00:00:42.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:01:11.000You've rarely seen this kind of focus and commitment.
00:01:14.000Seriously, they recently shared with me that they are doubling down and want to literally double their number of total happy customers in the next year.
00:01:22.000If you're struggling with back, neck, shoulder, hip, or knee pain, or even general muscle aches and pain, then I'm suggesting you order their three-week quick start, still discounted only $19.95, about a dollar a day to see if we can get you out of pain.
00:02:14.000Tucker 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.
00:02:23.000Unconstrained by the Constitution, the tech monopolies became more powerful than the federal government.
00:02:28.000Strangely, this didn't seem to bother anyone in Washington except Josh Hawley.
00:02:33.000Let's hope his colleagues read this book.
00:02:37.000Well, 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.
00:02:45.000They're deciding what we can say to each other, what news we should consume.
00:02:48.000They're deciding how we ought to raise our families.
00:02:52.000We've got to stand up to these woke monopolies, these big tech monopolies that want to run our lives.
00:02:58.000And that's what the book is all about, how we can do that and why we should.
00:03:02.000So 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.
00:03:16.000And 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.
00:03:24.000But 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.
00:03:34.000What do you have to say to a lot of the naysayers?
00:03:37.000Because I'm sure you're getting plenty of feedback on this.
00:03:40.000Yeah, what I would say is that what we as conservatives believe about the free market is we believe in competition.
00:03:44.000That's what makes the free market free.
00:03:48.000What 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.
00:04:02.000I mean, that is a deadly scenario for any democracy and absolutely a deadly scenario for ours.
00:04:07.000So 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.
00:04:15.000This is a time to say, why should Facebook be able to buy up all of its competitors?
00:04:19.000Why should Facebook and Twitter, Google, Apple decide that Parlor, a competitor, should cease to exist in the space of 48 hours?
00:04:26.000Why should they have that kind of power?
00:04:30.000And 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.
00:04:49.000And 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.
00:04:55.000And so page 82, again, the title, The Tyranny of Big Tech.
00:05:00.000It'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.
00:05:13.000This is how citizens guide and control their government, by deliberating about what's good for them in common.
00:05:19.000James 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.
00:05:28.000So 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.
00:05:36.000And tech is getting in the way of that.
00:05:38.000And 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?
00:05:48.000Yeah, that's my concern right there, Charlie.
00:05:51.000I'm worried that the republic itself is in danger.
00:05:54.000And our founders, by the way, they foresaw this.
00:05:57.000Our 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.
00:06:06.000Aristocracy ruled by the elite, by the few.
00:06:08.000And our founders were dedicated opponents of aristocracy and oligarchy.
00:06:13.000And unfortunately, that's what we're seeing now with these tech companies.
00:06:16.000We're seeing a very few people in a very few companies with outsize economic power, outsize political power.
00:06:23.000And they want to use that both to shape our economy and also to control our politics.
00:06:28.000This is what we've got to fight back against.
00:06:30.000We've got to say that, listen, in this country, power should reside with the individual and families, with ordinary, everyday working people.
00:06:38.000That's who ought to control our government.
00:06:40.000That's who ought to control our society, not a handful of elitists, woke elitists in these corporations.
00:06:46.000So you were elected in 2018 and you defeated Claire McCaskill in a pretty resounding victory.
00:06:54.000And that was part of the transfer of government where the House of Representatives went from Republican to Democrat.
00:07:00.000In the years before that, Republicans controlled the House and the Senate and the presidency.
00:07:05.000And their big accomplishment was a corporate tax cut for the companies that actually hate us.
00:07:12.000And it seems for years you couldn't get Republicans to even mention this issue of tech.
00:07:18.000It's almost an inarguable fact that these companies are not just against our country, but against the Republican Party.
00:07:26.000Amongst 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?
00:07:40.000Are you seeing an increased appetite for that?
00:07:43.000I've seen a definite shift in the short two years I've spent in the Senate.
00:07:46.000When 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.
00:07:54.000And of course, the Democrats, they've really fallen in love with monopoly power.
00:08:01.000They want to use the power of these companies exactly to do what the First Amendment wouldn't allow government to do.
00:08:06.000But I think on the Republican side, folks are beginning to wake up partly because these companies have become so brazen.
00:08:13.000What 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.
00:08:24.000They deplatformed many other conservatives, censored conservatives.
00:08:28.000I mean, they are so brazen about this.
00:08:31.000I 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.
00:08:41.000Well, and so the founding fathers were always very concerned, as you said, about aristocracy or too much power in a small group of people.
00:08:48.000This is a different thing for conservatives, though.
00:08:50.000And I really want you to dive even deeper in this because we're almost trained never to criticize private companies, right?
00:08:57.000In 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?
00:09:07.000The think tank people and the pundits had always say, oh, no, no, no, the market will figure it out.
00:09:14.000It was almost part of the muscle memory of the conservative movement.
00:09:18.000Your 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.
00:09:30.000We want limited power regardless if it's in a corporation or in the government.
00:09:35.000Can you talk about how conservatives should be unafraid about criticizing private private companies, which they aren't even private companies?
00:09:44.000Because 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.
