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Feb. 1, 2023 - Firebrand - Matt Gaetz
46:55
Episode 86 LIVE: Crushed (feat. Rep. Ken Buck) – Firebrand with Matt Gaetz
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Thank you.
Welcome to the National Council of the United States.
Matt Gaetz was one of the very few members in the entire Congress who bothered to stand up against permanent Washington on behalf of his constituents.
Matt Gaetz right now, he's a problem for the Democratic Party.
He can cause a lot of hiccups in passing the laws.
So we're going to keep running those stories to keep hurting him.
If you stand for the flag and kneel in prayer, if you want to build America up and not burn her to the ground, then welcome, my fellow patriots.
You are in the right place.
This is the movement for you.
You ever watch this guy on television?
It's like a machine.
Matt Gaetz.
I'm a canceled man in some corners of the internet.
Many days, I'm a marked man in Congress, a wanted man by the deep state.
They aren't really coming for me.
They're coming for you.
I'm just in the way.
Welcome back to Firebrand.
We are broadcasting live out of room 2021 of the Rayburn House Office Building on the Capitol Complex here in our nation's capital, Washington, D.C., and this episode gives us a deep dive into big tech, what the problems are, what the various things we can do to fight back might be.
Ken Buck wrote a great book about it.
It's called Crushed.
Terrific, terrific policy prescriptions there.
Great diagnosis.
We're going to get to that in a moment.
But Jameson on Rumble...
He says that debate on the pledge was hilarious.
So we had drama in the House Judiciary Committee today over, of all things, the Pledge of Allegiance.
I don't think you could say the Pledge of Allegiance too much.
So here's how the story begins.
Two years ago, when the Democrats were in control, I thought it might be a nice, unifying thing to put into our Judiciary Committee rules a Pledge of Allegiance at the beginning of every committee meeting.
And two years ago when the Democrats were in charge, this is how that went.
Take a listen.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I want to extend a welcome to the new committee members.
I'm grateful to be back on this august committee.
I understand and appreciate the significance and importance of the work that we do.
I just think it would be nice if, in the spirit of national unity and national pride, which I know we all aspire to do to a greater extent, that at the beginning of each meeting, the chair or one of the designees of the chair would have the opportunity to lead us in the Pledge of Allegiance.
We're all aware that in these times it's important for the country to see members of Congress working together on some things, and while I know that we can deal with divisive issues in the committee, it would be my hope that we could start every committee with a great, unifying, patriotic moment.
I yield back.
The gentleman yields back.
I recognize myself to speak in opposition to the amendment.
It's unnecessary.
The House begins every day with the Pledge of Allegiance.
We're covered by that.
There's no necessity to say the Pledge of Allegiance twice during the same day.
So that was two years ago, and oh my gosh, those masks are ugly.
I can't believe Nancy Pelosi made us wear those things.
Brian on Facebook thinks that I should not even be able to own a flag or say the Pledge of Allegiance.
What a little fascist you are, Brian.
A note that Michael made just now.
So that brings us to the Republicans regaining control of the Judiciary Committee.
And so I figure, well, the Democrats, they voted down the Pledge of Allegiance two years ago.
They literally voted it down.
And so I thought, well, we're in the majority now.
Let me offer it again.
And you will not believe the fireworks.
This is from today in the House Judiciary Committee.
For those of you who are listening to the podcast, you're going to hear me.
You're going to hear Jerry Nadler.
And then...
The terrific voice of Wes Hunt, freshman from Texas.
Take a listen.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Here on the august Judiciary Committee, we are charged with vindicating the constitutional rights of our fellow Americans, and our Pledge of Allegiance is a national symbol of pride and unity, and it was a great honor to be able to invite one of my constituents this morning to offer the Pledge of Allegiance, and so my amendment gives the committee the opportunity to begin each of its meetings with the Pledge of Allegiance.
It gives our members the ability to I thank the gentleman for his amendment.
