the whole landscape, and with it, the corporate apologist position of the party.
Now, even in the last four years, myself as a free market capitalist, I have found myself more and more critical of positions these massive companies have been taking.
Gradually then suddenly, it is more and more clear that the biggest companies in America and the world fund the most destructive elements of society.
And they're more than happy to outsource generations of talent and work, to press wages, lobby for open borders, pander to racial politics, and have a growing not-so-subtle hostility to our values, customs, and our country.
This has been a very challenging new landscape for many on the right to navigate, because typically we would think of big companies as being on team right.
I've mentioned this before.
They're basically two political teams.
Think of it as a sports analogy.
When you are cheering for a certain team, you're always going to be asking the referee to be favoring you.
Even though you might know that the wide receiver on the team that you guys are cheering for might have stepped out of bounds, you still might hope the referee might rule in your favor.
There's team right and team left, and on these teams are different coalitions.
On team right are gun owners, pro-life believers, people of faith, individuals that revere the Constitution, doctrinaire conservatives, and President Donald Trump has changed the teams.
For now, those of us that do not enjoy foreign wars, those of us that want to end foreign conflicts overseas, we support President Donald Trump.
Team left is primarily composed of pro-abortion, anti-gun, anti-freedom, Medicare for all socialist types.
Now, some of them might disagree on certain topics or issues, but they all find commonality under team left.
Traditionally, corporations were on team right.
But what if I told you that these companies don't even believe in capitalism?
That might sound performatively contradictive, but it is true.
These companies do not believe in a fair price system, competition, value exchange trade, or a restless entrepreneurial underbelly or activity.
These mega companies are not capitalist.
They are corporatist.
Instead of spending resources on research and development, these companies would much rather spend it on lobbying and government affairs.
They want the rules written to favor them special perks to protect their interests.
These massive corporate interests have only grown more powerful by the shutdown and the recent closure of over 100,000 small businesses.
That's right.
Due to the lockdown measures and the shutdowns, there are 100,000 less small businesses today than there were back in March.
And if the shutdowns continue in 60 days, there will be another 100,000 small businesses that will go bankrupt.
Corporate America is very happy when these stay-at-home orders are issued.
For them, these are potential customers.
People that are staying at home are going to be more likely to watch Netflix, order Amazon packages, maybe use Uber Eats, and also, of course, go to Walgreens or CBS.
For corporate America, the shutdowns have been massive business opportunities.
Amazon is worth more than ever before.
While middle-class families collapse under these lockdown orders and rising levels of debt, the trillion-dollar corporations are making out like bandits.
Now, let me be very clear.
These companies are not inherently a problem because they are big.
I am not against corporations by nature.
I am a capitalist.
However, these companies pose a threat because of their size, coupled with their commitment to funding racial politics and also depressing the American middle class.
Never has a country survived when its elites and its most vested members of society are playing an active role in the downfall of the country they live in.
Never before in our country's history have we had the wealthiest Americans spend their resources voluntarily to destroy the country they live in and where they made their money.
This has never happened before, going back even to Teddy Roosevelt's time, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, the titans of industry.
They were funding philanthropies.
They were funding charities and initiatives that benefited our country, universities, mental health clinics.
They were giving back voluntarily to try and believe in a strong America.
Now the elites of our country are doing the exact opposite.
This is a hard thing for conservatives to talk about.
But these mega corporations must be viewed no differently than elite colleges, news organizations, Hollywood actors, athletes, or any other vessel that represents the disintegration of America.
I want to talk about internet freedom.
Social media companies get to decide what content is suitable for the sensitive snowflakes among us and censor whatever they don't like.
Shouldn't you be the one to decide what you want to read or watch, not them?
Well, there's one thing you can control, their access to your data.
And for that, I use Express VPN.
You see, the problem with big tech companies is that they not only censor what you read, but they track what you do online.
They track what you're searching for, the videos you watch and everything you click.
They use this data to serve you ads and can match your activity to your offline identity using your device's unique IP address.
When I use ExpressVPN, these tech companies can't see my IP address at all.
My identity is masked and anonymized by a secure VPN server.
Plus, ExpressVPN also encrypts 100% of your data to protect you from hackers and internet bad guys.
So right now, go to expressvpn.com/slash Charlie, E-X-P-R-E-S-S-V-P-N dot com slash Charlie, expressvpn.com slash Charlie.
And why would you give these tech companies a free license to know everything about you?
So go to expressvpn.com/slash Charlie today.
So how do you know if a corporation warrants criticism?
Now, not every single company should be applied to this list.
For example, Ford Motor Company resisted calls from their employees to stop making police cars and they told them to get back to work.
Good on you, Ford Motor Company.
