Aug. 17, 2019 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
01:04:56
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| The left has no principles, and the media is the left. | ||
| It's just, whatever side helps them get power. | ||
| Hey, I'm Dave Rubin, and this is The Rubin Report. | ||
| If you're new here, click the subscribe button and make sure that the bell is solid to get all notifications. | ||
| And more importantly, joining me today is the founder and president of Turning Point USA, the largest conservative college student organization in the United States of America, as well as the host of the Charlie Kirk podcast. | ||
| Charlie Kirk, welcome back to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Thanks, Dave. | ||
|
unidentified
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Glad to be here. | |
| That was the longest intro I've ever given. | ||
| Well, thank you for enduring that. | ||
| All in one breath. | ||
| We're also basically dressed exactly the same here. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| We have some agreements, but we also have some disagreements, so this is going to be an odd mirror. | ||
| I think we've actually started to agree on almost every big thing over the last couple of years. | ||
| Well, a lot of the things, actually. | ||
| So you were on this show, what, it's about two years already? | ||
| It's like January of 18. | ||
| January of 18. | ||
| So that's like over a year and a half ago, basically. | ||
| And I've gotten to know you quite well in the last year and a half. | ||
| We've toured together, usually with Candace Owens, obviously. | ||
| And I want to cover all new stuff here, but I do want to quickly just talk about Turning Point briefly, because when we do these events together, and I'm sure we've got some coming up in the fall, You always make a point of saying to the audience, A, if you've got questions and you disagree with us, come up first. | ||
| So we always take questions from people that disagree with us first, and we treat them as respectfully as humanly possible, or at least as respectfully as they treat us. | ||
| But also, me and you have some disagreements, and we go up there and we talk them out. | ||
| So how is it that so many people on Twitter think you're a fascist? | ||
| What a strange concept. | ||
| How was that for a segue? | ||
| Very good, it was right into it. | ||
| What a strange concept to hear the other side to give people a platform that you totally and might fundamentally disagree with, then have a conversation about it, see where you might be able to build consensus, find the disagreements, then find why you disagree, which is super important. | ||
| So do you disagree because you have different data inputs, or do you disagree because you have different philosophical inputs? | ||
| Two totally different things. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, for example, someone might say, well, I want universal healthcare because it works so well all across the world. | ||
| Well, okay, let's talk about that, and you can maybe deconstruct some of the failures of socialized medicine. | ||
| Or, I want universal healthcare because I believe healthcare is a right. | ||
| That's different. | ||
| Right, those are very different things. | ||
| Totally different. | ||
| And then you all of a sudden have a conversation. | ||
| And then what happens after that conversation? | ||
| You've seen it, Dave. | ||
| I mean, you spoke with us at University of Connecticut. | ||
| You spoke with us at UC Berkeley. | ||
| You subbed in for us up in the Northeast. | ||
| I think it was New Hampshire, right? | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| You and Candace didn't show for that one. | ||
| That's the one that I dealt with, those lunatics, myself. | ||
| Thank you again for that. | ||
| Yeah, of course. | ||
| It went viral. | ||
| It did go viral. | ||
| You did brilliantly. | ||
| And Dave, you'll, I think, reinforce this. | ||
| Every time we get a chance to go to these campuses and have these conversations, there seems as if, at least with the individual student and the people in the room, There's a level of respect for at least our worldview and our position from even those that disagree with us. | ||
| And we like to say that it's not that these students are opposed to our ideas, it's that they're not exposing them at all in the first place. | ||
| And just being able to have this sort of marketplace of ideas, and you and I will disagree on some things sometimes, which is amazing. | ||
| I mean, who wants to go listen to a bunch of people say, I agree, me too, I agree. | ||
| We don't want that. | ||
| That's called college. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That is called college, sadly. | ||
| And we're going to get into that because you and I are having a major issue right now with the big tech censorship stuff, which is, it's a personal issue for both of us as podcasters and YouTubers and the rest of it, but it's also a really serious philosophic issue. | ||
| But you know, one of the things that I always find most interesting at the events that we do is a lot of times there'll be like a crew in the back of the room that clearly is not there because they like us. | ||
| But you know, sometimes they'll sit there respectfully, but they'll kind of have a scowl on their face, or they'll be giggling or whispering to somebody. | ||
| But not really sure how to make of it. | ||
| But then, by the end, when you're expecting that, when you say to them, if you disagree with us, come up first, a lot of them just kind of leave. | ||
| Because I think something does actually happen over the course of the hour, hour and a half, when they go, whoa, these people that I'm heard of, heard or told are alt-right or fascist or something, they're not all that bad. | ||
| And then suddenly they feel sort of foolish. | ||
| Well, and what I love is that we're sitting on stage, we have you, we have the great Candace Owens, and they're here calling us racist, they're calling us bigoted, they're calling us backward thinking. | ||
| Hey, homophobe, homophobe! | ||
| Yeah, homophobic, right, of course, homophobic. | ||
|
unidentified
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Give me something here. | |
| Right? | ||
| All these sorts of things. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And all of a sudden they listen to this message of Western classical liberal ideas of listening to the other side and opening up markets and the individual matters the most. | ||
| We live in a great country. | ||
| And Dave, I have to say, I am a robber baron of one of the things that you say. | ||
| I've stolen it probably 30 times. | ||
| As long as you credit me now. | ||
| About more than 50%. | ||
| I'll credit it right now. | ||
| I credit you sometimes, but I'll credit you right now. | ||
| Where you ask the audience, you say, who here has it worse than your grandparents? | ||
| I've never seen a hand go up. | ||
| And isn't that a great visual representation of how beautiful this country is? | ||
| You know, there's one time just in the last few months, so I've asked that question hundreds of times at this point, and literally nobody. | ||
| Then about a month ago, I was at Santa Clara, and I asked the question, and it's even better. | ||
| The guy raises his hand. | ||
| He says that he's a Chinese immigrant to the U.S. | ||
| and he moved here, you know, five or ten years ago, and that he has it worse than his grandparents because the communists took all of his grandparents' stuff. | ||
| And I thought, wow, that's as good as it gets. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| That is as good as it gets. | ||
| But that sort of Argument is not made ever on college campuses through the traditional institutional professor and academic elites. | ||
| Instead, the philosophical position that is predominantly put towards students is that America is a mistake, the ideas that you grew up with are flawed, but we have all the answers. | ||
| We and our couple thousand professors in the academy, we're the smart ones, we're the philosopher kings that Plato used to talk about. | ||
| Give us the power, And give us the trust to how to run society and things will get better. | ||
| And they focus on the inequality. | ||
| They focus on the structural deficits. | ||
| And of course there will always be structural deficits. | ||
| If a society ends up eradicating them, I don't think that's going to happen in our lifetime. | ||
| There will always be outliers, there will always be people, but generally... Well, you're going to have to kill a lot of people to do that too, right? | ||
| Look at the Soviets. | ||
| We only have to kill 60 million people to try to get to agreement. | ||
| That's hard to swallow, and it didn't even work after that! | ||
| And look at Communist China under Mao. | ||
| Anyway, so the Academy is rooted in not teaching the other ideas, but teaching their ideas, the monolithic ideas. | ||
| And that's why what we're doing, and we love bringing you to campus, what we're doing at Turning Point USA is having so much resonance. | ||
| I mean, we have grown so substantially since the last time you and I sat down. | ||
| You see our conferences, thousands and thousands of students, they're growing exponentially, and we just have to slow down. | ||
| Was it your idea to just kind of also make them more fun? | ||
| Because I speak at all sorts of stuff, and there's definitely a difference between going to a turning point event, in the way the crowd, it feels a little bit, almost like you're at a pro wrestling match, and I mean that in the most, I mean that in the fun way, because even whatever they're chanting, and sometimes they're chanting MAG or whatever it is, it's like they're not doing it out of races, they're doing it out of like, let's have some fun. | ||
| With some of this, and I don't even think all of them are pure MAGA people or anything, it's just like, oh, let's not make politics just endlessly painful and boring and stiff. | ||
| If I have to hear one more lecture from someone like, Nixon shouldn't have been engaged, like, okay, I got it, you know? | ||
