Consolidating the Conservative Movement Against Corporate Oligarchy with Senator Mike Lee
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Hey, everybody.
Today on the Charlie Kirk Show, a fun, spontaneous conversation with Senator Mike Lee, a friend of mine, someone who loves his country.
We talk philosophy.
We talk what's going on in D.C., where do rights come from, and so much more.
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Hey, everybody.
Welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.
Someone just came through our office here, very important person and a friend of mine and someone I really respect.
Senator Mike Lee.
Senator, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.
Thank you.
It's an honor to be here.
Senator, you are one of the most articulate voices when it comes to liberty and the Constitution.
I'm going to ask a little bit about D.C., but actually, I'm less interested in what's happening in D.C. than ever before because it can easily be explained as the totalitarians want to take our rights away.
I just want to get deeper later in this conversation of where rights come from and why it's important to protect them.
But first, what's going on in D.C.
Well, they're trying to make government bigger, trying to make it a bigger part of people's lives, trying to increase the amount of money that has to be paid to Washington, D.C. so that people in Washington, D.C. can control their lives.
It's not a very good bargain.
You give up more of your property to, in turn, give up more of your freedom.
Bad deal.
And it must be really frustrating to be in D.C. right now.
Terribly, especially because so few people in Washington, D.C., particularly in the governing party, seem to have an appreciation for the fact that freedom isn't free and that government can't expand except at the expense of individual liberty.
Nor do they seem to grasp most of the tendency toward tyranny that exists in any government.
Government power is no less than electricity or fire or water, something that, while necessary, has to be very carefully guarded.
Otherwise, it'll become destructive of the very ends that it's there to protect.
And so I'm very outspoken about this.
I'd love to get your thoughts on kind of the motives behind some of these people.
It seems as if it's hard to get into motives because you don't know everything that drives someone, but it's hard to explain a pure motive when they want to expand government this dramatically, all the while keeping our borders wide open.
Yes.
Expanding our national debt and deficit, taxing job creators and people that create wealth in our country, and then also kind of pandering to a small subset of corporations.
What does drive the Democrat Party?
It might be the number one question we get, Senator.
Look, I'm willing to assume for purposes of this conversation, any conversation really, that there are probably as many mindsets within the Democratic Party as there are mindsets within the Republican Party.
I'm also willing to assume that some of them, maybe many, maybe most, I really don't know, genuinely believe that they are advocating on behalf of America's forgotten man and forgotten world.
Downtrodden.
The downtrodden.
Yeah, they're up there as the friend of the poor and middle class.
They may well believe that.
In other cases, there might be other people who just want to make it easier to get re-elected, or perhaps they're secure in their reelection prospects, but they want to be praised by the liberal media establishment and by the liberal entertainment media establishment, by the establishments of various sorts in all these disciplines, all of which are decidedly liberal.
And it's easier to do liberal things and get praised.
So it might be something as simple as that.
But regardless of what their motives are, it's actually easier for me as a human being, given that there are a lot of people I know and like and want to assume the best about who have fallen for this stuff.
It's easier for me to assume that most or all of them maybe have very good motives, but they're mistaken.
They're mistaken because they've fallen for something that, by its very nature, isn't populist, can't care for the poor.
Government lacks the capacity to love any more than it lacks, it has no more the capacity to love than it has the capacity to hug.
That doesn't exist.
And so that's what we have to battle: the public perception that they're the friend of the poor and middle class when really they're working to undermine it, whether they're intentionally or otherwise.
And it seems that no matter what the circumstance is, there is always either a federal government-style response that they want to try to empower.
And this virus and our reaction to it has only allowed that to happen with very few Republicans standing up to that.
I remember you and I shared a conversation last spring.
I think you had the virus.
And I said, Senator, please don't vote for this stimulus bill.
It was the first stimulus bill.
And you said, Yeah, I don't know how I would vote on this.
I can't remember what you said publicly.
I was quarantined at the time.
I remember that.
And we had a good conversation.
And I just wanted to have one senator vote against it.
That was my goal.
Just one.
Because I believe the only stimulus very well could have been reopening the American economy, not creating money and indulging in Keynesian economics as if that's going to somehow save us.
I was very unsuccessful in trying to steer one vote.
