The Charlie Kirk Show - Reimagining a Better GOP with Will Chamberlain
Aired: 2021-02-07
Duration: 42:45

[00:00:00]  Hey, everybody.
[00:00:00]  Today, my conversation with Will Chamberlain from Human Events, humanevents.com.
[00:00:06]  We talk about the GameStop craze.
[00:00:07]  We talk about the future of the Republican Party, tech censorship.
[00:00:10]  You're going to love his analysis.
[00:00:12]  I want to thank you for supporting us at charliekirk.com/slash support.
[00:00:17]  Our team right now is editing episodes up very late.
[00:00:21]  We almost run 24-hour shifts.
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[00:00:37]  Will chamberlain is here.
[00:00:39]  Buckle up, everybody.
[00:00:40]  Here we go.
[00:00:42]  Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
[00:00:43]  Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.
[00:00:45]  I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
[00:00:49]  Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
[00:00:52]  I want to thank Charlie.
[00:00:53]  He's an incredible guy.
[00:00:54]  His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created.
[00:01:01]  Turning point USA.
[00:01:03]  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.
[00:01:11]  That's why we are here.
[00:01:15]  Hey, everybody, welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.
[00:01:18]  We're having a couple technical difficulties, but we're still connected.
[00:01:22]  I guess that's one of the few things that's a positive of all the technology.
[00:01:26]  Besides that, everything's terrible.
[00:01:27]  Speaking of technology, I want to, we're here with Will Chamberlain from HumanEvents, humanevents.com.
[00:01:32]  Make sure you check out their website.
[00:01:34]  I write a weekly piece for them.
[00:01:36]  I'm actually finishing up a piece right now.
[00:01:38]  They do a phenomenal job.
[00:01:39]  And Will is the man behind that.
[00:01:42]  Will, welcome back.
[00:01:44]  Good to be with you, man.
[00:01:45]  Looking forward to your piece.
[00:01:47]  Yes, thank you.
[00:01:48]  So, Will, I do not have Twitter.
[00:01:52]  I do not have Instagram.
[00:01:53]  So, I just read articles.
[00:01:54]  I know it's strange.
[00:01:55]  Sometimes people send me tweets, but I actually have been wanting to see your commentary on this GameStop thing because I can imagine that we are thinking so similarly in this.
[00:02:06]  Can you walk us through what your thought is on this entire GameStop hedge fund populist revolt?
[00:02:14]  So, you know, I have an interesting take on this.
[00:02:16]  And I'm, because, and, and the thing is, I've actually been a short seller in the past, right?
[00:02:20]  And this is actually going to go.
[00:02:22]  I short sold Tesla stock at one point before it blew up.
[00:02:25]  So I didn't get, you know, blown up personally by that.
[00:02:29]  But I've been a short seller before and I'm reasonably familiar with the marketplace.
[00:02:33]  Basically, what happened is, you know, from a, you know, in terms of the broad, you know, narrative scenario, you have a bunch of individual investors collecting together and actually pushing up the price of GameStop stock to the point that a number of hedge funds convinced that the company would go bankrupt are now themselves facing bankruptcy.
[00:02:55]  And there's an element of those short-selling hedge funds were cocky, had it coming, weren't doing good risk management.
[00:03:03]  There's an element of kind of a populist, you know, us versus the hedge funds.
[00:03:06]  What are the hedge funds actually doing that's productive or good debate?
[00:03:11]  And there's also, you know, a question of like, well, is short selling bad generally?
[00:03:15]  Like I saw in Tucker Carlson, the idea that short selling should be banned generally.
[00:03:19]  And I, and I actually, you know, it's easy to like, I think let's go back maybe 10 years to the housing crisis.
[00:03:25]  I still remember when short sellers were kind of seen as this, this kind of the, you know, the anti-hero or the sort of, you know, underdog against the entrenched financial powers.
[00:03:35]  You know, I don't know if you guys, if you've seen Moneyball, the movie.
[00:03:38]  Oh, not Moneyball, sorry, the big short, the big short.
[00:03:40]  Moneyball, yeah, Moneyball is the baseball film with Brad Pitt.
[00:03:43]  Right, right, right.
[00:03:44]  But the same author.
[00:03:45]  This is also very relevant.
[00:03:46]  It's a great film too, but yes.
[00:03:48]  Yeah, agreed.
[00:03:49]  But it's the big short that's relevant here.
[00:03:50]  And, you know, the idea is that you had these really renegade, isolated, Just a few hedge fund managers that figured out the housing market was going to collapse, that it was an entire, it was all BS, and they bet against it and made a lot of money.
[00:04:05]  And they're the protagonists of that story.
[00:04:08]  They're heroic.
[00:04:08]  Now, we've come 10 years later, this story comes up, and it's the hedge fund short sellers that are really the bad guy, the villain.
[00:04:15]  And the hero is the people pumping up GameStop stock to send the short sellers into the increase.
[00:04:22]  And so, you know, the question is: what's different about each of these two scenarios?
[00:04:28]  It's like, well, you know, in the case of, if you look back to the big short, the people who were saying the housing market is going to crash were really iconoclastic.
[00:04:38]  They were taking a very brave stand with their own money and it completely against the dominant narrative.
[00:04:43]  And the narrative about GameStop was a whole bunch of dominant big hedge fund managers taking a very, very small company that was, you know, in hard times.
[00:04:53]  Everybody knows it's in hard times and trying to drive that company to bankruptcy.
