00:00:20.000His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:00:29.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:01:19.000So we're de facto banned from Google, and I'll get into all the details on that.
00:01:23.000And now we're partially banned from Twitter because we don't tend to roll over when people tell us we can't speak the mind and speak freely.
00:01:32.000And Facebook kind of decides, depending on whatever side of the bed, Mark Zuckerberg wakes up on, whether or not we're going to be banned on that day.
00:01:40.000But the big news that we broke earlier this week is that we've been tracking our traffic from Google search, and it is down almost to zero.
00:01:49.000And this has been a precipitous decline since the 2016 election.
00:01:54.000And as of May the 6th of this year, it's basically just completely off.
00:01:58.000It's almost impossible to get a Breitbart story unless you type in the word Breitbart.
00:02:03.000And the more political your search term gets, like Biden and Joe Biden, you're not going to find a Breitbart article within, you'll scroll back all day.
00:03:14.000So we started looking at our traffic from Google, and it started to decline a lot right after the 2016 election and steadily declining, steadily declining.
00:03:23.000And then all of a sudden, it just dropped off a cliff to the floor in May.
00:03:27.000And we started piecing back the specifics.
00:04:11.000If you search for Alex Marlow, if you search for Joel Pollock, if you search for Matt Boyle, our most prominent people, you're still not going to get Breitbart links.
00:04:18.000Like the people who spend their whole day working at Breitbart, they're not going to direct you to Breitbart.
00:04:22.000So this seems like some of them might be political.
00:04:25.000So naturally, we checked what we could get out of other websites.
00:04:29.000We looked at the Daily Caller and Fox News, and we noticed that we looked at about 50 odd top-tier publishers, and eight of the bottom 10 were all conservative.
00:04:38.000Breitbart being third to the bottom, with Daily Caller and the Daily Wire somehow being even lower than Breitbart, which is tough to do because it's hard to be lower than zero.
00:05:35.000One way you guys can do, and this is when we're going to turn this into a story, but this will be a little exclusive for your audience, Charlie.
00:05:40.000That if you go to a Breitbart, pick out your favorite story of the day and search for the headline verbatim.
00:06:58.000You have to start with the premise that the concept of the First Amendment is something that is a collective responsibility and not just a government responsibility.
00:07:07.000Now, if you can't buy into that with me, then this is probably not going to be your favorite episode of the Charlie Kirk podcast.
00:07:14.000But if you can go there with me and understand that other than Donald Trump, the most powerful people on planet Earth are Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos and Sundar Pichai and Jack Dorsey and the people who control virtually all speech and information in the United States by a percentage, aside from private conversations you're having one-on-one.
00:07:33.000Almost all speech that's taking place is dependent on these social media platforms.
00:07:37.000And they can decide unilaterally if your business sinks or swims, if your news story gets prominent position or no position at all.
00:07:46.000And once you realize that we've outsourced our First Amendment to these businesses, and by the way, Charlie, most all of these people are anonymous.
00:07:53.000Maybe the top one or two people in each company are known, but that's about it.
00:07:58.000Almost everyone else can have this level of power and control without any accountability to the public.
00:08:05.000And if those type of people can decide if your podcast episode or if your comment or if your link is going to get prominent placement or no placement, I mean, whoa, we got to reconsider where we're at in the United States.
00:08:18.000Yeah, and so build this out for me because a lot of conservatives are reluctant to talk about this.
00:08:25.000I think some are funded directly by the tech companies, far too many.
00:09:30.000Yeah, I think you used an expression last time called super government, or forgive me if that's not exactly what you used, but I really liked it.
00:09:37.000That sort of premise is what Silicon Valley does.
00:09:40.000Other than the United States government, it is the most powerful, consolidated group of people on the planet.
00:09:47.000And they're largely anonymous, as I say repeatedly.
00:09:51.000And for those people to choose winners and losers in a way that is completely opaque, and they only add very vague guidelines with subjective terms that they determine whether or not your content fits those terms or is an exception to their rules that are vaguely put into place and seem to change on a day-to-day basis and even a minute-to-minute basis.
00:10:16.000The free market is letting people have a chance that the government get out of the way as best they can until people can survive.
00:10:23.000But when the businesses themselves are using predatory practices and I believe outright discriminatory, ideologically discriminatory tactics to choose winners and losers, that is not freedom to me.
00:10:36.000And just because the oppression is not coming from the government, because it's coming from one industry, one sector of the economy, that to me is not freedom.
