The Charlie Kirk Show - Breaking the Back of the Big Tech Oligarchy with Senator Josh Hawley

00:00:00.000 On this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show, my conversation with Senator Josh Hawley.

00:00:00.000 Hey, everybody.

00:00:05.000 He's a terrific man, and we talk about breaking up big tech.

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00:00:21.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.

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00:01:42.000 Hey, everybody.

00:01:43.000 Welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.

00:01:45.000 With us today is one of the few men in Washington, D.C. with courage.

00:01:50.000 Senator Josh Hawley, author of the terrific new book, The Tyranny of Big Tech.

00:01:55.000 I'm going to plug it throughout our conversation.

00:01:57.000 Senator, thank you for joining us.

00:02:00.000 Thank you.

00:02:00.000 Thanks for having me.

00:02:01.000 So, Senator, you have been one of the most vocal members of Congress in regards to the issue of big tech.

00:02:09.000 You've been vocal on a lot of different things.

00:02:11.000 I want to talk to you about those as well.

00:02:12.000 But most importantly, big tech.

00:02:14.000 Tucker Carlson has a terrific kind of sentence of praise here that I want to read because I just thought it really captured what a lot of us are thinking.

00:02:23.000 Unconstrained by the Constitution, the tech monopolies became more powerful than the federal government.

00:02:28.000 Strangely, this didn't seem to bother anyone in Washington except Josh Hawley.

00:02:33.000 Let's hope his colleagues read this book.

00:02:35.000 Tell us why you wrote this book.

00:02:37.000 Well, it's because the power of monopoly, Charlie, has become so incredible that now these companies are deciding what counts as free speech in America.

00:02:45.000 They're deciding what we can say to each other, what news we should consume.

00:02:48.000 They're deciding how we ought to raise our families.

00:02:50.000 And it's time to put a stop to it.

00:02:52.000 We've got to stand up to these woke monopolies, these big tech monopolies that want to run our lives.

00:02:58.000 And that's what the book is all about, how we can do that and why we should.

00:03:02.000 So some people will say, for example, Steve Moore wrote a piece last week, you might have saw it or not, saying that you are on the progressive side on this, that the beauty of America is our ability to have massive merger and acquisitions.

00:03:16.000 And because you submitted a piece of legislation, I believe capping MNAs at $100 billion, if you're worth more than that, which I think is brilliant.

00:03:22.000 It's awesome.

00:03:24.000 But what do you have to say about this kind of doctrine in the conservative movement that, quite honestly, I used to espouse quite a lot because I was raised in a conservative movement that was dominated by libertarian literature.

00:03:34.000 What do you have to say to a lot of the naysayers?

00:03:37.000 Because I'm sure you're getting plenty of feedback on this.

00:03:40.000 Yeah, what I would say is that what we as conservatives believe about the free market is we believe in competition.

00:03:44.000 That's what makes the free market free.

00:03:46.000 We want to have robust competition.

00:03:48.000 What we don't want to see is a handful of companies guarding themselves, protecting themselves, insulating themselves from competition, from innovation, and then worse, turning around and using their market power to try to control our politics.

00:04:02.000 I mean, that is a deadly scenario for any democracy and absolutely a deadly scenario for ours.

00:04:07.000 So I would just say to my conservative and libertarian friends who believe in the free market as I do, this is a time to fight for competition.

00:04:15.000 This is a time to say, why should Facebook be able to buy up all of its competitors?

00:04:19.000 Why should Facebook and Twitter, Google, Apple decide that Parlor, a competitor, should cease to exist in the space of 48 hours?

00:04:26.000 Why should they have that kind of power?

00:04:28.000 The answer is they shouldn't.

00:04:30.000 And one of the reasons that we're seeing both a suppression of speech, but we're also seeing a slowdown in innovation, is because these monopoly companies have too much power and it's hurting competition.

00:04:40.000 It's hurting the free market.

00:04:41.000 Bottom line, competition and liberty go together.

00:04:45.000 Liberty and monopoly do not.

00:04:47.000 That is really well said.

00:04:49.000 And I'm going to ask another question there, but I want to read a part from your book because it's really, really, it's really terrific.

00:04:55.000 And so page 82, again, the title, The Tyranny of Big Tech.

00:05:00.000 It's a basic premise of small R Republican thinking, going at least as far back to Aristotle, that citizens in a free state must be able to reason together about their common needs and interests.

00:05:12.000 In other words, to deliberate.

00:05:13.000 This is how citizens guide and control their government, by deliberating about what's good for them in common.

00:05:19.000 James Madison followed this line of reasoning in his design of what became our Constitution with its distinct branches of government and mandated sharing of power between nation and states.

00:05:28.000 So you say here, in order for us human beings to actually be fully human, we must be able to express different ideas, to be able to communicate with one another.