[00:04:56]  So it's just a different nature of what the short sellers were actually doing.
[00:05:00]  One that is the one person who's standing up in a sea of conformity and saying, no, This housing market is fake.
[00:05:08]  It's based on massive fraud and we should see it come down.
[00:05:12]  And while everybody else, all CNBC, is saying the other going the other way.
[00:05:16]  And this time it's like the short sellers and everybody targeting GameStop is part of the establishment, part of CNBC, and it's going the other direction.
[00:05:24]  So it's interesting from that dilemma.
[00:05:26]  I think the right take is not short selling is always bad because there is a valid role for short sellers as the people who are out there looking for and policing fraud.
[00:05:35]  I think that that's the best example of, you know, the housing market is a classic example of that.
[00:05:39]  There was massive housing market fraud.
[00:05:41]  A whole bunch of people were benefiting and the short sellers were the ones putting their own capital at risk to call that out and try and stop the fraud in its tracks.
[00:05:51]  But when the short sellers are instead bullying a small company into bankruptcy, that's not good anymore.
[00:05:58]  That's not helpful.
[00:06:00]  That's not really necessarily societally productive.
[00:06:03]  So that's point one.
[00:06:05]  And then I have more on the risk analysis side.
[00:06:07]  I mean, this hedge fund this hedge fund completely blew risk analysis 101.
[00:06:13]  They apparently sold short more than 100% of the company, right?
[00:06:18]  So if the market cap of the company is a couple billion dollars and they're $3 billion short, then they're doing what's called naked short selling.
[00:06:26]  I'm trying to remember the exact mechanism by which that happens, but normally in a short sale, you have to borrow the shares in order to then sell them.
[00:06:34]  And then you have an obligation to repay them at some other point.
[00:06:37]  I think naked short selling is effectively just making a bet on the stock price that it will go down.
[00:06:44]  And the problem was, I think somebody else explained it, that by short selling so much of the company, by borrowing so many shares, it meant that there were not that many free shares available to be bid on.
[00:06:56]  And somehow it meant that a small number of people kind of trying to pump the stock could trigger a massive escalation in price and therefore a squeeze on the short sellers.
[00:07:04]  And that happens because short sellers can be forced to repurchase the shares.
[00:07:09]  Think about it, for example.
[00:07:11]  Say you buy a stock and you're just all you do is just spend your own money, you buy a stock.
[00:07:15]  The most you can lose is the amount of money you put in, right?
[00:07:17]  The stock could conceivably go to zero and you just lose your money.
[00:07:20]  If you sell a stock short, you are borrowing that stock and then selling it on the market.
[00:07:25]  You hold the capital in the interim, but you have this lingering obligation to repurchase the stock, which means your loss is theoretically infinite.
[00:07:34]  Like the stock could go to the moon and maybe you short sold the stock at $50 or $10 in the case of GameStop, and you're having to rebuy every one of those pieces of stock at $350, $400.
[00:07:45]  Because of that, you're always on a margin account if you're selling a stock short, which means that you can be forced to repurchase your shares if your broker no longer believes that you are capable of being meeting, you know, making good on whatever your obligation is.
[00:08:00]  But yeah, so that's essentially why they're in so much trouble.
[00:08:03]  Like all these hedge funds failed risk analysis 101, got in a position where they could be blown out and forced to cover and lose a huge amount of money based on this bad short position.
[00:08:15]  Well, and so Will, what I'm trying to understand, though, is just how the creative destruction worked together to make this possible.
[00:08:23]  It seemed that millions of people quickly participate in it, participated.
[00:08:28]  But if I were to, if I'm reading this correctly, it was less about making money and it was more like, no, you're not going to get rid of GameStop just for doing this all over again.
[00:08:38]  It felt more of a point of challenging incumbent financial institutions more than here's a way to make a quick buck, which I'm sure a couple of people were rallying behind that.
[00:08:52]  Yeah, I think there's sort of this weird stubbornness of, no, you're not going to bully GameStop out of existence and you're not going to bully us into agreeing with you that the company should go bankrupt.
[00:09:03]  And I think that's a sort of novel, again, it's due to the kind of novelty of this particular short-selling situation where you have a bunch of, you know, you have a sort of weak, you know, financially, you know, weak company that everybody knows is financially weak, but that still has a lot of like positive feeling among the younger generation.
[00:09:21]  Like I went to GameStop.
[00:09:22]  I'm sure I bought video games.
[00:09:24]  Yeah, I did too.
[00:09:25]  And I think that's also where AMC and BlackBerry came in.
[00:09:28]  It's like there were this, it's this Gen Z millennial nostalgia that converted into market defense.
[00:09:34]  Right.
[00:09:34]  Like we'll keep defending these companies and keeping them going, even if they don't look good right now.
[00:09:40]  But I mean, that's what like, you know, think about what that's actually what private equity investors do all the time.
[00:09:44]  They sort of look for undervalued companies and buy them.
[00:09:47]  Like Warren Buffett with sees candies.
[00:09:50]  He does, this is exactly what happens.
[00:09:52]  Right.
[00:09:54]  And so, and, and when you have, I mean, and suddenly this sort of, again, as we talked about, the sort of rationale of short seller as hero or short seller as what's the, what's the word I'm really looking forward?
[00:10:05]  Not even villain, but just I'm trying to think of contrarian.
