00:00:08.000Today on the Charlie Kirk Show, should people support Buy American?
00:00:13.000I dive into that and also a Washington Post swing and miss at Turning Point Action.
00:00:18.000Please email us your questions: freedom at CharlieKirk.com, freedom at CharlieKirk.com.
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00:01:10.000His 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.
00:01:18.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:01:38.000I pulled open my computer very early this morning and flipped open my news consumption.
00:01:46.000And I saw that an article the Washington Post did on our political vehicle, Turning Point Action, was on the front page of Drudge.
00:01:51.000Now, I don't necessarily go to Drudge anymore, not exactly my favorite website.
00:01:55.000I think it's gone very far to the left.
00:01:57.000I prefer realclearpolitics.com and also Revolver News, amongst other news aggregating websites.
00:02:04.000And I saw this article that the Washington Post did on us at Turning Point Action was traveling and kind of going viral, which was really perplexing to me.
00:02:11.000And if you read this article in the Washington Post, it's such an incredible nothing story.
00:02:16.000And it was about 1,300 or 1,600 words.
00:02:20.000And this reporter went out of his way to try to paint a picture that those of us at Turning Point Action are trying to misrepresent things on the internet.
00:02:30.000So just very clearly, at Turning Point Action, our 501c4 organization, we run a digital war room with volunteers and also paid staffers to help put forth positive messaging on the president and also put out facts about Joe Biden's record.
00:02:49.000Anyone who's worked in politics before knows that this is very run of the mill.
00:02:53.000It's not anything out of the ordinary.
00:02:55.000Yet the Washington Post decided, for whatever reason, that this warranted a very big story.
00:03:01.000And then Drudge Report put on the front page of their website.
00:03:04.000Breitbart.com, Alam Bukhari, and you guys heard him on our podcast, did a phenomenal counterpiece to this.
00:03:11.000His piece was terrific, where, and unfortunately, because of the Washington Post's, let's just say, overzealousness going after turning point action and the work that we are doing.
00:03:24.000Now, mind you, the Washington Post went out of their way to try and contact these social media companies to misrepresent the activity that we were doing, which is really nothing more than a digital war room or influencer marketing.
00:03:36.000Because of this, real life teenagers that were using their real accounts that love the president had their accounts suspended and banned from social media.
00:03:44.000This article from Breitbart is a great counter to the Washington Post's attempted hit job on turning point action, which ended up being one of the biggest swings and misses of the activist journalist landscape that I've seen in recent memory that said, Washington Post compares pro-Trump teenagers to Russian trolls, gets them banned from social media.
00:04:03.000And he said it best here: Alam Bukhari said, conservative digital activists were smeared as behaving like, quote, Russian trolls by a recent article in the Washington Post.
00:04:12.000The writer also made sure to reach out to both Twitter and Facebook to get the teenage activists banned.
00:04:17.000Alum continues by going through the actual names and faces and stories of these teenagers that were doing nothing more than engaging in a volunteer network with some paid people as well in a activist mindset on the digital landscape.
00:04:33.000And one of the activists, Paige Noonan, said the Washington Post completely misrepresented their behavior and misrepresented comments made to the newspaper by her father.
00:04:42.000Quote, I don't know why they put the article there.
00:04:46.000She also continued to say, It's sick that the Washington Post and Twitter are working together to take away my right to free speech because she, a teenager, now is completely kicked off of social media because the Washington Post, in bloodthirsty fashion, saw this story where they were trying to attack turning point action and the work we are doing to elect the president of the United States, and they wanted to personally destroy anyone who is remotely associated.
00:05:12.000You go through, and Alam does a great job of this on his article on Breitbart.com of the job postings on Democrats that are trying to do the exact same thing that we were doing.
00:05:24.000The Texas Democrat Party is currently advertising for a deputy digital organizing director who will recruit and manage an in-state volunteer digital captains program to develop, curate, and distribute grassroots-generated content in support of Democrats up and down the ticket.
00:05:39.000The South Carolina Democrat is currently recruiting a digital organizing manager.
