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July 10, 2024 - Firebrand - Matt Gaetz
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Episode 169 LIVE: The Unprotected Class (feat. Jeremy Carl) – Firebrand with Matt Gaetz
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Thank you.
brand inside of the House of Representatives.
You're not taking Matt Gaetz off the board, okay?
Because Matt Gaetz is an American patriot and Matt Gaetz is an American hero.
We will not continue to allow the Uniparty to run this town without a fight.
I want to thank you, Matt Gaetz, for holding the line.
Matt Gaetz is a courageous man.
If we had hundreds of Matt Gaetz in D.C., the country turns around.
It's that simple.
He's so tough, he's so strong, he's smart, and he loves this country.
Matt Gaetz.
It is the honor of my life to fight alongside each and every one of you.
We will save America!
It's choose your fighter time!
Send in the firebrands!
Welcome back to Firebrand.
We are broadcasting live from the Rumble Studios here in the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C. I've got a terrific guest who's going to join me in a moment, Jeremy Carl.
He is a commentator.
He is a scholar at the Claremont Institute where we get so many of our ideas.
Really, it's the group that's filling the intellectual vacuum that's been abandoned by so many of the compromised think tanks in this town.
But before we get to his work critiquing DEI and the left's current incarnation of multiculturalism at the exclusion of a pretty substantial portion of the country, Jeremy, I've got to talk to you about just what has the Capitol abuzz right now.
You've seen Pelosi offer something other than a full-throated endorsement of Joe Biden.
Joe Biden has scurried off to the Congressional Black Caucus where he is being protected by the likes of Frederica Wilson and Maxine Waters.
Those are the stalwarts.
Congresswoman Beattie, you've seen Emmanuel Cleaver out there advocating for him.
But then people like Richard Torres, a Democrat from New York, people like Michael Bennett, who went on CNN last night and just filleted Joe Biden.
It is all over the place.
So I'm too in it.
I'm in the committees with these people.
I'm seeing the funeral-like look on their face.
What is your perspective on this moment in presidential political history that we are in?
Well, it's fascinating.
And there's really very little precedent that I can think, if any, for it.
Some people talk about LBJ being pushed out or really pushing himself out, though, in 1968. But I think it's It's not a good comparison for what we have right now.
It really is just a weird thing where the Democrats want to get him out, but to do so sort of exposes the lies that they've been telling about his fitness for years.
And it's sort of a game of chicken because Biden's just saying, hey, I'm not going to go.
You know, I'm happy here.
And so they have to decide.
Right now, they're so-called fishing in the Rubicon.
They won't cross the Rubicon and just demand that he get out.
And so they're just putting themselves in a worse and worse position, which is, of course, great for us.
Yeah, I want to break this down in kind of the different vectors of Biden world.
You served in the Trump administration.
Yes.
I've served in the Department of the Interior, and so you know what it's like to be in the official admin as you've got a president who's embattled or taking criticism or seeing the media turn on them.
That affects that vector, the morale of the admin.
Then there is the political world, the campaign team.
We've seen reporting that they have to continually do these all-hands calls to keep everyone from jumping out of windows in Delaware because they're ready to draw the warm bath and get the sharp blade out over there.
And then there's Congress world.
And that's where I've had the visibility where there's this real deviation between how Members in really safe seats are thinking about Joe Biden, how frontliners are thinking about, and then what I call the new frontliner class.
Because if you're in like a D plus eight seat, you really haven't had to campaign in a general election with great vigor.
And now, like your pollsters and your consultants are saying, whoa, whoa, whoa, you won this district by 12, 16 points.
Now Joe Biden is tied.
He's down a point.
He's inside the margin of error.
So there are all those different vectors.
I want to get your take on What you think is going on in kind of Biden White House world and admin world from your perspective as a former admin official?
Yeah, well, I think probably the folks in the admin are kind of panicking.
There's a lot of confusion.
They're probably getting a lot of signals from different places.
I think, ironically, Biden, for all his incapacity, has actually done a pretty good job of staying on message to the best of his ability, which is he hasn't kind of deviated at all about, hey, I'm not going anywhere.
All his NATO buddies came to town.
Right.
You know, he's able to get the band together with NATO. Absolutely.
So I think that's what they're thinking about.
I'll tell you what is interesting.
You mentioned these swing areas.