[00:10:09]  The short seller is contrarian, right?
[00:10:11]  I think that's the big difference.
[00:10:12]  You know, in the housing market, the short sellers were the contrarians standing up for what they believe was the truth in the face of the world.
[00:10:19]  In the GameStop case, that's not the establishment wisdom was GameStop is doomed.
[00:10:23]  And really the contrarian position was actually, no, this company is going to be successful.
[00:10:28]  And I think that that's a good way to look at, you know, if short sellers stop being contrarian and start the establishment trying to bully a small company into bankruptcy, maybe they're not actually doing that much of significant societal value.
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[00:12:44]  So walk me through what you think this tells us politically.
[00:12:48]  It tells us, do you think that there's a deeper point here?
[00:12:51]  Do you think that this might be a harbinger of things to come?
[00:12:54]  Or is this this kind of a fun little episode in the latest of a day trading craze post-lockdowns?
[00:13:01]  Well, I think it's, I mean, it's yet another example of how social media in general can upend different spheres of human activity, right?
[00:13:10]  So, I mean, politics is one area that's been upended by social media.
[00:13:14]  I mean, that's, you know, the election of Donald Trump and the development of the new nationalist conservative movement.
[00:13:20]  And nobody in the establishment per se saw it coming.
[00:13:23]  It felt it was a way that social media provides a sort of locus and a meeting point for people to collect and then act collectively that didn't exist before.
[00:13:33]  And so they were able to do that in politics, which is obviously one place where collective action can create change, but another place where collective action can create changes is the financial markets.
[00:13:42]  And so this is sort of a just an I think it's another instantiation of how social media changes the world broadly.
[00:13:49]  And so can you talk about the response?
[00:13:52]  As we predicted, federal regulators got involved, politicians, media companies, all because millennials and Gen Z folks were putting in their money to try to say AMC BlackBerry and GameStop.
[00:14:05]  We're going to try and keep it alive and try to stick it to the man, if you will.
[00:14:08]  But the institutional response has been unbelievable from many of these actors and many of the power sources.
[00:14:17]  Can you help us unpack that?
[00:14:18]  Yeah, so I mean, I saw a lot of reporting that not only was there, I mean, so there was a massive institutional response both from governmental actors and major private actors to try and stop what was happening to these hedge funds.
[00:14:33]  Citadel, which I'm actually not familiar with exactly what their operation is, but they're just a massive financial operation and an investor in Melvin Capital, which was the most prominent public short seller of GameStop.
[00:14:46]  They apparently made a call to Robinhood, who they are actually the biggest customer of, and told them, hey, maybe you should stop trading in, maybe you should stop this whole nonsense where you're letting your users engage in market manipulation to screw us.
[00:15:02]  And then you also, there were rumblings on Twitter that Janet Yellen, too, was involved in making calls and connecting people.
[00:15:08]  And she's a person who's taken $800,000 in speeches from Citadel and a total of millions for paid speeches from these various Wall Street banks.
[00:15:16]  And it sort of immediately showed, I think, what the nature of the Biden administration really is.
[00:15:21]  You know, you had this sort of fake populism when Biden tried to pretend he was like the scram candidate and Trump was the Wall Street candidate.
[00:15:29]  I remember that.
[00:15:29]  And I'm just like, look at where your donations come from.
[00:15:31]  They come from Wall Street.
[00:15:32]  You're outraising him there like nine to one.
[00:15:34]  There's a reason for that.
[00:15:37]  And if you remember, I think also that Chinese professor who gave that speech about how, you know, our old friends are now in power now because, you know, our old friends are Wall Street and Wall Street has Biden's ear.
[00:15:48]  I think we're seeing.
[00:15:50]  And so that's almost more notable itself than the sort of uprising against the short-selling hedge funds, which is just how quickly the Biden administration revealed itself as the tool of Wall Street.
[00:16:02]  Yeah.
[00:16:02]  And I argued that if the Republican Party was smart, which they aren't, they would have seized on this opportunity.
[00:16:09]  They would have been able to win over millions of young people that saw in real time a system that was already manipulated, but they say you can't further manipulate this system.
[00:16:20]  And look, the trust in the institutions is already eroding.
[00:16:24]  It's eroding day by day, week by week, month by month.
[00:16:28]  Normal people do not trust the system, the educational system, the media system, and definitely not the financial system.
[00:16:35]  And Trump was just the latest chapter in all of that.
[00:16:38]  It just kind of, it manifests itself in different ways.
[00:16:42]  And this, we call it kind of populist energy.
[00:16:45]  I think that's fine.
[00:16:46]  I think that's a good filler word.
[00:16:47]  Go back to the election of 1896 with William Jennings Bryan, who kind of kicked off this century and nearby, nearly a century and a half of populism, where he got us out of kind of the post-Civil War finger pointing and kind of got us into talking about a lot bigger issues.
[00:17:03]  And what I think we're seeing here, though, Will, and this is something you've been talking about, and I'm trying to build out a thesis around is that, you know, 1896 to about 1910, you had William Jennings Bryan, President McKinley, then he obviously got shot, and Teddy Roosevelt.
[00:17:18]  And we kind of successfully transitioned from the farms to the factories.
[00:17:23]  And it was kind of that agrarian to industrial transition.
[00:17:26]  And not every country was able to do that.
[00:17:28]  Russia, for example, was not able to successfully transition from an agrarian-based economy to an industrial economy without a Leninistic style figure rise up.