I think I don't know how you would have voted if you would have.
Well, Rand Paul and I were both quarantined at the same time.
That's why my mission failed.
Right, right.
And that may well have been your greatest chance of getting one or two votes.
But we were both sidelined at the time.
But you're exactly right.
This is one of the reasons why my wife, Sharon, frequently points out that all socialism is emergency socialism.
That's such a good point.
Socialism never came into being.
It never gained a foothold anywhere without some sort of emergency, real or contrived, or a combination of the two.
And that's how they do it.
And that's what has been concerning to me about our COVID response from the very beginning.
So, Senator, one issue that I want to talk to you about that I'm just curious how you think we should approach.
And I've become, some would say, a radical on this issue because I come from a natural rights doctrine.
Leo Strauss articulated this so well.
And the idea that we are made in the image of some creator, and who are you in the state of nature?
And we have a moral right to be able to speak.
We have a moral right to protect our family.
We have a moral right to not be searched and seizured against.
And I'm afraid, Senator, that we now have a small group of corporations that arguably might be more powerful than our government.
And you could call it because of technology or Section 230.
But we're seeing a dramatic consolidation of power, unlike anything that's different than even the early 1900s with what they would call the robber barons.
But I know that there are some people that would take exception with that.
We call these the tech companies, but they really are acting in a behavioral pattern against any sort of any of the best interests of the American people.
What do you think our approach to these companies should be?
In some ways, Standard Oil has got nothing on them.
At least with Standard Oil, there were alternatives.
That's such a good point.
There were substitutes in a way that there aren't really substitutes here.
Many Americans get their information from their phone, from an app on their phone.
And it's very difficult for many Americans to get information except through one of several corridors controlled by some combination of Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon.
If you can control those five levers or any one of them, you can control access to information.
And if you can do that, you can change all sorts of things, including the use of force that we call government.
So I totally agree.
And so what is the proper response?
Is it time to start using political power?
Is it time to start saying we have to use government, which we don't like to do, to go after these tech companies?
It may well be.
And for you to say that, that's a big deal.
It is a big deal.
Keep in mind, Charlie, our antitrust laws don't make it illegal to be a monopoly, but they do make it illegal to acquire or maintain monopoly power using anti-competitive conduct.
That is arguably what we're looking at now.
When you've got a small handful of them, again, having monopoly power isn't per se illegal, but how people get there and how people maintain it very often is.
It's starting increasingly to look a whole awful lot like some type of some combination of antitrust, anti-competitive behaviors that they've used either to acquire or to maintain monopoly power.
And the way I look at it is very similarly, how would we act if a government agency was acting this way?
And it's almost at that level.
Yes.
Now, it is important for us to bear in mind differences between this and government, because it's those differences that determine the kind of remedy to which we have access.
Clearly, if any of these companies were doing any of the things that they're doing relative to speech, it would violate the First Amendment.
And we've got to keep that lane clear so that we're talking about the right thing.
We lose credibility insofar as we say, oh, what Google is doing is unconstitutional.
It's not the right way to think about it.
The Constitution restricts governments.
In fact, with the exception of the 13th Amendment, all provisions of the Constitution deal with governments and not individuals or corporations.
But that doesn't mean that what they're doing is okay.
And so that's why we would describe it, not in the same terms we would use for a government, but we would describe it in terms of bad things that corporations can do that are often illegal, sometimes even criminal.
And immoral.
I mean, definitely.
And immoral.
And immoral.
And so I guess where I'm getting at is that the idea of the Constitution was always to limit power.
Yes.
So people can be free.
Yes.
And so now you have a question of is it time to limit the tech company's power.
I think it is.
And I believe that in many circumstances, existing law already does that.
In other circumstances, we might need some tweaks to the law to further empower government to protect us from the dangerous accumulation of power in the hands of the few.
In many respects, our existing antitrust laws are sufficient because these folks have become increasingly emboldened and brazen about their anti-competitive behavior.
Look at the antitrust action that was filed against Google just a few months ago by the Department of Justice.
Very well researched, very well reasoned.
And I think it's that sort of thing that's possibly going to have significant hope of bringing about a remedy that will stop some of this anti-competitive behavior.