So I live in Montana, where we have John Tester, who, and this is really stiff competition, but he may be the biggest fraud in the United States Senate.
He's a good one, though.
I respect the political skills of a guy who votes that liberal and who continually gets elected in Montana.
I've looked into the eyes of the people from Montana.
They are not liberal people.
No, no.
And it really is amazing.
Part of it is because we just have a terrible media that just doesn't cover him.
But literally, from a political science perspective, if you look at a dot of the kind of partisan lean of states and the dot of where people vote, everybody's kind of in a bunch, as you just alluded to.
And then Jon Tester's all the way out by himself Just, you know, on the far extreme, just completely out of touch with the state.
And now he's getting very nervous because he said these nice things about Biden.
And now he's kind of like, well, I'm not sure that Biden, he's sort of changing his tune.
So I think there's a lot of panic in these close congressional races as well, as you mentioned.
And it's the Sherrod Brown, the John Tester, the Mark Warners who are actually getting together and really talking about this, and Michael Bennett now giving a lot of life to that argument with his recent appearance on CNN. So there's two schools of thought in the House conference right now, and I want to get your reaction.
One is...
When the enemy is infighting, you just let them continue to do that.
You don't give them a centralizing force to rally and attack.
So this is an opportunity for Republicans to pass the gas stove bill and whatever sort of Mother's Day resolutions we have in the drawer.
The other theory of the case is this is the time to apply some pressure.
And the one The platform we have to apply that pressure.
We don't have the admin.
We don't have the White House.
We don't have the media.
We don't have big tech.
We don't have the Senate.
We have the House of Representatives.
And so you could activate the floor of the House of Representatives to force people into a pro-Biden or anti-Biden camp.
Like right now, Pelosi's able to be out there throwing shade, saying, well, you know, well, if he makes the choice, he's our guy.
I mean, that's like, yeah.
That's like somebody...
Yeah, it's very disingenuous on her part.
But what if there was a vote today on the floor to have a mental competency test for the president?
What if there was a vote on whether or not the 25th Amendment should be contemplated?
What if there was a vote on who should control the nuclear codes?
So which camp are you in?
Let them destruct or activate the floor and apply some pressure and see how some of these Democrats shake out in their voting behavior.
Well, I'm going to be unfair.
You're a much better politician than I am.
You've had a lot of success in this area.
What do you think?
What would you do?
How do you see it?
I'll tell you if I disagree.
I tell you, I would be forcing Democrats to either own or disclaim Biden.
I think that when you have an enemy that is at a point of great confusion and discord...
That's not when you allow them to sort of start cleaning up their own mess.
Sure.
Instead, what you want to do is start to force decisions on them.
And really, I'd love to see what decision they make on things like, you know, like a mental competency test.
Yeah.
I'd love, and I think that's right.
I mean, and, you know, just showing again how much better your political skills are than me.
I hadn't even thought of Really doing that on the floor, and I think that would be really effective.
I'd say the one kind of shade I would have on it is, because I would like them to keep Biden, because I think they just lose with Biden, whereas with the other, they could lose worse, okay?
I think Kamala could be a disaster and we could win in a true landslide, but there's just more variability in the system, and I'd rather take a more obvious W. So I wouldn't want to put pressure on them in such a way that makes them probably stick with Biden, but take the really painful vote.
Yeah, no, and I actually think that would be the most likely outcome, because if Chip Roy has his mental competency test legislation on the floor, I don't think you're going to see a lot of Democrats rushing to vote for that, right?
They'll quibble on some basis that that's not an appropriate action for the House, and they'll vote no, which kind of forces them into the arms of Biden.
Because let me tell you something, the conversation is coming where Valerie Jarrett and Susan Rice and Ron Klain and a few of these gray-haired buddies from the Senate, Chris Coons, they'll bring in Obama, and they'll sit down and say, Joe, Jill, Hunter, it's time for your next grand act of patriotism, and it's time for you to step aside for Kamala Harris to be the nominee.
And if what you're saying is right, you prefer the nursing home patient as opposed to what's behind door number two.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Then I think you almost want to arm Biden in that discussion by being able to say, look, every house Democrat just voted to not take my nuclear codes away.
Grandpa can still have his keys.
Absolutely.
You don't have to take them away.
Yeah.
So I don't know.