[00:17:38]  We had our own version of that, a lot less, less deadly, Woodrow Wilson, obviously, but we had that kind of progressive moment.
[00:17:46]  But my concern is that we are now in that next major economic change.
[00:17:53]  And it's not anything even close to like when the internet was developed or when smartphones came out.
[00:17:58]  It is a completely different economy that will disenfranchise more people than the Industrial Revolution did with old family farms.
[00:18:06]  And I'm talking about a different way of accumulating capital, a different way of starting businesses, a different way of communicating where for us, we'll be able to survive.
[00:18:13]  You know, we understand how to work these things.
[00:18:15]  We know how we're on top of the curve, but I'm afraid even other people in our generation will not be able to survive, even with the tech savviness that they might have where they grew up around it.
[00:18:27]  Can you talk about this kind of new economic system?
[00:18:30]  Whether we like it or not, it's coming through that's no different than the agrarian to the industrial transition.
[00:18:36]  Right.
[00:18:36]  I mean, you end up with, I mean, I think there's much more of a winner-take-all nature to the modern internet economy than there was to, you know, I mean, I think the closest thing would be something like the early railroads, which had similar, which created similar economy problems.
[00:18:51]  Which was the same sort of thing.
[00:18:52]  Yeah.
[00:18:52]  Yeah.
[00:18:53]  I mean, and, you know, one of the things I did when researching, you know, kind of regulating big tech is one of the big moments of national regulation that just had this bipartisan support was when they decided to regulate the early railroads because those early railroads had monopolies.
[00:19:08]  And I mean, think of it, you're the only railroad from New York to Chicago.
[00:19:10]  You control the entire means of Leland Stanford.
[00:19:14]  You're getting taxed.
[00:19:15]  Yeah.
[00:19:15]  Right, exactly.
[00:19:16]  Like you're getting taxed.
[00:19:17]  No, I mean, you're so big and so important and so dominant to something everybody needs that guess what?
[00:19:22]  There's a societal interest at stake in how you run your company and you don't just get to do whatever you want.
[00:19:28]  Like that's that was the decision that, and that was a bipartisan, there was no meaningful disagreement.
[00:19:32]  That was a massive bipartisan act that regulated the railroads and prevented reduced some of their power.
[00:19:38]  And so I think we're now transitioning into some of these winner-take-all type markets.
[00:19:42]  Like I look at Facebook and Twitter as having this dominant, this dominance in their relative spheres.
[00:19:48]  Google, obviously, I mean, I think we talked about a couple of weeks ago how Google and Apple combined have 98 or 99.8% of the mobile operating system market.
[00:19:58]  And so because of, you know, this sort of the winner-take-all effect of everybody, everybody in the world having a smartphone, everybody being able to use, you know, these two companies dominating the operating system and having essentially control of that gateway that we're all using.
[00:20:15]  Yeah, regulation is going to be inevitable by someone because there's only so much power we'll allow those companies to accrue.
[00:20:22]  And I think, and also that has downstream effects on everybody's life generally, where, you know, if you have a few winner, you know, companies that won these massive competitions and have dominant control over their markets, you know, that impacts, I mean, it impacts the way startups end up working.
[00:20:40]  But it also means that there's just, there's a lot less, I guess, you know, kind of what you might call middle class career work, the sort of work that I think people found, you know, I think Tucker's talked about this, but the sort of, you know, kind of union work, but also just normal middle class class work to be done.
[00:20:58]  And so I think that's the economic dislocation that we're going to, we are experiencing.
[00:21:02]  We're going to experience more of.
[00:21:04]  And, you know, how our politicians deal with it is going to determine whether or not we have real radicals come into power.
[00:21:11]  Well, and what, you know, there's a starting probably around the financial crisis in 08, Obama was kind of the first person to benefit from this sort of populist outrage.
[00:21:22]  And he didn't do it all because of him.
[00:21:24]  He had charm.
[00:21:24]  He had charisma, but he just happened to be the right political party at the right time when there was just Republican fatigue.
[00:21:31]  He ran on a lot of very popular reforms that actually never ended up happening, such as transparency in government, restricting Wall Street.
[00:21:39]  And the next thing you know, he has Timothy Geifner as his treasury secretary.
[00:21:44]  There's just this kind of repeated pattern from Obama where he was able to really benefit from a lot of that populist energy.
[00:21:52]  Trump would obviously be another variation of that, but we have the Tea Party movement, the Occupy Wall Street movement.
[00:21:57]  But I think when history is written here, and we have to take a step back and look at this from more of just kind of a decade snapshot and less from just kind of a day-to-day snapshot, like what does 2010, 2020 tell you?
[00:22:09]  It shows you that through different points of outrage and different points of concern, normal people are trying to get their leaders' attention.
[00:22:21]  And they've been doing it clumsily, but I'm just think about this 30 years from now when the historians look at this period of time.
[00:22:27]  What is 2010 to 2020 going to tell you?
[00:22:30]  It's going to show you the Tea Party movement, the Occupy Wall Street movement, Trump, MAGA, and all of a sudden, this entire now new economic populace, or I don't know if GameStop will make it into that sort of history.
[00:22:44]  We'll see how significant it is.
[00:22:46]  But what concerns me, though, and where I think that the leaders have terribly underestimated where this can go is a president like Biden is actually the manifestation of what normal people hate the most, is that he is a pathological liar.