Ford Motor Company also did not take any government bailout money despite Chrysler and General Motors taking federal bailout money.
But here are five things that if you see a corporation is doing they fit this criteria.
Number one, they support the U.S. Chamber of Commerce or vice versa.
Now, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce for a very long time has been posing as the front-facing voice of American business.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
It should be the U.S. Chamber of Crony Capitalism or the U.S. Chamber of Crony Corporatist Chinese Interests.
The U.S. Chamber represents the biggest companies in our country.
They do not represent the small businessman, the entrepreneur, the disruptor, the dreamer, or the creator.
Look no further than the immigration portion of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce website.
It says very clearly that we should protect dreamers, TPS recipients, and employment-authorized H4-dependent spouses.
Basically, the U.S. Chamber's position is we need more low-wage workers to bring down the wages of middle-class Americans.
If you go to the USChamber.com and you go to diversity and inclusion, it's all about BLM Incorporated, embracing how we need to embrace black-owned businesses, which I do support, but not the over-pandering of such agenda.
On the U.S.Chamber.com, you can only go about halfway through the website where all of a sudden they have Black Lives Matter on the front page of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is the special interest advocacy arm of the big business in our country.
Now, I was very pleased to see Kevin McCarthy, House Minority Leader, say he does not want the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's endorsement.
He does not hope for it.
He does not wish for it because they have sold out to China.
Good for you, Kevin McCarthy.
That is a very hard stance for a Republican leader to take.
Every Republican in the country should reject the U.S. Chamber of Commerce completely.
I could go piece by piece, but if, for example, you go to international trade and investment, it says very clearly trade works, tariffs don't.
New tariffs on steel, aluminum, and Chinese imports, as well as the potential for other tariffs, are spark a global trade war.
Of course, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's position is that the more piles of plastic that we have coming in from China, the better.
Does not matter that we have garage sales where we try to have people take garbage out of our homes.
For them, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on U.S.Chamber.com, they want unlimited amount of trade that benefits China.
For them, a strong China is a strong world.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is bought wholeheartedly by the Chinese Communist Party.
You go to healthcare.
Here they talk about access and affordability.
I could have basically written this for them by saying that I want some sort of corporatist agenda, nothing about price transparency, nothing about holding the hospital lobby accountable, nothing about actually informing consumers.
You go to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce website and then you go to other issues that actually matter.
They have an entire slide on climate change and the environment, not about protecting American workers, coal workers, frackers, or actually protecting U.S. interests.
Instead, they care about nice buzz issues, climate change, and the environment.
Now, why is this?
Well, it's because whatever happens on college campuses does not stay on college campuses.
The Insidious Chamber Agenda 00:02:33
It grows to corporate America.
And yes, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is all about believing in almost a gilded age America, that a small subset of very powerful companies should make every single decision for us in our country.
We as conservatives should reject this wholeheartedly.
There is nothing free market about the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
They argue for special cutouts, carve out subsidies and favors that benefit their clientele, which are the companies on the Dow 30 or the SP 500, the companies that can afford multi-million dollar lawyers and government affairs departments, companies that quite honestly fund the most insidious forces of America.
That is the U.S. Chamber.
And I encourage you guys to go to U.S. Chamber.com.
And I want to make something very clear.
This is different than many of your local chambers, maybe the chamber in your local county, local city.
Some of those chambers might be in the good direction because they're actually locally governed.
Some of them are not.
But the National Chamber of Commerce has not represented small business owners for quite some time.
They are a proxy of the Chinese Communist Party and very well might just be a proxy of the Democrat propaganda machines.
That's number one.
Number two, if a corporation funds or panders to BLM Incorporated, I've made a significant amount of online purchases over the last couple of years.
When America had its so-called racial reckoning after the killing of George Floyd, all of a sudden every single company in the country was almost forced and/or compelled, one way or the other, to email every customer that has ever done business with them, what they are doing to fight systemic racism in America.
These are companies that I have not bought anything from in years.
Brooks Brothers, American Express, you name it, any sort of company I have ever even subscribed to or done business with sent me an email saying, here's what we're doing.
Here's the money we're giving away.
If you're an American corporation funding BLM Incorporated, you're on the other team.
You might as well leave the country because you represent forces that are so insidious, malevolent, and dangerous.
You want to see America collapse from within.
So those are some of the bigger examples.
But let's go through the entire list.
269 mega companies, massive corporations, who are supporting BLM and Antifa that have pledged financial support and other means of support to BLM Incorporated and Antifa, the terrorism happening in our streets.
269 companies.
A List of Malevolent Forces 00:03:38
23 and me.
72 and Sunny.
This is in alphabetical order, by the way.
AbV, Abbey, Road Studios.
The Academy, The Oscars.
Activision, Blizzard.
