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Empowering Moms at the School Board
00:09:09
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| Hey, everybody. | |
| Today on the Charlie Kirk Show, Kimberly Fletcher joins us to talk about how we are going to hold the federal government accountable for calling moms terrorists. | |
| And we talk about the Nord Stream pipeline, some breaking news from an award-winning journalist. | |
| I don't know if he's award-winning, but he's certainly impressive, Seymour Hirsch. | |
| And then we have Mike Davis, who says Biden's doing a good thing on big tech. | |
| I am not convinced. | |
| And more, email us freedom at charliekirk.com. | |
| Subscribe to our podcast. | |
| Open up your podcast application and type in Charlie Kirk Show and hit subscribe in the upper right-hand corner. | |
| Get involved with Turning PointUSA today at tpusa.com. | |
| That is tpusa.com. | |
| Buckle up, everybody. | |
| Here we go. | |
| Charlie, what you've done is incredible here. | |
| Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campuses. | |
| I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk. | |
| Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks. | |
| I want to thank Charlie. | |
| He's an incredible guy. | |
| His spirit, his love of this country. | |
| He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA. | |
| We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country. | |
| That's why we are here. | |
| Brought to you by Andrew and Todd at Sierra Pacific Mortgage. | |
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| Go to andrewandtodd.com, the wonderfulandrewandtodd.com. | |
| One of the biggest stories of the last couple of years is how the Biden regime targeted moms and school boards, calling them domestic terrorists. | |
| The new Republican Congress is going to get to the bottom of this, and hopefully people will be held accountable. | |
| Joining us now is Kimberly Fletcher from Moms for America. | |
| Kimberly, welcome back to the program. | |
| Hey, great to be here, Charlie. | |
| Kimberly, you know all about this and a lot of the moms you work with were actually targeted. | |
| You've dealt with this personally. | |
| Walk us through it and also tell us what do you think this new Republican Congress should do to get to the bottom of it. | |
| Well, I would really like to see the questions that have been asked in the past and ignored being answered. | |
| I think the fact that we now have control of the Congress, we have a better power play on getting those answers. | |
| I really like what Jim Jordan is doing and Matt Gates coming out and putting the pressure on the various organizations to answer those questions. | |
| We're dealing with it on the national level as well as the local level. | |
| And what's really exciting about where we're at now is for years I had to try and convince people that everything was local and I don't have to convince people anymore. | |
| And while a lot of people are really depressed about the last election, it was the best, most successful election in my lifetime because moms came out in droves. | |
| And the biggest question they asked was, do we have to vote for every office on the ballot for my ballot to count? | |
| And they came in and they voted the down ballot. | |
| They voted the things closest to them, school board, city council, sheriff. | |
| And when they had people that they believed in who they felt would stand for them, for us, our principles and our values and protecting our kids and our schools, then they voted for them on those levels too, which is why Florida did so well and Governor DeSantis did so well, because he connected with the moms. | |
| We were at the table. | |
| When we had concerns, he addressed them. | |
| That's what I would like to see Congress do. | |
| Yeah, so this is a very interesting story because it involves potentially three different agencies, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Education, which we don't talk about a lot, which is this guy, Miguel Cardona. | |
| And it seems to be the evidence suggests, and we'll get a definitive answer as Congress starts to do their job, that the National School Board Association, a non-government organization, lobbied the Biden administration, was able to get an audience with three different government agencies that resulted in terrorist type activity, mean terrorist threat level activity, | |
| as if we were dealing with Al-Qaeda having a sleeper cell in Charleston, South Carolina. | |
| That sort of law enforcement activity was then a result of the National School Board Association lobbying our government. | |
| Do I have that about right? | |
| You do have that right. | |
| And here's the really scary part about that is when the federal government comes out with those kind of standards, then all of the law enforcement agencies on the local level act on it. | |