[00:23:05]  He's a corporate type.
[00:23:08]  He's whatever deal that can be cut to give him the most amount of permanent power, he will do it.
[00:23:12]  He's not ideological in that sense.
[00:23:14]  And for him, he knows the greatest threat to his political power comes from Cortez and Talib.
[00:23:18]  So he says, okay, I'm going to go ban fracking and that'll keep him off me for two weeks, right?
[00:23:22]  Or I'm going to go support impeachment.
[00:23:25]  So that his biggest political calculus, his political calculus, which is not incorrect, it's just selfish and it's immoral, is that the left wing has the greatest chance of preventing him from staying as president.
[00:23:39]  With that being said, though, Will, is where this goes next will go one of two ways.
[00:23:45]  It's either the Republican Party is going to decide to become a Teddy Roosevelt party and actually get very serious about the robber baron and trench corporate interests and care about small C conservative values, or we're going to see a Bolshevik revolution in this country that will terrify everyone.
[00:24:02]  And do you agree with that?
[00:24:06]  Yeah, I think that's right.
[00:24:08]  I mean, it reminds me of something Tucker said about if you think Trump is scary, like, what do you think will happen next?
[00:24:13]  Or the people who are trying to be like, you know, criticize Josh Hawley, who I think is a great Republican and a great senator.
[00:24:20]  And also, I mean, I'm reminded of, you know, even a few weeks ago, you know, I work as senior counsel for the Internet Accountability Project.
[00:24:27]  You know, we fight big tech's abuses.
[00:24:29]  And, you know, there was some letter sent by some kind of the classic think tank bigwigs in DC on the conservative side that was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, we can't use antitrust against these big tech companies.
[00:24:40]  Got to protect competition.
[00:24:42]  Got to do all that.
[00:24:43]  And I'm just like, these people need to, you know, it's not, it's not 2010 anymore, guys.
[00:24:48]  It's not 2005.
[00:24:49]  It's 2021.
[00:24:51]  And these companies are oppressing your donors, right?
[00:24:54]  And they are oppressing the base of the party that you are a part of.
[00:24:59]  And you're sitting here doing their bidding.
[00:25:02]  Why?
[00:25:03]  Because they because they get paid, right?
[00:25:05]  I mean, it's like, do you take money from George Soros?
[00:25:08]  No, stop taking money from Google.
[00:25:10]  Like, you know, that seems really straightforward.
[00:25:14]  Like, Google's not on our side.
[00:25:17]  They censor our users.
[00:25:18]  They oppress our, they, you know, oppress our base.
[00:25:21]  No, don't take their money.
[00:25:22]  Stop it.
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[00:26:34]  There's a two-part argument on the tech side.
[00:26:37]  First of all, we must understand that they have created monopoly in a space that is rather new, no different than Carnegie and Rockefeller.
[00:26:47]  And they've been able to create this incumbency based purely on computing power.
[00:26:53]  And that is an arena that we're still trying to figure out.
[00:26:56]  We're still trying to figure out server space and how to compete against it.
[00:27:00]  And any competition they have, they buy up at a massive, at a massive multiple.
[00:27:07]  And so they have economic dominance and they also treat us like garbage.
[00:27:11]  They suppress us.
[00:27:12]  They go through ideological manipulation.
[00:27:15]  And my fear, Will, is that if we do not create some form of a bipartisan agreement like the railroads to go after these companies and go after them quickly, I'm not really sure where that's going to lead.
[00:27:31]  Yeah, I worry, I worry very much about it.
[00:27:33]  I've been worrying about it for 40 years.
[00:27:36]  I was really aggressive about pushing Republicans to act in 2018 to even, I think I started a White House petition to get them to protect digital speech in the public square back in 2018, got 100,000 signatures for it.
[00:27:49]  But, you know, it's hard to get everybody out of their entrenched habits.
[00:27:52]  Now, that being said, I think, you know, the Republican Party's got two years to figure out, okay, like, what are we going to be for?
[00:27:59]  And what are we going to do?
[00:28:00]  Exactly right.
[00:28:02]  And the answer can't be, it's like, oh, well, Trump's gone.
[00:28:05]  Now, we could ignore all those populist concerns.
[00:28:07]  Clearly, you know, we just need to go back to, you know, Mitt Romney Republicanism and everybody will be fine with that.
[00:28:12]  No, no, no, actually.
[00:28:15]  Liz Cheney's about to find out really, you know, when she decides that she's going to respectfully decide for family reasons not to run for her seat in the House of Representatives again.
[00:28:25]  She's going to be the first to find out.
[00:28:26]  It's like, actually, no, the party's changed and you need to get with the program.
[00:28:32]  If the Republican Party came out and said, we are for small business, not big business, if we are for entrepreneurs, not kleptocrats, and we are for choice and markets, but not manipulation, and we are for the creation of a family.
[00:28:48]  And by the way, we're totally against this woke industrial complex crap, right?
[00:28:54]  Against, I mean, just so if you come out with just a sword and just every day, just a metaphorical sword and just say this stuff is a bunch of garbage.
[00:29:01]  But then you also say, look, we'll work with anyone to say that maybe it's not a good thing that the Louis Vuitton guy is worth $150 billion, right?
[00:29:10]  Bernard Arnault or whatever.
[00:29:13]  I mean, what did he do in the last calendar year that made your life better?
[00:29:17]  You know, he makes all of his products in mainland China.