Adidas, Airbnb, Alaska Airlines, Amazon, AMD, American Airlines, American Express, American Apparel, Apple Music, Ancestry, Armani, Astro Gaming, ATT, Atlantic Records, AWS, Axe, Barclays Bank, Barnes Noble, Bandcamp, Bank of America, Buyer, Bergdorf, Goodman, Bethesda, Ben Jerry's Billboard, BMW, BP, Booking.com, Boost Mobile, Bratz, Burger King, Bungie, Burberry, Burt Speez, Cadillac, Call of Duty, Capcom,
Capital Records, Canada Goose, Cartoon Network, Chick-fil-A, Chipotle, Cisco, Citigroup, Coca-Cola, ColourPop, Cosmetics, Condé Nost, Converse, Corsair, Creative Commons, Criterion Collection, Crunchyroll, CW, CBS,
DHL Express, Dell, Degreed, Devolver Digital, DirecTV, Discord, Disney, Dorito, StoorDash, Duolingo, Dribbble, Dropbox, E-News, EA, Eaton, EB, 8, Sleep, ESPN, Etsy, FedEx, Fender, Figma, Fila,
Fitbit, Footlocker, Formula One, Fox, Frosted, Mini Wheats, Funimation, GameSpot, Gartner, Gatorade, Genetech, General Motors, Gibson, Glossier, GoDaddy, Goldman Sachs, GoFundMe, Google, GoPro, Guerrilla Glue, Grammarly,
Grinder, Guerrilla Collective, Gumroad, Gushers, Habitat for Humanity, Harry's, HBO, HBO Max, Head Up, Help, Scout, Hershey's, HM, Home Depot, Honda, HP, Hulu, Humana, Humble Bundle, HyperX, IBM, IKEA, IMAX, Indiegogo, Itch.io, Intel, Envision, ITV, Kickstarter, La Coste, Lego, Levi's, Lenovo, Lexis, LinkedIn, L'Oreal, Paris, Logitech, Lowe's, Lucky Brand, Lulu, Lemon,
Louis Vuitton, Lyft, Madden, NFL20, Marvel Entertainment, MasterCard, Mattel, McAfee, McDonald's, Mercedes-Benz, MetLife, Metropolitan Opera, Microsoft, Mozilla, Napster, NASCAR, NCSoft, Netflix, New Balance, New York Life, NFL,
NHL, Nynantic, Nickelodeon, Nike, Nintendo, Nordstrom, Northface, Old Spice, OnlyFans, Paramount Pictures, Paramount Network, Patreon, Peloton, PepsiCo, Pfizer, Inc., PlayStation, Plex, Pokemon, Popeyes, Chicken,
PopTarts, Porsche, Pringles, Procter Gamble, Pugent Systems, Puma, Pushin, Qualcomm, Quick and Loans, Reddit, Red Hat, Red Lobster, Red Wing, Reebok, Reese's, Rice Krispies, Riot Games, Rockstar Games, Salesforce, Santa Fe, Scholastic,
Sega, Sesame Street, Society, General, US, Showtime, Sketch, Slack, Sephora, Shopify, Skillshare, Snap, Snapchat, Sony, SoundCloud, Spotify, Square, Enix, Starz, Starbucks, Star Wars, Subway, Supreme New York, Cisco Corporation,
Taco Bell Target, TBS, Tesco, Ticketmaster, TikTok, Timberland, Tinder, T-Mo, Will, Tumblr, Twitch, Twitter, Uber, Uber Eats, Ubisoft, UG, Ulta Beauty, Under Armor, United Health Group, Vanguard Vans, Veggie Tales, Verizon, Versace, Vivovo, Via, Viacom, CBS, Virgin Records, Verda, Viz, Vivalde, Warner Brothers, Warner Records, Wells, Fargo, Wendy's, WeWork, Xbox, Yamaha Music, Yelp, YouTube, Zara, and Zoom.
Those are the 269 companies that have all pledged over $1.6 billion to BLM Incorporated and Antifa.
Outsourcing Profit Over Workers 00:04:05
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The third characteristic of a corporation that warrants criticism, that might be a corporatist company, not a capitalist company, is they refuse to disclose or end their relationship with China.
Are you currently buying products for something made in China?
If so, why?
Try to stop doing that.
Never buy anything ever again made in China if you can help it.
It might be textiles, it might be technology.
I know it's hard, but do your best.
If an American company is still doing business in China after what they have done to our country and the world through the Chinese coronavirus, the covering up of it, the lying, the misrepresentation of it, then they are on Team China, not on Team America.
This is the equivalent of Pearl Harbor against our country.
More people died.
The cover-up in the economic casualty has been a crisis the likes of which we have not seen in our lifetime.