And I think there's a game being played where some of the people on the left are using the threat of antitrust to try to get these tech companies to act in a more aggressive way with censorship.
Yes.
Almost like having a sword of Damocles over Google, saying, like, if you do not censor Trump and conservatives, then we're really going to punish you.
Yeah.
No, that's right.
And it's one of the things I serve on both the Commerce Committee and on the Judiciary Committee, both of which in different ways have significant roles over these areas.
In those hearings through those two committees, I've had the opportunity to question Jack Dorsey at Twitter.
You've done a wonderful at Facebook.
And each time we raise this issue with them and the rather blatant viewpoint discrimination that they engage in against conservatives, religious Americans, and libertarians, they'll always respond with a curious combination of answers.
Usually leading with, look, we've got people on both sides of the aisle mad at us.
It's not just conservatives and libertarians.
It's also progressive liberals who are mad at us.
And I'm always quick to point out when they say that, that is not an answer.
First of all, they're mad at you on the left for an entirely different reason that you're not doing enough to censor, that you're not punishing conservatives, libertarians, and religious people enough.
I've also asked them on multiple occasions, both of them.
You know, we can all think of 5, 10, 15, 20 examples of prominent conservative, religious, or libertarian groups or candidates who have been blocked, censored, otherwise had adverse action taken against them by Facebook and by Twitter.
And I've said, can you name me one liberal, one, that has endured that sort of thing.
And they always will say in a public setting, oh, there are a lot of them.
I could come up with a lot of them.
And I said, okay, I'm not asking you to tell me whether there are a lot of them.
I'm asking you to name one.
Just one.
That's right.
They can't do it.
They won't do it.
Then they come back and say, well, I'll get you a list.
They don't.
They can't because they don't do that.
That's exactly right.
That door swings one way and not the other.
Now, look, they have the right to do that part of it.
That part of it probably doesn't violate antitrust laws itself.
Other things might contribute to their violation of antitrust laws or other companies facilitating that.
But that runs afail of the law in another respect.
That's a deceptive trade practice.
And under Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act, it ought to be punished as such.
I've run a bill, legislation called the Promise Act that would clarify that and would direct the Federal Trade Commission to assert its Section 5 authority when they do that.
Because what they're doing is they're claiming publicly that they do not tip the scales politically when in reality they do quite the opposite of that.
That is fraudulently selling a service that they've mischaracterized.
That's illegal.
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With the Hunter Biden story, for example, where they didn't allow that story to be spread, which very well might have had an impact on early voting in some of these states.
That should have been the October surprise.
Undoubtedly.
Undoubtedly should have been.
And they suppressed it.
Over and over and over again, they've done these things.
And then the intelligence community came out of nowhere, which has now been debunked, and they said, oh, this came from Russian intelligence.
There is no basis of that.
None.
None whatsoever.
And they use that as the justification to censor.
No, that's right.
It's one of the reasons, Charlie, one of many reasons why I am instinctively, reflexively resistant to anytime someone comes out and claims, purports to speak for the intelligence community.
What does that mean?
It's so broad that it could mean anything and everything and nothing at the same time, which is their whole point.
And then when they use the word debunked in the same sentence as the intelligence community, you know that's BS because they've used that trick so many times.
It's usually what they say, what they say when they're trying to say something that they're doing.
Well, it's the same three guys that are giving marching orders, Brennan and Clapper.
They're all kind of saying the same thing.
And then all of their former employees that are now staffers at some college, like, oh, yeah, they'll sign a letter that says that we were briefed on something.
You're unbriefed on no intelligence.
Now, isn't it Brennan and Clapper that in the past deceived us about they lied under oath in front of Congress regarding mass surveillance of Americans?
Right, right.
Which is a big problem.
So I want to get into the now the more philosophical part and whatever time we have remaining.
I know that your time is very valuable.
Where do rights come from?
Rights exist because we exist.
They come from God.
And whether someone believes in God or not, they know that we exist.
They know that they themselves exist.
That's a very Aristotelian argument.
Yes, I like to think so.
Or just as common sense, he was kind of the pioneer of that.
We know that we exist.
There is an inherent dignity to the immortal human soul.
And by the way, whether you believe that or not, it still is.
It still is real.
And because we believe that each individual human being matters, rights exist.