[00:29:20]  He's a half French citizen, spends some time here, whatever.
[00:29:24]  He's just a good manifestation of really, if we're going to have a market system that rewards ingenuity and entrepreneurship and good ideas, what the heck did the Louis Vuitton guy do to make himself 70, Will, $70 billion richer just this year?
[00:29:40]  Well, I mean, it's the same.
[00:29:41]  It's a different form of status signaling, right?
[00:29:43]  You know, the woke industrial complex is status signaling through its intellectual framework, right?
[00:29:49]  Like we are better than you, we are more woke than you.
[00:29:51]  And then they're also signaling they're better, you know, they're wealthier than you because it's those same people going out and buying Louis Vuitton purses.
[00:29:58]  That's exactly right.
[00:30:00]  Like that's, that seems maybe, you know, why, you know, perhaps that's not as valuable.
[00:30:05]  That said, I mean, okay, it's Louis Vuitton.
[00:30:07]  Like if people want to pay for the branding, it's a free country.
[00:30:10]  They're not, that's, that's not the first thing on my list of big problems, but I get where you're coming from, right?
[00:30:15]  But no, the point is that, look, I could go through Zuckerberg has another $80 billion in net worth, right?
[00:30:20]  The Google people have another $30 billion.
[00:30:24]  Billionaires have added $500 billion to the net worth over the last year.
[00:30:29]  And conservatives' unwillingness to even talk about rising wealth inequality is a really serious issue.
[00:30:36]  Yes.
[00:30:36]  It was like a really big issue.
[00:30:38]  And look, I get it.
[00:30:39]  The most liberating thing that I've ever done is I wrote in a piece of paper saying, I can challenge markets now.
[00:30:48]  You see, when you grew up in the conservative movement, we did, we've talked about this before, Will, in 2010, 2011, 2012, no different than the 10 Commandments, we as conservatives learned markets can never be wrong.
[00:31:00]  We must always praise and worship wealth creation at all costs.
[00:31:03]  And look, 95% of the time, I completely sympathize with that.
[00:31:07]  I really do.
[00:31:08]  You know, when I go to my local coffee shop, I don't want them to be regulated.
[00:31:11]  I think they should be able to have a second, third, fourth, or 10th coffee shop.
[00:31:15]  But when you have economies of scale, when you're dealing with hundreds of millions of people and you're in the data surveillance capitalism business, and okay, I'm going to challenge my preconceptions a little bit, right?
[00:31:25]  Right.
[00:31:25]  Like, like, I mean, you're not the wrong coffee shop, right?
[00:31:28]  Like, Robin Hood.
[00:31:29]  Okay, what is what is Robin Hood's business model?
[00:31:31]  Right?
[00:31:31]  They charge almost nothing for their trades, and then they, what they do, how they make money, they sell that data that they get from bringing in all the retail traders and getting this huge market data.
[00:31:41]  They sell it to the hedge funds.
[00:31:42]  It's like, oh, but we're the ones democratizing trading.
[00:31:45]  We found out actually, no, they're not.
[00:31:46]  We, you know, we're actually the product, not the customer.
[00:31:49]  That's right.
[00:31:50]  You know, and that's, I mean, there's so many different examples of that.
[00:31:52]  And it's true that I think in particular, watching this happen on the right, this is especially why the whole like going back to the Martha Orthodoxy and insisting that we're just all wrong isn't going to work.
[00:32:03]  You and I, we grew up with this stuff, right?
[00:32:06]  Like we, we were all the books, Will.
[00:32:08]  Yeah, all I read my Rothbard.
[00:32:10]  I read my Mises.
[00:32:11]  I read my Milton Friedman.
[00:32:12]  I've got it all.
[00:32:13]  Hayek, I read all of it.
[00:32:14]  Ayn Rand, Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged.
[00:32:17]  You know, I read my Bostiat, and I like some of it.
[00:32:20]  I think it's actually really intellectually stimulating.
[00:32:22]  But then I also need to leave Narnia and come back to America.
[00:32:26]  Right.
[00:32:27]  Like, I don't know why.
[00:32:29]  I mean, because, and I think it's almost like the tech debate was the one that just, you know, crystallizes for me.
[00:32:34]  I mean, when I, when I talk about the rights of conservatives to speak freely on the internet and they're like, but what about Jack Dorsey's right to ban you?
[00:32:39]  I'm like, I don't care about Jack Dorsey's right to ban me.
[00:32:43]  Like, shockingly, I mean, again, we settled the debate about, you know, whether private companies can do whatever they want in the 1870s.
[00:32:51]  They cannot.
[00:32:52]  They cannot.
[00:32:54]  Well, and you're right, you're spot on.
[00:32:56]  And I will say some of the stuff that the purest market people say, I completely agree.
[00:33:02]  The lockdown stuff, I've been the most anti-lockdown person, I think, living it actually through the event we did at SAS.
[00:33:09]  A lot of the libertarians have been silent on that stuff, interestingly.
[00:33:12]  But I think if you, one of the major reasons we're seeing all this is because of the stupid lockdown policies that only allowed people that had wealth to be able to get more wealth.
[00:33:20]  Anyway, that, and I could sympathize with that with a libertarian, where they really lose me, though.
[00:33:25]  And this is the example that I use quite a lot, Will.
[00:33:28]  And if you ask them, just this example, they will expose how committed they are to an idea and not to what's actually good for people.