| And that's fine, you can listen to those scholars, but the traditional conservative conference is just, here's a bunch of white papers, here's how correct we are, let's look at these charts, And then you say, okay, I agree. | ||
| But what's happening is that we're also in a culture war. | ||
| And you go to these Turning Point USA events. | ||
| It's the music. | ||
| It's the bright lights. | ||
| It's the t-shirt cannons. | ||
| And all of a sudden, you're having fun. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And who's the... The left is anti-fun. | ||
| I mean, they're anti-comedic expression. | ||
| They're anti-creativity. | ||
| I mean, everything is you're going to offend somebody. | ||
| I mean, I'm surprised. | ||
| I really am surprised we have these t-shirt cannons. | ||
| That they have not said that we are making fun of, you know, some sort of victims of some sort of shooting because we have t-shirt candidates. | ||
| Well, you just handed it to them. | ||
| Well, there we go. | ||
| So, they'll come after that, look to it with us later. | ||
| But, you know, I'm joking, of course, but the point is that we try to make it high energy and we do and because of that our conferences and our events, you know, grow substantially. | ||
| So what did the conservatives do wrong? | ||
| If these classical liberal to conservative ideas are the right ones, and I think I'm pretty much with you on that at this point, where did the conservatives screw up that they lost the academy, they lost the media, they lost academia, they lost everything that led us to an entirely brainwashed generation of millennials, and then a group of, say, lefties that are older than them that just acquiesced to it out of sheer fear? | ||
| So we did two things majorly wrong. | ||
| One on the policy philosophy, Which I think you'll find interesting and then one just kind of structurally on like an infrastructure side of what we've done wrong. | ||
| First of which, I think that we lost a lot of young people and a lot of people that consider themselves liberals to this day, just over multi decades and multi generations of identifying themselves as that, based on doing what we now accuse the left of doing. | ||
| Which is, for many years, Republicans in the 70s and 80s, and I'm an Evangelical Christian, a Bible-believing Evangelical Christian, and so I have, I think, some standing to say this, the right in America was telling people how to live their life. | ||
| Not everyone, but boy did it sure sound like that, was that this is the correct way, this is the only way, and then you're mixing, it's really close to mixing deeply held religious beliefs and government policy. | ||
| Do you think they meant it in that that's truly what they wanted, say the evangelicals or the religious right, or that it was purely a political ploy? | ||
| Because a lot of people look back to George W. Bush's re-election. | ||
| When they made gay marriage like this wedge issue, which I don't think George W. Bush specifically cared about gay marriage, but in that way it was a political tool, not necessarily an ideological tool. | ||
| It's tough to say. | ||
| I will speak to the fact that I think conservatives today on the right, and you'll agree with this, we have the moral high ground because the ethos of the modern new conservative movement is don't tell me how to live my life, I won't tell you how to live your life, don't take my stuff, I'm not going to take your stuff. | ||
| That's really the ethos of why we have the moral high ground. | ||
| That's that libertarian side I keep telling you guys about. | ||
| Just keep sticking with that and you're good. | ||
| I agree and there's some things that I think will become more populist, but that's okay. | ||
| With that being said, so where did we go wrong is we became the angry librarian in the room in the 70s and 80s. | ||
| Don't have fun! | ||
| Stop doing this! | ||
| And again, as an evangelical Christian that believes these, I do believe all these ideas, that doesn't mean you have to put them forth in government policy. | ||
| Meaning that you personally wouldn't want to partake in this, whether it's sex or drugs or... Yes, and that's fine. | ||
| Like, for example, we've talked, I think, privately about drugs. | ||
| I think you should be able to put what you want in your body. | ||
| I've never done drugs. | ||
| I don't plan on doing drugs, but why is it my problem that you're doing that, right? | ||
| So that's a personal versus policy versus kind of public policy debate. | ||
| So when you talk to the more old school conservatives on that, so let's just forget all the other drugs for a second, because I think there's a secondary thing when you talk about the highly addictive ones, but let's just talk about marijuana for a second. | ||
| Yeah, that's a little different of an argument. | ||
| Let's talk about marijuana. | ||
| So on marijuana, when you talk to the more old school conservatives, I simply don't understand the position. | ||
| Because I get it, you guys want to have a certain moral center that you don't want to deviate against. | ||
| I understand that. | ||
| But that center then, I mean this is what you're getting to, it then deviates from your state's rights stuff, your limited government stuff, and it's like, Those things are in constant conflict, and why leave it to Chuck Schumer to say that marijuana should be a state's rights issue? | ||
|
unidentified
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When I heard him say that, I was like, ugh, you morons! | |
| Why give him that political win? | ||
| And so here's my only contribution, I think, to the whole marijuana debate, where I come from. | ||
| People should be able to do what they want with their body, but when it starts to get into the glorification | ||
| of the substance, that's where I'm gonna push back. | ||
| And that's where you and I can have an interesting discussion. | ||
| So will it make society a better place over the next 20, 30 years if more people are doing | ||
| marijuana? | ||
| Maybe, maybe not. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I mean, if you're doing it instead of pharmaceuticals, maybe, but if you have a bunch of 14-year-olds | ||
| that are consuming edibles, I don't know if that's a great thing, right? | ||
| However, that doesn't mean that it should be illegal. | ||
| And that's a really important thing, and that's where principles come in, is you can disagree with something fundamentally and still think that other people should be able to do it. | ||
| That takes tolerance, that takes maturity, and that's what a civil society is all about. | ||
| So are you pleased, then, watching the way conservatives have moved? | ||
| Because when people say to me, oh, Dave, you always go to these conservative things, and you know they secretly hate gay people, and blah, blah, blah. | ||
| That's the most false, ridiculous thing I could possibly think. | ||
| Here. | ||
| Well, I never see it. | ||
| I mean, I always say this, like, I can't find them. | ||
| Like, you can keep telling me that. | ||
| I haven't found them. | ||
| I haven't. | ||
| I mean, Dave, let's talk about this for a minute. | ||
| You and I spoke at Louisiana State University, in the deep south, in the Bible Belt. | ||
| And you got a standing ovation! | ||
| I think I got more applause than you, for the record, I'm just saying. | ||
|
unidentified
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Totally! | |
| And then we also had Candace Owens, who got a standing ovation. | ||
| I thought this place was supposed to be backwards thinking and bigoted. | ||
| And, I mean, I guarantee you, we could go to the University of Alabama, we could go to the Lincoln-Reagan Day dinner in Alabama, and you would get that same sort of response. | ||
| I'm speaking at Liberty University in October. | ||
| And Jerry Falwell is an amazing guy, and they're going to welcome you with open arms, and you'll get a standing ovation from them. | ||
| Now, they have a biblical view of marriage, of which I have, but your biblical view of marriage does not have to be what your public policy prescription for marriage is. | ||
| Those are two totally different things. | ||
| So let's go back to the question, then. | ||
| Where did the conservatives really get tripped up on this? | ||
| So I'm glad to see it moving. | ||
| I'm with you. | ||
| It's moving. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| But where did they get screwed up, and how do you fix the remaining part of that? | ||
| It's where the evangelical right began to take these deeply held religious beliefs and see how popular they were in certain parts of the country and then say, well, let's just make it into then our public policy platform. | ||
| And that's not what the left is doing to us. | ||
| They're now taking secular humanist Very, very kind of, I would say, morally transient positions. | ||
| Now they're putting it in their public policy positions. | ||
| They're doing it, and we're accusing them of it, right? | ||
| Now we're saying, wait, you can't tell me how to, you can't tell me what bath, I can't, I have to use this bathroom or this, or you can't tell me how to live my life. | ||
| No, wait, wait a second. | ||
| A lot of Republican people on the right made a mistake of doing this back in the 70s and 80s. | ||
| Do you get a lot of Republicans pissed at you when you acknowledge this? | ||
| Because this is a pretty big mea culpa, I think, for an evangelical Christian and someone that's leading young conservatives. | ||
| I think we shouldn't be afraid to admit mistakes. | ||
| I mean, if we think that we've done brilliantly as a country throughout the last 30 years on every issue, I mean, come on, that's a foolish position to have. | ||
| And if you look at it, William F. Buckley was super libertarian on certain issues. | ||
| Really libertarian. | ||
| I mean, he was for the legalization of marijuana. | ||
| I mean, William F. Buckley, the founder of National Review, is for legalization of marijuana. | ||
| And that's a position a lot of people, you know, are surprised to hear. | ||
| And, yeah, do I get a lot of backlash? | ||
| I get disagreement. | ||