Maybe it will work out that way.
At the end of the day, we are really spectators at the moment.
And the question is whether or not as this, and it is a moment in history, as it plays out, do we want to be the non-playing characters or do we want to define our Our own destiny with the use of the house.
I do want to get to your area of study.
You're a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute.
I'm a huge fan of the scholarship that comes out of the Claremont Institute, but explain to people the mission of the institution first before we get into your specific area.
Sure.
So we are a public policy think tank, but we're a little bit different.
You alluded to that in some of your earlier areas.
We're less kind of like writing white papers on what marginal tax rates should be and more about trying to educate people about our founding principles and attempting to restore our founding principles to kind of a governing role in society, which we would argue that for some time they've essentially been displaced.
So that's the kind of central principle thing.
So it actually sort of tends to be A kind of very high-minded and elevated and philosophical conversation.
And in fact, I've kind of been very grubby in this book and kind of getting into a very messy area of public policy.
But I think it's actually one that really does implicate some of these fundamental founding questions about unalienable rights and equality and things that are promised to us in the Declaration and Constitution.
So here with Jimmy Carl and he focuses his research on multiculturalism and race relations.
So it must be fascinating conferences that you get to go to at the race relation multiculturalism booth that you hang out at.
And I'm sure you get to meet a lot of interesting people.
But in all seriousness, you're out with this very hot book right now, The Unprotected Class, How Anti-White Racism is Tearing America Apart.
And so Lay out your fundamental critique of the system that is destructive and divisive right now.
Yeah, well, it's just that right now we actually do kind of have systemic racism in the United States.
It's just the opposite way of the way that the left is talking about it, which is we have systemic racism against white Americans.
Now, of course, I'm not suggesting this is the only type of racism that exists in 2024, but I argue that it's the politically most salient And so what I do in the book after kind of setting up a little bit of the terrain and walking through the civil rights law and the civil rights revolution is in 12 different areas of American life,
everything from crime to looking at the military to health care to even the church and entertainment, I attempt to kind of lay out What anti-white policies and anti-white attitudes are kind of pervading and the sort of very negative effects they're having and then at the end I kind of sketch out why is this happening because it doesn't everything happens in politics for a reason right it's not just like a random occurrence and then I sort of say well what can we we do about it and that's that's sort of the the the
book in a nutshell.
It's almost as if we've created a culture of victimization.
And if you're not a white guy, there's a victim group for you to associate with.
And it's a pretty easy one to glom to based on your identity.
And so if you're a white guy and you're looking around and saying, well, everybody else is part of a victim group.
What's my victim group?
A drug addict becomes kind of the big one.
Yeah, absolutely.
And in fact, one of the things I have talked about in interviews and also talk about in the book is I am not looking to create a new victim group here, right?
Like, I'm just simply saying, like, white people should have enough self-respect that we should stand up for equal treatment.
So I'm not trying to create a politics of whiteness.
I'm trying to create a politics of we should all be treated in an fair and equal way.
And you are seeing this, by the way, you're seeing when a lot of times when I've talked to more challenging interviewers, you know, they say, well, you know, what's the evidence for this?
White people seem to be doing pretty well.
Well, I talk in the book about some of the ways in which white people are not doing so well in 2024. You discussed the sort of drug overdose epidemic as one of those.
But beyond that fact, you see in the census and in other data A flight from whiteness.
So if you can identify as anything other than white, you do.
In 1960, we had about 550,000 Native Americans on the U.S. Census.
In 2020 U.S. Census, we had 9.7 million.
Now, this is not due to a Native American fertility explosion in those 60 years.
It's because I want to know what's going on in the wigwam.
No, it's because people figured out that, hey, it's a lot better to be a Native American.
It's Elizabeth Warren.
It's that play.
She was one of the nine million.
I don't know if she checked the box, but she did pretty clearly get benefits in her academic career.
She went to a really mediocre law school, but somehow wound up at Harvard Law.
So what's the answer to the criticism we are frequent?
Well, actually, let's hear the criticism.
We've got a number of my colleagues in Congress and other leftist commentators who make this argument that it is indeed the need to target white people that animates their public service.
Take a listen.
The Army has struggled to meet its recruiting goals.
We want to figure out what can we do to help the Army meet those goals.
We are in a war for talent.