I support the amendment.
Does anyone seek recognition?
I would oppose it simply on the grounds that, as members know, we pledge allegiance every day on the floor.
And I don't know why we should pledge allegiance twice in the same day to show how patriotic we are.
As I said, we pledge allegiance on the floor every day.
I don't think this is the most important amendment in the world.
But since we do pledge allegiance every day on the floor, I think it's unnecessary.
Quite frankly, you are correct, sir.
We should be saying the pledge every single day, every single morning, and every single committee.
Because when I was in elementary school, that's what I did.
And I worked my butt off to be sitting here right now in this room, and the least we can do is to pay homage to the sacrifice of those that come before us to say, you know what?
Democrat or Republican, we are in this together.
That flag is the one thing that unites us.
Let's just take 30 seconds to put all of our differences aside and say we can agree that this country is wonderful, this country has done outstanding things, and that brave men and women were willing to die for it.
And that's what sets us apart from every other country in the entire world.
Every generation stands up to die and fight for that flag.
The least we can do is send the Pledge of Allegiance.
I yield back.
That was Congressman Wes Hunt, new member of Congress, but a rising star already.
And I think it's quite something that Jerry Nadler spoke against my amendment today.
Wes Hunt gave that speech, and then subsequently, Jerry Nadler and every single other Democrat on the committee ended up voting with us because they were properly shamed into doing the right and patriotic thing.
And speaking of right and patriotic, it was such an honor today.
To invite, to give the first Pledge of Allegiance in the House Judiciary Committee for the 118th Congress, one of Northwest Florida's own, Staff Sergeant Beekman, joined me.
We had a great time, a great patriotic time.
Take a little listen and watch on this video of our experience.
It is my pleasure and distinct honor to introduce to the committee Staff Sergeant Corey Ryan Beekman, an American hero and a constituent of mine residing in Pensacola, Florida, and I request that he be an American hero and a constituent of mine residing in Pensacola, Florida, and I request that he be permitted It's not objection.
I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
Patriotism to me is summed up to one thing.
It's men and women that have decided to write a check to the American people, which is redeemable up into their entire life.
Just like my fellow team leader back in Iraq.
We don't get along left and right side of the aisle, but we need to remember we're all Americans and get back to the core beliefs of what we were and not so divisive, but think of what as a whole.
We're going to disagree, but we need to find the middle ground as Americans.
I could not have said it better myself, and we are always, always honored to be able to highlight the distinct and elite patriotism, especially of our fellow Northwest Floridians.
Great comment from Joe on Rumble says, If Wes Hunt were a stock, I'm buying a bag.
And I totally agree with that assessment.
But if we want to protect the true values that undergird our Constitution for free speech, we are going to have to take on big tech.
Now, one of the people who is at the forefront of that fight is Congressman Ken Buck of Colorado.
He stopped by Firebrand just moments ago for a discussion.
Take a listen.
Mr. Speaker, I rise to discuss the threats facing conservative speech in this country.
When members of government take it upon themselves to declare certain speech illegal or undesirable, they effectively silence opposition.
This isn't the American way.
We've seen this kind of censorship in Saudi Arabia, Communist China, Soviet, Russian.
We never want to see it in America.
Tonight, we're gathered to call attention to a shocking coordinated attempt by progressives in business and government to suppress dissent, stifle debate, and threaten free speech.
You just heard from one of the greatest advocates for free speech in our country, certainly the best in the House of Representatives.
My colleague from Colorado would not want to mix those up, Ken Buck.
And last evening, that was Representative Buck leading an hour of debate on a critical issue regarding telecommunications companies and what they're doing to limit access to programming based on viewpoint.
Ken Buck also wrote a great book, Crushed.
What a title.
Big Tech's war on free speech.
It's got a terrific forward from Senator Ted Cruz.
Great endorsements from Governor Mike Huckabee and David Horowitz as well.