| So we have had moms who have been going into the school board meetings, who have read from the books that their children are being exposed to, who have addressed real concerns that the school district should be paying attention to. | |
| And they're being told that they can't talk about some of these things. | |
| Like when they're reading the books, these excerpts, they said, you can't read that because it's public TV and that's against the FCC standards, you know, to have that on TV. | |
| And when the moms keep reading it, then we have had moms who've literally been handcuffed by police officers and taken out of these school board meetings. | |
| Who are the terrorists? | |
| So when you have the federal government basically arming or empowering local governments to harass parents, that is a big problem. | |
| And the moms are starting to fight back. | |
| In fact, we have a bill that we're pushing in several different states. | |
| It was actually inspired by John Rich. | |
| And I had a great conversation with him about some really cool things he did in Tennessee. | |
| And we're labeling it, referencing it as the FCC standard bill. | |
| If you cannot air it on TV or radio, then you cannot have it in the classroom. | |
| It's pretty simple. | |
| That's so smart. | |
| Continue. | |
| Yeah, so we have Texas, we have legislators in Texas who are picking it up. | |
| Seven other states, we have legislators who are also going to be introducing it. | |
| And this is giving moms power on the ground because a lot of times when you get a bill that you're pushing forward, the legislators get squeamish when it comes to the penalties. | |
| But what good is a law if it doesn't have a penalty when you break it, right? | |
| So what's really great about this, this bill that we're introducing is it takes the protection of the educational clause away. | |
| So they hide behind this idea of educational. | |
| When you throw that word out there, you can put anything behind it. | |
| So what we're doing is taking away that protection. | |
| And when you do that, penalty is already there. | |
| They become pedophiles grooming and sexualizing our children just like anybody else. | |
| And we as parents and local officials can then file legal charges against them. | |
| We have had it with being on the defense and we're going on the offense. | |
| I love that. | |
| And that's a simple point, which is if you can't air it on television, why should you be able to share it with a seven-year-old? | |
| And I discussed this with Pete Hegseth in his new documentary, The Miseducation of America, where it's just, this is a very interesting example. | |
| So we have a very diverse audience of a lot of opinions. | |
| And so sometimes I'll show the pornography that is showed in our schools on air, right? | |
| And I'll say, hey, eight-year-olds are learning this. | |
| And we get emails, Kimberly, of people that are really angry that I would dare show pseudopornography on our show. | |
| I say, wait a second, why aren't you that angry to go to your local school board to make sure kids aren't learning it? | |
| You're angry that I'm airing what's happening in our schools. | |
| And so I just always find that to be very interesting where people will get so fired up, like, how dare you expose this to me, Charlie? | |
| Like, well, it's actually in curriculum, okay? | |
| Curriculum. | |
| So, Kimberly, talk a little bit more about that. | |
| You're leading a really heroic movement of moms. | |
| I think it's just getting started. | |
| And let's just be honest, this was the Biden regime's attempt to try to thwart and prevent a parents' party from becoming a serious political force. | |
| Yeah, and it's not working. | |
| It's actually backfiring. | |
| And the thing is, if you're not being targeted, if you're not being attacked, if you're not being maligned, then you're not over the target. | |
| We are over the target. | |
| And we are literally standing in between those who want this country and the children that they think who they can mold into, making it what they want. | |
| We are in their way, and they've known that. | |
| So, there's a great book that came out. | |
| I don't know if you had a chance to read it. | |
| It's called None Dare Call It Conspiracy. | |
| And it was a guy. | |
| You got to be a little careful with that, but you got to be a little there. | |
| Let's just be media matters. | |
| That's an interesting thought. | |
| There's some elements that I don't agree with, but please continue. | |
| Yeah, okay. | |
| Well, but the point of the beginning of it that's really good is it says that the objective of every conspiracy is to convince people that there is no conspiracy. | |
| And so they want to make you out to be crazy or a domestic terrorist, or they want to malign you in every way you can to disparage you so that people won't listen to you. | |
| And that's what they've been trying to do. | |
|
Good Ranchers Meat Box Review