One of the things we have to do is really find a way to tell the Army story to as many young Americans as we can.
When we have a military that seems to invoke this sense of wokeness and where we're like on a snipe hunt for white supremacy every day in the military, I think that that causes people who might otherwise sign up for the Army to not do so.
Mr. Gates is the very first person to mention white supremacy or wokeness.
The only person on this committee who seems obsessed with white supremacy and wokeness is Mr. Gates.
White supremacists.
White supremacy.
Organized white supremacy.
White supremacy.
White supremacists and extremists.
White supremacy.
Neo-Nazi.
Domestic terrorism.
And white supremacists.
Widely fueled by white supremacy.
White supremacists.
White supremacists.
White supremacists group.
I want to understand white rage.
And I'm white.
And I want to understand it.
Ask the force to, uh, Conduct a brief stand-down to discuss the issue of extremism in our ranks.
White supremacy.
White supremacists.
Political extremism.
The Ku Klux Klan.
Domestic terrorism.
Domestic terror.
That we must confront and we will defeat.
The only person who seems obsessed with white supremacy and wokeness is Mr. Gates.
I guess I'm the obsessed one, Jeremy.
I mean, that's an amazing supercut, by the way.
And I'm glad you actually put up that military thing in general, because it's actually one of the most discouraging trends that we have.
And I talk about this in my military chapter of the book, because while race relations have not been perfect in the military, they've been probably better in the military for longer than just about anywhere else in society.
Military communities, the most integrated communities in America, We've always said, you know, whether it's not black or white or anything else, you all bleed red.
We've had a notable integration in the military for longer than we had it in the broad society.
And the Democrats seem intent on completely undoing that.
You and others have kind of unmasked this in various investigations of what's going on.
And you touched on this while numbers are going down.
I document this in the book.
So in the last five years, we've had a 40% drop In white recruits to the military, no drops in any other group.
And that's I mean, that'd be a problem for any reason.
But what makes it a particularly big problem is those people are much more likely to be the tip of the spear.
They're much more likely by percentage to be in special forces kind of like really doing the most dangerous and important work we have in the military.
And we're telling them you're not wanted.
Yeah, it's as if a lot of my colleagues are on a white supremacy snipe hunt.
And I wonder what you've really studied as the political incentive for that.
I mean, is it just as simple as you've got some self-loathing white libs who think that if they demonstrate that they too are on a white supremacy hunt, that that will appeal to other voters?
Because, I mean, I've never seen a Republican Build a more multicultural coalition than Donald Trump.
And so what is it about what you study about the political science of this that draws people into this fiction of white supremacy around every corner?
Absolutely.
So let's break it down for a couple different groups.
There's the white liberals.
And for my next book, I kind of want to put them on the psychiatrist's couch and talk about all that's going on with them.
Because you actually really do document, by the way.
And this is not, you know, everything I'm giving you here is from mainstream sources.
These aren't like partisan sources.
A huge amount of mental illness in the white liberal community as compared to white conservatives.
So I think that's some of it.
I think some of it is a status.
They just self-diagnose better.
We're more mentally ill, but we just aren't enlightened enough to be able to self-diagnose all of our different frailties.
Well, yes, but they're actually, this is usually the way the question is asked is, has a provider diagnosed you with a mental health thing?
So again, I think it's pretty real.
There's also, I think we're kind of getting toward this, A status element of it.
So for somebody like me, I mean, my family's doing very well.
My wife's a doctor.
I have a background in business.
You know, we're not starving, but we've got five kids and we're not like trillionaires or anything.
And I'm sitting there looking, you know, how am I going to provide for them?
I'm worried about it.
Now, if I had a couple extra zeros in my bank account, it's a little bit of a flex, right?
It's like, oh, yeah, yeah, sure.
I've got privilege because I can maneuver around that system anyway if I really have a lot of power.
So for the, you know, the Hollywood elites and all these type of people, I think that's what's going on.
So that's white people.
I mean, I'm oversimplifying here, but I'm just trying to tell this story really quickly.
Now, for minorities, I think it's a little more complicated.
And again, there's lots of things going on, but I'll pick what I think is the biggest.
So the late sociologist C. Wright Mills, who was very, very influential, came up with a concept of what's called a legitimating ideology.
And that's basically a fancy way of saying a story that you tell yourself and others to kind of do the thing that you want to do anyway.