Ken, I'm going to get into the book in a moment, but can we start with the hour of debate you led last night?
What led you to do that?
Well, I'll tell you what led me to do it.
DirecTV took Newsmax off.
AT&T and DirecTV took One American News off, and it is clearly an attempt by the left to silence the right.
We had two sitting members of the United States Congress, members of the Energy and Commerce Committee, who demanded that three networks, Newsmax, One American News, and Fox News, be taken off the air because of their radical positions.
When we, as members of Congress, start to silence the other side, we've got real problems.
I'm not opposed to any viewpoints on the other side.
I think the more they talk, the dumber they look, and the more we gain.
But to try to silence the other side is just wrong.
Well, and it's very important that you understand that fact pattern.
You had Democrat members of Congress who...
Don't like the views that they see on Newsmax, One American News, probably Real America's Voice, and any other conservative-leaning channel.
And so they sent a threat, an explicit threat, to AT&T Direct TV to try to get these channels canceled.
And you know what?
It worked.
It worked as to OAN, and now we see that very same negative action directed toward Newsmax.
And do you think that's part of a broader play that you talk about in your book, Crushed?
I do, but Matt, one of the important things is, and I failed to mention it earlier, is that Energy and Commerce has oversight over the Federal Communications Commission, which makes a lot of these decisions.
And so, really, they're putting pressure on companies to take off conservative speech, or the Biden administration will act in concert and make sure they're punished.
And do you think these companies really feel that pressure is a negative thing, or is it more that the members of Congress basically gaslight a permission structure for these woke corporations to do what they want to do anyway, and that is to limit a conservative viewpoint from being proliferated?
Well, you and I will never know because we don't go to Davos.
But the folks that go to Davos, that rub elbows, that make these kinds of decisions, they all get together behind closed doors.
I don't know who initiates the conversation, but the result is the same.
It's censorship.
Undeniably, this is part of a broader construct that all Americans need to be aware of.
We're going to get into the book in a moment, but here were my thoughts on the cancellations that we saw with AT&T and DirecTV.
Take a listen.
I remember when I was in school, it was always the liberals, the classical liberals that wanted this robust marketplace of ideas and it was a few conservatives who didn't want you to see certain things or look at certain things or read certain things.
And now it's like totally flipped the script because they have such a low view of our fellow Americans.
So what are we going to do about it?
The Energy and Commerce Committee should be holding hearings on this.
The Department of Justice antitrust entities should be looking into whether or not this is too much of a concentration of power and entities like AT&T and DirecTV that are stifling Newsmax and One American News and even Google's Terrible work to try to demonetize the Federalist.
And I also believe that in the House Judiciary Committee we should ask these questions seriously and encourage the Department of Justice to take action.
Congressman Ken Buck is my colleague on the House Judiciary Committee, and we've worked very closely to try to stop this cartel of big tech.
The book is crushed.
It's got Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, and Apple on the cover.
Ken, which is the most dangerous in your research?
Google.
And why?
They control digital advertising.
They control over 90% of the buy side.
90% of the sell side and they bought DoubleClick, which is the auction house.
If you can imagine, they own the referees, they own the league office, they own both teams playing the football game and you and I are supposed to go to Vegas and place a wager It's absolutely absurd to think that one company can have that type of power in digital advertising if Congress did the right thing and adopted a bill that you and I supported last year, and Mike Lee and many others support on the Senate side.
We would actually have a fair digital advertising.
It would reduce costs to consumers and be really positive.
And let me be straight with our viewers.
Ken and I are opposite many of our fellow Republicans often on these issues of antitrust because there is a libertarian streak among some Republicans that would say, gosh, if you don't like what these companies are doing, just don't use them.
Create your own company.
What would be your response to that critique?
Well, first of all, I think that the streak has to do more with taking money than it does with their ideological views.
Oh, so you think that the people that vote with Big Tech do so because of the political contributions that Big Tech gives?