| But I also, and I qualified in a very certain sense, that I hold these positions, but there has to be, in the way that you create public policy, if every single individual says, I'm going to have my worldview get put into law, you have what you have left is chaos. | ||
| You have California. | ||
| Where you have all these little sub-tribes lobbying for the most lunatic minority oppression Olympics, as you call it, policy positions. | ||
| And that's a really dangerous thing. | ||
| And then you see how it ends up working because my parents were visiting for the last week and my dad was amazed at the amount of tent cities we've got going up in all of these places. | ||
| These progressive utopias that are supposed to be the friendliest to the poor people and everything else. | ||
| Yeah, and so anyway, so that's the one thing I think that conservatives are getting better at now. | ||
| I really do. | ||
| And I think President Trump has done a great job of this. | ||
| I have to say he's done a great job of this. | ||
| He has been anti-dogma. | ||
| And I love being, I love the idea of crushing pre-existing dogma. | ||
| Or at least challenging it. | ||
| Because if some dogma's good, it should be upheld. | ||
| There's some things that should be. | ||
| So for example, one piece of dogma in our society is hard work is a good thing. | ||
| Okay, that's good. | ||
| Great. | ||
| Let's keep that. | ||
| But then there's other pieces of dogma that, let's just declare war on every country that looks at us funny. | ||
| Really? | ||
| That's what Republicans should believe? | ||
| Like, after the horrendous Iraq war and the endless Afghanistan war, we should still just be war-happy and trigger-happy at every corner? | ||
|
unidentified
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I think so. | |
| Isn't it strange now how the media is sort of painting conservatives as the anti-war party in a bizarre sense? | ||
| It's unbelievable. | ||
| Tulsi is all against war and now they're making it sound like she's a conservative. | ||
| This goes back to what Dennis Prager talks about. | ||
| The left has no principles and the media is the left. | ||
| Whatever side helps them get power. | ||
| And there's this mayor of Baltimore. | ||
| She goes on television the day that President Trump correctly decided not to execute a missile strike that would have killed 120 Iranians. | ||
| She says, well, this is a huge sign of weakness against President Trump. | ||
| And I saw this. | ||
| I said, only President Trump. | ||
| Could get a Democrat to accuse him of not declaring a war on a sovereign country. | ||
| Is that his gift more than anything else? | ||
| You know him obviously, but if you were to whittle away everything else, is that the gift? | ||
| That somehow he has that pinpoint precision ability to find out what their weakness is and get them to use it against themselves constantly? | ||
| It's one of his greatest gifts. | ||
| I think he has a lot of them. | ||
| He's able to expose the hypocrisy within them so brilliantly. | ||
| And even deeper than that, I think it's a very interesting thing. | ||
| He's able to pull out the radicalism within the left. | ||
| And I think that's a good thing and a bad thing. | ||
| I think it's a good thing because you can see who they really are. | ||
| I think it's a bad thing because then more people then become radical. | ||
| And that sort of is where we're at right now, right? | ||
| He's kind of exposing the hell out of them. | ||
| And actually, it's funny, every time he exposes them for something, I'm like, oh, that thing that I was talking about as a lefty, like when I still considered myself a lefty, I'm like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's the thing I was talking about three years ago. | ||
| Now it's just burst forth. | ||
| For everyone to see, but it is a catch-22, right? | ||
| Because on one hand, you're exposing it, that's good, sunlight. | ||
| On the other hand, then it suddenly keeps us in this constant state of flux. | ||
| The equation is, so then President Trump exposes the radicalism, which is good, so we can see who these people really are. | ||
| We can see who Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Ayanna Pressley, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, we can see who they really are, and the ideas they hold, which is good, that's always a good thing. | ||
| But then what happens is the media hates Trump so much, they modernize these ideas. | ||
| They all of a sudden make it, oh, it's not that bad, Ilhan Omar says that some people did something about 9-11. | ||
| It's not that bad that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez calls herself a socialist. | ||
| They almost make it palatable. | ||
| Or digestible. | ||
| And you have more people than embrace these radical positions. | ||
| I guess that's where we are. | ||
| I'm a little troubled by that. | ||
| And I do want to make a really interesting point that I want everyone listening to this and watching this to think about, which is what makes this particular struggle versus leftist Marxism and kind of Western society values so unique. | ||
| And my knowledge has never happened before. | ||
| Almost every one of these revolutions that we can point to over the last hundred years, the Russian Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, every time that Marxists have taken over a government, and you see it through the universities, that's similar. | ||
| But they were always pro-nation state. | ||
| Like the Russian Revolution, they were pro-Russia. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| You see what I'm saying? | ||
| They were there for the country. | ||
| And so they were able to win over the countrymen because they're like, well, we love the country more than we want. | ||
| This is so different. | ||
| They're actually trying to assume power by being against the country. | ||
| Yeah, the founding principles were evil. | ||
| The founders were evil. | ||
| Let's take down all the statues. | ||
| It's anti-Alinskyite. | ||
| Alinsky talked about embracing And he was essentially telling people how to lie to get to power. | ||
| That was essentially the doctrine of Saul Alinsky. | ||
| But Alinsky talked about using the main symbols and the main sayings of a country to get to power and never diminish them. | ||
| Betsy Ross, oh my gosh, forget about that. | ||
| So Saul Alinsky would have said, Colin Kaepernick, you're a fool. | ||
| You should have embraced the Betsy Ross flag and said, she was a feminist and she would be upset with where America is today. | ||
| That's what Saul Alinsky would have said. | ||
| We've never worked with this sort of insurgency. | ||
| Do you think it's possible? | ||
| I mean, the place that I've sort of gotten to them is, okay, so let's just say we disagree with most everything they say, right? | ||
| I don't, you know, I try not to impugn people's motives. | ||
| I tend to think at this point that their motives are bad. | ||
| And that they really know that they're being owned every other day. | ||
| There's always some clip of them just saying something awful and not knowing what they're saying, or they can't respond to a basic question, are you for left-wing terrorism? | ||
| They can't say, no, I'm not for terrorism, et cetera, et cetera. | ||
| How much of it do you think is just that they genuinely, and I hate to say this, because this is not how I operate about people that I disagree with politically, but that they genuinely just want to create chaos? | ||
| They're the chaos makers, and then they'll have, say, the Warrens or the Bernies clean it up at a nicer level, or something like that. | ||
| But they're just on the ground, just creating as much chaos as possible. | ||
| Depends who you're talking about. | ||
| I'm talking about those four. | ||
| The gang of four. | ||
| The squad. | ||
| Talib, Presley, Cortez, and I'm forgetting one. | ||
| Omar. | ||
| Omar, yeah. | ||
| So you have to first ask the question, and it's, do they want what's best for America? | ||
| And that's a really hard question to answer. | ||
| and it depends on what you mean by what's best. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But do you think, here's another great, here's a question, do you think they're thankful | ||
| to be in America? | ||
| Like do you think they're overflowing with gratitude? | ||
| I don't get that impression, I get bitterness. | ||
| It seems like they're bitter. | ||
| That when they're walking the halls, that they're committed. | ||
| I mean, you see it in them. | ||
| Yeah, you see it. | ||
| Right? | ||
| That they're on a mission. | ||
| That there's anger driving them. | ||
| That there's something, they believe that this system that we're living in, this beautiful country with so much opportunity, so much blessing, so much overflowing abundance for all people, that they see something that I don't see and that you don't see. | ||
| And of course we see problems, right? | ||
| We see our inner cities ruined, we see all these sorts of things. | ||
| But we also understand that on the moving average, this country's been unbelievable and continues to be, and the re-embracing of those ideas will make it more so. | ||
| I don't feel as if that they're thankful to be in this country, and so there are always people, though, in every major civilization like this, that kind of to use the joker term, just kind of want to see the world burn. | ||
| And I don't know if that's them or not, but they sure sound like that at times. | ||
| And I find it that they use every single instance of political exploitation opportunity to try to advance their own political agenda to get further into power. | ||
| And it's a very dangerous position because any sort of cross-examination of these people, they immediately accuse you of the most vile things you can possibly do. | ||
| I mean, it's always, it's always, you're a racist, you're a bigot. | ||
| Which is too bad, because... I could not care less about their gender or their color. | ||
| Ever! | ||
| Ever! | ||
| And so, look, when I criticize them, I'm not criticizing them because of their race, I'm criticizing because of what they say in their worldview, and they just happen to be that race. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, it's like, this is an afterthought. | ||