So the question should be, if a company you know is still doing business in China, they love their profits more than they love America.
Remember, I'm a capitalist because I believe it serves the best interest of America.
We are a country that has an economy in it.
We are not an economy that happens to be placed in a country.
Number four, if they're outsourcing jobs, very conservative estimates, according to the Department of Commerce, showed that U.S. multinational corporations, the big brand name companies, which employ a fifth of all American workers, cut their workforces by 2.9 million workers during the 2000s while increasing employment overseas by 2.4 million.
So I'm a capitalist and it thinks this is wrong.
I don't think this is a good thing.
What do we get in return?
Piles of plastic garbage that didn't make us any wealthier or richer, and generations of workers that became addicted to opioids, lost the factories that they knew to be their place of meaning, their place of work, and their place of provision.
And a Wall Street Journal analysis showed, quote, 35 big U.S.-based multinational companies added jobs much faster than other U.S. employers in the past two years, but nearly three-fourths of those jobs are overseas.
And I can't believe it.
I'm actually reading some of this from the Center for American Progress.
It's actually a very fairly written article.
It has the citations I was looking for, probably because it reinforced a pro-domestic union agenda.
However, facts are facts, and I'm happy to use them.
I can't believe I'm actually citing something from AmericanProgress.org.
That kind of just goes to show how the political continuum has been completely changed, thanks to President Trump.
Billion Dollar BLM Donations 00:05:30
We're going to get to that in just a second.
The fifth is if a company does not pay their workers well.
We have seen middle-class wages finally start to go up under President Donald Trump.
But if massive companies do not pay their workers well or fair wages, then the question should be why, and if they're willing to outsource them just for an extra buck or an extra penny on a dollar, then maybe those companies are far more interested in maximizing their profit margins than actually having sustainably strong companies for our country.
So let's zero in on how some of these corporations have pandered and partnered with some of the most dangerous forces in our country.
For example, DoorDash.
DoorDash Incorporated, which delivers prepared food, gave $500,000 to BLM Incorporated.
Most of this list, by the way, I'm about to read, is from the Federalist great website.
Deckers, Deckers, as a company, is standing together in solidarity to fight for equality, they said in an email to the Daily Signal.
And they also gave $500,000 to BLM Incorporated to build power to bring justice and healing to black people across the globe.
How about Amazon?
Amazon linked to BLM Global Network Foundation in a press release on June 9th, identifying it as among 12 groups that would get a total of $10 million from the online retail giant.
Amazon announced as part of that effort, Amazon will donate a total of $10 million to the organizations that are working to bring about social justice and improve the lives of black and African Americans.
Recipients, selected with the help of Amazon's Black Employee Network, include group focused on combating systemic racism through the legal systems, as well as those dedicated to expanding educational economic opportunities for black communities.
How about Gatorade?
Gatorade gave a $500,000 gift to BLM Global Network Foundation.
Microsoft announced on June 5th that it would donate $250,000 to the BLM Foundation, BLM Incorporated.
How about Glossier, which is a skin care and makeup company, said in a May 30th press release that it would divide $500,000 among the five organizations, including BLM Incorporated and the BLM Incorporated Global Network Foundation.
23andMe, CEO Ann Wojishki, announced June 2nd that the biotech company and its employees would donate to BLM Incorporated and linked to the BLM Global Network Foundation.
Airbnb, $500,000 to BLM Matters Foundation and the NAACP.
Nabisco, $500,000 to BLM Global Network Foundation.
Dropbox, $500,000 to BLM.
Fitbit said that they were going to make a donation.
We don't know how much.
Tinder online dating app said that it would donate its proceeds to the BLM Global Network Foundation.
Walmart said it would contribute $100 million over five years to create a new center for racial equity.
CEO Doug McMillan said Walmart generally gets accused of being a Republican propaganda arm or protector or donator to Republican causes.
We know that is not true.
The Walton family donated more to Hillary Clinton than to Republicans back in 2016.
Target announced $10 million in an effort to advance social justice through supporting partners like the National Urban League, an African American Leadership Forum, and BLM Incorporated.
Levi's is donating $200,000 to the BLM Incorporated Movement, $100,000 to ACLU, and $100,000 in grants to Live Free USA.
GAP brands, Athleta, Old Navy, and Gap, $250,000 to NAACP and Embrace Race.
How about Lululemon?
Athletic where Lululemon originally announced $100,000 to the Minnesota Freedom Fund.
Minnesota Freedom Fund, of course, bailed out the terrorists and the thugs that were burning down downtown Minneapolis.
I'm sorry to say every time I buy Lululemon, I now know better.
So we'll no longer buy from Lululemon, which unfortunately is now funding the bail for terrorists.