So in 2024, you can't just have minority groups or members of them going up to white people saying, like, you know, hey, like, give me your stuff, right?
Like, that's not considered acceptable in America.
So in some jurisdictions, in LA, New York...
Jurisdictions, it could be.
But what you have to do is you have to create this legitimating ideology.
So you start talking about white supremacy, white privilege, white oppression, you know, the whole history of the horrible things you did.
And then it's like, no, no, no, you...
You need to give me your stuff because I am owed your things.
And so that's the sort of legitimating ideology that I think we have going on.
You need to create that because at the end of the day, it's one of the oldest stories in politics.
Somebody else has got something and I want it.
And so this is how I'm going to take it.
And one of those things certainly is opportunity.
And so we've talked about that in the military, but we've also see it manifest in the corporate world.
We are incredibly proud of our friends at O'Keefe Media Group for having exposed that at the Walt Disney Corporation in its worst form.
Take a listen.
DEI is an order form for people.
Not about good or qualified or credentialed or talented.
Just immutable characteristics.
That which you cannot change.
We're in a situation where...
We wanted to hire somebody in a department a few years ago now, who was half-black, but didn't, like, appear half-black.
And there was a creative executive who was like, we're not, like, that's not, that's not what's wrong.
They wanted the full...
They wanted somebody in meetings who would appear a certain way, and he wasn't going to bring that to the meeting.
And so this is, like, on the...
This was on the corporate side, like the business side.
DEI says it's what's on the outside that counts.
How many left-handed lesbians do you need?
Have you have enough women of color on your board?
Have you hired enough illegal immigrants lately?
And so it's probably fair that Disney would say, we don't want a white person to play this role.
Yeah, I mean, I think they're very careful about what, they're very careful about messaging because they don't want to get to a discrimination in either direction.
But certainly there have been times where, you know, there's no way we're hiding a white male.
It's kind of unspoken.
There are times when it's spoken.
How would they say it?
There's no way we're hiding a white male.
Like straight to you?
Okay.
America isn't a slave auction.
We cannot hire and promote and pay people based on the skin color or the traits they cannot change.
we must hire and promote and pay based on merit and merits alone.
We're back live with Jeremy Carl, author of The Unprotected Class.
So Jeremy, talk a little bit about how we see DEI specifically playing out in the corporate world, in the purveyors of DEI, and how you study that impacting these fundamental issues of culture.
Yeah, well, and corporations have tremendous power, and I think even more, and certainly not the sole focus of my corporate chapter, but the one I probably spend the most time in is the tech world, because the culture of big tech, that's where all the big money is right now, has a huge effect, and it's so far left.
You even had some in the kind of peak of Post-COVID, they said, we're going to do...
They had a different word for it, and I put it in the book.
I'm blanking on what it is all of a sudden.
But essentially, they were doing racially preferential firing because it was like equity, right?
So that basically meant if you're white, you're out the door first when they needed to do a cutback.
And it was just overt.
I mean, by the way, completely illegal.
I don't know if they ever were ultimately successfully sued over it.
I don't think that they were.
But you've got this.
You've got...
Things where the CEO of Citigroup is, you know, taking a knee for Black Lives Matter.
You've got all sorts of ridiculous things going on in these corporations.
You've got overt discrimination going on.
You touched on the Disney example.
I was on Andrew Klavan's podcast, a really good guy, but not like a fire-breathing, you know, right-winger or anything.
You know, just like a good, solid, sort of normal conservative.
And he just mentioned offhand, and this is something I've heard elsewhere, but he indicated, you know, personally aware of this, Of situations where he and Hollywood, you know, basically had seen an African-American person be put on a script, getting a credit for something that they didn't have anything to do with because somebody needed to, you know, check a diversity box, right?
So that's a pretty stunning story.
And again, there are a lot of stories of things like that going on in Hollywood.
It's just, it's pervasive that you will have less of a chance as a white American in a big corporate environment right now.
You just will.
Where does that lead?
Because it seems as though it creates a market inefficiency around talent.
And where market inefficiencies exist, ultimately people go to exploit those inefficiencies for profit.
Are we going to see the days when the companies go to the headhunters that specifically find people who weren't sufficiently diverse but who might be sufficiently talented or skilled in order to add value to a company for the almighty dollar?
