How Conservatives Regroup and Rebuild with Will Chamberlain
Charlie sits down with the Editor-in-Chief of "Human Events," Will Chamberlain, to take stock of what happened last week, including the Georgia Senate races, and to begin charting the path ahead. From big tech's purge of conservatives, to the assault on Parler by Amazon Web Services and the app stores, what will it take for conservatives to regain the leverage that's been lost? What will it take to build our own centers of power and infrastructure? And is it possible to survive the next two years until the next election? All of this and more with one of the smartest guys still allowed on Twitter. Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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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 Will 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 attacked from three different multi-trillion dollar companies.
That and so much more.
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Will Chamberlain from Human Events is here.
Buckle up, everybody.
Here we go.
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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.
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 dig 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.
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's some people that are still kind of in the camp of trying to justify what happened.
But I mean, I'm in the complete belief of complete and total, you know, denunciation.
Where are we at here?
Yeah.
I mean, I don't see anybody really justifying it except some very, very fringe people.
It's, you know, clearly this is not what we do.
We don't riot.
Don't, you know, this is not the right style.
And even if there was somehow like 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.
I mean, who riot.
Like they, you know, they write down the number of the lawyer they're supposed to call to get bailed out.
So, I mean, it's just a terrible strategic mistake and also just horribly immoral.
So we shouldn't do that sort of thing.
I think, you know, from my perspective, Georgia is a serious disappointment.
I think in many ways, we kind of suppressed our own turnout by, you know, like not doing well enough in terms of explaining people, explaining why people needed to go out and turn out to vote, even in the face of questions about election fraud.
Like, I don't know that we did a great job of that.
And 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, I mean, massive big tech censorship.
You know, I've had spent the last two years preaching that we needed to be more aggressive, regulate, always on kind of 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.
Yeah, I mean, I've never wanted to be wrong about something more.
But Will, it was no coincidence that, you know, 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.
Right.
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 runoffs.
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 U.S. 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 ever remember.
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 going to 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.
That's a really good point.
Yeah.
And now, I mean, now that's gone.
I mean, 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, modest police presence.
But that's what happened.
And there were some agitators and some people that were part of, you know, BLM stuff that was peppered in throughout the.
Sure.
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.
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And so then the right, 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 because they finally were able to do what they've wanted to do for the last couple of years, which is the most comprehensive social media cleanse in American history.
I agree.
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?
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 it, 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, you know, it's a loss of a major communications platform and tool for the conservative movement.
I mean, that Twitter account in many ways, you know, could make or break lower, you know, conservative candidates in congressional races.
It could keep, you know, make conservative points.
Like 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 conservatives generally.
It's not good for us to have lost, you know, 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, you know, we have Fox News, but the left has all the major networks and MSNBC and CNN.
Losing big, big social media accounts like that is a loss for our movement generally.
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.
Right.
You know, what a make of it.
I think it's a realization that the sort of, I've 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 everyone on our side.
It's going to mean a lot of discipline.
Like we have to be disciplined because it sort of falls onto the parlor point.
Parlor 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, you know, like I see us in sort of face of, you know, 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.
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 stupid, if I may say, or they just didn't care because they're like, oh, they're all a bunch of rhinos.
I say, wait a second.
I sent this email to one of our listeners at freedom at charliekirk.com.
She said, Loeffler and Purdue are rhinos.
First of all, that's not exactly right.
Purdue is actually a generally conservative senator.
I disagree with them in 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 we lose Georgia and the tech company said, this is our chance.
And they're almost doing this like, 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.
Yeah.
I mean, we, 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 work of to rebuild with.
And it's not like, you know, Joe Biden's going to 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, we should, I don't know why we would want to stand in the way of that.
I mean, what if these companies don't think that's the same?
If 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 the censorship they want.
Right.
That's true.
And I mean, that's, that's also, you know, 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, you know, in many ways, that's the big missed opportunity here.
We did have power at the right time if we had gotten, you know, 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 that, you know, I've talked about before, like going forward, I think it's just, this has got to be like, if you're, 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.
Like going forward, you have to be for protecting your social conservatives on social media.
And if you're not, like what, what use are you?
I mean, it's a very basic thing.
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, it's super creepy.
And I don't use that word lightly.
And it's so, 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 parlor accounts.
In fact, Candace Owens and I were, I literally, my, people say, Charlie, what's your handle on parlor?
It's at Charlie.
Yeah, I'm at Will.