00:05:43.000The Kansas Democrat Party, it wants someone who will take care of personally executing voter contact through what?
00:05:49.000Engaging digitally, phone calls, and texting.
00:05:52.000So, what we were doing because of the shutdown and the virus is we put our staffers and we put our grassroots organizers online to go contend for the president's re-election on the digital landscape.
00:06:03.000For the Washington Post, they find such great exception for this.
00:06:06.000The Washington Post, for whatever reason, they are very triggered and they're very upset that there might actually be a grassroots groundswell and a concerted effort to try to get this president re-elected on the digital landscape.
00:06:24.000So, it's been a fun 24 hours dealing with the fallout of continually being on the front page of Drudge and Washington Post, but that's all part of the program.
00:06:31.000And all of you out there, you know exactly the price that is built into this fight.
00:06:36.000You know that if you are going to go above and beyond to try to support this president, you're going to continue to have activist members of the media go out of their way, try to misrepresent your positions and try to find something that isn't there.
00:06:47.000By the way, by the way, you go a level deeper.
00:06:51.000The Democrats are doing exactly this all the time.
00:06:53.000The Democrats have professional operations that engage in kind of digital activism and do things that are multiples more newsworthy than anything that we are doing.
00:07:07.000For example, they have actual activist campaigns that try to harass and try to go after people they disagree with.
00:07:13.000That's what the Democrats are funding.
00:07:15.000In fact, there's job positions for it.
00:07:16.000So I want to thank Alan Bakari from Breitbart.com for defending us and for defending Turning Point Action, our political vehicle.
00:07:24.000And when you are being attacked by the Washington Post and the New York Times, that's how you know you are doing an effective job.
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00:09:02.000Andrew Wilford, at the end of the article, identifies himself as a policy analyst with the National Taxpayer Union Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to tax policy, research, and education at all levels of government.
00:09:15.000There are plenty of differences to be found between Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
00:09:19.000But on one issue, at least they speak with one voice.
00:09:22.000Of course, on that issue, so-called buy American regulations, and they're both wrong.
00:09:27.000So President Trump has long said that buy American, high American is a cornerstone of his domestic policy from day one.
00:09:34.000Joe Biden, who of course plays follow the leader, that's what he does, he saw the effectiveness of that and rolled out his own $700 billion plus buy American campaign in early June of this year.
00:09:45.000But Andrew Wilford, who's a policy analyst with the National Taxpayer Union Foundation, thinks that they're wrong because we want products made in our country.
00:09:56.000While President Trump signed a 2017 tax reform law, which encouraged foreign income repatriation and headquartering in the United States, he has also curtailed foreign trade in many harmful ways.
00:10:06.000Import taxes on American consumers have more than doubled under President Trump, costing the average American household $555 a year.
00:10:13.000Well, never mind that President Trump signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which saved an average American family $2,000 a year by government estimations.
00:10:23.000And the repatriation of jobs from overseas, spurred by the 2017 law, have helped establish record low unemployment across the country.
00:10:31.000And according to Bloomberg, it said U.S. companies repatriated cash hit $1 trillion under the tax law as the end of 2019.
00:10:39.000But then he goes deeper into why he thinks things should not be made in this country.
00:10:45.000Now, under doctrinaire and dogmatic Austrian economics, which I can resonate a little bit with when it comes to monetary policy and some other things, you would say that you never want any tariffs and you would want to have the most amount of comparative advantage possible.
00:11:02.000Now, in a lot of different ways, I take exception with this.
00:11:05.000I used to believe that, oh yeah, why wouldn't we want to have cheaper labor markets in Southeast Asia?
00:11:13.000And then I look at the landscape of this country.
00:11:16.000I go to places like Hamilton, Montana, or Columbus, Ohio, or Charleston, West Virginia.
00:11:23.000And I drive by countless factories that were once flourishing, endless amounts of businesses that have closed.