Well, I think that you already are beginning to see little bits of this.
A friend of mine named Nate Fisher has a group, New Founding.
And again, it's not sort of doing anything explicitly on race, but I think it kind of indirectly touches on a lot of this for kind of people who are getting pushed out of the system, whether it be because of their ethnic background or because of their religious values or whatever else.
And there's real market inefficiencies to exploit there.
I think you're also going to see...
And again, this could have some weird backfires.
You're going to see more young white people becoming entrepreneurs because they realize there's no place for them as easily in the system.
So they're going to go outside the system.
And you're already seeing this.
Again, I talk to a lot of younger white people.
First big show I did on this book was with Charlie Kirk.
And Charlie said, you know, hey, when I talk to my donors about this type of issue, they're like...
You know, they get a little bit nervous.
They're like, you know, can you say that?
It sort of sounds racist.
Not all of them be said, but you know, some of the older guys that they do.
When I said, when I go on a college campus and I talk to young white people, they say, this is the number one issue we're facing.
Thank you so much for raising it.
So I think there's a generational change at foot and it's going to develop in some interesting and unpredictable ways.
Yeah, and it seems as though the awareness of it among those most impacted by it would be a natural outgrowth.
But then how that manifests, I never thought about it in terms of the growth of entrepreneurship and then what that does also to America's great corporations.
I grew up a guy rooting for America's businesses.
You're not rooting for Alibaba to win, right?
You're rooting for America to win.
But if our businesses become just sort of servants of DEI rather than the great centers for innovation and progress that we've seen throughout our lives, that has a cascading impact too.
Absolutely.
And I think the good news maybe for our bigger corporations is we're seeing more pushback finally.
And you look at folks like our friend Stephen Miller at America First Legal, they're pursuing a really aggressive legal strategy of beginning to sue some of these companies that are doing blatantly It's just illegal under the current law, anti-white stuff.
And so I think where you'll see is that the people who still really want to discriminate in corporations against white people will find a way to do it.
But there's a lot of them that are just kind of going along because that's the system.
And they would actually kind of like to do merit hiring.
And what our job is, I think, as Republicans in the very short term is to kind of open the door and make it easy for those companies to do the right thing because you know that you're putting a threat on the other end now, too.
I think that's the short-term thing you can do.
Final question, but I've got a lot of constituents in my district who are farmers, who live in rural areas, who they're not part of any Fortune 100 corporate structure.
And when you just see the words diversity, equity, and inclusion, There's nothing naturally about those words that's scary, but when you put them together, it has resulted in this incredibly racist and divisive and destructive policy.
So how would you describe DEI to someone who didn't have a natural apprehension toward it and wanted to understand what it meant to them?
DEI is anti-white.
I mean, that's what it is.
And it's one of the reasons that I was actually very insistent.
So originally, I wanted to title this book, It's Okay to Be White, which would have been very impish.
And I actually got that by the editors.
And then two months later, the publishers came back and said, you know, we can't sell a book with that title in Walmart or Costco or Barnes and Noble, which is interesting because, of course, if I'd said it was okay to be Asian American or Hispanic Yeah, or Native American.
Right, right.
So it was actually a perfect illustration of my thesis, right?
Like, put on the Klan hood now, Jeremy, because you said it's okay to be white.
But I think, I actually really like, I mean, we've done a great job of stigmatizing the word DEI, and I think that's great.
I have no objection to us using it.
But I also think it's very important that we kind of take the battle now to a new front, and we don't mystify what DEI means, which is DEI, I mean, there's more at stake, but at its core, it's about anti-whiteness.
And it is about the opposite of merit.
And it's not just for folks in your district.
I mean, I live in a rural area outside a small city in Montana.
So I sort of have friends who are dealing with the same thing.
It's not just for big companies.
It's everywhere that you're going to be at a disadvantage from this.
And as the demographics of America change, that is going to actually get even worse for you unless we do something to stop it.
The unprotected class.
Jeremy Carl is the author.
And thank you so much for your perspective, for all the work that we see done at the Claremont Institute as well.
I did want to leave everyone with one final clip.
Today in the House Judiciary Committee, we had a discussion over how the people who place advertising are using their market power in order to achieve political goals.
And one of those political goals is censorship.