[00:33:41]  And that's a different thing, right?
[00:33:43]  So let me give you an example.
[00:33:44]  If you've ever driven through the industrial Midwest where I grew up from Indiana to downtown Chicago, there's something called the Chicago Skyway.
[00:33:52]  The Chicago Skyway is about 25 to 35 miles, about 30 miles long.
[00:33:57]  It goes from northern Indiana, Gary, Indiana, all the way up to downtown Chicago.
[00:34:01]  It's super fast.
[00:34:02]  It's privately owned with its own private tollway with a private group of investors.
[00:34:09]  And so if I were to go to a libertarian, I said, okay, so just to make sure we're all on the same page, you think that the owners of the Chicago Skyway can ask when you go and pay your toll, hey, are you a Trump supporter?
[00:34:20]  And if I say yes, they should be allowed to not have me go on the Chicago Skyway so I can go into Chicago the most efficient way.
[00:34:28]  A pure market guy will say, yeah.
[00:34:31]  Well, how am I supposed to find a competitor?
[00:34:33]  There's one Skyway.
[00:34:36]  Right, right.
[00:34:37]  Yeah, what are you going to do?
[00:34:39]  Like, build your own Skyway?
[00:34:40]  Build a notch.
[00:34:42]  Really?
[00:34:43]  But that's.
[00:34:43]  How much eminent domain do you need to do that?
[00:34:46]  Like, what do you think?
[00:34:46]  How do you think that happened?
[00:34:48]  You know, no government action at all involved in the creation of a massively.
[00:34:53]  Yeah, so the government that we have public-private partnership, which is basically what these tech companies are.
[00:34:58]  They're public-private partnerships.
[00:35:00]  And then they create this highway into downtown Chicago.
[00:35:03]  It would be insane.
[00:35:05]  I mean, the fact is, when you go on the Chicago Skyway, if you pay $16, you could be a bigot, you could be a pope, you could be a priest, you can drive on the skyway.
[00:35:15]  That's the amazing thing.
[00:35:16]  Because, and here's why, and the courts justify it as economies of scale.
[00:35:21]  When you reach a certain economy of scale, you can't discriminate.
[00:35:25]  You become a public good.
[00:35:27]  Yeah.
[00:35:28]  I mean, and that's literally the rationale behind Section 230.
[00:35:31]  People don't even understand that.
[00:35:32]  Like, that's why they created Section 230.
[00:35:34]  They said, okay, like, we want you to be able to do some moderation.
[00:35:38]  So, like, for porn, for, you know, just you name it, for like horrible abuse, harassment.
[00:35:44]  Okay.
[00:35:45]  I mean, and we also want you to not be liable for defamation if you do that.
[00:35:49]  That's the 230 balance, knowing that if you're running a social media platform, that you are essentially publishing all these third parties' posts.
[00:35:56]  Great.
[00:35:57]  But that carve out from the government, that makes it a public-private partnership.
[00:36:01]  That creates this exemption from common law tort liability that every other person in business in this country is subject to if they publish a third party's posts or a third party's content and it's defamatory.
[00:36:13]  Like, why can't we then, there's clearly a public interest in ensuring you're able to run your business this way.
[00:36:20]  Isn't there a public interest in ensuring you don't infringe on everybody's freedom of speech too?
[00:36:24]  Like, why is one public interest regulatable, the other not?
[00:36:28]  Again, that's exactly right.
[00:36:29]  Yeah.
[00:36:30]  There's so much tension here.
[00:36:32]  So much tension.
[00:36:33]  Well, and I think they're, I think that they're so wrong.
[00:36:36]  It's just more and more clear than ever before.
[00:36:39]  So, so, Will, can you help us unpack where you think the Republican Party needs to go specifically?
[00:36:46]  We have impeachment coming up this week.
[00:36:48]  There's just on impeachment, it's clear.
[00:36:50]  I mean, we should, every single senator should be voting to oppose the impeachment.
[00:36:55]  I actually think it's a really straightforward argument that it's unconstitutional.
[00:37:00]  Essentially, the Constitution says shall impeach only presidents and other executive officers.
[00:37:08]  That, you know, that the penalty is both removal from office and potential exclusion from future offices.
[00:37:17]  There's really basic textual arguments that, and 45 senators already think it's unconstitutional.
[00:37:21]  That's the way they should go.
[00:37:22]  I have no idea why any Republicans feel the need to virtue signal about impeaching a private citizen.
[00:37:30]  That just doesn't make any sense.
[00:37:32]  So that's yeah, I think the Republicans need to say, we are not going to debate the merits of this.
[00:37:39]  We are going to just say, and this entire exercise is unconstitutional.
[00:37:43]  Our vote will be a rejection of this circus.
[00:37:47]  As soon as you get into the weeds of what did he know or what did he say, you're already conceding that this entire circus is legitimate.
[00:37:54]  Yeah.
[00:37:54]  Yeah.
[00:37:55]  I think that's exactly right.
[00:37:58]  You know, that it's beneath us.
[00:37:59]  I mean, and if people, because the whole argument about like, well, then how, then he's able to invade impeachment by doing something impeachable in his last day in office.
[00:38:07]  It's like, no, He can't just do anything in his last day in office.
[00:38:10]  There's criminal prosecution available if he commits a crime.
[00:38:13]  There's the entire point of impeachment is to prevent, to remove an officeholder.
[00:38:18]  And you don't get to do bills of attainder in this country.