00:05:36.000 And tech is getting in the way of that.

00:05:38.000 And so are we actually even able to have a republic when we have a small group of companies that are arguably more powerful than our own government?

00:05:48.000 Yeah, that's my concern right there, Charlie.

00:05:50.000 You just nailed it.

00:05:51.000 I'm worried that the republic itself is in danger.

00:05:54.000 And our founders, by the way, they foresaw this.

00:05:57.000 Our founders said the great enemy of a republic is aristocracy or oligarchy, if you like, which is just oligarchy, of course, is ruled by the wealthy few.

00:06:06.000 Aristocracy ruled by the elite, by the few.

00:06:08.000 And our founders were dedicated opponents of aristocracy and oligarchy.

00:06:13.000 And unfortunately, that's what we're seeing now with these tech companies.

00:06:16.000 We're seeing a very few people in a very few companies with outsize economic power, outsize political power.

00:06:23.000 And they want to use that both to shape our economy and also to control our politics.

00:06:28.000 This is what we've got to fight back against.

00:06:30.000 We've got to say that, listen, in this country, power should reside with the individual and families, with ordinary, everyday working people.

00:06:38.000 That's who ought to control our government.

00:06:40.000 That's who ought to control our society, not a handful of elitists, woke elitists in these corporations.

00:06:46.000 So you were elected in 2018 and you defeated Claire McCaskill in a pretty resounding victory.

00:06:54.000 And that was part of the transfer of government where the House of Representatives went from Republican to Democrat.

00:07:00.000 In the years before that, Republicans controlled the House and the Senate and the presidency.

00:07:05.000 And their big accomplishment was a corporate tax cut for the companies that actually hate us.

00:07:12.000 And it seems for years you couldn't get Republicans to even mention this issue of tech.

00:07:18.000 It's almost an inarguable fact that these companies are not just against our country, but against the Republican Party.

00:07:26.000 Amongst your colleagues in the Senate, are you seeing some Republicans start to be open around this idea of using political power given to us by the people to go after these companies that act as if they're sovereign nations?

00:07:40.000 Are you seeing an increased appetite for that?

00:07:42.000 You know, I am.

00:07:43.000 I've seen a definite shift in the short two years I've spent in the Senate.

00:07:46.000 When I first came to the Senate and I proposed legislation to take on tech, you know, to be honest with you, I couldn't find very many takers on the Republican side.

00:07:54.000 And of course, the Democrats, they've really fallen in love with monopoly power.

00:07:58.000 They want tech to censor even more.

00:07:58.000 Now they love it.

00:08:01.000 They want to use the power of these companies exactly to do what the First Amendment wouldn't allow government to do.

00:08:06.000 But I think on the Republican side, folks are beginning to wake up partly because these companies have become so brazen.

00:08:13.000 What they did with Hunter Biden during the last election, where they suppressed that news story for days and weeks on end, what they did in January, where they kicked President Trump off of all of the social media platforms.

00:08:24.000 They deplatformed many other conservatives, censored conservatives.

00:08:27.000 You've experienced this, Charlie.

00:08:28.000 I mean, they are so brazen about this.

00:08:31.000 I think conservative elected officials are finally waking up to what voters have known for years, which is that these companies are powerful, they are dangerous, and they are no friends to democracy.

00:08:41.000 Well, and so the founding fathers were always very concerned, as you said, about aristocracy or too much power in a small group of people.

00:08:48.000 This is a different thing for conservatives, though.

00:08:50.000 And I really want you to dive even deeper in this because we're almost trained never to criticize private companies, right?

00:08:57.000 In our upbringing in the conservative movement, 2011, 2012, when I was first getting turning point started, you know, there were certain things that you were not allowed to say, right?

00:09:07.000 The think tank people and the pundits had always say, oh, no, no, no, the market will figure it out.

00:09:12.000 Do not touch that.

00:09:13.000 Just cut their taxes.

00:09:14.000 It was almost part of the muscle memory of the conservative movement.

00:09:18.000 Your whole doctrine, which is phenomenal, and Tucker's been espousing this, and JD Vance, who's a friend who also endorsed your book, he's also been articulating this is, hold on a second, we should be against absolute power.

00:09:30.000 We want limited power regardless if it's in a corporation or in the government.

00:09:35.000 Can you talk about how conservatives should be unafraid about criticizing private private companies, which they aren't even private companies?

00:09:44.000 Because I think that's what's stopping us from actually getting momentous change, if that makes sense, because we're just so, it's so ingrained in our thinking that we're not allowed to criticize private corporations.

00:09:55.000 Yeah, absolutely.

00:09:56.000 I would start by going back to the American founders who understood this.

00:09:59.000 You know, there's a reason that the founders, first of all, were against monopoly, and they actually limited the corporate form back in the day.