And we therefore have certain rights that are inalienable and that come from our creator that exist because we do and he does.
And so what do you have to say when someone says, no, no, health care is a right.
No.
Housing is a right.
Rights are things government may not do to you.
Rights decidedly are not things that the government must provide for you.
That's different from a right.
Sometimes people in today's society have a tendency to describe as a right anything that they think is good or necessary or necessary or is important.
So if they want to say, I really like X, they'll say X is a right.
Netflix, for example.
It's silly enough to prove the point, though.
Yes, exactly.
Rights really are things that reflect what government can't do to you.
Government is best understood as the use of force.
It's the official collective use of coercive force.
It is violence that happens to be officially sanctioned.
Violence, in the case of our country, with a seal with an eagle on it.
Now, government is necessary.
I don't mean to sound like someone who's nihilistic in his approach to government.
I'm not.
We need it.
We need it to make sure that we don't hurt each other, kill each other, or take each other's things.
Or get invaded.
Or get invaded.
In some instances, it's also appropriate for the government to be involved in public goods, transportation corridors, for instance.
That's something that we've accepted in modern society as a role for government to play.
The further afield you get from those basic items, the more concerning it is.
Because government action is not only not a right, it's the opposite of a right.
Government acts only at the expense of individual liberty.
So if I can share with you my concern, Senator, and I do not have a good answer to this, it's a question of whether or not liberty is sustainable.
And Thomas Jefferson wrestled with this because he said eventually people will vote enough stuff in and this idea of self-governance, this idea of the pursuit of virtue, will fall upon itself.
Do you think we're on that last gasp of liberty where just the hordes and the masses are going to vote those of us that care about natural rights into oblivion?
I'm not asking you to make a prediction.
It's that I'm trying to ask philosophically, is liberty sustainable as a long-term governing model?
It is sustainable always.
It does not mean that liberty will in fact be sustained.
The difference lies in understanding the distinction between the French Revolution and the American Revolution, which ultimately comes down to the distinction between a democracy and a constitutional republic.
What is the difference?
The difference is that the pure democracy exists in the abstract for the purpose of carrying out the blanket will of the collective, the whole, the simple majority.
Whatever it wants is the right thing in the case of a democracy.
In the case of a constitutional republic, the point is let the people elect their own representatives and let those representatives determine the course of government, but make them bound to act only in certain areas where they are authorized to act and in the manner in which they're authorized, carving out certain areas as beyond their control.
That's where liberty lies.
That's perhaps why Jefferson had this very dark, dismal view of liberty over the long haul.
His experience with self-government was heavily influenced by what he saw in France.
Now, I think he was more optimistic than he should have been about the French Revolution and its durability.
But still, he's not a good idea.
He should have read some Edmund Burke.
Yes, yes, he really should have.
He should have spent a little bit more time thinking the way Edmund Burke thought.
Jefferson had some very hot takes that were not always right.
Well, look.
Madison cooled him down, though.
Right.
The obsession with France, the Francophile thing.
The need for a revolution every 20 years.
Now, it's interesting.
That's one of the most misquoted quotes ever because Thomas Jefferson wrote that in a letter to Madison.
And then Madison wrote him back, said, no, that's actually a really bad idea because we set up systems for the next generation.
And Thomas Jefferson basically said, yeah, you're right.
Don't you have the impression sometimes that Madison and Jefferson were playing off of each other?
No, of course they were.
Jefferson would say crazy crap like that, in part to get a reaction out of Madison, who he knew would reliably pull him back down to earth.
And Madison was kind of the more deliberate, deeper thinker.
Not to say that Jefferson wasn't.
I mean, I actually take a view that the Declaration and the Constitution are very much related, and that not everyone has that view.
Well, in fact, I wrote a book about this a couple of years ago called Our Lost Declaration, in which I explained that the Constitution.
I got a good idea from him.
Oh, glad to hear that.
The Constitution is the frame.
It's the framework.
The picture itself is the Declaration.
Because that's cool.
It gives us the vision of who we are and why it's so important to protect liberty and where those rights come from.
And so the difference between a Republic and a democracy is so important.
And every time a Republican says democracy, I just cringe.
We're a democracy.
Oh, my goodness.
Stop saying that.