Lululemon also brandated $250,000 to local Minneapolis organizations of NAACP and BLM Incorporated.
Nike promised to donate $40 million, $40 million to social justice organizations that support BLM Incorporated.
McDonald's, fast food giant McDonald's, is committing $1 million to NAACP and the National Urban League.
Wendy's pledged $500,000 to support social justice, the youth and education of the black community, starting with the Third Good Marshall Fund and, of course, BLM Incorporated.
Coca-Cola, $2.5 million, and they sent out a statement saying this is where we stand on social justice, and $2.5 million in grants from the Coca-Cola Foundation and NAACP Equal Rights Initiative.
And of course, BLM Incorporated.
Peloton announced a $500,000 donation to NAACP Legal Defense Fund and BLM Incorporated.
Facebook pledged $10 million to organizations campaigning for racial justice.
And Bank of America, $1 billion to BLM Incorporated.
PepsiCo, $400 million to BLM Incorporated.
Apple, $100 million to BLM Incorporated.
And Comcast, $100 million to BLM Incorporated.
All in all, according to Axios, the largest 100 U.S. companies have so far committed to $1.6 billion to BLM Incorporated and its allies.
So if you're wondering who's funding these protests, who's funding this riots and this arson?
Well, it's very clear who's funding it.
When you go buy something at McDonald's, Wendy's, stay at an Airbnb, go to Walmart, Target, buy Levi's jeans, maybe deposit a check at Bank of America.
And while you're at it drinking a Diet Coke, you are funding the riots in the Arson of America via Corporate America.
Funding Riots With Diet Coke 00:16:56
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The most incredible development of the rise of corporatism that is bizarrely blended with social change and critical race theory is how the activist left has totally abdicated any criticism of these big, powerful companies.
I remember a day when Michael Moore and the media colluded to attack the entire corporate class just merely out of spite because it was aligned with George W. Bush, which of course it was.
The critical race theory swarm of ideologues have now changed their strategy.
Instead of fighting corporate power, they have infiltrated the top levels of business and remade them in their image.
The largest, most valuable companies are now at will funding mechanisms, like an ATM, whenever they want it, for BLM Incorporated.
Now, this would be bad enough, that list that I just mentioned.
Now that BLM Incorporated and the Biden activist arm is sitting on a billion dollars of extra cash, not to mention the $300 million put on by George Soros, the hundreds of millions of dollars from Mike Bloomberg, and the hundreds of millions of dollars from Tom Stire.
All of that would be bad.
But these companies are not even acting in the best interest of our workers.
Take AT ⁇ T, for example.
Tucker Carlson did a brilliant expose of AT ⁇ T.
The biggest companies, by the way, are fighting for H-1B visas, which basically allow American companies to depress wages to fire existing American workers.
They time and time again say that, well, we can't find American workers to do these jobs.
What they're really saying is we don't want to pay American workers to do these jobs.
AT ⁇ T, headquartered in Dallas, Texas, did what they call re-badging.
They re-badged 8,000 jobs where they made 8,000 Americans train their replacements halfway around the world in Hyderabad, India, and offshore all of their talent.
So these American companies have had a choice to represent their workforce, represent our country, and instead they would much rather give these jobs, give the work and the middle class income halfway around the world.
And as I mentioned in this article, which is stunning, 2.9 million jobs have been offshored and over 2.4 million new people overseas have been hired.
As overseas outsourcing has really expanded and ballooned, U.S. manufacturing has suffered the brunt of the blow.
This is a from, this again, this is from Americaprogress.org, and I double-checked all these statistics.
It's just true.
Facts or facts and how you use them is up to you.
Manufacturing plants have declined sharply in the last decade, shrinking by more than 51,000 plants, 51,000 plants that have just closed.
51,000 averaging, let's say, 200 people per plant.
That's the entire middle part of our country.
So Malibu and Manhattan can get abundantly wealthier.
Jeff Bezos is now worth $168 billion.
In fact, if you type in Jeff Bezos' net worth, you'll get five different answers.
One says $193 billion.
One here says $162 billion.
Conservatively, he's making about $321 million a day.
$321 million a day.
We've spoke at length here on the Charlie Kirk show, what happens when the middle class in our country no longer feels invested or has faith in the direction of our country.
If Jeff Bezos earned all $193 billion, then so be it.
However, Amazon's position in the market is more corporatist than capitalists.
They don't pay federal income taxes, yet you do.
No, they pay other taxes.
They pay payroll tax.
They pay property tax.
It's not their tax-free all the way up and down their operation.
However, for a singular individual like Jeff Bezos to be worth $193 billion, while consumer-held individual middle-class debt in this country has now surpassed $14 trillion, that's right, $14 trillion.
We have 30 million people out of work.