00:02:08
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| But you know what? | |
| Everybody has a mom. | |
| And it is a game changer when moms show up empowered with who they are, what America is about, what your rights are, where they come from, and then they know how to effectively exercise them. | |
| And that is what we do. | |
| We are now in the process of actively recruiting and training moms and grandmas across the country to fill a role as a school district ambassador in every one of the 13,452 school districts in the country to counter these negative influences of the associations that our tax dollars, district money is paying for, and the teachers' unions. | |
| And we need to take their money away. | |
| And this is what these school district ambassadors will be trained and knowledgeable to do. | |
| And they're already doing it. | |
| We have now a counter force when moms show up. | |
| They're not just angry. | |
| We can give them tools to be empowered and effective. | |
| I love it. | |
| And you're doing wonderful work, Kimberly. | |
| I'm going, I'm speaking at a mom's event in Illinois in a couple of weeks. | |
| I'm sure you've involved in that. | |
| Great. | |
| I say yes. | |
| I am. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Our moms are, our moms for America is a partner in that. | |
| I love it. | |
| I won't be able to be there. | |
| I'll miss you. | |
| I'm sorry. | |
| And Tifa is threatening us and all this. | |
| And I hope it wakes some people up. | |
| The actual terrorists are going to be the ones trying to prevent our holiday and our event at the holiday in the holiday. | |
| God bless you, Kimberly. | |
| Thank you so much. | |
| Thank you. | |
| All right, everybody. | |
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| And I got to tell you, it blew me away. | |
| You know, I've been using Good Ranchers for a while, but I said, come on, you guys got to send me it. | |
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| It blew my mother-in-law away. | |
| It's great stuff. | |
| It really is. | |
| Now, look, you got to check it out. | |
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| Flowers, chocolate, can jewelry express true love? | |
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|
Economic War Against Allies Exposed
00:12:00
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| Don't say it how you always have. | |
| Say it with meat. | |
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| Full transparent, this is a very complicated story. | |
| Our team has done a fabulous job summarizing it. | |
| You remember five months ago, there was this mysterious explosion in the Nord Stream gas pipeline, which is not an insignificant pipeline, that routes natural gas from Russia to Germany. | |
| Now, remember, it was such a big pipeline, they wanted to have the second one. | |
| They wanted to have Nordstream 2. | |
| Now, it wasn't clear who exactly was responsible. | |
| But one factor of this, if I remember correctly, it was the ambassador from Poland, the Polish ambassador or something to NATO. | |
| Somebody in the Polish government tweeted out, thank you, America. | |
| Do you remember that? | |
| And then he deleted that tweet. | |
| Something of that variety, which did suggest that there was some intelligence there. | |
| I don't think it was the Polish prime minister. | |
| It was some external Polish government official. | |
| Anyway, so we weren't sure who did this, but the narrative that was introduced by the American government was this is Russia bombing their own pipeline. | |
| Now, that would always potentially could be true, but it was just very unlikely that Russia would destroy their own cash cow into Europe. | |
| That would only further jeopardize their ability to pay their bills, keep the petrodollar afloat. | |
| So that didn't make a lot of sense. | |
| It was potential. | |
| Now, Russia benefits from Nord Stream 2, gave them leverage over Europe. | |
| And so the most plausible culprit was, of course, America. | |
| Now, I think there's some tape here. | |
| This is Victoria Newland in January saying, look, if Russia, this is January of last year, if Russia does indeed invade Ukraine, Nordstream 2 will not move forward. | |
| Very short clip, Victoria Newland, PlayCut 84. | |
| And I want to be clear with you today. | |
| If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another, Nordstream 2 will not move forward. | |
| Now, she's saying Nord Stream 2. | |
| So we have to be very clear. | |
| That's the new pipeline. | |
| That is not Nord Stream 1. | |
| Okay, so Nord Stream 1 is what was bombed. | |
| Nord Stream 2 was still being created. | |
| Now, remember, this was an underwater natural gas pipeline. | |
| So now journalist Seymour Hirsch, very interesting man, has a very, very long and in-depth bombshell story arguing that, yes, definitively, the demolition was conducted by the United States and that it was being planned months before Russia ever invaded Ukraine. | |