| I mean, it would be the same thing if Adam Schiff was saying that. | ||
| I mean, I've had plenty of fun at Adam Schiff's expense, by the way. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| I've had plenty of fun at Chuck Schumer's expense and Nancy Pelosi's expense, but the one time you accuse these other people, you know, Rashida Tlaib and Presley and Cortez, you accuse that squad, if you will, all of a sudden you're called these horrible names. | ||
| And you know what's too bad about it is that there is real racism in the world. | ||
| There is. | ||
| But the more that that term is thrown around flippantly and just so kind of haphazardly, it cheapens real racism. | ||
| So I know you don't want to help the Democrats, but if you were, say, a saner Democrat than them, if you were just a little more of a moderate, and it's so funny because now Pelosi, who really is pretty far left in and of herself. | ||
| She's a radical. | ||
| Yeah, but now she's being framed as the centrist Democrat, even though she's certainly not the type of liberal, because her answer is always government, that I would care about. | ||
| But let's say there were a couple, are there any Democrats that you think are sort of more blue dog, old school? | ||
| There's that guy that was on the stage from Maryland, Delaney. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He was just on the wrong stage, I mean. | ||
| I mean, he was talking about this country has been great to a lot of people, we need to get back to national service. | ||
| He was saying some things I actually agreed with. | ||
| So, okay, so then if you were talking to him. | ||
| The one guy. | ||
| Right, so the one guy. | ||
| And maybe Hickenlooper, but then he said some nutty stuff, so one guy. | ||
| Okay, but if you were talking directly to him, and you wanted to help this guy regain the party. | ||
| What would you tell him? | ||
| In some ways I do. | ||
| Even for a guy that wants Trump to obviously win again. | ||
| Of course I do, but in some ways I want a functioning second party. | ||
| In some ways I want a party that will step up and say, you know what? | ||
| We do want regulatory reform. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| We do want to fund our military. | ||
| That would be nice. | ||
| Or we don't want open borders. | ||
| How about that? | ||
| And I think Delaney could come to an agreement with that. | ||
| What would my advice be to him? | ||
| I mean, you have to fight the radicals within your own party before you even focus on, you know, President Trump, because you've got something very, very dangerous within your own party. | ||
| And again, who am I to give advice to the left? | ||
| I mean, I want President Trump to win in a massive landslide, and I believe he's on his way to win, for many different reasons, this being one of the contributing factors, the fact of how radical the left has become, but it's not exclusive to that. | ||
| But I don't think that's going to happen, Dave. | ||
| I'm going to tell you why. | ||
| Well, I've seen no evidence of it. | ||
| You'd think that having Trump win an election might have caused a little self-reflection. | ||
| So here's the question. | ||
| When you and I go to college campuses at Turning Point USA, with Turning Point USA, are the students more like the squad or more like Delaney? | ||
| The students that come to us, that like us? | ||
| Well, like the radical protester types. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| Of course, they're much more like the squad. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| That's the leading indicator. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's the harbinger. | ||
| Whatever happens on college campuses will soon happen in the halls of Congress. | ||
| The leading indicator of a culture is what happens on college campuses. | ||
| Ilan Omar, AOC, they got educated on these college campuses, or lack thereof, or indoctrinated. | ||
| They got radicalized. | ||
| And then they get set forth and they're committed. | ||
| They have their marching orders. | ||
| If you look at a prototype of what the campus creates, the university, if there was a formula of what they're trying to put into the world, It is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. | ||
| Everything about her. | ||
| Constantly wrong but never in doubt. | ||
| Consistently challenging our history. | ||
| Totally questioning any sort of power structure at be. | ||
| No belief in national sovereignty at all. | ||
| And chaos, chaos, chaos. | ||
| That's the university. | ||
| That's what they're creating. | ||
| All right, so you don't want to help them that much. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, I don't. | |
| Well, I mean, I would like to see people like Delaney, you know, take root, but here's the other point. | ||
| So here's the other thing that no one talks about, which I think is an interesting point, which is in politics, you're always kind of looking at, who's my base? | ||
| How am I catering to that base? | ||
| And so when Donald Trump ran for the presidency and he went down the golden escalator, he did something that actually made the radicals, the Democrats, become more radical. | ||
| You say, how is that possible? | ||
| He stole their base away from them. | ||
| So he stole 10 million Democrats that are Catholics, that are union workers, that are electricians, that are middle class people, that have voted Democrat since 1970. | ||
| And now they're registered Trump people. | ||
| And they go to the rallies. | ||
| I mean, you look at the data that I have, actually, the Trump rallies. | ||
| Yeah, it's bananas. | ||
| Well, they're basically getting the disaffected Bernie people. | ||
| for Trump they think nothing of it. Well they're basically getting the | ||
| disaffected Bernie people. That's right. That's all how corrupt the Democratic Party is. | ||
| Screw the establishment, blow it all up. So then what happens if the Democrats all of a sudden have | ||
| 10 million less Democrats? | ||
| Mind you, Republicans bled a little. | ||
| They bled some suburban voters. | ||
| They bled some, you know, upper middle class voters just because they didn't like Trump's style. | ||
| But the offset was generally positive in the states that really mattered, which were the traditional Democrats. | ||
| Democrats look at their kind of roster like, oh my gosh, we're down 10 million voters. | ||
| And then some lunatic proposes in a room, well, instead of trying to win those people back, why don't we go win more people in Malibu and Manhattan? | ||
| Oh, what a great idea that is! | ||
| And then they start embracing these horrendously radical ideas as if they can get more people, maybe they can, I mean, I've been proven wrong before, but somehow they can win another 10 million people around the Green New Deal, universal healthcare for illegals, complete and total open borders, shutting down people you disagree with, prosecuting people that Dare say something critical of a member of Congress, which Rep. | ||
| Frederico Wilson said. | ||
| Yeah, that was a real... Or, you know, Dave, I've done a lot of traveling. | ||
| I have to say, a kitchen table issue in Pennsylvania is making sure that the Boston bomber can vote. | ||
| They're all about it, right? | ||
| Like they're one-issue voters on that. | ||
| It's amazing how many people in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania come up to me and say, Charlie, Whoever candidate makes sure that terrorists can vote, they got my vote. | ||
| Of course, I'm being facetious. | ||
| What audience are they catering to? | ||
| I was like, what audience are they catering to? | ||
| But does that tell you really how insidious this way of thinking is? | ||
| So like during the first debate when they all spoke Spanish and to me it was the worst-- - It was so cringy. | ||
| The worst sort of pandering. | ||
| It would have been like if this was 1940s and we had an influx of Irish Americans | ||
| and they were up, "Oh, we're gonna give you all a potato." | ||
|
unidentified
|
And Michelelli is gonna, you know, it's like, what are you guys doing? | |
| But it's the worst sort of pandering and yet they keep going to it. | ||
| So it's almost as if the ideology actually overrides what you're saying would just be sort of sound political You know, maneuvering to win an election. | ||
| They do whatever they need to do to assume power. | ||
| That's the left. | ||
| And so, if you come from the acceptance that they're trying to deconstruct this country, then it all starts to make sense. | ||
| Why would you want to have open borders? | ||
| You want to destroy the sovereignty. | ||
| Why would you want to give away stuff you can't afford? | ||
| We're so horrible and we should let everyone in. | ||
| By the way, this is what I can't understand. | ||
| A couple things, because you got me on this. | ||
| The Democrats say we're this horrible country. | ||
| I'll briefly say one of them. | ||
| The worst! | ||
| Why the hell would you want to be president of that country? | ||
| Like, I hate this country. | ||
| I want to be president of it. | ||
| That's a really interesting... That's just how good they are. | ||
| Well, that's right. | ||
| No, but they want to save us from ourselves, right? | ||
| Because they're the philosopher king that will save us. | ||
| The second thing is this, is if we were really this racist, bigoted, homophobic, horrendous country, why are millions of people trying to come here? | ||
| And just from a more broad standpoint, we take in half the world's immigrants every single year. | ||
| We take in a million legal immigrants every single year. | ||
| We're the most accepting, generous, benevolent country ever to exist in the history of the world. | ||
| I think we're overly generous at times, actually. | ||
| I think our generosity actually has come back to bite us at times. | ||
| I think that Trump has brought rational self-interest back to the conversation of the nation-state. | ||
| So just real quick on the immigration stuff, and then I really do want to get to some stuff that we disagree on. | ||