And according to a recent study done by Pew Research, quote, a majority of young adults in the United States live with their parents for the first time since the Great Depression.
I'm reading from the article here, quote, the coronavirus, the Chinese coronavirus outbreak, has pushed millions of Americans, especially young adults, to move in with family members.
The share of 18 to 29-year-olds living with their parents have become a majority since the U.S. Chinese coronavirus cases have begun spreading earlier this year, surpassing the previous peak during the Great Depression era.
Also, we mentioned this before on the Charlie Kirk show.
We're one of the only podcasts to actually mention this because it's actually interesting.
The corporate media will not mention it.
And unfortunately, there's so much political noise happening right now that it has just gotten glossed over.
According to the Brookings Institution, reinforced by Bloomberg.com that said this data is correct, we are on the verge of a population collapse.
Our country is about to have 500,000 less children next year than this year.
This is the greatest population collapse in American history.
Again, half a million fewer children, the coming COVID baby bust.
Now, some of you might think, well, more people locked up at home.
That means that the birth rate is going to go up.
That's not what it means.
Because of access to, let's just say, sophisticated technology, I'll keep it PG.
Couples can now decide if they want children or don't want children.
And most couples are saying they don't.
It's too expensive.
It's too chaotic of a world.
And having children are a value.
And most couples don't have that value after maybe having one or two kids.
Most young people are not having kids.
Most young people are not getting married because 52% of all young adults now live at home.
What we're entering into is a very dangerous landscape.
And we as conservatives should be unafraid to dive right into this discussion because I actually think we're on the right side of this issue.
I've said this once and I'll say it again.
Just because someone gets rich does not mean someone gets poor.
I've said this before and it is true.
However, when middle-income people have the belief that the system no longer benefits them if they work hard and play by the rules, and most of your young people are in an unproductive state, they're not getting married.
They're not having kids.
They do not have work.
They don't own anything.
52% of young adults live at home for the first time since the Great Depression.
And yet the Dow hits record numbers.
Companies are worth more than ever before.
And Jeff Bezos is now worth $190 billion or $160 billion, whatever number you use.
And Bill Gates is worth $115 billion.
Slow yourself down and ask yourself the question, how is this going to get better the more power we give these massive corporations?
And you ask yourself, why are these young people marching in the streets?
Of course, some of it is the garbage that they learn in the university system.
We talk about that quite often.
But it's also because these corporations and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
These corporations are not our friends.
As I said earlier, Mitt Romney said, corporations are people.
Don't you understand?
Corporations are people, my friend, is the exact quote.
Well, if corporations are people, then these people are making bad choices.
In fact, these people are now opposing Western values and our country.
So now two things will happen because of this.
Now, you're going to see people only purchase based on political ideology.
You are going to see other companies rise up in competition.
And I actually think that these companies that are engaging in this woke politics that are trying to find some sort of woke privilege, I actually think they're going to be punished financially.
They're going to be punished in the marketplace because of it.
I don't actually think they're going to benefit the more that they pander into this racial politics, anti-American ideas.
I actually think they're going to lose market share eventually because of it.
With that being said, I think that we as conservatives do not think analytically enough in that space.
I don't.
I actually don't think that we, as conservative purchasers or consumers, are harsh enough on these companies.
You see, we have been conditioned through a lot of think tanks that have been very generously funded by Corporate America to believe all corporations are good.
And again, I do not actually come from the default position that corporations are bad.
You actually have to earn the label of being bad in my eyes.
You have to earn the label of being deceitful or being dangerous to a free society.
And these companies have.
Every single one of these companies that I've mentioned, I've listed that are funding BLM Incorporated, and they're using your hard-earned dollars in Middle America to then convert it to offshore work, keep wages down, make employees retrain their counterparts halfway around the globe while they get fired and terminated with no bonuses and no severance packages while simultaneously funding the riots and the arson of our country.
So then, of course, your church can then burn down, then Bibles can be burnt down on the streets of Portland and Seattle.
Those corporations deserve no defense from conservatives.
So what do we do about it?
Number one, we need a new generation of entrepreneurs.
If you're a young person that has an idea, go act on that idea instead of maybe going to college.
There's a great article in the Wall Street Journal that says rising education levels provide diminishing economic boost.
If you are still going to college and you are tens of thousands of dollars into debt, unfortunately, you are going to be tied to that massive debt burden and you are going to have a far less likelihood of finding a job because you have been sold a swong song.
You've been sold a false narrative that college is going to benefit you financially and materially.
And for some people, it does.
Most people, it does not.
One of the major reasons why these corporations have been able to have such massive power over young people is because young college graduates need these jobs so desperately because they've amassed such significant financial debt.
So if you have an idea for a business, go start that business.
We need more entrepreneurs.