And the word that lefties in both political parties often use, they're obsessed with saying our democracy, our democracy.
And, you know, I made some headlines, not necessarily favorable ones.
When during the vice presidential debate last fall, I was live tweeting the whole thing.
And while I was live tweeting the whole thing, I got tired of Vice President Harris, then Senator Harris, using our democracy over and over again.
And I tweeted emphatically, we're a constitutional republic, not a democracy.
It is a difference that matters.
So you're right to be irritated when they say that.
Because it matters because we matter.
Because we don't want government.
You don't want the use of officially sanctioned violence, coercive force, being brought to bear for light and transient reasons.
You want that force to be reserved to only those circumstances that we as a society have constitutionally adopted as appropriate and within the power of government.
And so we are seeing the trend that all of us have feared, which is totalitarianism.
Yes.
And that document has done more to prevent that than I think we ever realized because it spreads out power over space and time.
It's really hard to revolutionize the American government in just one election cycle.
Right.
33 senators are up.
You have thought on that?
Yeah, yeah.
No, you're exactly right.
It's hard to revolutionize everything all at once.
But if you can acclimate people to the idea that everything and everyone belongs to everyone.
That's very Huxleyan of you.
Yes.
Everyone belongs to everybody.
It is intentionally Huxleyan.
It's a brave new one.
That's right.
But that is the mindset of those who defiantly refer to our system of government as, quote unquote, our democracy.
Ultimately, that's where it leads.
Ultimately, it leads to socialism.
Ultimately, democratic government, if it really is a pure democracy, ultimately it leads to people coveting each other's property and using the blunt instrument of government to get it.
So let's conclude with this.
What do you think are the tangible steps that are necessary to change the trajectory, not save the nation overnight, really change the trajectory?
This is a tough lift because as soon as people start to get a little bit of addict, a little addicted to their sugar-high stimulus checks, why not keep them going?
Yes.
Now, it's going to be very difficult to break that habit, especially because these things are very politically popular.
It's not going to work.
In order for the restoration of the document written by wise men raised up by God for that very purpose back in 1787, to restore that document, which has fostered the development of the greatest civilization human history has ever known, we're going to have to start restoring the twin structural protections of the Constitution, which are more important in my view than any other single feature of it.
The vertical protection of federalism, keeping most of the power at the state and local level, and the horizontal protection of separation of powers, saying that each entity within the federal government has to fit within one of the three branches of government, and each branch has got to stay in its own lane.
To restore federalism, you have to restore separation of powers.
The best tangible first step we could take to restore federalism and thereby start the ball rolling toward both federalism and separation of powers is actually through the Reigns Act.
The Reigns Act, an acronym standing for Regulations from the Executive in Need of Scrutiny, is aimed directly at restoring separation of powers.
The minute you start to restore separation of powers by preventing the excessive delegation of lawmaking power to unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats, all of a sudden Congress will have to take more votes on more topics, including things like labor, manufacturing, agriculture, mining, powers that were stripped away from the states starting about 80 years ago.
And Congress, when it has to take more votes, will start realizing it's absurd that we regulate everything from Washington.
So federalism will start to be restored as we restore separation of powers.
If I had one single shot to take in the legislative chamber, in Congress, if I could have one free pass at passing legislation, it would be the Reigns Act.
Wow.
I wish Republicans would have done that when we controlled the House, the Senate, the presidency.
The House of Representatives voted each year, every year, at least once a year, to pass the Reigns Act when we have the majorities.
Sadly, tragically, inexcusably, in my opinion, never came up for a vote in the Senate, despite the efforts of many of us.
Probably more important than a corporate tax cut, but that's my opinion.
Undoubtedly so.
Senator, thank you for your leadership.
And I would love to talk even further about the philosophical basis of our country and our civilization because there's so much misunderstanding behind all of this.
And we have a beautiful country.
You're doing a great job fighting for the people of Utah.
Thank you for fighting to end these endless wars.
It's ridiculous what we've had to go through.
You've been terrific on that.
So thank you, Senator.
Thank you, Charlie.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
Email us your thoughts.
As always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
And get involved with TurningPointUSA at tpusa.com.
Thanks so much, everybody.
Talk to you soon.
God bless.
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