00:11:00.000I also think that it doesn't have any understanding of how these tech companies operate because they purchase all their competitors at a multiple at a very infant stage.
00:11:11.000So anyone that might ever become a suitable competitor, they get purchased, they get offers that are 20 times revenue, not even earnings, just 20 times revenue.
00:11:20.000Because Google will see, yeah, we might be able to incorporate some of their stuff.
00:11:23.000But better yet, the long term, the long-term return is actually them not being around.
00:11:34.000They figure out ways to, using crony tactics, to try to make sure they don't have any competition.
00:11:41.000And there's lots of different tricks they use.
00:11:43.000The Wall Street Journal had a big story on how Amazon was meeting with startups with the suggestion that they might invest in them, and then they end up launching competitive products.
00:11:52.000So, they basically end up picking their brain and then going into direct competition with them, assuming the story is true.
00:11:59.000It's been many years, but I think back in, I think it was 2012, Zuckerberg basically admitted that he's not going to let competitors use his platform to get a leg up, that that's not what he's going to do.
00:12:10.000So, if his potential competitors were advertising or promoting themselves on Facebook to a certain degree or using Facebook to test out product and get information, that he was going to get in the way of that.
00:12:22.000So, they're already on record saying such things.
00:12:24.000And once you listen to their own words, this is one where you don't have to take my word for it.
00:12:29.000They've said this stuff openly enough times.
00:12:32.000Kent Walker is saying we're going to make nationalism and populism a blip or a hiccup, is admitting they are going to interfere in elections.
00:13:20.000The solution is not just going to come from government.
00:13:22.000But I do think that's probably where it begins: is if they have a clear monopoly in a certain area, you have to do something to break them up.
00:13:29.000Google, I think, is multiple monopolies.
00:13:48.000What's really stunning to see, Alex, is the left is very strategic, incredibly Machiavellian in this.
00:13:55.000Now, the radical left, they're consistent sometimes, but even someone on the between that kind of jumps in between the two camps of radical left and mainstream left, whatever that means, they see these tech companies as an opportunity.
00:14:10.000You see, they see them as a blunt forced object to be able to destroy conservatives all across the world and across the country.
00:14:17.000And for them, they know they're going to be protected.
00:14:20.000They know they're going to be preferred.
00:14:22.000And so they will not do much of anything.
00:14:24.000They also get an extraordinary amount of political campaign contributions from these companies.
00:14:29.000Whereas if these companies were in any sort of other sector or industry, whether it be oil and gas or whether it be in just basic telecommunications or in retail like Walmart, they would be broken up instantaneously if they did not hold these kind of ridiculous left-wing dogmatic views.
00:14:48.000And so people like Adam Schiff and people like Maxine Waters, they look at the social media titans as almost the fifth branch of government.
00:16:12.000But what I find really fascinating, though, Alex, and I want to dive into this, is that as I've done this on Google, and you kind of can go find the pro-Google literature written by conservative think tanks as like the first search result.
00:16:26.000Interestingly enough, they boosted those search results.
00:16:28.000And I look at these conservative think tanks that are funded by Google, and they write very pro tech company type literature.
00:16:54.000Or do you think that they're using a specific love of the free market to protect their incumbency temporarily before they're able to create a new government?
00:17:04.000That's exactly where you have to start thinking about.
00:17:07.000That's why I always talk about it in the context of the left in terms of understanding their priorities.
00:17:12.000And their priorities are going to be pushing the political agenda first because it's part of the nature of being on the left is politics is always above all else.
00:17:20.000On the right, we have things like faith and family, maybe our business, maybe our first principles, but it's not going to be politics.
00:17:27.000Politics will come in four, five, or six on our list.
00:17:30.000Even people like you and me, Charlie, who live and breathe it every day.
00:17:33.000I'm sure what animates you most in your life is not just purely being a political animal.
00:17:52.000When you're in the left and you can see it, just look at the front page of Reitbart.com where we demonstrate this with example after example every day.
00:17:58.000Everything in their core is about politics.
00:18:01.000Look at the way they have tarnished Herman Cain.
00:18:04.000They have made Herman Cain a cudgel to beat President Trump with pseudoscience acting as though they can prove that he got the coronavirus from the Trump rally because he specifically didn't wear a mask.
00:18:16.000None of these people know if this is true or not.
00:18:18.000And they have reduced a man who was a rocket scientist, who saved a pizza business, who was a happy warrior, who overcame segregation.
00:18:26.000He's one of the great American stories possible.