| His argument, first and foremost, more about him, his articles exposing the Central Intelligence Agency's anti-war activists are credited with leading to the 1970s church committee. | |
| This is a very credible man. | |
| According to Hirsch, the U.S. intelligence agencies anticipated the Russian invasion and came up with a demolition as a way to force European allies to stand up against Russia. | |
| Quote, as long as Europe remained dependent on the pipelines for cheap natural gas, Washington was afraid that countries like Germany would be reluctant to supply Ukraine with the money and weapons it needed to defeat Russia. | |
| It was at this unsettled moment that Biden authorized Jake Sullivan to bring a really qualified guy to bring together an interagency group to come up with a plan. | |
| Now, look, this is important for a couple reasons. | |
| The big quote is this: last June, Navy divers, operating under the cover of a widely publicized midsummer NATO exercise known as Battops 22, planted the remotely triggered explosives that three months later destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines, according to a source with direct knowledge of the operational planning. | |
| Now, I can keep on going through this. | |
| Our team did an amazing job summarizing all this, but let me just editorialize for a second. | |
| If this is true, this is an act of war on behalf of the United States against the Russian government. | |
| There is no question of that. | |
| If this is indeed true, which I believe it is true, you don't get to bomb countries' pipelines and act as if that's not an act of war. | |
| But who is it an act of war against exactly? | |
| Is it an act of war against Russia, an act of war against Germany, an act of war against NATO? | |
| And or is this a false flag potential operation just to get everybody mad at Russia to be able to send more money and weapons into Ukraine? | |
| I don't exactly think, I don't, I do not know how anyone could make an argument that this is responsible. | |
| According to Hirsch, Navy divers were there because they're not special forces. | |
| Special forces operations require White House briefing. | |
| The White House briefed congressional leaders. | |
| Hear that? | |
| So according to Hirsch, the divers were chosen because they're not special forces. | |
| So they were able to bypass Congress. | |
| Biden didn't want them to know, so the operation was downgraded from covert to a highly classified intelligence operation with U.S. military support. | |
| With one weird trick, Biden was then able to keep Congress out of the loop. | |
| Hirsch said the attack was conducted in coordination with the Norwegian Navy while we kept other nations in the dark. | |
| Did our government bomb Russia's cash cow and the energy source for Europe? | |
| Why would we do that? | |
| So the Nord Stream story is very interesting for a variety of different reasons. | |
| So look, this is very dark. | |
| Basically, we attacked our allies to force them to stay on our side in the war. | |
| But it is also an it isn't not also an attack on Russia because it is also Russia's leverage over Europe. | |
| And so this was, we asked the question when it happened. | |
| It is the Latin phrase, qui bono. | |
| Who benefits? | |
| Yeah, I mean, I agree. | |
| I'm looking at our team discuss this right now. | |
| It's an attack on both. | |
| It is an attack on both Russia and Germany. | |
| It certainly is a fact. | |
| I mean, I have friends right now in Germany that are saying this has been an awful winter, that they go into restaurants that have had to truncate their hours because they are not allotted enough, I guess what they call it, heating units because of how cold it is, and they do not have widespread access to natural gas. | |
| You can thank the environmentalists for that. | |
| Apparently, the French are having a really tough winter as well. | |
| They're freezing their tails off. | |
| And so the Americans did this. | |
| Did we do this in tandem with our European allies? | |
| Did we do this in harmony with them? | |
| So the White House continues to categorically deny this, obviously. | |
| It's just a further exposure of an economic act of war conducted not just against Russia, but against our own allies. | |
| And so instead of trying to broker peace, we're sending deep sea navy divers who then could circumvent and avoid Congress to attack Germany. | |
| Now, this is a very simple observation that will be made on Twitter and on most conservative media. | |
| We tend to not do simple around here, but it is necessary. | |
| Could you imagine if Donald Trump did this? | |
| Again, it's simple, but it is a necessary observation. | |
| Could you imagine if Donald Trump enlisted a team of Navy divers that would intentionally not have to be briefed to Congress to attack both Russia and Germany simultaneously, that would further inflame a deadly and catastrophic border dispute war. | |