00:11:34.000And I asked myself the question, where is the breaking point where all of a sudden the amount of manufacturing decay that you have in your country has resulted in a permanent underclass of people that are either addicted to opioids, in a state of depression, or go to government assistance.
00:11:53.000And then if they go to government assistance, it'll only mean that we have to raise our taxes in the future to help pay for the welfare state for the people that were once gainfully employed.
00:12:02.000So while, yeah, it might be that we might have to pay a little bit more for a sweatshirt or a little bit more for a pair of sneakers or a little bit more for a backpack.
00:12:11.000What about the total cost for the society and the culture?
00:12:14.000And some people would say, such as Andrew Wilford, seems like a nice guy, I'd be happy to talk to him.
00:12:19.000He says that we at all costs must try to bring down the cost of production.
00:12:28.000This is a predominant think tank mentality that in some ways has plagued our government for decades, namely on the right.
00:12:37.000He continues by saying, on this issue, neither Canada has the right vision for a productive American economy.
00:12:44.000I'd be very interested in hearing from Andrew how unproductive the American economy was prior to the Chinese coronavirus.
00:12:51.000I think the author knows that answer, but he doesn't want to talk about it.
00:12:56.000This article feels as if it was influenced or written on behalf of corporate interests.
00:13:02.000Corporate interests, I quite honestly are okay with the 12 million manufacturing jobs that were shipped overseas.
00:13:09.000And it's not just the jobs themselves.
00:13:12.000It is the churches in those communities that then see declining tithes.
00:13:16.000It is the schools that see a declining tax base.
00:13:19.000It is the small business owner on the side of the street, the restaurant, the laundromat.
00:13:23.000It is the soul of these communities that fall within the weight of themselves.
00:13:30.000We've talked about this before on our program where we're trying to pick apart what is driving the arson and the unrest happening in our country.
00:13:38.000Why are we seeing the repeated cycles of destruction?
00:13:55.000One of the main reasons why young people are taking to the streets is they're not building equity.
00:14:01.000Because when they're 27, their life looks the same when they're 32 or they're 37.
00:14:08.000In fact, despite working hard and playing by the rules, they actually don't see their lives get materially or incrementally better.
00:14:18.000A lot of the hyper-urbanization push in our country is because middle America, rural America, that used to have communities that were 20,000 to 30,000 people.
00:14:29.000We used to have communities like that all across the country, went from 20,000 people to 8,000 people.
00:14:38.000They started to verticalize their lifestyle.
00:14:41.000They stopped thinking about owning land or preserving a specific cultural identity.
00:14:48.000They stopped focusing or looking at supporting the small business owner on the side of the street or the local coffee shop and said they go shop at Starbucks.
00:14:58.000Now, mind you, I'm all for the efficiency of Starbucks.
00:15:01.000I think it's a good thing that you're able to order coffee 10 minutes down the street and have it waiting for you.
00:15:06.000I think that free market, innovation, and enterprise is a very beautiful thing.
00:15:13.000However, when it becomes so hyper-corporatized, where the only thing that we care about is the optimal level of productivity, and you don't care about wages, you don't care about family formation, when you don't care about living a quiet and peaceable life, I think that balance is extremely important.
00:15:31.000Especially, and I encourage all of you to do this.
00:15:33.000If you live in a major city, go take a drive from your major city on a major interstate and just take an exit.
00:15:40.000Take an exit where you have bad sell service.
00:15:44.000It might be through Nebraska, might be South Dakota, Iowa, Virginia, and go 20 miles off the grid and go to these cities.
00:15:52.000These cities that tend to be 10 to 15 miles apart for a reason, because that used to be the half-day capacity of transporting grain or goods on horseback.
00:16:04.000There's a reason why it's almost laid out in a grid fashion in that part of the country.
00:16:33.000And so our addiction to cheap plastic products from China and a complete betrayal of any sort of buy American economic position has resulted in a middle class that is quickly disappearing.
00:16:50.000He continues in this article by saying, quote, Trump has flirted with Buy America rules, specifically targeting medical supplies, a potentially disastrous idea in the midst of a pandemic.