Number two, we need to be unafraid to be harshly critical when certain companies get too big.
Apple is worth $2 trillion.
Is Apple going to close down all their manufacturing in China anytime soon?
And if not, why?
I get push notifications from Apple News quite often pushing propaganda from CNN and from New York Times and the Washington Post.
Why is that?
Who's in charge at Apple News?
Who's in charge at Apple?
Who runs the App Store?
These are questions we should be unafraid of asking.
When a company is worth $2 trillion, they are more powerful than most countries on the planet.
And they should be held to a very hard account.
And that does not mean that the four tech CEOs just zooming into Congress asking very easy vanilla, sometimes pre-scripted questions fed to them by lobbyists.
That is nowhere near the type of criticism I'm talking about.
The third thing is we have to be very critical of these shutdown measures.
Understand every single one of these trends, we have made corporate America stronger than ever before.
And by the way, I am not calling for the same sort of criticism that the left puts forth in corporate America.
They think all corporations are bad.
I'm not saying that.
But I'm not saying all corporations are good either.
See, the left has shown how morally bankrupt they really are.
For years, the left said corporations are bad, wealth accumulation is awful until the corporations did something very tricky, very sneaky.
They were tired of the criticism, so they just purchased the activist class.
They were tired of being picketed, tired of being boycotted, tired of being shouted out and screamed at.
And the extortionists won.
They said, okay, BLM Incorporated, how much do you need?
And they said, how about $1 million from you, $2 million from you, $300 million from you, a billion from you?
And they said, we'll be back when we need more.
For these companies, it's a rounding error.
To not have the sort of relentless push from the activist class is extraordinary.
To not have that relentless push from this insurgent activist community has been a sigh of relief for most of these CEOs because we as conservatives just do not do that.
The left used to criticize corporate America.
Now they collude and have taken them all over.
And understand, monopolies hate markets.
When Amazon has gotten as big as they have and Google now controls 92% of all search results, they don't want competition.
Find any left-wing cause that you think is ruining America.
Planned Parenthood, gun confiscation groups, critical race theory, BLM Incorporated.
Then go check the donor list.
I guarantee you the biggest companies in our country are sending them seven-figure, multi-million dollar wire transfers.
Liberals have now been paid off by corporate America, more so than any other time that I've been doing this and writing and thinking.
I'm very worried about what comes next.
Because if you think the restlessness is going to subside just because an election is over, I think you're wrong.
I think you're missing the bigger point here.
When you have a generation of young people that does not own anything, they have certificates or diplomas that taught them nothing except resentment, bitterness, and arrogance and deceitfulness.
Meanwhile, corporate America is getting richer than ever before.
When a socialist who comes along who's rather charismatic and blames other people, that person has a great deal of resonance to that generation.
And this is happening in real time.
We as Republicans, as conservatives and Trump supporters, we now represent the middle class.
The Democrats used to say they did.
Now they understand it's just much easier to represent the corporate class.
And there's a massive corporate marriage with China.
Over 100 Texas A ⁇ M professors have been found to have undisclosed relationships with China, all on Chinese payroll, which is illegal, by the way.
Former senators, such as Mark Kirk, who used to be an Illinois senator that I used to work for, I'm ashamed to say that, works for a Chinese-U.S. exchange relationship.
A lot of this, by the way, has been covered by the great Tucker Carlson.
Joe Lieberman, who's on television a lot and says some things that are true and correct, he lobbies for ZTE.
And I've said this before, it should be illegal for former members of Congress to lobby for any company at all.
Go find another job.
Go be like the rest of us.
If you served in Congress or on a congressional staff, it should be illegal, punishable up to life in prison if you go lobby.
It's that simple.
We as Republicans have to get on the right side of the campaign finance issue because that's really at the root of all this.
We as conservatives should never be corporatists.
We should be capitalists.
We should love a free enterprise system, competition.
That is vanishing and disappearing very quickly in our country.
American entrepreneurship is vanishing.
And it's vanishing quicker than anyone can realize.
According to many recent studies, the rate of startup creation has been decreasing for years.
And because of the shutdown, it basically is gone.
Entrepreneurship was already in decline prior to the shutdown.
Now it might just be something of a past life.
It's more than a startup slump.
It is now a startup crisis in our country.
And so we as conservatives, we value new ideas.
We love marketplaces.
We love competition.
And a permanent corporate class that serves the interests of the wealthy elite and continue to push down the same sort of products that are made in China towards us is a new form of permanent corporate tyranny.
Conservatives Engage Corporatism 00:07:16
Now, again, these companies are not bad because they are private corporations.
They're bad because they're both big.
They're abusing their power.
They depress wages.
They argue for open borders and lobby for them.
They do not even represent remotely close to a pro-Western stance on the issues.