Not only to them, but to the overall effort.
I think that Big Tech has bought the...
Many of the think tanks in this town, I think Big Tech has their tentacles in just about every area.
They are literally spending over $100 million to influence policy in Washington, D.C. It brings us to my favorite paragraph in the book.
I'm reading directly here.
They are fully engaged in political patronage, hiring the family members of elected leaders, making targeted political donations to the campaigns of critical members of Congress, buying off various Washington, D.C. think tanks, academic centers, and advocacy groups.
And then you cite Meta, the company that owns Facebook, spent $20 million on lobbying in 2021. Amazon spent more than $19 million.
The only public company that spent more on lobbying was Blue Cross Blue Shield.
Which members of Congress do you think are compromised because their family members have jobs with big tech?
Well, I mentioned in the book that Zoe Lofgren's daughter works for, I believe it was Amazon.
And Zoe Lofgren is a Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee from California.
Not only is she a Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee from California, she represents Silicon Valley, but also when we had a markup on six antitrust bills, she offered at least one poison pill amendment for every bill that we had.
She voted against every bill that we had, and she was working every single caucus on the Democrat side trying to get them to oppose our bills.
And I don't know if she still does, but even Chuck Schumer's daughter worked for Facebook.
Oh, no, no, no, my friend.
Two daughters.
Two!
Two daughters work for Big Tech.
One works for Facebook, one works for Amazon.
We also know that Nancy Pelosi's husband invests in these companies.
And it just so happens that before Google was sued last week by the U.S. Department of Justice, two weeks earlier, her husband had sold the Google stock that they owned.
Just a coincidence.
Unbelievable.
And when the American people want to understand why there isn't progress made on these issues that, frankly, should be broadly supported, should be overwhelmingly bipartisan, you see these vectors of influence that are just outright corrupt.
You are a constitutional conservative, you're a student of history, and you took some time in the book to talk about how our founders thought about the creative class.
Reflect on that a little bit.
Sure.
Well, it's clear that our founders valued private property rights almost above all other rights, and they recognized that prosperity is directly linked to private property rights.
And so they set up very clearly in the Constitution a system for patents, but they also had debates, vigorous debates, about monopolies because of the East India Company and other examples of monopolies that they saw, which were really state-sanctioned monopolies.
And they said in an exchange between Madison and Jefferson, oh, this could never happen in a country like America that we're setting up.
A monopoly could never take place.
The people would, you know, rise up against it.
Little did they foresee, one, the Industrial Revolution, but also the revolution that we're going through in our economy now.
And in a lot of ways those monopolies are preserved because we've wrapped the apparatus of big government around big tech.
And at times it's hard to tell where big government ends and big tech begins because so many of the officials in the FCC and the Department of Justice and the FBI end up going to work for big tech.
And so they never want to anger them too much.
They always want to be very accommodating because in a lot of cases it's their future employer.
Absolutely.
And it's clear that if big tech were to actually be challenged, many of the folks would have to go out and earn a real living somehow.
Amazon also gets treatment in the book regarding their self-dealing and the way that they vertically integrate to crush small businesses and entrepreneurs.
Lay out the Amazon critique.
Well, here's what Amazon does.
It has a monopoly on this e-commerce platform that it owns.
And by the way, Matt, I think you and I want to celebrate success in this country.
We don't want to criticize success.
But what they do with their platform is...
Excuse me.
They recognize a product is selling very well.
We'll just call it a widget.
They have a contract with a third party widget maker.
The widget's selling very well.
They go out and they replicate the widget.
They then sell their own widget.
They take the third-party widget and they put it on page three.
They put their widget up on page one.
So they are using their platform in an anti-competitive way.
They're using their platform to identify a successful product and then make sure that they punish the innovator of that product, punish the investors in that product, and take every last cent that they can out of the market for their own product.
And Jeff Bezos' response to that was, well, people like Amazon.