I was there early too.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So I just, because I said, hey, this thing's going to take off.
I want to be there.
And I like John.
I can never pronounce his last name, Mattsy, or Mates, Good Guy.
And I know some of the investors in Parlor.
And I've been cheering them along.
I've been posting periodically.
And 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.
You know, they're working on it.
And Dan Bongino has 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, Will, well, just go create a competitor.
That's what Parlor 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 parlor 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 multi-trillion dollar companies go, you can't exist.
Go from there, Will.
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 a log, you know, they have an oligopoly.
You know, I looked up, I was asking, 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.
That's exactly right.
Yeah, there's no way that is, I mean, now that there's an antitrust issue, right?
If they're collecting, you know, if they're acting in concert in restraint of trade, there might actually be under current law, some antitrust companies.
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.
Yeah.
Under current law, I would agree with you completely, right?
We don't have the law written now to win and discrimination, save for maybe in like some state courts where there's like- And we need to.
We need to pass those in the state legislatures quickly.
Right, right.
Like we need, we need to change the law as it goes as regards discrimination.
Under current law, antitrust 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 companies.
Because they used to be on team right.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
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, like nine times, 1990s, I should say, they were not a very valuable company, but Bezos bought something called merchant.com and they started, they wanted to actually create what is now called Shopify.
And they, in 2000, they slowly realized that most of the infrastructure, 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 servers.
And they are the gold standard.
There's Microsoft.
I mean, 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 apps, 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've not heard of them do this for anyone.
Yeah, neither have I. Not for the web.
I think maybe they did it for Gab.
I don't know.
You know, I think maybe, maybe, right?
But Gab, I think, is now on Rackspace or something.
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.
It's not a logical fallacy.
Yeah.
No, that's a good point, right?
I always like, people always say that's a fallacy.
It's like, no, it's a prediction.
Predictions are not fallacies.
It's a predictive measure, actually.
We know where this is headed.
And so the issue now is parlor, which is supposed to be a competitor and was having massive amounts of traffic coming to it, might collapse at any moment because they don't have server space.
I think Amazon is granting them a couple of days to go find new servers.
It's not that simple.
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, you know, building turning point.
But where were our VCs going out and doing this four or five years ago, right?
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.
That is unbelievable to me.
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 to, you know, router with Gab.
And I always thought it was more important.
Like we didn't want to fight to be segregated in our own like 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, you know, like any, 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 like.
Well, but what this does show me, Will, is that this and the Shopify thing is really, really scary too, is they're not going to stop.
And they've already, they already kind of showed us the payment processors, the banks.
That's the real one that's going to be very interesting.
The banks.
The banks are going to 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 it that there was legitimate death threats on their platform?
I'm just trying to understand it to build out their argument.
They're not.
It's either, I think they have moderation policies at Parlor about violence and incitement and unlawful content, right?
It's not a complete free-for-all there.
It's not Reddit.
Well, Reddit moderates, but it's not 8N.
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 they're, you know, everybody's pointed to like, look at Lynn Wood.
He's still on Parliament.
You know, he's still on Parlor or whatever, and he's saying these horrible things.
Lynn Wood was on Twitter a week ago saying crazy stuff then too.
I mean, there's a came on so he could affect the Georgia runoff.
Right.
Yeah.
Like I think I tweeted something along the lines of, you know, he was he was kept on the platform just long enough to lose us the Senate seats.
Yeah, to be helpful and then get him off.
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 decide out of nowhere, well, 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, you know, request of them in good faith, they would be a little more patient than just a unilaterally 30 days or something, right?
Or something like that.
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, it's not done in good faith.
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 going to 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.
You know, 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?
Well, I mean, I think, you know, 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, is a 20-year project.
And losing money for 15 of it.
Right.
Like, I mean, these 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, we'll have the assistance of the federal government, which will be doing their bidding too, probably, especially to squash the like conservative alternatives to everything.
I mean, we can't like, you know, 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?
And here's an idea I had.
It's like a state like South Dakota, you know, 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?
I mean, yeah, sure.
I mean, we should.
Or Texas, Texas floats a multi-billion dollar note and is like, you know, this, 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.
Yeah.
And this 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.
I'm like, dude, no, it's, you know, that's the piece.
It's an SOS call.
I don't know.
I don't know how liquid he is.
I mean, he's, he's, we'll see if he wants to do it.
I think there's plenty of people that will buy Tesla stock right now.
That's true.
That's true.
Tesla's doing good.
That's right.