00:17:01.000While a strong domestic industry prepared to manufacture medical supplies is a laudable goal, the American economy has already gone into overdrive producing all kinds of pandemic supplies, restricting supplies from other countries that only reduce Americans' access to these products.
00:17:16.000This is just parsing out a positive response to a pandemic to find a narrative suiting negative.
00:17:24.000So explain to me, Andrew Wilford from the National Taxpayer Union Foundation, I'd love to talk to you.
00:17:30.000Why would it be a bad thing if we made vitamin C in our country?
00:17:34.000Why wouldn't it be a good thing if all of a sudden we made penicillin again in our country?
00:17:38.000Why do we need to wait for China to ship us Advil?
00:17:42.000Why was it a good thing that we weren't making personal protection equipment here?
00:17:46.000Why should other countries dominate our manufacturing base?
00:17:50.000See, for Andrew, and this is the way he views the world and many other corporate Republican types, the only thing they care about is the optimal comparative advantage and the profit at the end of the transaction.
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00:24:48.000So while it might be a foreign company, they're making it here.
00:24:53.000So every time I see a pickup truck, I know that an American family is eating tonight because that truck is on the road, even if it's a Nissan, even if it's a Toyota.
00:25:03.000And that's just one of the successful tariffs that we've put on the books.
00:25:07.000And I say this as a free market person, but I'm a patriot before I'm a capitalist.
00:25:12.000And so insofar that there is just this dogmatic repulsion to say that we can't have any form of recalibration of trade, I say prove it.
00:25:25.000Andrew Wilford in this article, who's just basically a mouthpiece and in a lot of different ways, articulating the corporate mindset that dominated the Republican Party, that quite honestly, I, for quite some time, parroted before I actually drove the middle part of this country and realized and recognized that piles full of plastic and garbage coming from China and coming from Vietnam are not making our country any wealthier.
00:25:55.000In fact, there's also, there's other metrics that we should judge successful in our country, such as can middle-class families pay their medical bills?
00:26:02.000Can middle-class families educate their children without having to go into debt?
00:26:05.000Can middle-class families afford to go on two vacations a year?
00:26:09.000In 1985, it took 35 weeks of work for a family of four to be able to sustain itself.
00:26:15.000Now, it takes 53 weeks of work, which forces the woman to go into the workforce.
00:26:21.000Now, that's not necessarily a bad thing.
00:26:23.000If women want to go into the workforce, that's a terrific thing.
00:26:37.000I don't care how many toys and gadgets that you can get for your children that you end up putting in your garage and begging people to take it away from you.
00:26:46.000I would much rather have American-made products and less of them that cost more than piles of stuff made in China that I have no connection to whatsoever that was made unethically and at the cost of the strength and the backbone of our country.
00:27:06.000I think it's a good thing that President Trump has brought back steel production to our country.
00:27:10.000I think it's a good thing that he wants to make us the drugstore of the world.
00:27:13.000I think it's a good thing that we are seeing a renaissance of manufacturing be restored back in our country.
00:27:19.000We, as the third largest country on the planet, as the wealthiest country on the planet for now, have the intellectual capacity, the entrepreneurial grit, the access to capital markets, and an incredible future ahead of us.
00:27:36.000Quite honestly, we should be the export capital of the world, where our country is looked to for critical infrastructure.
00:27:46.000Any country that does not have a stable manufacturing base will not also have a middle class.
00:27:52.000And President Trump knew this instinctively.
00:27:56.000When running a business, HR issues can kill you.
00:28:46.000Spelled bam to the BEE.com slash Kirk.
00:28:52.000Andrew continues in his article by saying, quote, in the face of such policy, Trump's tax policy that brought American businesses home, Biden's approach would go right back to the old system.
00:29:01.000But worse, not only would he return to a worldwide system of taxing income from foreign assets, but he would charge a 10% offshoring surtax.
00:29:09.000So at least this article is fair and it's not a pro-Biden article.