| But on the immigration stuff, look. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| There are videos of Obama, of Pelosi, of Chuck Schumer, of Bill Clinton, all saying virtually the exact same things that Trump now says, and Trump is considered racist. | ||
| Now, I get it. | ||
| Trump also has a strange intonation and inflection when he speaks, and he can be a little sloppy around some of the language or maybe intentionally Inflammatory or, yeah, and that's fine. | ||
| It doesn't even matter which way you look at it. | ||
| The point is that what he's actually saying is not different, really, than what Obama's saying. | ||
| Just this morning, I tweeted out a clip of Obama saying virtually the same things that Trump says. | ||
| Now, do you think there's anything that Trump could do if you think his policies around immigration are moral and just? | ||
| They're reasonable. | ||
| Is there anything you could do just around the language that might ease up some of this tension? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, the one suggestion that I've made publicly, and I'll make it again, is we have to own the legal immigrant. | ||
| I loved when Trump talked about the big door. | ||
| I want to hear more about the door. | ||
| I want him to say wall and door. | ||
| That'd be just my one piece of recommendation. | ||
| Because I was watching this ridiculous clip on Twitter the other day, and the left... | ||
| The left, they shadow box and make it seem as if, if you're accusing border jumpers and line cutters, I don't call them immigrants, they're border jumpers and line cutters. | ||
| Because you know what an immigrant is? | ||
| Someone who waits their turn, that comes to this country correctly. | ||
| Which is why we're seeing tons of studies now where legal immigrants, first generation legal immigrants, are the most anti-illegal immigrants. | ||
| Yes, because they had to wait for the process, they had to get a green card, all these amazingly hard, difficult things. | ||
| We have to make that easier. | ||
| But the second thing is, the left, they make it seem as if you're against line cutters and border jumpers, you're somehow against legal immigrants. | ||
| And I take the position, and some people on the right disagree with this position, I think we should have more legal immigrants. | ||
| I think we should be the Kentucky basketball. | ||
| of immigrants. | ||
| I want the smartest, richest, most aspirational, creative people in the world to come here that are under the age of 35. | ||
| This should be the laboratory of excellence for the world. | ||
| I want the best Koreans, Indonesians, Somalians, Germans. | ||
| I don't care where you're from. | ||
| If you have aspiration, come to America. | ||
| That should be the advertisement. | ||
| And boy, this Donald Trump is great at marketing. | ||
| He could sell that in a second, couldn't he? | ||
| He could do a world tour. | ||
| Just on the legal immigration tour. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I think that would be... The media would find a way... Here's the link. | |
| Sign up. | ||
| I think the media, all of a sudden, would be totally against... They'd be building the wall for him. | ||
| I'm kidding. | ||
| But the last thing is this. | ||
| Look, if the illegals were voting Republican, and they were tending to vote Republican, the Democrats would already have the wall built and say anyone who opposes the wall is against the black community. | ||
| Right, they would find some way to spend it. | ||
| Which actually is correct, that open borders hurt the black community, believe it or not, but that's another... Yeah, that's another whole other thing. | ||
| Alright, so I want to back up to one other thing and then let's get to the tech stuff. | ||
| Which is super important. | ||
| On how sort of conservatives or people on the right have to sort of widen the net right now, how do you think the messaging could be about making room for secular conservatives or secular Republicans? | ||
| So someone like Heather MacDonald, who I've had on the show. | ||
| She's a-religious. | ||
| I think she's an atheist. | ||
| Yeah, she said, I find petitionary prayer futile. | ||
| And I love Heather. | ||
| I heard this, come on. | ||
| We disagree. | ||
| Okay, but you want to live in the same society as her, and you probably agree with her. | ||
| I'm not a religious fundamentalist. | ||
| So, but I think, and when I was on Candace's show on PragerU, I brought this up, that there's such lunacy on the left, that to me, all the right has to do, all conservatives have to do, is just be, at every turn, be a tiny bit better. | ||
| Like, you know what I mean? | ||
| Not a lot, but just a little bit better. | ||
| What do you think conservatives or Republicans or whatever can do for the disaffected lefty that still is secular, maybe has some religious belief, but it's not sort of a core tenet or whatever it is. | ||
| What do you think that people on the right can do? | ||
| Well, I have to give the conservatives credit. | ||
| I think Donald Trump's done a lot of that. | ||
| I mean, Donald Trump has been amazingly embracing of the evangelical community, but he himself I don't want to speak for him, was definitely more secular, right? | ||
| I mean, he was not running a campaign like Mike Huckabee or Rick Santorum was in 2016. | ||
| I think you would agree with that. | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| It was much more based on ideas and the revitalization of the nation-state. | ||
| And those guys actually have very little influence now over modern Republican politics. | ||
| Yeah, and look, I agree. | ||
| Again, I want to just make sure I reinforce this. | ||
| I agree with them on basically a lot of things they're saying personally. | ||
| And now, my pro-life position is, I could defend that from a secular lens. | ||
| If you've got another four hours, we can do the whole thing. | ||
| Or you could talk to Lila Rose about that, because Lila is really great. | ||
| We've done that one! | ||
| I know, it's an amazing podcast. | ||
| I listened to it a couple times. | ||
| She was really, really good at it. | ||
| But the thing that I find Really interesting about this is that the Republicans are becoming the tolerant ones. | ||
| We really are. | ||
| And it's the Republican conservative ones that have the most intellectual diversity, that have the most... I believe that's going to have the most religious diversity. | ||
| We're trending towards that. | ||
| And I like to think that Turning Point USA has really been on the cutting edge of this. | ||
| I think we've been on the cutting edge of it. | ||
| Listen, I go to Turnpoint, there are kids in yarmulkes, there are black kids, there are Muslim kids, there are trans people. | ||
| We have a spokesman, Rob Smith, who's a veteran of our country, happens to be gay, black, super articulate. | ||
| Candace Owens was with us for a while and did an amazing job. | ||
| I would like to think that we're practicing what we're preaching. | ||
| I would like to think that. | ||
| And also, doing events with you is so fun Because it's one thing to say you're the tolerant one, and then you're the only one. | ||
| But it's fun because then you and I will disagree on a couple things. | ||
| But the marketplace of ideas and the collision of ideas, it also keeps you, like any muscle, if it atrophies, if you don't use it, it atrophies. | ||
| The same thing goes with your policy positions in your politics. | ||
| And I really believe part of the reason why the left has become so radical is they haven't had to debate. | ||
| Yeah, they got fat because it was so easy to call everyone racist and sit back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Correct, yes. | |
| AOC, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has she ever gone on a center-right platform? | ||
| That's a really good question, is it? | ||
| I know of no knowledge of it. | ||
| Ever since that one woman asked her three tough questions about, and she said Palestine was occupying Israel or something, she has done nothing but friendly media. | ||
| I would love to sit down with her, and even though I've gone after her on Twitter, obviously I would treat her, of course, with the same respect. | ||
| I know you would, and I would too, and I would ask her direct questions and I would hope she would ask questions out of me. | ||
| And so the one thing I think is really important that I get far too often, a question I get a lot on college campuses, and then we can get into the tech stuff, is that students that are in the middle, they come after this This is the best case scenario at times, but it's not correct where they say, well, yeah, the left has gone out of control, but the right has also gone really out of control. | ||
| And I say to myself, what do you mean? | ||
| There is no moral equivalency between the two. | ||
| Where is right wing Antifa? | ||
| Well, they'll tell you it's the KKK. | ||
| There's 45 of them, and every time they try to materialize anywhere, it's unilateral, uniform, and overwhelming denouncement of these people. | ||
| Just out-of-control denouncement. | ||
| Yeah, I think we should just hit that, though, because if what happened a couple weeks ago with ICE, yeah, with the attack, or with Andy, even, right, with Andy Ngo, who I had on, I mean, if either one of those things had come out of the right, They'd be having a town hall where Marco Rubio would be getting strung up. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And so they virtue signal a lot better than us. | ||
| But what I'm trying to say is, I'm not trying to say we're better people and we deserve all this, but boy, our worldview is better than them right now. | ||
| A hundred percent. | ||
| Because if you're a member of Congress, And you're asked a specific question, will you denounce Antifa, which for all intents and purposes, in my mind, is a domestic terror organization. | ||
| They're a domestic terror organization. | ||
| They should be treated as such. | ||
| How do you assault a journalist like that with masks, with concrete milkshakes? | ||
| Send them to a hospital and not be called a domestic terror. | ||