00:10:05.000 I mean, you couldn't use the corporate form in America for the first really century, a little more than a century of our existence as a nation, unless you were a church or an educational institution or maybe for a public works project that the government oversaw.

00:10:18.000 And the reason was they were so concerned that the corporate form would turn into monopoly.

00:10:23.000 They were so concerned about concentration of power in the economy.

00:10:27.000 Our founders understood that anytime you have concentrated power in society, it will always, always convert itself into political power.

00:10:35.000 That's what aristocracies do.

00:10:37.000 You amass wealth, you amass influence, and then they start trying to run our lives and run our government.

00:10:42.000 And that's what these tech companies are doing.

00:10:45.000 They are economic monopolies, but they're trying to project their power into politics.

00:10:49.000 And we're witnessing it.

00:10:50.000 We saw it last fall during the election.

00:10:52.000 We saw it this January, February.

00:10:54.000 We see it now with the sports MLB, that these other make-it corporations trying to force Georgia and other states to back away from election integrity legislation.

00:11:04.000 That is concentrated economic power trying to leverage it to control our politics.

00:11:10.000 So I think we need, as conservatives, we need to recover the founders' understanding about monopoly and liberty, which is that they don't go together.

00:11:18.000 And so we got to break up the monopolies and have real competition so that we can protect the people's liberty.

00:11:25.000 It doesn't matter what your politics are or who you voted for.

00:11:28.000 Everyone should have the right to express themselves freely.

00:11:31.000 Sadly, the big tech monopoly has instead opted for censorship.

00:11:34.000 To fight back against big tech's control of the internet, I use ExpressVPN.

00:11:38.000 Free to access tech giants make all of their money by tracking your searches, video history, and everything you click on, then selling off your sensitive data.

00:11:45.000 When you use the ExpressVPN app on your computer or phone, you anonymize much of your online presence by hiding your IP address.

00:11:52.000 That makes your activity much more difficult to trace and sell to advertisers.

00:11:55.000 What's more, ExpressVPN encrypts 100% of your network's data to protect you from cyber criminals.

00:12:01.000 And it just takes one click to protect all your devices.

00:12:03.000 That's why ExpressVPN, that's right, ExpressVPN is rated number one by CNET and wired.

00:12:09.000 Revoke big tech's right to your data.

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00:12:29.000 And you articulate this wonderfully on page 134, right at the end of part two.

00:12:33.000 The American founders advocated a political economy of republicanism to protect the rule of law of the common man.

00:12:40.000 But this was a political economy of aristocracy, which you're talking about what's happening right now.

00:12:44.000 You're referencing the FTC decision with Google.

00:12:47.000 The tech barons wanted to control the economy, the media, news, and politics, all of it, remaking the nation in their image.

00:12:53.000 As for the Republic, that grand experiment in self-government by the common man and woman, that would fade away, recede into the mists of history, really well written, unobtrusively, quietly, such that no one would really notice, to be replaced once and all by a rule of the corporate elite.

00:13:08.000 Can you talk about that where we are now?

00:13:14.000 And it seems that we know where these woke corporations stand.

00:13:19.000 We know that they have a certain viewpoint.

00:13:21.000 But now talk about this in the economics terms, not just so you'll be able to get a lot of conservatives, for example, in the House Freedom Caucus, to agree with you on censorship, to agree with you even on Section 230.

00:13:31.000 But then, Senator, when you start to say, no, no, no, we got to break these companies up, all of a sudden then some Republicans are saying, no, no, we don't do that.

00:13:39.000 We just allow the market to operate.

00:13:41.000 Why is it that we now need to intervene?

00:13:44.000 Why is it we need an interventionist economic doctrine with these companies?

00:13:50.000 Well, first of all, these companies have gotten big and powerful and achieved monopoly status because of government's intervention.

00:13:55.000 Let's not kid ourselves.

00:13:56.000 This didn't just happen magically.

00:13:58.000 The government gave these companies a special immunity deal.

00:14:01.000 That's Section 230, whereby they could do what they do, collect all of the data they collect on us, take it without our consent, sell it without our permission, where they could engage in this manipulative advertising, which is their whole business model, and they could do all of that and not be challenged, not be taken to court, not be held accountable.

00:14:19.000 That subsidy has been worth billions and billions to these tech companies, and it's helped them to get gigantic, powerful, and ultimately to achieve monopoly status.

00:14:29.000 So here's what I would say is as Republicans: we have a history as a party of saying that we are pro-worker, we are pro-free market, and we're pro-competition.

00:14:38.000 Those things sit together.

00:14:40.000 What we are not in favor of is monopoly.

00:14:42.000 And we have a history of a party of breaking up monopolies.

00:14:44.000 And we need to recover that.

00:14:46.000 Part of the reason that we are pro-capitalism is because we're anti-monopoly.