00:09:56.000I would start by going back to the American founders who understood this.
00:09:59.000You 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.
00:10:05.000I 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.
00:10:18.000And the reason was they were so concerned that the corporate form would turn into monopoly.
00:10:23.000They were so concerned about concentration of power in the economy.
00:10:27.000Our founders understood that anytime you have concentrated power in society, it will always, always convert itself into political power.
00:10:54.000We 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.
00:11:04.000That is concentrated economic power trying to leverage it to control our politics.
00:11:10.000So 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.
00:11:18.000And so we got to break up the monopolies and have real competition so that we can protect the people's liberty.
00:11:25.000It doesn't matter what your politics are or who you voted for.
00:11:28.000Everyone should have the right to express themselves freely.
00:11:31.000Sadly, the big tech monopoly has instead opted for censorship.
00:11:34.000To fight back against big tech's control of the internet, I use ExpressVPN.
00:11:38.000Free 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.
00:11:45.000When you use the ExpressVPN app on your computer or phone, you anonymize much of your online presence by hiding your IP address.
00:11:52.000That makes your activity much more difficult to trace and sell to advertisers.
00:11:55.000What's more, ExpressVPN encrypts 100% of your network's data to protect you from cyber criminals.
00:12:01.000And it just takes one click to protect all your devices.
00:12:03.000That's why ExpressVPN, that's right, ExpressVPN is rated number one by CNET and wired.
00:12:29.000And you articulate this wonderfully on page 134, right at the end of part two.
00:12:33.000The American founders advocated a political economy of republicanism to protect the rule of law of the common man.
00:12:40.000But this was a political economy of aristocracy, which you're talking about what's happening right now.
00:12:44.000You're referencing the FTC decision with Google.
00:12:47.000The tech barons wanted to control the economy, the media, news, and politics, all of it, remaking the nation in their image.
00:12:53.000As 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.
00:13:08.000Can you talk about that where we are now?
00:13:14.000And it seems that we know where these woke corporations stand.
00:13:19.000We know that they have a certain viewpoint.
00:13:21.000But 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.
00:13:31.000But 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.
00:13:58.000The government gave these companies a special immunity deal.
00:14:01.000That'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.
00:14:19.000That 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.
00:14:29.000So 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.
00:15:59.000Because they need to take as much information from us as they can.
00:16:03.000Our 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.
00:16:14.000They 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.
00:16:55.000So there are huge, huge costs to their business model.
00:16:59.000And that's even before we talk about censorship and political control.
00:17:03.000So 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.
00:17:15.000The basic business model, I think, is an affront to conservative principles about private property, about ownership of your control of your own information.
00:17:24.000And that's another thing we've got to challenge.
00:17:26.000So now I want to get into why nothing gets done on this topic.
00:17:31.000I 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.
00:17:46.000Can you talk about the lobbyist infantry that Google employs in Northern Virginia and Washington, D.C.?
00:17:55.000How Google learned from the Microsoft failures of the 90s?
00:18:00.000Remember, Microsoft came under all of this antitrust action, and Microsoft said, screw you, we're going to ignore you.
00:18:06.000And then they kind of had a couple years of difficulty.
00:18:38.000They'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.
00:18:48.000And 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.
00:19:16.000They've contributed to a lot of conservative groups.
00:19:18.000And 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?
00:19:26.000They 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.
00:19:53.000I 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.
00:20:20.000And 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.
00:20:31.000On our side, you're somehow violating the 10 commandments of free markets, which in reality, we're actually trying to preserve them.
00:20:37.000And I also, I don't love utilitarian arguments because they could be used for evil.
00:20:43.000But just from a pure utilitarian standpoint, we like markets because we like human beings and human flourishing.
00:20:50.000When 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.
00:21:03.000And 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.
00:21:14.000So I want to talk about where our voters are.
00:21:16.000So Senator, you're very smart because you actually listen to the people you represent.
00:21:20.000You 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.
00:21:29.000And all of a sudden they come in with their distribution center and we're supposed to believe this is economic growth.
00:21:34.000Amazon, I think, gets treated with kid gloves because a lot of the criticism from our side rightly goes towards Facebook and Google and Twitter.
00:21:41.000But 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.
00:21:53.000Do you include Amazon in a lot of this criticism?
00:21:56.000And can you talk about how that has impacted some of your voters' livelihoods or your citizens' livelihoods in Missouri?
00:22:01.000Yeah, I absolutely do include Amazon in this criticism.
00:22:04.000Amazon is one of these dominant platforms.
00:22:07.000If 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.
00:22:18.000I mean, listen, I grew up in a small town of about 4,800 people in rural Missouri called Lexington, Missouri.
00:22:24.000This is a place that subsisted on small local businesses, a farming community as well.
00:22:31.000So, 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?
00:22:38.000Where did I buy my cleats to play football?
00:24:15.000You know, it shouldn't be true because the choices that we make do have a difference in our lives.
00:24:19.000And 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.
00:24:25.000And 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.
00:24:32.000In other words, don't allow the digital platforms to colonize your life, to use your phrase, Charlie.
00:24:58.000Then I'm turning it off and I'm putting the phone down and I'm going to go do something with a real person.