| You have an organization, you have a hierarchy, you have a common meeting place. | ||
| I mean, all this stuff that- Because they're doing that dirty work. | ||
| That's what I'm saying. | ||
| Right, but everything the FBI, there's like a checklist that the FBI has of what a terror group is. | ||
| They qualify as a domestic terror group. | ||
| I mean, they have specific targets, right? | ||
| All this sort of thing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And yet, total silence amongst the left. | |
| Complete and total silence. | ||
| And I'm rooting for people like Delaney and Andrew Yang, because Andrew Yang denounced it. | ||
| Andrew Yang had the best tweet, and then we'll get to the tech stuff. | ||
| The best tweet. | ||
| He said, and I think it was just kind of this very interesting observation. | ||
| He has an IQ that's amazing. | ||
| He's a really smart guy. | ||
| He's misguided on the UBI thing, but that's okay. | ||
| And he said, I notice conservatives follow a lot more liberals on Twitter than liberals follow conservatives on Twitter. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Did you see this? | |
| Yeah, I saw it. | ||
| He's getting there. | ||
| Give him five more months of this circus. | ||
| He's going to be very, he's going to have a different view of the left than he did a year and a half ago. | ||
| I actually, I completely agree. | ||
| And then we're going to get to the disagreement stuff, but I'm with you on that because he keeps, you know, I had him in here and I think he's a really... And by the way, your interview with him was fantastic. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Really good. | ||
| Not necessary to say. | ||
| But it's honest. | ||
| I think you're basically right because even when I asked him what his progressive politics were, everything he said was about equality. | ||
| You know, I'm for gay marriage or Something like that. | ||
| And it's like, but that's not progressive anymore because we've progressed to it. | ||
| We've progressed to equality. | ||
| So in my view, he really is an old school liberal. | ||
| And yes, on some of the big government stuff and whatever you think about UBI, he's not there. | ||
| But I think once he's done with this evil machine, he's gonna, in a weird way, he could end up being more right than most liberals. | ||
| I think that probably is where he'll end up. | ||
| Okay, fine. | ||
| I want to move to the disagreements. | ||
| We've been too nice to each other here. | ||
| You wrote a piece in the Washington Post about big tech a couple weeks ago, and everyone that's watching this knows that where I'm at right now is the libertarian side of me that thinks that the market can solve everything, or at least that the market is the best way to solve problems. | ||
| Not that they're always going to be solved, but that's the best way. | ||
| That's being pushed to its limits. | ||
| The rubber is meeting the road. | ||
| I think the tech companies have gotten so out of control with the bannings, with the shadow bannings, with the demonetizations, with algorithms that nobody seems to know how to control or are being manipulated, and I could go on and on with a zillion other things. | ||
| Your argument basically was, yeah, I don't want the government doing anything, but here we are. | ||
| That's the but. | ||
| And now the but, of course, is where? | ||
| That's where the problems start kicking in if you hold an ideal that markets are supposed to solve these things. | ||
| So I'm not there. | ||
| I'm just not there. | ||
| It's a really tough conversation, Dave. | ||
| I'm so glad we're having it. | ||
| Because I'm a Milton Friedman guy. | ||
| I'm a free market, free people. | ||
| Wait, New York Times had him on the cover. | ||
| He's an alt-right hero. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| That was the most ridiculous piece that I've seen. | ||
| My dad, 40 years, he's had the New York Times. | ||
| I think even longer than I've been born, he had it for like 45 years, still subscribed. | ||
| Nothing like seeing his son's head. | ||
| This was one of the most dishonest pieces of journalism I've ever seen. | ||
| You have one guy, like one guy, and it's just this pabulum, thousands of words of nonsense. | ||
| Anyway, that's a different thing at a different time. | ||
| I've invited the author on the show. | ||
| Milton Friedman. | ||
| I'm a Milton Friedman guy. | ||
| I'm a Thomas Sowell guy. | ||
| I believe markets do solve solutions. | ||
| For those of you that are listening or watching that aren't sure what my view of markets are, it's that free people exchanging goods in a free society, voluntarily, mutually cooperating as they see fit, will benefit society, benefit the individual, and that's essentially a market. | ||
| So a couple things. | ||
| In order for a market to operate, you also believe in private property. | ||
| That's a big thing. | ||
| So you have impartial courts that can adjudicate differences. | ||
| So you're not an anarchist. | ||
| I'm not an anarchist. | ||
| Adam Smith talked about the importance of impartial courts because you're going to have differences of properties and not just physical property, but intellectual property and all that. | ||
| And also, of course, the price system. | ||
| That's really, really important. | ||
| Milton Friedman talked how prices are the language of how we communicate with each other. | ||
| So if tomorrow Starbucks made every single cup of coffee $25, which is not inconceivable, considering their upward... You mean they're going to lower the prices? | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| The upward trajectory that they're on for coffee, there's something to be said that less people will buy that coffee. | ||
| And so that's how you communicate. | ||
| Some people might open their voice and be upset, but the silent regression from buying their coffee will be reflected in their balance sheet. | ||
| And that's how we communicate value to value. | ||
| Prices are super important. | ||
| So, I think the first thing we talk about tech is we also have to first admit we really don't have a market in tech. | ||
| There's a couple reasons behind this. | ||
| And then we have to talk about some of the problems that I think everyone admits. | ||
| First of all, there's a lot of cronyism that exists between the big tech companies right now. | ||
| Whether it be government contracts, whether it be far too extended patents that are given to Google. | ||
| We need to think about this. | ||
| I think that patents, in a lot of ways, are anti-free market. | ||
| and I think we should shrink the window of how long some of these patents are. | ||
| So you said it the best. | ||
| Google has this algorithm that no one can figure out, right? | ||
| But they also have it patented, and they have it patented for a very long time. | ||
| And so if it were to be put off the patent market, well, it's also made public. | ||
| And someone could compete against it. | ||
| So that's an interesting thing to think about, that there could be. | ||
| that they're actually hiding behind some of the government favors that are given to them. | ||
| Right, so it's a weird place to be though because you're sort of asking for government interference | ||
| with the hope of this back-end freedom thing. | ||
| Let's go to what we want. | ||
| I always tell our team at Turning Point USA, every time, "What does success look like?" | ||
| Well, Charlie, success looks like 1,400 high school kids in DC. | ||
| in August. | ||
| Great. | ||
| How do we get there? | ||
| We work backwards to where we are today. | ||
| Let's do that. | ||
| Why not? | ||
| Take me on this voyage. | ||
| What does success look like? | ||
| Fair, free, and open platforms with different ideas can express themselves. | ||
| Multiple tech companies, not four, but dozens of tech companies competing for our interests that are able to have these ideas present, hopefully an improving product over time. | ||
| And hopefully a search engine that doesn't have 92% of the market share. | ||
| I don't think that's a healthy thing. | ||
| I just don't. | ||
| I think even 40% would be a lot, 92%. | ||
| So that's where success would look like a disaggregation, let's call it that, or a decentralization. | ||
| I think that's probably a fair, we would agree with that, right? | ||
| And also you not having to battle YouTube nonstop and you not having to do all these things. | ||
| You actually focus on content creation. | ||
| I have to ask you, Dave, how many hundreds of hours have you spent of wasted energy on this stuff? | ||
| Oh, it's been, I mean, I have to fight them publicly constantly. | ||
| It's like, it's not fun. | ||
| It obsesses you, right? | ||
| Yeah, well, it's not fun. | ||
| It's not that it's, well, it's bad business because I'm putting out content that I end up losing money on. | ||
| I mean, in a weird way, there are times where I'm doing the producers. | ||
| The more things that I make, the more money I lose, which is not fun. | ||
| But also, it's just publicly, it's not fun to have to attack your own platform. | ||
| But okay, so far I'm with you on the ideas, but now where we're going to have our problem is the functional part. | ||
| The question is, so let's say we deregulate some of the patent stuff, but is it enough? | ||
| And I'm at a place right now where Tucker Carlson said something really interesting to me and really stuck with me. | ||
| He said, Charlie, I want you to think about this. | ||
| Who is more powerful, the IRS or Google? | ||
| And I immediately said the IRS, because that's what we conservatives believe. | ||
| We believe that government has uniform power. | ||
| And I defended it, I thought, pretty well. | ||
| Google doesn't have the power of audits. | ||
| Google can't put you in prison. | ||
| prison, you know all these, IRS could do all those sorts of things, right? And IRS can wreck your business. | ||
| And Tucker retorted with a really interesting thing. He said, "Well, but Google can't shut down your business." | ||
| I said, "Yeah, I guess that's right." And I debated a little bit. | ||
| And Google can manipulate entire society to believe something that might not be true. | ||