00:18:29.000And the media is distilling him down simply to the guy who didn't wear a mask at a Trump rally.
00:18:42.000And I bring this back to big tech because if you see them through the lens that I do, which is Silicon Valley is a single party leftist town.
00:18:50.000They're under obligation to make sure Democrats win.
00:18:53.000When they get up in the morning, they have to assure that's the case.
00:18:56.000And if not, then their platforms are being used for ill.
00:19:16.000We got the tape of them talking about us the exact same way.
00:19:20.000So if people understand that, I think that there's hope that we can get to some understanding, but we've given them way too much power and they're only going to take more.
00:19:28.000The last big principle I want to talk about for a second here, Charlie, is you should accept the concept that they're either getting more or less power at a given moment.
00:20:02.000We have to understand that they have almost a totalitarian capacity to be able to control minds, control human behavior, control all sorts of different ways of processing information.
00:20:16.000I mean, and at Google, they have this saying where they say, do no evil or don't cross the creepy line, right?
00:20:22.000And they actually changed it, which is really interesting.
00:20:24.000Now they changed it to do good or something.
00:21:04.000So even though he's not with us on politics, he is with us on these first principles.
00:21:09.000And he thinks Google is going to manipulate the election to the tune of 10%.
00:21:13.000Literally, they have the capacity to move 10% vote.
00:21:16.000That means, Charlie, all the hard work you've done over the last few years, all the work we're doing at Breitbart, all of this will be completely erased simply by Google manipulation.
00:21:27.000You know, I don't say I can confirm it, but this is a guy who's dedicated his life to this topic and wants to see Biden win, still sees that is the threat is that high, is that high.
00:21:37.000Now, so if you think of it like that, and you look at the fact that Breitbart is getting maybe a third to a fifth of the traffic through Google as some of our top competitors, maybe even less relative to our overall traffic, and you start seeing how undecided voters are having their minds controlled by Google, who will not allow for them to see our content.
00:21:56.000They're blocking our content, and that to me is blocking our democracy.
00:22:02.000And so part of the reason why the founding fathers put in the First Amendment is they had this very bold and proven to be correct idea that dialogue is really good and that dissenting ideas should be protected and that disagreement is healthy for a republic.
00:22:42.000And no mention at all whatsoever of the persecution of freedom of speech or any of that.
00:22:46.000And so we don't talk enough about why does freedom of speech matter.
00:22:49.000And you say it best, which is if you actually do not have freedom of speech and freedom of consciousness and dialogue and discourse, Course, well, then you basically surrender and sacrifice the entire zeitgeist and decision-making process to a group of people.
00:23:03.000And then, therefore, by definition, they're going to probably make a bad decision.
00:23:07.000And since it's such a centralized power structure, that bad decision could harm everybody.
00:23:11.000And so, go ahead, you were going to come in.
00:23:14.000Yeah, and there's no accountability for the bad decision.
00:23:16.000So, if you look at, and if you look at just what they can do, and you brought this up at the top and how Breitbart is currently in Twitter timeout, we're currently in Twitter timeout because we live streamed, we simply streamed videos of doctors who do not have the orthodox view as sanctioned by our establishment media in Silicon Valley in the World Health Organization in terms of the coronavirus and treatments, et cetera, and lockdowns.
00:23:44.000And these doctors, many of them are from some of the best institutions in the country, and a lot of them are board-certified or even double-board-certified.
00:23:52.000These are not, these are not fringe people.
00:23:54.000Most of them are very mainstream people.
00:23:56.000This is mainstream thought for the most part.
00:23:58.000So, what the media did is, even though we live streamed, we did not endorse, we did not fact-check or confirm, we merely live-streamed actual doctors in White Coast giving a press conference on Capitol Hill.
00:24:11.000And they would cherry-pick one or two comments made by one of the doctors and used that to define the entire multiple-day event.
00:24:20.000And not only that, anyone who dared to carry that event was then memory-holed from the internet.
00:24:40.000And I mean, they just, according to our team here, Dr. Simone Gold was just fired.
00:24:45.000So, that's the price that, and we had that conversation with her privately.
00:24:49.000I said, they're going to come after you and they will try to destroy your life completely.
00:24:54.000And so, here, I want to end the conversation on this, Alex, which is the outrage that I have for the people on the right that take money from these tech companies, that are funded by them, that play nice with them, and they hide behind their free market fundamentalism.
00:25:09.000And I think we have to get a lot tougher is not the correct word.