Matter of fact, they like Amazon a lot more than they like Congress.
Why shouldn't we just submit to our big tech overlords?
If over 80% of people are saying that they believe that Amazon would do the right thing, and certainly Congress does not reach that threshold, who are we to critique them?
Well, I'll tell you who we are.
We're individuals that understand that at some point China catches up.
And China catches up because they have low labor rates, they have very low environmental regulations, and so low energy costs.
And the only way we stay ahead of China and others in the world economy is to out-innovate.
And if you take the incentive to innovate away, if you take the investment in innovation away, we lose.
You're very critical of Apple in the book as well.
You've got all kinds of interesting fruit puns.
But you talk about the app marketplace.
And Elon Musk has described this app marketplace that Apple controls as a functional tax on the internet.
You know, a 30% tax on all things that people are using to interface with the digital world.
How should people think about the app marketplace in antitrust terms or in government power terms?
Well, if you look at Spotify, Spotify is paying a 30% surcharge because Apple has a product that competes with Spotify, Apple Music, on the App Store.
And so if you dare to compete with an Apple product on their platform, they are going to charge you.
So Spotify costs $12 on the App Store.
Apple Music chart costs $9 a month and actually people are still choosing Spotify because it's a better product even at that cost.
But Apple is going to make money off of that better product because they're on the App Store.
Now one great example of what happens with Apple is Parler.
After the January 6th ride in the United States Capitol, the next day Apple took Parler off the App Store.
Within two days, Amazon Web Services refuses to service the web contract with Parler, and Parler is basically shut down.
It's shut down because it is a conservative voice in the Twitter sphere.
And so we know that people were using Facebook on January 6th.
We know that people were using Twitter.
They weren't punished.
The company that was punished was Parler, and it started with Apple.
The book is crushed.
The author is Congressman Ken Buck and he really takes a lot of these big tech companies to task.
He calls Twitter an ideologically driven cartel.
Now obviously we're seeing some changes at Twitter now.
Those changes were probably happening in real time as you were writing the book.
How do you assess the Twitter environment?
Today, I assess it as a positive move and actually pressure on these other companies.
The great thing of what Elon Musk has done is he's really brought back the curtain and exposed the mindset of these wokesters in Silicon Valley.
You call them wokesters?
I call them woketopians.
Okay, Woketopians, I'll adopt your phrase.
They are people who just disagree with our point of view.
And what's so beautiful about this monopoly, Matt, is that on the one hand, they have a monopoly in the business marketplace, and they use the same tactics...
To try to have a monopoly in the marketplace of ideas.
They don't want you buying someone else's product, so they actually destroy the competition.
They don't want you believing someone else's ideology, so they try to destroy that ideology.
The information we learned from the Twitter files about how government tried to manipulate viewpoint and content, how internal executives and internal entities were set up to silence conservatives, to limit certain viewpoints.
How pervasive do you think that is across all of these major tech companies, or do you think there's something different and unique about Twitter?
No, I don't think there's something different, unique.
I think it's often the same people that are moving between companies that are helping to form the culture in those companies.
Every one of these companies, I give examples in the book about how They all have suppressed speech.
Jim Banks from Indiana criticized Time Magazine for giving the Woman of the Year Award to a biological male, and they took him off the platform.
Now, you can agree with that.
You can disagree with it.
He has a right to speak his mind, and Rand Paul was taken off the platform for questioning Dr. Fauci in a Senate hearing.
In a public Senate hearing, he's taken off the platform for that kind of speech.
We know that...
Shelby Steele had a documentary, What Killed Michael Brown?
And that documentary was taken off of the Amazon site as a result of it being Black History Month, and it didn't fall in the examples of black history that Amazon wanted to promote.
So every one of these companies has engaged in this same type of censorship because The speech disagrees with their view of the world.
It's a tremendous diagnosis of the problem we have, how we got here, how it is fundamentally anti-American when we look at the values and principles that Really organized our concept of freedom and speech and expression.