| Could you imagine the coverage? | |
| So, look, maybe this article is not accurate. | |
| It certainly reads like it's accurate. | |
| It's incredibly detailed with sourcing that is there's no way it's fabricated. | |
| I mean, either somebody's lying to him or he has the source, or he's definitely talking to somebody who's giving him information. | |
| So, either that person is lying to him or they're telling the truth, probably telling the truth. | |
| And so, it is a question: is this an act of war? | |
| And by the way, just so we're clear, the article is phenomenally detailed, and he is a very credible person. | |
| It's not just some schlepp off the street that was like, Yeah, I think this happened. | |
| Well, who are you? | |
| I stayed at a Holiday Inn Express last night, like, Yeah, that's not this guy. | |
| This guy actually has detailed clandestine activity by the Central Intelligence Agency for quite some time. | |
| So, if Seymour Hirsch's story is accurate, Biden then attacked our own allies and Russia in order to force them to stay on our side in the Ukraine proxy war. | |
| But I'm just more kind of interested in the Russia element of this. | |
| Is this going to sound, I'm going to have to be, I'm going to have to say this correctly without it coming across. | |
| If this is true and we did this, should we not be rather impressed by Russia's restraint? | |
| Now, I mean that actually very clearly. | |
| If you bombed a piece of critical infrastructure that was leveraged for Russia and they did not respond in kind, I mean, that's that's pretty interesting, isn't it? | |
| Now, you might say, well, how are they supposed to respond and all that? | |
| I mean, fair enough, but this was a cash cow for the Russians. | |
| Should it have ever gotten approved in the first place as a separate issue? | |
| But also, the Germans just took it. | |
| So, the Germans have to have a now, they have a below standard of living to get them further into a proxy war, makes them look super pathetic, and then the Russians lose their cash cow and they don't retaliate. | |
| That seems to be against the narrative that Putin and the Kremlin are sociopathic warmongers that want nothing but destruction and carnage and are going to nuke the entire continent. | |
| Hey, everybody, Charlie Kirk here. | |
| Just when you thought it couldn't get any better, Mike Lindell with My Pillow is launching the My Pillow 2.0. | |
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|
Antitrust Laws vs Tech Giants
00:11:36
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| Check it out. | |
| Joining us now is Mike Davis to talk about big tech, Joe Biden's focus on big tech, and whether or not we can find some agreement on that. | |
| Mike, welcome to the program. | |
| Thank you for having me on, Charlie. | |
| So, Mike, you sent a tweet about Biden and his stance on big tech. | |
| I'll allow you to make the case. | |
| The floor is yours. | |
| So, I disagree with President Biden on just about everything. | |
| I think he is a bumbling buffoon of a president. | |
| We saw last night at his State of the Union address. | |
| He's just this angry old man screaming at the TV screen. | |
| But I'll tell you one area where I think he's gotten it right is his big tech antitrust proposals and appointments to rein in Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple. | |
| And I think that is critically important that that happens. | |
| We've seen with President Biden appointing Jonathan Cantor to the critically important antitrust division at the Justice Department. | |
| Jonathan Cantor is the assistant attorney general for the antitrust division at the Justice Department, along with Lena Khan as the FTC chair. | |
| These are two appointments that show that President Joe Biden is willing to ignore Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple's big campaign contributions and their dark money contributions and work with Republicans on a bipartisan basis to finally end big tech's gatekeeping power over information and commerce. | |
| And I think this is where Republicans and Democrats must come together to hold big tech accountable because it's becoming too late. | |
| Big tech is China-controlled. | |
| Big tech uses their market power to crush competition, shutter small businesses, and cancel conservatives and others with whom they disagree. | |
| And the stars are aligned right now. | |
| We have this rare bipartisan opportunity with populist Democrats, with Joe Biden and the Elizabeth Warren wing of the Democrat Party, along with the Trump wing of the Republican Party, to finally hold big tech accountable. | |
| And I think we need to take advantage of this opportunity. | |
| So let me challenge one part of it. | |
| I don't know that I do not know this topic nearly as well as you do. | |