00:14:50.000 Those things go together.

00:14:52.000 What happens with monopolies is that ultimately takes us down the road of corporatism.

00:14:56.000 That ultimately gets us to a place where we don't really have a functioning free market anymore.

00:15:00.000 We have a few companies that always make deals with the government.

00:15:03.000 So you get big government, big business working together, and you no longer have a robust, functioning free market.

00:15:10.000 So to preserve capitalism and the free market, we've got to break up monopolies.

00:15:15.000 That's what I would say to my conservative friends.

00:15:17.000 That's what I believe in.

00:15:18.000 I'm a pro-free market conservative.

00:15:20.000 And above all, I'm a pro-liberty conservative.

00:15:23.000 And that's why I'm anti-monopoly.

00:15:25.000 So let's talk about the actual human cost of this.

00:15:28.000 And you talk about this in specifics about a Missouri school.

00:15:32.000 I'm trying to find the exact page here.

00:15:34.000 I think it's around 64.

00:15:36.000 But you talk about how they're addicting America to these devices and to their algorithms.

00:15:41.000 Can you walk us through that?

00:15:42.000 Because there's also a human cost to all of this as well.

00:15:46.000 Tremendous human costs.

00:15:47.000 Their business model, these dominant platforms, and we're talking here about Twitter, we're talking about Facebook, Google, Apple.

00:15:53.000 Their dominant business model is built around addiction.

00:15:56.000 They want to addict us to their product.

00:15:58.000 Why?

00:15:59.000 Because they need to take as much information from us as they can.

00:16:03.000 Our personal information, our preferences, what websites we visit, what movies we watch, what news we consume, how long we linger over this ad versus that ad.

00:16:12.000 They track all of that.

00:16:14.000 They build giant dossiers on us individually, and then they use that personal data, that personal information, to try and sell us stuff or to try to encourage us to do this or not that, to manipulate us, essentially.

00:16:27.000 That's the business model.

00:16:29.000 To make it work, they've got to have us spend as much time as possible online.

00:16:33.000 And so this gets to the model of addiction, and the costs are huge.

00:16:36.000 I mean, you look at social media use.

00:16:38.000 It is correlated in teenagers, for instance, with higher rates of isolation, higher rates of depression, even higher rates of suicide.

00:16:46.000 You see similar things in adults where increased social media use is correlated at least with feelings of isolation and depression.

00:16:54.000 Also, productivity loss.

00:16:55.000 So there are huge, huge costs to their business model.

00:16:59.000 And that's even before we talk about censorship and political control.

00:17:03.000 So for all of these reasons, we've got to say, listen, we're not just going to let you take our private property, which is our personal data, without telling us, without our consent, without paying us, compensating us in some way.

00:17:15.000 The basic business model, I think, is an affront to conservative principles about private property, about ownership of your control of your own information.

00:17:24.000 And that's another thing we've got to challenge.

00:17:26.000 So now I want to get into why nothing gets done on this topic.

00:17:31.000 I want to get into a little bit more of a cynical chapter of this conversation, which is how powerful these tech companies are in Washington, D.C., how much money they spend on public affairs, how much Netpack contributes to Republicans and Democrats.

00:17:46.000 Can you talk about the lobbyist infantry that Google employs in Northern Virginia and Washington, D.C.?

00:17:55.000 How Google learned from the Microsoft failures of the 90s?

00:18:00.000 Remember, Microsoft came under all of this antitrust action, and Microsoft said, screw you, we're going to ignore you.

00:18:06.000 And then they kind of had a couple years of difficulty.

00:18:09.000 Bill Gates testifying didn't go well.

00:18:11.000 So Google said, ah, we're going to do it differently.

00:18:13.000 We're going to build a beautiful office.

00:18:15.000 We're going to employ former congressional staffers.

00:18:17.000 We're going to make all the correct contributions.

00:18:19.000 It'll cost us 30 to 40 million a year, but that'll be a rounding error for the federal government staying out of our business.

00:18:25.000 Can you talk about money and politics?

00:18:28.000 How these tech companies are directly involved in the process of legislation?

00:18:33.000 And dare I even say, regulation?

00:18:36.000 Yeah, absolutely.

00:18:37.000 Here's what they've done.

00:18:38.000 They've gone out and they have purchased influence with lobbyists, as you say, Charlie, but also with think tanks, with academics, with the whole sort of chattering class in Washington, D.C.

00:18:48.000 And they have entire infantry is really a good word, a whole phalanx of folks who are out there willing to say, oh, wait a minute, no, we can't interfere with these companies.

00:18:59.000 No, no, no, you mustn't.

00:19:00.000 You mustn't break them up.

00:19:01.000 No, no, no, no.

00:19:02.000 You mustn't say that they shouldn't censor speech.