Remedies.
I want to talk about that.
And let's sort of go through it constitutionally.
I mean, you look at Article I powers, the powers of the United States Congress, the legislative branch.
And your indictment is that the legislative branch is essentially bought off one way or the other.
Do you have hope that...
Through Article I powers, we will be able to reach some sort of vindication for free speech, or is the system so corrupted by money and influence and compromise that that is less likely?
Well, if we could back up just a second.
There's a problem when monopolies control steel and oil and banks.
There's a bigger problem when they control information.
Yes.
When they control information, we're talking about a threat to our democracy.
Obviously, the control of steel means that steel prices will go up and we may have a lower quality steel.
When they control information, we really have to be concerned about them putting their thumb on the scale in an election.
So first of all, I think it's critical that we talk about a monopoly over information.
But secondly, the idea that somehow we could pass a law in the 1800s and we could pass a law, the Clayton Act in 1913, and then Congress steps back and we say, you know, the courts can fix all of this.
We'll just let them develop the case law for antitrust.
That's now what the Constitution says.
Article 1 writes the laws.
We have a new economy now involving e-commerce, involving searches on the internet, involving social media.
We have an obligation to write the law, not just to say to the courts, go fix this.
An obligation, but do we have the capability?
I believe we do.
We had the capability in the Industrial Revolution, and I believe we have the capability now.
I believe what we have to do is to make sure that we give information, just as I'm trying to do in this book, and just as you and I tried to do in the Judiciary Committee and on the floor, we give information to people and hope that That they ask the right questions and come up with the right answers.
And I have faith.
We convinced 39 of our colleagues, 37 of our colleagues, to vote for antitrust bills on the floor.
Our leadership never expected a vote that high on those bills.
And I believe the momentum will just keep increasing.
The momentum at times seems far too slow.
And you point out the Pelosi familial stock trades as potentially one animator of that speed.
And it's certainly troubling, and I certainly hope that's not the case.
But I mean, it's right before our very eyes.
And I don't share your optimism.
I actually think that Big tech has become more powerful than any government that has ever existed in all of human history, and the power they have over the United States Congress is sickening and debasing and ultimately debilitating to a lot of our common sense legislative efforts.
I also want to talk about opportunities that exist sort of through Article II powers and the executive.
I mean, should Joe Biden be doing more on this?
What could a visionary administration or president do in the absence of Congress as a helpful hand?
Well, I love the fact that Joe Biden has the Democrats in control of the House, in control of the Senate, obviously, in control of the executive branch for two years.
And within weeks after that control ended, he writes an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal calling on Republicans and Democrats to work together to solve this big tech antitrust issue.
If he wanted it solved, he had the ability to ask Speaker Pelosi, Leader Schumer, to get it solved.
Well, I mean, he has blood on his hands on a lot of these issues because it was members of the Biden administration that were trying to manipulate viewpoints on big tech during the coronavirus pandemic.
So they don't want to divorce big government from big tech.
They actually want to meld the two to a greater extent, which actually kind of sounds a lot like China to me and not the United States.
But if the right person...
We're guiding the decisions of the administration.
Lay out a vision for what could be done with FCC appointments, with FEC appointments, to try to get us on the right path.
Matt, I'm not even sure we need to have a vision.
I think we can just look at the Trump administration.
The Trump administration, along with the state attorney generals, engaged in a series of lawsuits against Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook.
That are very effective.
Now, it takes a period of time to make that happen, but the Federal Trade Commission and the Antitrust Division both engaged in those lawsuits.
I think in the next couple of years, we're going to see dramatic Supreme Court decisions that are going to strike these companies.
Yeah, leading right into my next question about the role of the courts in this, oftentimes litigation around these issues does not get very far because there are special immunities that the United States Congress has given these technology companies that shield them from the very same liability that would append to,
you know, Fox News or CNN or any website or local news channel or local newspaper, some believe that stripping those immunities will be sufficient, not just necessary but sufficient to resolve the issue because then trial lawyers will feast on the carcasses of big tech and bring them to heel.