| And we went through the whole litany of how powerful Google was, and I thought about it for months. | ||
| And I think that's a really important thing that we conservatives do. | ||
| We actually are always challenging our positions. | ||
| I think that's what's so healthy about our movement. | ||
| And it hit me about a month and a half ago when I was using, I had my laptop open, and I had my Gmail account, watching YouTube, you know, on my Google Calendar, and I said, my goodness, they know everything about me. | ||
| The IRS doesn't know crap. | ||
| The IRS knows a couple bank statements, you know, my taxes and my bank statements. | ||
| That's a very small picture of my actual activity. | ||
| And I thought to myself when I had this computer open, I said, what if one engineer in Google was flipping through Twitter and saw one of my tweets praising President Trump? | ||
| And he said, screw this Charlie Kirk guy. | ||
| And he goes to work tomorrow and he decides to look at everything about me. | ||
| Do we know that's not happening? | ||
| I mean, I think we can go on the assumption that it is happening. | ||
| That's really scary. | ||
| That's more power than the NSA has. | ||
| And, by the way, we know that Google is so slanted in the wrong direction ideologically. | ||
| We know they've shown regret for not doing enough in 2016. | ||
| We know the political imbalance of their political contributions were over a million dollars to Hillary Clinton and zero dollars to Donald Trump in 2016 as far as political contributions. | ||
| They fired James Damore. | ||
| So here's the question. | ||
| Is there a place for the federal government to get engaged or involved, tinker around the edges, or do something to change the way that this is currently happening. | ||
| And the piece I wrote in the Washington Post was first admitting how this could go wrong. | ||
| So let's just, can I start there, is that okay? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| So that's why I brought up the piece, because I think you did try to at least acknowledge the freaking murky road that this thing is. | ||
| I'm struggling with this, because free market's so great, I believe this, I see this beautiful society created by the free market, and I say, What about this? | ||
| These companies, I'm struggling. | ||
| That's a good thing to struggle because then you actually might find reasonability somewhere. | ||
| And so the first piece is let's see how this could go wrong. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| More times than not, when you apply regulation on a very, very big company, The regulation ends up getting written by those companies. | ||
| The regulation gets lobbied for by those companies. | ||
| There's last-minute, middle-of-the-night changes being put by senators and K Street law firms and lobbyists that end up actually benefiting the very company that's supposed to regulate. | ||
| Right, it ends up hurting the competition that's trying to upstart because they can never keep up with the regulations. | ||
| Precisely. | ||
| Okay, so now you're, so far you're giving me stuff that I'm with you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I talked about this in the piece, right, so I opened up with this, right? | |
| And so, let's take a very agreeable example. | ||
| It's Dodd-Frank. | ||
| Dodd-Frank, for those of you that don't know, that are watching this, was a banking regulation bill passed out of the 2008 financial crisis, authored by Chris Dodd and Barney Frank. | ||
| to try to regulate the big banks to try to never allow the 2008 financial crisis to happen again. | ||
| But essentially what it would be is, he's like, okay, I lost my arm in a horrible motorcycle accident and I'm taking Pepto-Bismol for a stomach ache. | ||
| It's like a complete wrong treatment. | ||
| They had nothing to do with this. | ||
| So they apply the wrong treatment to an ill-advised, poorly analyzed problem And what ended up happening was the big five or six banks, Goldman, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, you know, these massive, massive banks that have trillions and trillions, hundreds, tens of billions, tens of trillions in dollars of assets collectively, they lobby for regulation that they understand, that they can comply with. | ||
| Now they're even too bigger to fail. | ||
| And what has happened? | ||
| You now have Wells Fargo, you have BOA, you have JP Morgan, with stock prices that have never been higher, with more power than they ever had, and what did Dodd-Frank do? | ||
| We have seen a massive decrease and decline in community banking. | ||
| Massive. | ||
| Because for the bank, the local bank of Sacramento, let's just take a minute, local bank of Sacramento, that might have $250 million in deposits, And they might do, let's say, $12 million in revenue. | ||
| They've got some good loans out, healthy balance sheets, all that. | ||
| But all of a sudden, a federal regulator walks in with an encyclopedia of new regulation they have to comply with. | ||
| And they say, well, this is going to cost you $800,000 in law costs. | ||
| And they're, well, sorry, this is the new law. | ||
| Well, $800,000 for JP Morgan is called lunch. | ||
| That's nothing. | ||
| I mean, it's nothing. | ||
| So what ends up happening is it penalizes it. | ||
| So I'm admitting I'm being vulnerable. | ||
| So this is a huge concession on your part. | ||
| It's a part of the piece. | ||
| I'm being vulnerable of how I've come to this because I first want to just tell the audience that I'm not dealing in absolutes here at all. | ||
| I'm dealing in very much of there's context and there's texture to this. | ||
| So anyway, so how regulation could be a weapon used. | ||
| You saw this with Facebook, though. | ||
| You saw this with Facebook, where Facebook actually put forth this proposal of how to protect people's privacy. | ||
| That was like 450,000 pages of garbage that was basically written by Sheryl Sandberg and Mark Zuckerberg of how their company can thrive and rule the world. | ||
| Okay, that's stupid. | ||
| The question is, how do we get to that success? | ||
| And I think what I wrote in the piece is the number one thing that we can do is change section 602. | ||
| I think that's the number. | ||
| It's either 206 or 602. | ||
| I can be dyslexic at times. | ||
| So I think it's 602. | ||
| In the technology code that was passed in the 1990s that allows these technology platforms to hide behind the label of being a platform when they're really acting like a publisher. | ||
| So the Rubin Report, right, any of these companies, you guys are publishers, right? | ||
| Pardon me if I'm wrong. | ||
| Yeah, I'm responsible for the content. | ||
| So if you look at that camera and say something horribly libelous about somebody and publish it behind your name, you could be held accountable for that libel suit. | ||
| Now, a platform, right, a platform is supposed to be an open forum where no one can be held accountable to it. | ||
| However, where they get around it is where they have these community standards, right? | ||
| Right, which is the sneaky way of, oh, we're going to kind of curb out who we don't exactly want in there. | ||
| So, trying to break outside the binary box, Since the piece, I've thought of this more and I've gotten some really good feedback on it. | ||
| There can be a third box created too. | ||
| You can have a platform publisher and then a social network. | ||
| They're definitely acting like a publisher. | ||
| They're pretending to be a platform. | ||
| But why not create a third box and have an Internet Bill of Rights? | ||
| That's an interesting idea. | ||
| I'm not saying that's 100% what I believe, but why not? | ||
| Because when you're consuming so much information online and so many people, their livelihoods are online and we're gravitating towards online, what's to say that there shouldn't be that kind of third box? | ||
| And so there's a very aggressive community that says, regulate these companies, throw the regulators at them. | ||
| It's very tempting to do that because you want to seek vengeance against these companies that are doing these horrible, horrible things. | ||
| But my whole thing right here is that something needs to change governmentally. | ||
| We're at that point. | ||
| What that something is, I'm open-minded to. | ||
| I proposed in the Washington Post piece that got a ton of play. | ||
| Got more mail from that piece, I think, than any other thing I've written. | ||
| The 602 code is the opening. | ||
| That's where I think we have to change it. | ||
| So I like the platform vs. publisher debate, and I think you're right. | ||
| They are acting now as publishers, not open platforms. | ||
| So I think there's something there. | ||
| I think where I would still be struggling is... I can get you on the Internet Bill of Rights. | ||
| I would love that. | ||
| Well, publisher, let's say, if you're a platform, as they're pretending to be, then you have certain things to abide by. | ||
| So that sounds good, right? | ||
| Road to hell is paved with good intentions. | ||
| Now we've got something that sounds good, but then to enforce it, what are you going to do? | ||
| What is the government going to do? | ||
| Suddenly you have a gajillion bureaucrats running around these companies, making sure that they're doing all of those things, and it's like, do the middle management government bureaucrats have any insight into how these companies operate internally? | ||
|
unidentified
|
You do. | |
| You create a division in the Department of Justice that's focused on internet civil rights. | ||
| It's no different than free expression that was challenged in the 70s and 80s, and a lot of different in the gay community. | ||
| There was huge controversy in the 1980s in California in particular, a lot of lawsuits that stemmed out of that, and there was a creation eventually in the Department of Justice that focused on... How is it any different, Dave, when you get the kind of penalization that you've gotten on social media, or when Crowder gets demonetized, how is that not a violation? | ||
| I don't want to force that baker to bake the cake! | ||