00:25:14.000I think we have to, boy, what's the right word?
00:25:17.000We have to treat them as if they were taking money from our most brutal enemy.
00:25:23.000And can you comment on that about how actually the people within our own ranks are accepting money from these tyrants that hate our guts that actually want to topple Western society using technology?
00:25:37.000And big tech, which of course, this was hammered during the hearing this week, is of course much more open to doing business with places like China than they are with the United States government, which is not surprising, I think, for people paying attention, but is still disturbing.
00:25:54.000What they're doing in Washington is they're among the biggest lobbyists now in Washington is the big tech industry.
00:26:45.000I think people who take on big tech, I think they will see some of that cash flow Replaced by other good actors in the country who simply want our freedom back from these Silicon Valley giants.
00:26:59.000This is why I think it's such a big thing.
00:27:03.000And we're trying to document who's taking money, who's taking the most, and who's merely talking a good game and not acting because they're taking money.
00:27:11.000Congressman Greg Stuby came on my radio show this week and said he's now refusing to take additional money from Silicon Valley.
00:27:18.000But that's one congressperson out of 538.
00:27:52.000And so I agree with you in one sense, and I think you're more positive than I am on one of it, which is I think it just gets to a structural root cause issue.
00:28:00.000And you and I talked about this back on the last time.
00:28:02.000I think one of the biggest problems we have in American politics is how we fund our elections.
00:28:06.000And I am not a proponent of publicly funding elections.
00:28:10.000But I do think that what you just said articulates it perfectly.
00:28:14.000It's legalized bribery in a lot of different ways, where a lot of our elected officials, especially on the Republican side, they'll be like, yeah, I really agree with you, but I'm not going to do anything about this.
00:28:22.000Well, that's not a republic that's functioning.
00:28:25.000And especially when you have foreign interests that can do that, or I mean, for all intents and purposes, the tech companies are foreign interests because they don't share our ethos.
00:28:33.000I don't care if they're in Silicon Valley or they're in Wuhan.
00:28:36.000I mean, for all intents and purposes, they're a foreign ideology.
00:28:39.000It doesn't matter if they're domiciled in our country.
00:28:40.000And increasingly, much of their business is overseas, and they know it.
00:28:44.000And they know that's where it's going.
00:28:45.000It's going to be a majority international business over time if it's not there already.
00:28:51.000And one of the most popular presidents in American history was a Republican, Teddy Roosevelt.
00:28:56.000And we're not supposed to talk about him, right?
00:28:57.000We're supposed to just kind of say, oh, yeah, he was the worst thing ever.
00:29:00.000And, you know, I grew up in certain conservative circles where I read literature saying he was an awful overreaching power grabber.
00:29:07.000And I've revisited some of that literature.
00:29:09.000And I think there's some truth to some of that.
00:29:12.000I think some of his quotes were probably a little aggressive at times where he said, you know, I'm not going to let the Constitution get in the way of a good idea.
00:29:18.000I'm like, okay, a little bit exciting.
00:29:19.000But I don't know if we've ever experienced a politician recently, Alex, that says things a little aggressive.
00:29:26.000But the point is: this is that he was incredibly popular in a lot of ways, actually helped create American capitalism as we know it in the 20th century.
00:29:53.000I find this to be a constant battle in my life that it's now just because we cover something at Breitbart, I endorse everything a human being's ever done in their entire life.
00:30:02.000It's just an absurd thing that is just so.
00:30:05.000And by the way, it's someone who kind of gets some of his values from the Bible.
00:30:09.000It's so anti-so anti-Judeo-Christian because we all kind of come into the world with the premise that we're all sinners and we're all flawed.
00:30:17.000And then now I'm supposed to, if I endorse one idea, I've endorse the entire person.
00:30:22.000But I like Teddy Roosevelt's populism.
00:30:24.000I think his instincts there is there is a level where the free market and the size and scope of businesses does overwhelm what is best for the people on an individual level.
00:31:28.000I'm going to do the opposite of the truth and project it on you.
00:31:31.000And so in closing here, Alex, I think that the money and politics issue, you and I can talk on a separate podcast.
00:31:39.000I actually think that's why we have ridiculous policies on immigration.
00:31:44.000Everything is such that the corporate class just drives everything because they fund the elections.
00:31:48.000And I actually think a lot of these politicians, if they were given a decision that they would make independent of corporate lobbyist pressure, they would actually generally side with the way that you and I see the world.