| So you'll be able to, I'm sure, push back rather effectively, which is, so let's say Biden put forward a good appointment at the DOJ on this issue. | |
| Is that something you'd say is fair? | |
| Yes, very much so. | |
| And we supported Jonathan Cantor. | |
| And I don't know anything about him, the details of it. | |
| So I suppose a counter that I would love to have you navigate through are two of the following. | |
| Number one, is it possible that Biden is and his allies are threatening big tech to try to get them to do more censorship and to try to use these as threats to get them more sympathetic to Democrat causes? | |
| For example, I'm going to use the FTC to threaten Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook, and therefore they'll be more likely to do the bidding of the FBI. | |
| What do you say to that argument? | |
| Well, I mean, that's certainly possible that different parts of the Biden regime are using this for nefarious reasons, but I'll say this: that the reason that YouTube can censor Senator Rand Paul, a medical doctor and a top policymaker in our government over his COVID statements is because Google owns YouTube. | |
| Google is a trillion-dollar big tech monopolist. | |
| And instead of competing against YouTube, Google simply acquired YouTube. | |
| And if Google and YouTube actually competed against each other, there's no chance that YouTube would have censored Senator Rand Paul. | |
| And that's the point with antitrust. | |
| When we break up big tech, when you break up Google and YouTube, when you break up Facebook and Instagram, it makes it much less likely that they're going to censor people. | |
| They're going to be competing for users instead of censoring their users. | |
| And that's why. | |
| No, I'm totally sympathetic to that. | |
| I'm just cynical about complimenting Biden on anything. | |
| So you're going to have to keep on defending it. | |
| So the second argument would be that it's going to be unsuccessful because it will either be challenged in the courts or these companies are so big that they actually might invite the regulation. | |
| I mean, you see Facebook, they have this ridiculous website where they say, we actually want Congress to act. | |
| We want Congress to pass data reform. | |
| You've heard this argument plenty of times. | |
| Big companies actually like regulation because for Facebook, another $70 million of legal fees is a rounding error. | |
| But for their competitor, that is the difference between survival or oblivion. | |
| What is your thoughts on that? | |
| You're exactly right, Charlie. | |
| And that's why you want to do antitrust because antitrust is law enforcement. | |
| It is the opposite of regulation. | |
| With antitrust, you are targeting the anti-competitive tumor on the market. | |
| You use criminal antitrust law enforcement and civil antitrust law enforcement. | |
| You file a lawsuit against Google. | |
| You file a lawsuit against Facebook. | |
| You target the bad actors. | |
| You do not do industry. | |
| It's the opposite of industry wide regulation. | |
| As you said, Charlie, Facebook wants industry-wide regulation. | |
| Of course, they do. | |
| Trillion-dollar companies want regulations because they're entry barriers to startup competitors, as you just described. | |
| You're exactly right. | |
| That's why you want antitrust. | |
| That's why, for example, there are two lawsuits right now from the DOJ antitrust division against Google. | |
| One is against Google's search monopoly, Google search, and one is against Google's advertising monopoly. | |
| If these two lawsuits succeed, particularly the advertising lawsuit, the antitrust lawsuit that Jonathan Cantor just filed, along with Republican state attorneys general across the country, including the Virginia attorney general who joined this lawsuit, Andrew Ferguson, the Solicitor General of Virginia, clerked with me on the Supreme Court. | |
| He clerked for Justice Thomas. | |
| When I clerked for Justice Gorsuch, he worked with me on the Senate Judiciary Committee, confirming President Trump's judges. | |
| He's no liberal. | |
| He's no squish. | |
| He's very much behind these antitrust lawsuits that they're filing against Google's advertising monopoly. | |
| Totally. | |
| So let me entertain another piece that I would like to have you respond to is regulation of whom. | |
| One of the issues with a voluminous regulatory code and Stalinistic bureaucrats is they get to decide who actually gets more pressure or scrutiny than others. | |
| So for example, there is this kind of new fake big tech, let's just say posture, anti-big tech posh that Biden is having like, whoa, we're banning TikTok or University of Texas. | |
| Now, they're banning. | |
| I totally support it. | |
| I think TikTok should be totally banned, but they're doing this because Google is calling them and saying, hey, we want this done because YouTube Shorts is not exactly as successful as we would like. | |