Now, we saw a lot of these powerful companies, including Unilever, Who's chief executive, Harish Patel, I was questioning in the upcoming clip.
They were saying, well, sure, we place hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising, but we don't have any political tilt or political belief.
And you'll see how that goes in the questioning.
Enjoy, take a listen, and check back with us soon.
Mr. Patel, are you part of an organization that uses market power for censorship?
No, sir.
And how much advertising capital do you deploy annually?
How much marketing investment do we spend?
850 million a year.
And you spend, you said, less than 1% of that in the news area, right?
Yes, sir.
And that's because, really, your brands don't want to be involved in these caustic news disputes or political disputes.
They want to be apolitical in the presentation of their brand.
Is my understanding of that testimony correctly?
So we serve 90% of American households with our portfolio.
It's a fascinating answer, just not to my question.
Is the reason you de-emphasize news because you want to be apolitical?
We target our investment to address the consumers that buy our brands.
Okay, are you doing so for political reasons or apolitical reasons?
We don't do it for any political reason.
Okay, so then why are the vice presidents of your company trying to shape the way Facebook limits view of a Trump advertisement?
So I'm not sure what the intention of that communication was, but that's not...
I do.
It was to get the Trump ad taken down.
It's pretty clear.
You had two vice presidents, Rob Master and Luis Tacomo, who were pressuring Facebook to utilize Facebook's policies to take down a Trump ad.
So it's just hard to believe that your goal is to avoid politics when, like, not some intern at your company, but the vice presidents, At Unilever are writing Facebook saying, we want you to take this Trump ad down and apply these policies to do it.
So I'm not sure what the intention of communication was, but that's...
I'll tell you what, I'll read you the communication.
It's two words.
It's your vice president, Tagarm, when they were trying to get the Facebook ad taken out, it said, honestly reprehensible.
So you're using this $800 million plus power that you have over the marketplace.
Facebook is craving your advertising dollars.
You have two vice presidents hammering Facebook to take down a Trump ad about whether or not Joe Biden should have his ear inspected for an earpiece.
That was what the ad was about, that you all found so reprehensible.
Sir, respectfully, I'm not sure that word was done by a Unilever person.
Okay, so Mr. DeComo didn't work for Unilever?
He sits on the, if I did my homework right, I think that came from the GARM, Rob.
Oh, Rob Rankowitz.
Yes.
Member entities to GARM. You pay GARM. You guys are GARM. I mean, as Mr. Jewell said, you guys have got, you have to have tools in order to help you place your ads, so you go fund GARM, and then here your vice presidents are commiserating with GARM over the fact that Facebook won't remove this.
I guess, Mr. Shapiro, when we look at these big advertising platforms, and they're hearing the people with the advertising dollars hammer them with this ideological tilt, what does, what What does that do to the marketplace for ideas?
Obviously it shuts down the marketplace of ideas, which is largely the intent.
And one of the things that I've heard from some of the Democratic members of the committee today is an extraordinary amount of projection.
Projection wherein they suggest that Republican members of the committee are trying to shut down free speech by trying to get answers to questions about the kind of political pressures that are being put on social media companies, for example.
But it's been Democrats who for years have been spending their time trying to pressure social media companies into doing their bidding by limiting the types of information that are available to the public and how that information is actually distributed.
One of the things that's worth noting here is that it's not just a matter of advertising dollars flowing.
The way that it works on social media is that if you are demonetized, Then the reach of your actual content is also limited by the same social media companies.
Do you think the frequency of those demonetization rises when you have vice presidents of companies at Unilever trying to hammer entities like Facebook into taking down Trump ads?
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
There's no question that when you have internal pressures put on social media companies to take down right-wing material, That that has an impact on the reach of right-wing messaging.
There's just no question.
And I guess I don't mind when Democrats say they don't like conservative speech or we get to say we don't like some of their speech.
That's how this works.
When the business community colludes and utilizes market power to shape the way social media companies or websites disseminate information, that the public doesn't even get to see that debate and engage it.
And I think the fact that it's clandestine is actually even more corrosive to the values that undergird That's absolutely true.
The complete lack of transparency with which GARM treats both the member companies as well as the consuming public is one of the major problems.
If they simply wish to levy a boycott against a right-wing source, they should simply say that's what they're doing.
Hiding behind fake standards in order to project objectivity is a major problem in transparency for the market.
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