00:31:58.000And so I just get, I continually see good ideas get interrupted, killed, disrupted, and thwarted by the lobbyist class because of how we fund our elections.
00:32:07.000But with that being aside, with putting that aside, specifically, what should be the message for conservatives in the next couple months for big tech and the next couple of years?
00:32:42.000And we have to, I think at this point, it's time to investigate Google and their practices and their algorithm to see whether or not it does discriminate against people based off of legitimate mainstream viewpoints, which I don't know what the laws would be on that, but it seems illegal.
00:32:58.000I know the attorney generals are cooking something up on Google on that front.
00:33:02.000I'm very curious to see where that goes.
00:33:04.000I think developing alternatives, funding alternatives is a big deal.
00:33:08.000Accepting money from these big tech giants is totally unacceptable.
00:33:12.000And every Republican who accepts money should get primaried.
00:33:15.000I'm not saying I want to throw all of them out.
00:33:17.000Some of them are going to be decent, and I'm just going to disagree with them on this issue.
00:33:20.000And I'll group them on nine out of 10 other issues.
00:33:22.000I'm a realist in this regard, Charlie.
00:33:24.000But you have to put pressure on these people.
00:33:26.000You should primary them and say that if you're taking money from the people who want to destroy your own voters' livelihoods online, that is not something we can tolerate.
00:33:54.000And you also brought up, you brought up a point that really was thought-provoking here in one sense, which is that the more we talk about it, the better, because that's what tech hates.
00:34:04.000Tech hates the fact that they're subpoenaed and that there's a light on them.
00:34:08.000We had somebody on the podcast, I can't even remember who you were talking to, where all of a sudden there was one thing and it got reversed as soon as they started talking about it.
00:34:14.000And it just kind of goes to show the power there.
00:34:18.000And also, I think there are some really interesting policy ideas.
00:34:21.000Dr. Robert Epstein, who you mentioned, he thinks that this can all be solved by making the Google algorithm public.
00:34:28.000I don't know if you've heard about that.
00:34:38.000I think that there's different buckets, and I think we're going to get better at talking about it as we move on.
00:34:44.000And I think that's just what happens in conservative circles is we kind of get a little bit surprised.
00:34:50.000And you and I were really well versed in this, but we have to kind of bring along some of these lawmakers on this.
00:34:55.000So I think you have to look at this in different buckets.
00:34:57.000I think you have to do the first bucket is platform access, freedom of speech, and capacity to be able to use the platform.
00:35:03.000Another bucket is: are you going to use the broader power of your platform to manipulate human behavior and human choices, which are actually a different thing?
00:35:11.000Because that's like search engine manipulation and all sorts of different stuff.
00:35:14.000Where the other one is, why can't I get a YouTube channel?
00:35:19.000Why are you taking down this video in particular and my content?
00:35:22.000Then the other bucket is: are you potentially thwarting potential other competition and other market, other entrepreneurs in the market that might want to compete against you?
00:35:31.000And so I think these are all just different buckets.
00:35:45.000The Apple News push notifications I get, I mean, I might as well be in Havana, Cuba.
00:35:51.000I mean, I've never seen a positive thing about my country push-notified me on Apple News.
00:35:56.000And it actually makes me sick to my stomach because I can only imagine the 15, 16, and 17-year-olds that get these push notifications in Apple News, the world that they think they live in, right?
00:36:04.000I mean, and again, I just did it as a test.
00:36:06.000I didn't go through the Apple News notification.
00:36:07.000I just said, just send me general news.
00:36:09.000And I get nothing but Huffington Post BuzzFeed NPR about how America's an awful place.
00:36:14.000So tell me how many iPhones you think there are in the United States at the moment.
00:36:20.000If I were to guess, I mean, 330 million people.
00:36:51.000I think you can if you go into the settings, you can put DuckDuckGo or something like that.
00:36:55.000But it's a very people who I got to tell you, I haven't changed it.
00:36:58.000So I know when I'm logging into my iPhone, that I'm getting sent Hoving to Post content and CNN and New York Times, and I'm not going to get Breitbart content.
00:37:07.000And this is exactly what keeps ideas like the ones you and I work so hard to hone and craft and to make reasonable and accessible.
00:37:15.000And no one even gets a chance to debate with us on this because unless you're already a fan or you've someone who personally turns you onto it, it's so hard to discover conservative thought at this point.
00:37:45.000It's a what Breitbart exposed was proof, hard proof that it has been connecting the dots from that meeting in 2016 to the dip in traffic, to the erasure of traffic on Joe Biden.