00:19:05.000 It's important that they censor speech.

00:19:07.000 They have a whole echo chamber that they have built for themselves.

00:19:10.000 And that includes conservative groups and organizations.

00:19:13.000 I mean, Google has been smart.

00:19:14.000 Facebook has been smart.

00:19:16.000 They've contributed to a lot of conservative groups.

00:19:18.000 And so anytime you challenge their power, and I found this personally, when you challenge their power, you introduce a bill, for instance, to break them up, what happens?

00:19:26.000 They go and they turn on their chorus, and the chorus of folks paid by Google starts saying, oh my gosh, this is anti-free market.

00:19:35.000 Oh, my gosh, this is anti-capitalism.

00:19:37.000 You know, that's for the right.

00:19:38.000 On the left, they'll say, oh, my goodness, you know, This would empower extremist voices.

00:19:44.000 Whatever the talking point is that will keep Google in power, that will keep Facebook in power.

00:19:50.000 That's what they amplify.

00:19:51.000 And they're powerful.

00:19:53.000 I would say what I've observed on Capitol Hill, I don't think there are any more powerful lobbies in the town of Washington, D.C. than big tech.

00:20:02.000 I totally agree.

00:20:03.000 And so for conservatives, it used to be heretical to say that anything but libertarian economics is the greatest thing ever.

00:20:11.000 On the left, it's heretical to say anything but racial politics is the most important thing.

00:20:17.000 So Google knows this.

00:20:18.000 So they fund the appropriate groups. 0.86

00:20:20.000 And therefore, if you dare say that you're not going to put whatever tech policy they want on the left, then you're a racist and you're empowering the worst possible white identitarians.

00:20:31.000 On our side, you're somehow violating the 10 commandments of free markets, which in reality, we're actually trying to preserve them.

00:20:37.000 And I also, I don't love utilitarian arguments because they could be used for evil.

00:20:43.000 But just from a pure utilitarian standpoint, we like markets because we like human beings and human flourishing.

00:20:50.000 When we set up a system that doesn't help human beings and human flourishing, we shouldn't feel just indebted to have to, not indebted is not the right word, but we shouldn't feel obligated, that's the right word, to have to defend that sort of system.

00:21:03.000 And I think that a lot of Republicans and conservatives, they either don't understand where their voters are, which I want to talk to you about in a second, or they're being paid by these tech companies, or they're just not that interested in this issue.

00:21:14.000 So I want to talk about where our voters are.

00:21:16.000 So Senator, you're very smart because you actually listen to the people you represent.

00:21:20.000 You listen to the voters of Missouri who are telling you, hey, it's not a good thing that Amazon is coming in and destroying the small businesses.

00:21:29.000 And all of a sudden they come in with their distribution center and we're supposed to believe this is economic growth.

00:21:34.000 Amazon, I think, gets treated with kid gloves because a lot of the criticism from our side rightly goes towards Facebook and Google and Twitter.

00:21:41.000 But Amazon is more involved in, I think, of this economic decolonization of America where they're just taking out all of the meaningful work and replacing with piles of plastic.

00:21:53.000 Do you include Amazon in a lot of this criticism?

00:21:56.000 And can you talk about how that has impacted some of your voters' livelihoods or your citizens' livelihoods in Missouri?

00:22:01.000 Yeah, I absolutely do include Amazon in this criticism.

00:22:04.000 Amazon is one of these dominant platforms.

00:22:07.000 If you look at Amazon's attempt to control almost all e-commerce in America, as you referenced, Charlie, but really then to control more and more of the real economy to displace family businesses, for instance.

00:22:18.000 I mean, listen, I grew up in a small town of about 4,800 people in rural Missouri called Lexington, Missouri.

00:22:24.000 This is a place that subsisted on small local businesses, a farming community as well.

00:22:31.000 So, you know, this is for me, I lived that kind of a life where, you know, where do you go to buy your tennis shoes that you need to play sports?

00:22:38.000 Where did I buy my cleats to play football?

00:22:40.000 No, you went to the local store.

00:22:41.000 I mean, because there weren't any other options, but you went there, the local store.

00:22:44.000 We knew who ran it.

00:22:45.000 This was a family business.

00:22:46.000 Amazon's model is to destroy all of that.

00:22:49.000 It's to destroy the local stores. 0.68

00:22:51.000 It's to destroy the family businesses.

00:22:53.000 It's to replace them with Amazon Incorporated.

00:22:56.000 That's what they want to do. 0.79

00:22:58.000 And they want to use their monopoly power to do that.

00:23:00.000 And while they're at it, Charlie, they also want to buy up the cloud.

00:23:03.000 That's Amazon Web Services.

00:23:05.000 And they also want to buy up all the distribution network in America.

00:23:08.000 And of course, now grocery stores.