[00:38:22]  Like we don't, we don't just target random people in Congress.
[00:38:24]  That's not, that's not how it works.
[00:38:26]  Like that's, and, and that's how it used to work in Britain.
[00:38:29]  And that's literally one of the things that the founders were said they didn't want any part of.
[00:38:34]  So this, that's easy.
[00:38:35]  Impeachment, nobody should be voting for impeachment.
[00:38:38]  And I'm shocked by how weak, you know, that Chuck Schumer, people like that are saying, oh, it's a slam dunk.
[00:38:44]  I mean, read the constitutional text.
[00:38:45]  Basic textualism would say this is not something that the founders are okay with.
[00:38:50]  They were very reluctant to include impeachment in the Constitution at the outset and constrained it more narrowly than it had been done under British practice as a result.
[00:38:59]  And even beyond that, Chuck Schumer and these Democrat senators, they seem intent to try and create America or the Senate and the House to become a parliamentary system less than a bicameral constitutional republic.
[00:39:15]  They basically want it that if you have 51 votes, you absolutely can prevent a private citizen from running again.
[00:39:23]  And the left has always hated how slow our process is, how many checks and balances are built into it, and how difficult it is actually to effectuate change.
[00:39:35]  Yeah.
[00:39:36]  I mean, they're already calling the filibuster a Jim Crew relic, despite the fact that they used it a million times just over the last four years.
[00:39:45]  They really want to have created these massive structural changes in the way our government works.
[00:39:49]  I mean, the thing number one, Republicans should do is oppose every single one of those as forcefully as they can.
[00:39:56]  And I think one important point is, I don't know if they've won the filibuster debate or not already.
[00:40:01]  It's unclear.
[00:40:02]  But, you know, if they have to pick and choose when they filibuster so that they don't trigger the Democrats getting rid of it, I think you just make sure you pick and choose all the structural changes.
[00:40:11]  Like we can overcome a policy, a credit policy, but we can't overcome DC and Puerto Rico becoming exactly right.
[00:40:18]  We can't overcome national mail-in voting.
[00:40:21]  We can't overcome like electoral college stuff.
[00:40:26]  That's the stuff that needs to be like the third rail.
[00:40:28]  We filibuster this.
[00:40:29]  We oppose it with everything.
[00:40:30]  We've got to not change our system.
[00:40:32]  And we shouldn't, we should not do what the Democrats did.
[00:40:35]  Remember, do you remember the Democrats deciding to filibuster Gorsuch when he was appointed?
[00:40:41]  And that was still when they had the filibuster for the Supreme Court justices.
[00:40:44]  Well, that was really dumb because Gorsuch was as moderate a pick as Republicans were ever going to put forward.
[00:40:50]  And if you were going to line up in unison against scoreship, you'd line up in unison against every conservative judicial nominee, which means, well, guess what?
[00:40:57]  We have to get rid of the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees.
[00:40:59]  I completely agree.
[00:41:00]  You're not even going to be reasonable.
[00:41:02]  So we do have to be reasonable with how we use it.
[00:41:04]  I think that we should use it as the nuclear option.
[00:41:08]  And I think that on the big structural changes, for example, on the COVID relief bill, I wouldn't filibuster.
[00:41:13]  I just wouldn't.
[00:41:15]  Do I think it's trash?
[00:41:16]  Of course I do.
[00:41:17]  Do I think it's garbage?
[00:41:18]  Absolutely.
[00:41:19]  Do I think that we should use cinema and mansion for when they want to add DC as a state?
[00:41:23]  Yes.
[00:41:24]  That's when I think we should say, no, no, no, you're going to have to invoke culture.
[00:41:28]  They don't have the votes to do it if Mansion and Cinema hold the line.
[00:41:31]  They don't.
[00:41:32]  If every Republican decides not to break culture.
[00:41:36]  Yeah.
[00:41:37]  And I think, I mean, I just, I worry that we're going to do the same thing where we have like this ultimate grassroots pressure of must oppose every single Democrat issue using all means to our at our disposal.
[00:41:46]  Like we are not in, this is the consequence of losing the Senate, right?
[00:41:51]  I would love to be in a position where we didn't lose the Senate and we're able to do what we wanted, but we did lose the Senate.
[00:41:55]  So our hold on power, the tools we have available to us are fragile and will break with overuse.
[00:42:02]  So we have to be careful about how we use them.
[00:42:04]  I agree.
[00:42:04]  Humanevents.com, Will, anything else on your mind?
[00:42:08]  Not too much right now, other than the Lincoln Project, of course, being outed as this horrible apologizers for, you know, grooming is terrible, terrible stuff.
[00:42:18]  Couldn't have seen it coming at all, given the nature of their founders.
[00:42:21]  Horrible, horrible.
[00:42:22]  We'll have to dive into that at a different episode.
[00:42:24]  So, all right, Will.
[00:42:25]  Thanks.
[00:42:26]  All right, man.
[00:42:26]  Humanevents.com.
[00:42:27]  Talk to you soon.
[00:42:28]  Thanks.
[00:42:28]  Yep, later.
[00:42:31]  Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
[00:42:33]  If you want to get involved at Turning Point USA, go to tpusa.com.
[00:42:36]  Email us your questions, freedom at charliekirk.com.
[00:42:40]  Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
[00:42:41]  And thank you for supporting us at charliekirk.com slash support.
[00:42:45]  God bless.