If we are serious about addressing these questions, we as conservatives should be bold enough to engage in the conversation of corporatism taking over America.
And there are plenty of people that listen to this podcast, and I hope you guys email me, freedom at charliekirk.com, your thoughts on this.
That'll say, well, Charlie, I thought that you're a free market capitalist.
I'm worried about this because I'm a free market capitalist.
Because I actually don't think monopolies that are permanently entrenched, that use the tax code to their advantage, that use public policy to protect their incumbency, that use political favors to grant them insider deals and government contracts, I don't think we should be celebrating that, such as Amazon does and so many of these massive companies.
And even more than that, even if these companies were not doing that and they were very, very big, if they're funding BLM Incorporated and they are offshoring jobs at the rate that they are in the midst of a pandemic, I'm in no position morally to defend them, and I won't.
It really is corporations versus America.
It's Hollywood versus America.
It's NBA versus America.
It's Major League Baseball versus America.
It's now Christian Inc. versus America.
It is corporations versus America.
It's universities versus America.
It is the Democrats versus America.
All these pieces together, actually left to their own devices, would not get along very well.
One of the reasons why, as to why all these different parts and these components are playing nicely, almost in a machine, is because of their agreement of how much they hate Donald Trump, of how they hate the president.
And because of that, they have used that commonality and that agreement to play nice.
There's actually a political opportunity for conservatives out there.
Bernie Sanders built his entire political coalition criticizing and critiquing corporate America because he was criticizing corporate America.
And I think unfairly at times, just saying they're nothing but bad because they exist in the private marketplace as a Democrat socialist, which is not my complaint at all whatsoever.
I agree at parts, I agree at times they should not offshore jobs.
We've been through that, depress wages, pander to China.
But just because a company does find levels of success or wealth, it is not therefore immoral.
I do not hold that view.
In fact, I think that in order to find that sort of success level, you had to persuade people to buy your products.
Generally, I think they should be rewarded for that and incentivized to do more of that.
I think competition is a good thing.
I just think it's really troubling.
That's not what's happening.
But the general corporate critique is a place that we as conservatives can find at least a starting basis point with those of which on the left or in the Democrat community are not in the Biden corporate wing of the Democrat Party.
If you have a Bernie Sanders supporter in your life, send them this podcast.
They might actually agree with parts of it.
Their solution, actually, their prescription would be probably to nationalize more things and make it more inefficient and turn it more into a bureaucracy.
My policy prescription would be we need more competition, more private property rights, more entrepreneurs, more ideas, more creativity, and a broader, more robust marketplace.
Capitalist prescription or a socialist prescription.
But we both can agree that the current corporate class is trending in a direction where we will have a government within our own country that is not the U.S. government, and it will be a corporate government.
And that corporate government will be unelected, be ungoverned, and have unlimited control over our life, medically, data-wise, consumer-wise, and employment-wise.
If a company is funding BLM Incorporated, I do not trust them in any sort of facet to make moral decisions for their workers or for our country.
It's corporations versus America.
If we as conservatives get on the right side of this issue, we will win every single election in a landslide.
We get on the wrong side of this issue.
If the Democrats get on the right side of money and politics and corporate power, conservatives and Republicans will be a minority party for generations to come.
We as conservatives should not reflexively worship companies.
We should not dogmatically protect entrenched corporate interests just because they exist.
If a corporation does not display courage against critical race theory, they should be criticized.
If a corporation sends jobs to India, China, or Vietnam, they should be criticized.
If a corporation partners at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce for pro-China policy or open borders, they should be criticized.
This is a massive opportunity for those of us conservatives that care about winning and care about what's best for our country.
If this goes unaddressed, the 30 million people out of work and the 52% of young people at home and the $14 trillion of consumer debt, all of that will combine as introductory ingredients into a socialist hurricane that none of us are comfortable living through.
If we act as if this does not exist and just say, oh, that's the market.
It'll play itself out.
That is not the market.
It won't play itself out.
It will turn into entrenched monopolies and the socialist demagogues will win the argument and we will wonder what went wrong.
I challenge you to think creatively on this issue.
We need to dive deeper and challenge maybe some of the presuppositions and some of the premises that we had in prior political discourses and discussions.
I love liberty.
I love free markets.
That's why I am concerned about the current paradigm of corporations versus America.
And we should be bold enough and courageous enough to engage on this issue.
Please email me your thoughts, freedom at charliekirk.com, freedom at charliekirk.com.
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Please email us your thoughts on this episode in particular.
Super interested to hear where you guys are on this issue because I think it's a growing issue and something that we as conservatives should be unafraid to address.
Thank you guys so much for listening.
God bless you.
Talk to you soon.
Thanks so much.
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