00:23:10.000 So Amazon basically wants to run our lives.

00:23:13.000 And I think what you're seeing is these companies, the other tech companies included, they basically want to control the American economy.

00:23:20.000 You know, they want to control our lives.

00:23:22.000 They want to control our speech.

00:23:23.000 And they want more and more of the real economy to be tethered to and directed by them, by the digital economy.

00:23:31.000 And ultimately, this is bad for jobs.

00:23:34.000 This is bad for the economic independence of working Americans.

00:23:38.000 And this is something I get into in the book.

00:23:40.000 So you talk about in part three, what people can do.

00:23:43.000 I actually haven't gotten that far, but what can people do?

00:23:46.000 Because I have the chapter opened.

00:23:48.000 Because a lot of people feel helpless outside of voting and buying a pillow on Fox News promo code Kirk.

00:23:55.000 They feel as if there's nothing that they can do.

00:23:58.000 What can someone do up against a trillion-dollar company, Senator?

00:24:01.000 You have these guys that have more power than Alexander the Great could have dreamed of.

00:24:07.000 And just local citizen in Joplin, Missouri, or in Des Moines, Iowa says, I don't even want to try.

00:24:14.000 Is that true?

00:24:15.000 You know, it shouldn't be true because the choices that we make do have a difference in our lives.

00:24:19.000 And I talk about in that part of the book, in my own experience as a husband, as a father, and just what we do in our family life.

00:24:25.000 And I think one of the things that my wife and I have found is it's important to live as much as your life away from these digital platforms as you can.

00:24:32.000 In other words, don't allow the digital platforms to colonize your life, to use your phrase, Charlie.

00:24:36.000 It's a good one.

00:24:37.000 Don't allow them to move in and control your family.

00:24:40.000 So how can we do that?

00:24:41.000 Number one, we can limit the amount of time we spend on the platforms.

00:24:44.000 We know their model is addiction.

00:24:46.000 We know they want us on the platforms constantly.

00:24:49.000 So don't do it.

00:24:50.000 Don't give in to that.

00:24:51.000 Say, okay, listen, if I've got to be on Google, I've got to be on Facebook for something.

00:24:54.000 I'm going to do it for this specific reason.

00:24:56.000 I'm going to limit my time.

00:24:58.000 Then I'm turning it off and I'm putting the phone down and I'm going to go do something with a real person.

00:25:04.000 For families, you know, I've got two small boys at home and then a baby daughter.

00:25:08.000 For our little boys, we don't allow them to have mobile devices or tablets or mobile platforms at all right now.

00:25:13.000 And they're certainly not on social media.

00:25:16.000 We are trying to make the effort to build the ecosystem of our family, if you like, where it's not dependent on any way on social media or on these devices because we want our kids to actually have the joy of having real interpersonal relationships.

00:25:29.000 Now, every family's got to reach its own stasis there and figure out what's good for them.

00:25:33.000 But what we can all do is say, listen, we're going to be in control of our family time, not big tech.

00:25:38.000 We're going to make choices to raise our own kids, not big tech.

00:25:41.000 And it's really great if you can partner with other people and other families.

00:25:45.000 So with us and our kids, we found other like-minded families like, yeah, we don't want our kids online constantly either.

00:25:50.000 Okay, so then you get them together and they play sports together and they go to the park together and they hang out together and you begin to build this community.

00:25:58.000 And it's just old-fashioned neighbors with neighbors.

00:26:00.000 And I think the more we do that, the more we take back control from these tech companies.

00:26:05.000 That's number one.

00:26:06.000 Number two, we got to break them up.

00:26:08.000 At the political level, voters have to demand real action, not just talk, not just hearings, but real action to break these companies up.

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00:27:21.000 I totally agree.

00:27:22.000 And I'm somewhat of a radical on the device thing.

00:27:24.000 I've been speaking out about it.

00:27:26.000 I think that no one under the age of 18 should get a smartphone.

00:27:29.000 I think they're destructive to our humanity.

00:27:31.000 And when you see that Apple and Google and Facebook has combined thousands of well-paid neuroscientists that work for them, that treat your children like lab rats.

00:27:42.000 They bring in three and four-year-olds and they have devices of how to make them more chemically addictive.

00:27:49.000 So, for example, a pharmaceutical company might try, they wonder, okay, is this drug going to have its desired effect?

00:27:59.000 A hot sauce company like Cholula, they might wonder, is this sauce going to taste good?

00:28:03.000 Facebook, they're wondering, is this app going to be addictive to a five-year-old?

00:28:08.000 That is so perverse and wrong that they should have to have it.

00:28:12.000 They should have to pay for that.

00:28:14.000 The same way that Purdue should have to pay for OxyCotton, they should have to pay for that.

00:28:19.000 And so I totally agree.