00:25:04.000For families, you know, I've got two small boys at home and then a baby daughter.
00:25:08.000For our little boys, we don't allow them to have mobile devices or tablets or mobile platforms at all right now.
00:25:13.000And they're certainly not on social media.
00:25:16.000We 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.
00:25:29.000Now, every family's got to reach its own stasis there and figure out what's good for them.
00:25:33.000But what we can all do is say, listen, we're going to be in control of our family time, not big tech.
00:25:38.000We're going to make choices to raise our own kids, not big tech.
00:25:41.000And it's really great if you can partner with other people and other families.
00:25:45.000So with us and our kids, we found other like-minded families like, yeah, we don't want our kids online constantly either.
00:25:50.000Okay, 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.
00:25:58.000And it's just old-fashioned neighbors with neighbors.
00:26:00.000And I think the more we do that, the more we take back control from these tech companies.
00:26:08.000At 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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00:27:26.000I think that no one under the age of 18 should get a smartphone.
00:27:29.000I think they're destructive to our humanity.
00:27:31.000And 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.
00:27:42.000They bring in three and four-year-olds and they have devices of how to make them more chemically addictive.
00:27:49.000So, for example, a pharmaceutical company might try, they wonder, okay, is this drug going to have its desired effect?
00:27:59.000A hot sauce company like Cholula, they might wonder, is this sauce going to taste good?
00:28:03.000Facebook, they're wondering, is this app going to be addictive to a five-year-old?
00:28:08.000That is so perverse and wrong that they should have to have it.
00:28:20.000And then let's talk about breaking them up from a state level.
00:28:24.000So 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.
00:28:35.000If 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.
00:28:51.000Wouldn't that be an effective way to push back against them?
00:28:54.000It's time to start using political power.
00:28:56.000Why are conservatives afraid to use political power?
00:28:59.000I think because for a long time, we just, we haven't been alert to the problems.
00:29:02.000And 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.
00:29:10.000When that just isn't true, that just isn't true.
00:29:12.000And to your point, Charlie, we need to be for liberty above all, right?
00:29:15.000That's why we love the free market because it produces liberty because it gives people control of their government over their lives.
00:29:42.000Those 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.
00:29:52.000And so I think the more that states do, the better.
00:29:54.000But we also must not let the federal government off the hook.
00:29:56.000We'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.
00:30:07.000The federal government will have to break them up.
00:30:09.000And so we've got to keep that pressure up, especially on elected officials.
00:30:14.000So the book, again, is the tyranny of big tech.
00:30:16.000Senator, I want to ask you two more things.
00:30:18.000Number one, I want to thank you for your vote.
00:30:20.000I'm going to be one of the few talk show hosts that's going to thank you for this.
00:30:22.000But thank you for your vote on the Asian bill, the Asian hate crime bill, because it was so vague.
00:30:48.000I was a First Amendment lawyer, you know, so I take that really seriously.
00:30:51.000That 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.
00:32:31.000And 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.
00:32:44.000So in closing here, the Republican Party is changing and I think it's changing for the better.
00:32:50.000It's now a multiracial working class party that cares about the concerns of its voters and less about corporate donors.
00:32:57.000Can you just talk a little bit about how this tech issue is kind of part of a broader challenge of neoliberalism, right?
00:33:04.000Which is that maybe we shouldn't bring in 15 million people a year.
00:33:07.000Maybe our trade policies have been against the people of Missouri and Arkansas and West Virginia.
00:33:12.000Can 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?
00:33:21.000You 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.
00:33:32.000And what that says is we put the priorities of multinational business first and we don't really worry about working people.
00:33:39.000And if business wants to ship our jobs overseas, we're supposed to be in favor of that.
00:33:42.000If they want to open our borders and flood our markets with cheap labor, we're supposed to be in favor of that.
00:33:48.000If 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.
00:34:06.000We want to see real jobs brought here.
00:34:09.000We want to see good paying jobs here in this country.
00:34:11.000The Democrats answered all this, by the way, because the Democrats are also, of course, big-time globalists.
00:34:16.000Their answer is, let's have a global economy and we'll make up for it with socialism at home, right?
00:34:22.000So we won't really have any good jobs here anymore, but the government, that won't matter.
00:34:25.000The government expresses socialism at home, globalism abroad.
00:34:29.000Republicans need to say no to both of those things.
00:34:32.000You know, what we want is a strong America.
00:34:34.000We want an economy where working people can support themselves by the work of their own hands.
00:34:41.000To do that, Charlie, you got to be able to get a good job at a good wage in this country.
00:34:45.000And 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?
00:35:01.000No, we need policies that make American workers strong, that make American families strong, that make American communities strong.
00:35:07.000I'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.
00:35:21.000And they talked about how our farms are being taken over by big ag.
00:35:24.000They'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.
00:35:33.000And in some ways, those people are now Republicans and we represent the working class.
00:35:38.000The tyranny of big tech, it is the most important issue of our time.
00:35:42.000If 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.
00:35:52.000We must crush these companies for the betterment of humanity.
00:35:54.000Senator, thank you for your courage and for your time today.