I think the liquidity could magically appear is the point I'm saying.
Yeah.
I mean, like, you think about like, it's a big thing to decide you want to be adversarial.
You know, one of the entrepreneurs wants to be explicitly adversarial to the existing tech companies plus the existing and plus the federal government.
Teal and Elon could do it.
They could.
I mean, but oof, it would be, it's really challenging.
But I think, yeah, I mean, we should, you know, at the state level, they should, that should be done.
We should also be thinking about local level legislation and trying to enforce like consumer protection legislation.
You know, I mean, there's, there's arguments to be made that, you know, 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 users, state users have a right to be on these platforms.
They probably conflict with 230, but you got to try it.
I mean, it's not, we're not in a great position.
And like, I still, you know, I ultimately think, you know, the solution to collective, mass collective private discrimination is ultimately federal law making that discrimination illegal.
I still think that's, you know, that, 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 up to it.
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.
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, you know, states subsidize the creation of a competing infrastructure for their users.
I never thought I'd say that.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, what else are you going to do?
I mean, because it's not just a problem here, too.
I don't know if you follow Balaji Sernavasan 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, like let yourself be held hostage by an American corporation social media apparatus?
So maybe the Indian government decides, you know, we need our own national social media monopoly platforms, right?
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, you know, 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.
Which they could do.
Which they could do, right?
That's a billion users or half a 500 million or whatever.
Like that.
Yeah, like that.
Not a lot of purchasing power, but yeah.
Right.
Right.
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 you might have reported 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.
Are you serious?
Yeah, they passed.
They're going to pass.
They're pushing a law like that.
I don't know if they passed it, but I was actually, I was joking.
I was talking with, 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.
That's so cool.
Yeah, I'm stoked.
Yeah, 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 would have thought?
Ridiculously ironic.
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So let's talk strategically here, Will, legislatively and politically.
Somebody called me last night and they 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.
H.R. 1 is not passed, which is universal mail and 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?
I think that's exactly right.
It's the reason I thought it was so important to win the Senate races.
You know, I read 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 scientists.
And he just lays out all these ideas.
That's where all this stuff comes from.
Like add, you know, basically restructure the federal government and our election system so that to massively advantage Democrats.
And I think that's got to be the legislative goal.
Like keep Joe Manchin up to his word when he said he's not going to do any of that stuff.
You know, cinema, John Tester, like do whatever you think.
Mark Kelly, it's going to 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 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.
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 of states.
And then 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 don't why do you need your own statehood?
Why can't you just break apart into Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia statehood?
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.
Right.
Like maybe the counter argument should be make the federal district smaller and include just the mall and the seat of government.
That's exactly right.
Yes.
And then let the other parts, you know, have Virginia take over the other parts or something.
Right.
Or Maryland.
Probably make Maryland's probably a little easier because Virginia is sort of across the river.
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, all this taxation without 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.
Right.
And you can make a pretty compelling argument that it's unconstitutional, actually, to make D.C. a state 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, you know, Ramp Hall 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.
Yes.
So the other one is packing the courts.
Do you think realistically they'll be able to do that?
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 a bigger majority to try and push that through.
I think you'd see some of the institutionalists in the Senate pushback on that.
So I think we're going to be okay.
But I never wanted to be in a position where that was even a possibility.
Yeah.
And then the other one is HR1, packing universal mail and voting, which is going to be one of their big ones.
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, the filibuster needs to be for the structural changes to 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, they'll just eliminate it.
And then we're screwed forever.
So we really have to be careful with when we use that.
Well, I don't know if Manchin will vote to eliminate that.
I'm not convinced of that.
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.
And then that'll just tick them off.
That'll just tick them off.
I think we, because 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, you know, 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.
Yeah.
I mean, and that's the Democrats want to abolish the filibuster immediately and get to 50 on all of their pet projects.
Right.
That's what they want to do.
They have the slightest of slight majorities and they still, they don't care.
They want to use that to impose their will on us.
So in closing, Will, this week has been a horror show.
What gives you hope?
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.
And I think, yeah, we're already there.
People agree.
And so I think, you know, and ultimately, I, you know, 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, you know, 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 our, you know, for the conservative base.
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, you know, I'm talking about the true classical liberals are going to be very scared of what these people want to do to our country.
Agreed.
And now it's time to build new stuff.
Humanevents.com.
Will, we have to do it again soon.
Thank you.
Absolutely.
For sure.
Talk to you soon.
Thanks.
Bye.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
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