00:28:20.000 And then let's talk about breaking them up from a state level.

00:28:24.000 So it's my opinion that that's where a lot of the action needs to happen, where these states need to kind of consolidate their support, a coalition of 15 states outside of the lawsuits, outside of the attorney general stuff.

00:28:35.000 If 10 conservative states like North Dakota, not going to happen there because that government, that governor is a tech governor, maybe South Dakota, Florida, Oklahoma, Alabama, they said, okay, we are going to fine you $2 million a day if you don't meet this list of demands you're never going to meet.

00:28:51.000 Wouldn't that be an effective way to push back against them?

00:28:54.000 It's time to start using political power.

00:28:56.000 Why are conservatives afraid to use political power?

00:28:59.000 I think because for a long time, we just, we haven't been alert to the problems.

00:29:02.000 And I think we've bought into this idea that anything that currently, any company that exists out there must be the product of the free market.

00:29:10.000 When that just isn't true, that just isn't true.

00:29:12.000 And to your point, Charlie, we need to be for liberty above all, right?

00:29:15.000 That's why we love the free market because it produces liberty because it gives people control of their government over their lives.

00:29:21.000 That's what we need to be for.

00:29:22.000 And competition is the way to get there.

00:29:24.000 I love that idea about encouraging states to actually use the authority that they have.

00:29:29.000 As Attorney General, Missouri, that's the job I did before I ran for the Senate.

00:29:33.000 You know, that's why I launched investigations of Facebook and Google for antitrust violations.

00:29:38.000 We also have really strong consumer protection laws in Missouri.

00:29:41.000 A lot of states do.

00:29:42.000 Those can be used to hold these companies accountable and to go after their practices of like data collection, their practices of addiction, the things that are ruining people's lives.

00:29:52.000 And so I think the more that states do, the better.

00:29:54.000 But we also must not let the federal government off the hook.

00:29:56.000 We've got to press relentlessly because ultimately, at the national level, the only way from an antitrust perspective to make this truly uniform and effective is the federal government will have to act.

00:30:07.000 The federal government will have to break them up.

00:30:09.000 And so we've got to keep that pressure up, especially on elected officials.

00:30:14.000 So the book, again, is the tyranny of big tech.

00:30:16.000 Senator, I want to ask you two more things.

00:30:18.000 Number one, I want to thank you for your vote.

00:30:20.000 I'm going to be one of the few talk show hosts that's going to thank you for this.

00:30:22.000 But thank you for your vote on the Asian bill, the Asian hate crime bill, because it was so vague.

00:30:28.000 It was so nonspecific. 0.67

00:30:30.000 And it was just a virtue signaling vote.

00:30:32.000 It's all that it was.

00:30:33.000 Can you talk about that, please?

00:30:35.000 Because you obviously came under fire.

00:30:38.000 You're actually going to be thanked here, unlike most programs that are going to try to attack.

00:30:42.000 Talk about that, please.

00:30:44.000 Yeah, to me, that was a free speech vote.

00:30:46.000 I mean, I believe in free speech.

00:30:47.000 I believe in the First Amendment.

00:30:48.000 I was a First Amendment lawyer, you know, so I take that really seriously.

00:30:51.000 That problem with that bill is Section 4 of that bill gives to the federal government, the Department of Justice, the ability to define what is offensive speech and then to track it and to monitor it and to collect it and to help the states and local governments do the same.

00:31:06.000 I'm against that.

00:31:07.000 Hate crimes, that's one thing, but that's not what we're talking about here.

00:31:11.000 We're not talking about a crime.

00:31:12.000 We're talking about speech.

00:31:13.000 The bill calls it hate incidents.

00:31:15.000 And it says the federal government can define what counts as that.

00:31:18.000 I think that is extremely dangerous.

00:31:21.000 We have been down this road before.

00:31:23.000 Look at the Patriot Act where we gave the government all kinds of power over speech, over Americans.

00:31:28.000 It was supposed to be temporary, right?

00:31:30.000 It was supposed to sunset, never did.

00:31:32.000 Here we're still dealing with it now.

00:31:34.000 So I just can't in good conscience vote to give the government more power to define what counts as good speech or bad speech.

00:31:40.000 Yeah, and I was disappointed that more senators didn't vote with you.

00:31:43.000 So, I mean, I call the virus the Chinese coronavirus.

00:31:46.000 Is that now a hateful incident, according to the Department of Justice?

00:31:49.000 Might well be.

00:31:50.000 Yeah, it might well be.

00:31:51.000 I mean, that's exactly, Charlie, what was in the sights of this bill.

00:31:53.000 I mean, this is why it was initially introduced.

00:31:55.000 Senator Hirono, Democratic senator, it was her bill.

00:31:58.000 And she explicitly said that using terms like that is racist.

00:32:02.000 And that's the whole point of the bill is to try and ban the use of those terms.