Do you believe that repealing Section 230 would be sufficient to achieve that objective?
Absolutely not.
No, I think what's necessary is competition.
And there are really three areas.
Antitrust, Section 230, and privacy laws.
All three have to be used to accomplish our goals.
But Section 230 is a good place to start.
These companies are using the phrase otherwise objectionable as a shield to hide behind and in a way to punish people whose views they disagree with.
The real issue you mentioned, you know, CNN and Fox News and others, we don't object when CNN comes up with a story with a particular viewpoint.
Because we have Fox, we have Newsmax, we have One American News and so many others that can offer a differing viewpoint.
We don't object when the Washington Post and the New York Times has a particular viewpoint.
Because the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post will have a different viewpoint and in the marketplace of ideas will have competition.
When Google controls 94% of searches in America and changes its algorithm to punish conservatives and specifically Donald Trump in June of 2020 and benefit Joe Biden, that hurts because we don't have competition.
We don't have five Googles and seven Facebooks to allow the American public, the consumer, Power over freedom is one of the themes we see throughout the book, and it's precisely reflected in that.
And we have the power to do something about it.
Now, there was legislation that was passed to deal with some of these issues.
There were other bills that you and I supported that did not pass the House.
So talk about the legislation that did get through the House and what effect you think that will have on the conditions you describe in Crushed.
Sure.
There were three bills that passed the House.
One was a bill that allowed state attorney generals to file a lawsuit against Big Tech, an antitrust lawsuit against Big Tech, and keep that lawsuit in their home state.
A lot of these lawsuits are getting moved to the Northern District of California because they, quote unquote, have a special expertise in big tech.
What they have is the backyard of big tech.
The Northern District of California, Silicon Valley is in that district, jury pool.
It works for many of these companies, drawn from that area.
Home field advantage, as one might call it.
I think that's an appropriate way to call it.
So we passed a bill that said that if you sue somebody in Texas because they do business in Texas, that lawsuit can stay in Texas.
The second bill that we passed was a bill that actually gives more resources to the Antitrust Division and the Federal Trade Commission.
And the third bill was a bill that was sort of added on To get some support in the Senate, it was a bill from Senator Hawley that basically said that if a company has a tie to Communist China, that tie has to be disclosed at the time that a merger is being reviewed.
And one of the critiques that some of our colleagues make of our efforts is, well, you know, if you don't want Amazon to be the biggest, baddest, most vertically integrated innovation quashing company on the planet Earth, do you want Alibaba to win?
You know, do you want these Chinese companies to supplant U.S. technology?
How do you respond to that?
Well, they will most assuredly win if we don't encourage competition in the American marketplace, because American companies will get big, fat, and lazy, and we will lose ultimately in the marketplace.
The way to beat China is not to look more like China, and that's the problem with this...
Big tech enterprise and a captive government, in a lot of ways, to that enterprise.
If that's the winning model, China's going to do it better than we are.
And so we have to have a model that allows innovation, that allows development of ideas, and that doesn't permit these companies to engage in anti-competitive behavior.
I do not have confidence in the Congress to be able to address these issues to the degree that is necessary, given the rising power of big tech.
I see an executive branch right now that is not only not helpful, they're in on the grift.
And you describe a court system that previously they were able to play to this geographic advantage.
And then similarly, you know, we have these immunities that still exist.
So, I mean, people need to understand the diagnosis there.
And it brings us to sort of, I think, the fourth leg of the stool, and that's consumer choice.
And personal choices.
And in your case, political choices because you led on not taking political donations from these companies.
You don't use YouTube.
You don't utilize these companies in your daily activities.
To what extent is consumer choice a powerful tool to drive change?