| TikTok has seriously deteriorated the Gen Z market for Facebook and YouTube. | |
| Let's just go this a level further. | |
| Who's to say that with this robust antitrust regulation that might be passed or potentially enforced, that they'd go kind of soft on Google, soft on Amazon, but hard on Elon Musk's Twitter? | |
| Your thoughts, Mike? | |
| Well, again, this is antitrust. | |
| This is the Sherman Act, the Clayton Act. | |
| This is antitrust as law enforcement. | |
| It's not regulation. | |
| It's actually a statute. | |
| It's a statute that's been on the books for 100 years that needs to be updated to address big tech. | |
| But it's not regulation. | |
| It's antitrust. | |
| No, no, I hear that. | |
| But even with law enforcement, they get to choose who they get to go after more than others, right? | |
| There is, we see this with DOJ, right? | |
| They'll go raid a pro-life leader's home, but they won't go after people that bomb pro-life clinics. | |
| That's the argument I'm making is that there will be enforcement bias baked into this. | |
| Well, of course, there could be, but there aren't that many monopolists in the market. | |
| No, that's fair. | |
| That's a good counterargument. | |
| You're right. | |
| I mean, the whole point of antitrust is to go after the monopolist, go after the people who are using their market power to crush competition in the market. | |
| And really, there are only four in the big tech market. | |
| It's Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple. | |
| So if the DOJ antitrust division files a lawsuit against any of those four, two of those four, three of those four, four of those four, it's a good thing. | |
| So then the final argument that I'd like to have you respond to is how successful was, in your estimation, the Microsoft 2001 landmark case where Microsoft had to defend its pseudo-monopolistic practices. | |
| It got upheld and then overturned. | |
| It was a mess of lawsuits. | |
| Did it really result in Microsoft being less powerful? | |
| Because they're still one of the most valuable companies on the planet. | |
| It actually did. | |
| I mean, it led to what we saw in the tech market for 15 years after that with Google and these other platforms that were able to come out of that. | |
| The problem is that we have the problem with our antitrust laws is the way that our antitrust laws are written, the plain text of our antitrust laws, it is very clear that our antitrust agencies can law enforcement agencies, the Justice Department's antitrust division, the FTC, state attorneys general should be able to break up big tech. | |
| The problem is we have what's called the consumer welfare standard. | |
| And what the consumer welfare standard does is it essentially says that if the anti-competitive actions don't affect price, there's not an antitrust violation. | |
| Well, here's the problem. | |
| Google, how much does it cost to do a Google search? | |
| You think it's free? | |
| Gmail is free. | |
| Facebook is free. | |
| Twitter is free. | |
| All these big tech platforms are supposedly free. | |
| They're not free. | |
| What they're doing is they're turning us into the commodity. | |
| They're gathering as much intel as they can on us and selling us to advertisers, right? | |
| That's how they make their money. | |
| They look at our searches. | |
| They look at our movements. | |
| They look at everything that we do online and they sell us to advertisers. | |
| They micro-target us to advertisers, and that's how they make their trillions of dollars. | |
| But under the consumer welfare standard, we're not paying for the Google search with dollars. | |
| We're not paying for Facebook with dollars. | |
| We're not paying for YouTube with dollars. | |
| And so therefore, these lawsuits oftentimes get kicked under the consumer welfare standard. | |
| That's why we need to update our antitrust laws to make it very clear that this judicial activism called the consumer welfare standard does not apply to the tech market, Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple. | |
|
Thank You for Listening
00:00:42
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| I hope you're right, Mike. | |
| I'm going to remain cynical that Biden really wants to break up his biggest super PAC. | |
| I don't think that I don't think he wants it. | |
| I think it's smokescreen. | |
| I hear you and I trust you, but I think when the pressure starts to come upon Biden, he's going to defend those people that put him in the White House. | |
| Mike, final thoughts, I hear you, Charlie. | |
| We'll have you back on. | |
| Thank you, Mike. | |
| Appreciate it. | |
| Thanks so much for listening, everybody. | |
| Email me your thoughts as always: freedom at charliekirk.com. | |
| Thank you so much for listening, and God bless. | |
| For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com. | |