00:29:12.000Give him credit for that because Biden's tax policy is a complete and total disaster.
00:29:16.000Tax policy should always benefit the country of which the tax policy is being created in, which is low taxes, incentivizing American investment, and also making middle-class families' lives easier.
00:29:51.000But you also need to incentivize through trade and prioritize middle-class workers.
00:29:58.000I would much rather see 500,000 more American middle-class workers find meaningful work than 500,000 people in some other country find work.
00:30:09.000That is doing good by the citizens that elected you.
00:30:12.000That is the mandate that you have as an elected leader in our country.
00:30:17.000And so to go back to the top of the article, it says, both candidates support by American, both are wrong.
00:30:25.000When I see Made in America, I know that an American patriot and that family is eating tonight.
00:30:34.000There are plenty of struggling families out there that do not have work because we ship the jobs overseas that have lots of stuff.
00:30:42.000And if you asked them, would you get rid of the piles of plastic, the endless amounts of textiles that you bought from Walmart for a meaningful job, they would say yes in an instant.
00:30:55.000So when you ship careers overseas, you ship dreams overseas.
00:31:00.000And there's a direct connection to the rise in the suicide rates, alcoholism, opioid addiction, and the lack of religiosity in our country when that form of professional expression evaporates.
00:31:18.000Buy American is not just admirable, it's moral.
00:31:22.000The rest of the world should be forced to make products here in this country.
00:31:32.000Churches will have record amounts of tithes.
00:31:35.000And the socialist movements that are catching fire in our country because of the corporatist mindset that Andrew Wilford is articulating will be quelled.
00:31:48.000Under Andrew Wilford's world of no tariffs, appeasing corporate interests, and nothing made in this country, you will become a socialist country very quickly.
00:32:00.000Socialism is easily sold to people out of work and people who have seen their lives destroyed, like most of Middle America and lots of young people.
00:32:13.000The solution is to say we want entrepreneurs to invest in our country.
00:32:20.000We are not a small Western European country with just 15 million people.
00:32:24.000We have access to capital, energy, and talent, the three things you need to succeed.
00:32:30.000In a lot of different ways, the trade that we have done with these third world markets may have benefited us in the Ricardo law of comparative advantage.
00:33:00.000How about the manufacturing plants that once existed in Baltimore that were shipped overseas and the black community that was impacted?
00:33:07.000But according to the National Taxpayer Union Foundation, they think that's okay.
00:33:10.000They think, no, it's great because then all the black families in Baltimore can get sweatshirts for $10 instead of $20.
00:33:16.000They think it's great because you can get headphones for $80 instead of $150.
00:33:20.000Meanwhile, all those plants in Baltimore that were the tax base, that were the place of meaning, that kept the community together, that kept the crime rate low, shut down.
00:33:29.000And what do you think people are going to do?
00:33:32.000What sort of activity do you think they're going to indulge in?
00:33:35.000This is why President Trump's buy American position is so important.
00:33:41.000And it's very important that when we see this corporatist nonsense that is shared in op-eds, opinion pieces, and interviews, that we challenge it.
00:33:50.000It is the moral position and it is the economically correct position to say that we want our country to lead in advanced manufacturing, to lead in textile manufacturing, to lead in intellectual development.
00:34:03.000The failure for America to do so will only spell doom for the American middle class and with it, the future of the greatest country ever to exist.
00:34:11.000And I'm actually optimistic because I believe that we can have our best days ahead of us for making things in this country, taking risks and flourishing.
00:34:20.000That's a future I want, but not one that the biggest companies amongst us want, the ones that Andrew Wilford and the National Taxpayer Union Foundation tend to represent.
00:34:29.000And I'd love to have them on our podcast.
00:35:02.000Thank you guys so much for listening today.
00:35:04.000Please consider getting involved with Turning Point USA.
00:35:06.000Go to tpusa.com, tpusa.com to get engaged in the fight on high school and college campuses across the country.
00:35:12.000Please email us, freedom at charliekirk.com, freedom at charliekirk.com, with any questions that you have.
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