00:32:06.000 And, you know, again, to give DOJ the power to say, well, this is a hate incident now because you used offensive speech.

00:32:13.000 And we're going to track that and we're going to build a database on that.

00:32:17.000 I just think that is really dangerous stuff.

00:32:19.000 Well, it'll eventually lead to some form of prosecution of speech, inevitably.

00:32:24.000 They don't make lists for therapeutic reasons at the Department of Justice.

00:32:28.000 They make lists for action.

00:32:31.000 And that's something that I just want to thank you for because those are the tough votes where you can really see what someone's made out of because it's a pure virtue signaling vote that no one wants to get the criticism and you actually did the right thing there.

00:32:44.000 So in closing here, the Republican Party is changing and I think it's changing for the better. 0.74

00:32:50.000 It's now a multiracial working class party that cares about the concerns of its voters and less about corporate donors.

00:32:57.000 Can you just talk a little bit about how this tech issue is kind of part of a broader challenge of neoliberalism, right?

00:33:04.000 Which is that maybe we shouldn't bring in 15 million people a year.

00:33:07.000 Maybe our trade policies have been against the people of Missouri and Arkansas and West Virginia.

00:33:12.000 Can you talk about the direction of the party and how you want to play a role in that and what voters should demand out of their leaders, most importantly?

00:33:21.000 You know, I think that the party in the last 30 or 40 years has gotten caught up in what was a bipartisan consensus and basically in favor of liberal globalism.

00:33:29.000 That's what neoliberalism really is.

00:33:31.000 It's liberal globalism.

00:33:32.000 And what that says is we put the priorities of multinational business first and we don't really worry about working people.

00:33:39.000 And if business wants to ship our jobs overseas, we're supposed to be in favor of that.

00:33:42.000 If they want to open our borders and flood our markets with cheap labor, we're supposed to be in favor of that.

00:33:48.000 If they want to use forced labor and exploited labor overseas to compete with our free labor at home, we're supposed to be in favor of that.

00:33:56.000 Voters have had enough of that.

00:33:58.000 They said, no, We don't want any of that.

00:34:00.000 We don't believe in any of that.

00:34:02.000 We believe actually in a strong national economy.

00:34:05.000 We want to invest here.

00:34:06.000 We want to see real jobs brought here.

00:34:09.000 We want to see good paying jobs here in this country.

00:34:11.000 The Democrats answered all this, by the way, because the Democrats are also, of course, big-time globalists.

00:34:16.000 Their answer is, let's have a global economy and we'll make up for it with socialism at home, right?

00:34:22.000 So we won't really have any good jobs here anymore, but the government, that won't matter.

00:34:25.000 The government expresses socialism at home, globalism abroad.

00:34:29.000 Republicans need to say no to both of those things.

00:34:32.000 You know, what we want is a strong America.

00:34:34.000 We want an economy where working people can support themselves by the work of their own hands.

00:34:41.000 To do that, Charlie, you got to be able to get a good job at a good wage in this country.

00:34:45.000 And I think that's why you see Republicans rethinking some of the economic dogma of the last 30 and 40 years and saying, why should we be in favor of trade policies that sell out our workers in favor of forced labor in China?

00:34:59.000 Why should we be in favor of that?

00:35:01.000 No, we need policies that make American workers strong, that make American families strong, that make American communities strong.

00:35:07.000 I'm chuckling because growing up, it was the Democrats that used to actually argue for this, at least some of them, not the neoliberal Democrats, but the Bernie Sanders types, the people that used to ride the bikes in my communities and scream about how we have too many people coming into America.

00:35:21.000 And they talked about how our farms are being taken over by big ag.

00:35:24.000 They're actually kind of right, kind of all these whack jobs that used to ride through my neighborhood and scream about all this stuff, because there was a global agenda that was setting in.

00:35:33.000 And in some ways, those people are now Republicans and we represent the working class.

00:35:37.000 But anyway, I digress from that.

00:35:38.000 The tyranny of big tech, it is the most important issue of our time.

00:35:42.000 If we do not challenge these companies, we will all live in a weird mixture of brave new world and 1984, where we're going to pursue pleasure and not virtue, and there will be no liberty.

00:35:52.000 We must crush these companies for the betterment of humanity.

00:35:54.000 Senator, thank you for your courage and for your time today.

00:35:57.000 Thanks for having me.

00:36:00.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.

00:36:02.000 Email us your thoughts, freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:36:05.000 And if you want to get involved with Turning Point USA, go to tpusa.com.

00:36:08.000 God bless you guys.

00:36:09.000 Speak to you soon.

00:36:13.000 For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk. com.

The Charlie Kirk Show - May 11, 2021

Breaking the Back of the Big Tech Oligarchy with Senator Josh Hawley

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