| I don't Because what if Google shut us all up? | ||
| Shapiro, Crowder, Knowles, Clavin, Daily Wire, me, Prager, Overnight. | ||
| Would then we say we go after them with government? | ||
| And here's the other question I have for you, Dave. | ||
| What's stopping them? | ||
| Right, so I've been posing this actually, because this is what I've been talking about mostly at colleges lately, and I pose that question. | ||
| If they were to digitally assassinate me today, if all of them just agreed, Twitter down, YouTube down, Facebook down, Instagram down, Would that be a violation of my civil rights? | ||
| And I think it's as close as you can possibly get to yes. | ||
| They could just take you out of what the new public sphere is. | ||
| And especially the way that technology's evolving so fast, you could almost argue that your ability to be on those platforms in some weird way is almost paramount than your ability to just exist on a day-to-day basis, which is a sort of very Philip K. Dick to think of, Right, so my question for you, Dave, is are we there yet? | ||
| And if not, when will we be? | ||
| And I'm there. | ||
| Okay, so let's say I see it. | ||
| So Tucker and I have done this several times on his show. | ||
| So let's say I grant you that. | ||
| Then explain this to me. | ||
| Trump happens to be favorable to some of the people that you're mentioning here. | ||
| He's on the right side of this issue, I would say. | ||
| What happens now? | ||
| Trump loses in 2020. | ||
| You've got President Elizabeth Warren, who wants to... It's code 230. | ||
| My guys are telling me, by the way, not 602. | ||
| See, we fact check here on the Rubin Report. | ||
| That wasn't even dyslexia. | ||
| That was just a made-up... Yeah, it wasn't made up. | ||
| It was missed memory. | ||
| Okay, sorry. | ||
| I got all these numbers. | ||
| You've just lost all credibility. | ||
| And I really thought you were doing well this hour. | ||
| All right, now we've got President Elizabeth Warren, who would be more than happy, as a far-left progressive, to do everything that she can to have the government take over everything. | ||
| And now you've already handed her this power. | ||
| Now, I think I know what your answer is gonna be. | ||
| She's gonna do it anyway. | ||
| Whether Trump moves on it or not, the left will come for it anyway. | ||
| But that still seems... | ||
| Crazily dangerous to me at a terrible pressure. | ||
| Well, it depends on how we structure this in a way again I think I think the challenge is whenever possible. | ||
| We're going back to the doctrine of Adam Smith So here's the question Dave private property you've private property rights. | ||
| Don't you we all do? | ||
| Yeah so it aren't all your videos you put on YouTube your property and you've monetized them and so under the Adam Smith doctrine of markets and Well, technically, I don't know. | ||
| I actually just honestly don't know off the top of my head with whatever crazy thing I've signed with YouTube. | ||
| Are the videos that I put there? | ||
| So that's an interesting question. | ||
| The intellectual property is definitely yours. | ||
| Right, the IP, sure. | ||
| All this production cost, all that, that is yours. | ||
| And you've monetized it. | ||
| And I think, from what I understand, you've gone into a cooperative with YouTube. | ||
| I'm guessing that they have the rights to it once you sign over the rights. | ||
| But isn't there an argument to say, like, but this is my video, I've created this. | ||
| Whether it's been adjudicated or not, I'm not sure, but I think the solution has to go to the courts. | ||
| And this is me believing the courts have been highly politicized in many, many recent years. | ||
| The long-lasting legacy of Donald Trump will be, hopefully, the rebalancing of the federal judiciary away from slanted radicalism and towards, hopefully, kind of very restrained, kind of restrained, what's the word, textualism, being more textualist. | ||
| And so that's the question. | ||
| So if Elizabeth Warren starts to go on a rampage, Hopefully, you can be able to sue, and you can use the courts to uphold these things. | ||
| Under Obama, there were decisions that he was not crazy about. | ||
| So your basic belief, if we were to whittle all this down, would be that the three branches of government would still be able to function in a way that would protect us from the government over here. | ||
| Let me go a step further. | ||
| There's four branches of government, and the fourth is called Silicon Valley. | ||
| And they're stronger than the rest of the three of them. | ||
| That's where I'm at. | ||
| Where we have a super government that's been created. | ||
| Where the kingdom of DC is no longer the most powerful fiefdom in this game of thrones. | ||
| That the power is in Silicon Valley. | ||
| And this is where Tucker is on this issue, this is where Dennis Prager is on this issue. | ||
| In the IRS, to give you an idea, the IRS, they don't even accept emails. | ||
| You have to send a snail mail letter to them. | ||
| Again, they might be morally corrupted, but these guys at Google, | ||
| I mean, they're literally building new limbs for people. | ||
| I mean, they have driverless cars, highly technological people. | ||
| And so, and Dave, here's my question for you as a libertarian. | ||
| Do you support, looking retrospectively back in history, the trust busting that Teddy Roosevelt did in the 1900s? | ||
| Right, so I get it. | ||
| I mean, this is the slippery slope thing always, right? | ||
| There's a libertarian argument that would be against the Civil Rights Act that I think is a sad- I disagree with that. | ||
| No, so I disagree with it too, and I'm not for re-litigating it, but I think there is a libertarian argument there. | ||
| But this is where I would say, I would say this is the difference between basically a classical liberal and a libertarian. | ||
| I do find some utility for the state. | ||
| So nothing that you're saying to me, nothing you're saying is completely outlandish. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And I think if anything, For whatever disagreement there is here, in a weird way, we need to keep that disagreement. | ||
| Do you think that's fair to say? | ||
| No, I think that's totally fair. | ||
| Because that way, it keeps either side from, yeah. | ||
| It keeps an account, and not getting too far, and not allowing your emotion run, and I think to keep it in check, I just, so it's a very interesting conversation, because growing in the kind of conservative libertarian world, and reading Hayek, and reading Rothbard, I've been told my entire life, and I agree with this, Up until the last couple months, where I've told the true monopoly is government. | ||
| And it's just not true anymore. | ||
| We have companies that can do things the government cannot do. | ||
| And that's never been the case in human history. | ||
| It's just never been the case. | ||
| It just hasn't. | ||
| And where you have a government that can shut off the entire lines of communication for millions of people, you have a government that can say, we want everyone to think that Sam's Deli is closed tomorrow. | ||
| So everyone Googles, Sam's Deli. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, it's closed. | |
| Even though it's open. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You have an entire super government that's been created that can manipulate the entire behavioral pattern of a society. | ||
| And so if we could admit that's stronger than the government, then do we use government against it? | ||
| And again, I admit it, although how that could go wrong, you could actually end up making those companies more powerful. | ||
| But I want to go back to where I saw what success looks like. | ||
| And this has to be like the moonshot, we're going to get to the moon, and this is the advice I gave to President Trump publicly, where I think the President should issue a big challenge, saying to the entrepreneurs of America, go start the next tech company. | ||
| I'm going to use your platform. | ||
| I'm going to use as many platforms as I can touch. | ||
| Go do it right now. | ||
| Go raise the capital. | ||
| I believe in you. | ||
| Almost like creating entrepreneurial activity around this. | ||
| Well, Kirk, as you know, we're taping this at the end of July right now. | ||
| This is going to air in August because I'm off the grid for August. | ||
| You might be interested in perhaps an announcement that someone might be making at the beginning of September. | ||
| I don't want to say too much, but if you want to ping that Trump guy and tell him. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I love all that stuff. | ||
| And I'm not saying any of these things are exclusive. | ||
| I'm saying we've identified the problem, we understand the significance of it, we understand how we could solve it incorrectly. | ||
| Because the first thing you do in medicine is what? | ||
| First, do no harm. | ||
| It's the first thing. | ||
| So we have this problem, and we could end up actually making it worse, and that would be horrible, wouldn't it? | ||
| Imagine if we passed all this regulation. | ||
| Imagine if we had this crazy bill pass through Congress, we felt great about it. | ||
| Then 18 months later, All of a sudden, we find out that Google got all these last-minute provisions in, it's not being enforced, and they're ending up not 92% of search results, they have 99% of search results, and everyone gets taken off the market. | ||
| And that would be really, that would be defeating. | ||
| The road to hell, man. | ||
| All right, listen, we have to wrap, unfortunately. | ||
| Obviously, we're gonna do this again. | ||
| And, you know, look, if we ended up getting booted from the platforms, I guess we'll just have to keep doing this in person until... We could text this video to people or something, I don't know. | ||
| That'll take us down. | ||
| Thank you, Charlie. | ||
| For more on Charlie, follow him at charliekirk11. | ||
| And don't forget to click that subscribe button and make sure the bell is solid to get all the notifications for our videos. |
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