Ask the civil rights leaders of the 50s, 60s, and 70s how powerful it is to boycott racist businesses.
Ask people just how powerful it is in their neighborhood when they identify a wrong and they engage in an economic boycott.
It is very powerful, and it's really what we can do.
If nothing else, it makes you feel good.
You know, when you don't use Google and you use DuckDuckGo or some other search engine, it may take an extra couple seconds to get the result that you want, but it feels good.
And when you don't order your toilet paper for overnight delivery, you drive to a store or you wait two or three days, It feels good and folks can turn off the tracking devices on their phone and drive these companies crazy.
If you're not using Waze or Google Maps to go someplace, turn the tracking device off and you will deny them of information that they absolutely need that they sell to advertisers.
You have a say.
You have agency in this.
That was remarkable.
Speaker McCarthy has talked at some length about data privacy and data portability.
He seems to understand the issue intellectually, that the more of our own information we get control over, the more we have agency in the digital world.
How do you assess the role of some of those data bills and privacy bills, likely to go through the Energy and Commerce Committee, not our Judiciary Committee, but do you think they can make a dent?
I do, and let's just describe what data portability is.
In 1996, when the Telecommunications Act passed Congress, Congress gave consumers the ability to take their cell phone number From AT&T to Verizon or Verizon to T-Mobile.
And that opened up the marketplace where people weren't concerned about changing and looking for a better plan and a less expensive plan.
What we're talking about is when you search for something on Google, you own that information and you can take that information to another search engine and you can get paid for that information As the owner of that information, and that portability is essential to opening up the marketplace and allowing competition in this area.
I think that the Speaker understands that.
I think a lot of other Republicans understand it, and hopefully we can move some of that legislation.
And from a structural standpoint, it converts the user from the product to the client.
Absolutely.
You know, in a lot of ways right now, technology is cheap to access because you aren't the one being served.
You are quite literally the product.
Data is being extracted from you, sold elsewhere, and we've even heard liberal commentators like John Oliver talk about the importance of data privacy and Limiting the extent to which all of our searches and all of our places we go for barbecue can't be just stripped and then placed into the marketplace without not only not our consent, not even our knowledge.
And these executives at these companies have said publicly, on the record, I can tell you what you're going to think before you even think it.
That kind of arrogance is scary, but it's accurate.
And we need to make sure that as consumers, we're getting a benefit for that information.
So I got to know, are you selling Crushed on Amazon?
Absolutely.
Right.
So you haven't totally decamped.
No, no, no.
I don't use Amazon.
I don't buy a single product from Amazon.
You're selling one?
If Amazon wants to promote this book, I'm all in favor of having them promote the book and having people read about what an evil company Amazon is.
Yeah, I don't know that they'll be promoting it, and I don't know that their algorithm is going to drive people to your book, but it is an interesting commentary on the market power that a company like Amazon has.
I mean, if anybody writes a book, you're going to get about 75% to 85% of your sales through Amazon.
That's how people purchase this type of material to learn more.
So even as we're critiquing Amazon now, It is hard to unwind from it as you and I are having this discussion.
It is being live streamed over many of the companies that you're dictating.
And so I believe that the development of alternate pathways and tools, DuckDuckGo, we really promote Rumble as a way for folks to get video content.
You almost have to stay on multiple battlefields so that the argument can hopefully get through to some extent given the tremendous headwinds we face.
Well, we can't get off the grid and try to convince a majority of Americans that we're right.
And I also have an iPhone because I really don't have too much choice outside of the two major phone manufacturers to make that decision.
So I think there are things that we have to do practically.
But when we have a choice, we should absolutely make that choice.
It's a quick read.
You can knock it out on a good weekend afternoon.
You're going to get history.
You're going to get law.
You're going to get politics.
And you're going to get great information about technology and telecommunications.
Ken Buck, thank you so much for writing this book, for being a warrior in the cause, for free speech, and for joining me on Firebrand.
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