00:00:01.000Usually I do an Ask Me Anything episode, but things have been a little bit different this week.
00:00:06.000I wanted to join my friend Will Chamberlain, one of the smartest guys I know, a strategic and analytic thinker, to this Ask Me Anything episode where I ask Will about what's going on with the Georgia loss, the chaos on Capitol Hill, and President Donald Trump getting deleted from Twitter and Parler getting attacked from three different multi-trillion dollar companies.
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00:02:19.000Hey, everybody, welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.
00:02:21.000In place of an ask-me-anything, I'm going to ask Will anything, and this will hopefully be a weekly episode.
00:02:28.000Will Chamberlain, head of human events, does some great work, and he is very smart, and I really wanted to talk to him for a variety of different reasons.
00:02:37.000But Will, this was one of the worst weeks ever.
00:02:40.000Yes, I would agree with that, Charlie.
00:02:42.000It's been, I mean, you know, one after the other of really terrible events.
00:02:46.000I mean, the losing the Senate races, the riots on the 6th, and the massive escalation of dig tech censorship.
00:02:53.000I can't think of a worse week this year for the conservative movement.
00:02:57.000The only one contesting that would maybe be the week of the election, but even so, still very, very bad.
00:03:02.000Yeah, I mean, it set us back dramatically.
00:03:04.000So I want you just to take the floor, unpack how are you analyzing these things independently?
00:03:11.000I want to get to tech in a minute, but first, just can you help unpack Georgia and most specifically the riots?
00:04:18.000Like they, you know, they write down the number of the lawyer they're supposed to call to get bailed out.
00:04:23.000So, I mean, it's just a terrible strategic mistake and also just horribly immoral.
00:04:28.000So we shouldn't do that sort of thing.
00:04:31.000I think, you know, from my perspective, Georgia is a serious disappointment.
00:04:35.000I think in many ways, we kind of suppressed our own turnout by, you know, like not doing well enough in terms of explaining people, explaining why people needed to go out and turn out to vote, even in the face of questions about election fraud.
00:04:51.000Like, I don't know that we did a great job of that.
00:04:52.000And I think we probably suppressed our own turnout a little bit.
00:04:55.000And the Democrats were super motivated.
00:04:59.000And then to top it all off, I mean, massive big tech censorship.
00:05:02.000You know, I've had spent the last two years preaching that we needed to be more aggressive, regulate, always on kind of the bleeding edge of this issue.
00:05:10.000And I got so much pushback on, well, they're private companies.
00:05:23.000Yeah, I mean, I've never wanted to be wrong about something more.
00:05:27.000But Will, it was no coincidence that, you know, we lose the Georgia runoffs mostly because of apathy.
00:05:32.000And there was probably, you know, some shenanigans baked into it.
00:05:35.000But we just know how many human beings showed up in certain areas, like how many they walked the door on election day, and that number was down.
00:06:17.000And with it, I think years of hard-earned credibility the conservative movement had gained to show that we were successfully repudiating radical fringe voices and also to show that we were the peaceful ones.
00:06:32.000And we'll get into if there were other agitators and stuff.
00:06:34.000I think there's evidence to show that there were some bad actors there.
00:06:37.000But Will, you and I both know too, based on the arrest records, there are people that call themselves Trump supporters that were there too.
00:06:45.000And then as if that wasn't enough, the red terror on social media has now been completely implemented.
00:06:53.000The president, they took the president off Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, Twitter, Shopify, Spotify, as if they wanted to just cut him off from listening to music.
00:07:07.000And then on top of that, the parlor thing, which I want to get to.
00:07:11.000And so this week was probably one of the most destructive and difficult weeks.
00:07:17.000If you just look at it from an infrastructure standpoint, right?
00:07:23.000Like we found, you know, after November, I thought, okay, like it's a bad outcome, a very bad outcome to lose the presidency, but it's not catastrophic.
00:07:30.000We didn't lose the Senate because we didn't think, oh, we're going to lose the runoffs.
00:07:32.000Like we were ahead in the November election and both of the runoff elections, if you added up all the Republican votes versus the Democrat votes, but we managed to lose those seats.
00:07:44.000And it's just really distressing from a pure political power perspective, but also in terms of our credibility.
00:07:51.000Like, you know, people would ask me, like, why was the security so lax?
00:07:54.000And I think one of the reasons is we, you know, Trump supporters and the conservatives had built up a lot of credibility with Capitol Police.
00:08:00.000We'd held a lot of protests and they were always peaceful, like completely peaceful.
00:08:08.000I mean, no matter what, they would have defaulted to the assumption that Antifa were the real violent fanatics and didn't wouldn't have expected Trump supporters to just overrun, you know, modest police presence.
00:09:30.000And so then the right, whatever you want to call it, the chaos on the Capitol Hill happened.
00:09:37.000And then the left, I think there was a couple different reactions.
00:09:41.000I think some of them got angry and then some of them got, in some ways, very excited because they finally were able to do what they've wanted to do for the last couple of years, which is the most comprehensive social media cleanse in American history.
00:10:01.000How are we, what are we supposed to make of this?
00:10:03.000I mean, it's a dramatic moment for the country.
00:10:07.000It is indicative that if the president doesn't have protection on his Twitter account from arbitrary banning it, then none of us do.
00:10:17.000All of us are basically on these platforms with the sword of Damocles hanging over our account, no matter how much work we put into them, years we spend on the platform, reputation and credibility we've built up.
00:10:30.000And it's also a dramatic, you know, it's a loss of a major communications platform and tool for the conservative movement.
00:10:37.000I mean, that Twitter account in many ways, you know, could make or break lower, you know, conservative candidates in congressional races.
00:10:46.000It could keep, you know, make conservative points.
00:10:50.000Like it could keep conservative legislators in line, afraid of what would happen of the consequences of a tweet from the president that criticized them.
00:10:59.000And it was a rallying cry for the conservatives generally.
00:11:03.000It's not good for us to have lost, you know, I mean, it was the sixth biggest account on Twitter and probably the most engaged with.
00:11:50.000And if government officials are encouraging private companies to censor and the private companies are so inclined, then they work together and that's a nightmare environment for our ability to speak.
00:12:02.000It's Michelle Obama going and a bunch of liberal activists going to Twitter saying, please censor these people.
00:12:09.000That encourages an internal employee revolt at the company to push for censorship.
00:12:14.000I think we saw a news report about 100 or so employees demanding Trump be banned.
00:12:19.000And then the consequence, the banning of one of the biggest accounts in the country in the world.
00:12:26.000So that public-private partnership is there.
00:12:29.000We're going to have to deal with it for the next four years.
00:12:31.000Probably we don't really have, we have limited power bases with which to attack it and thwart it.
00:12:37.000I mean, hopefully we can do things at the state level to put a wrench in the gears.
00:12:42.000But there's, you know, we are going to have to deal with that.
00:12:46.000And that's going to put everyone on our side.
00:12:50.000It's going to mean a lot of discipline.
00:12:52.000Like we have to be disciplined because it sort of falls onto the parlor point.
00:12:57.000Parlor is not the solution to this problem, ultimately.
00:13:00.000And this week's events bear that out too.
00:13:03.000Ultimately, we are going to need to fight for our right to be on major social media platforms.
00:13:09.000And that's going to, you know, like I see us in sort of face of, you know, again, the analogy is difficult because the problems we're facing are not as dramatic as the ones faced by the civil rights movement, but it still needs to be conceptualized that way as though we're facing systemic private discrimination against conservatives.
00:13:26.000And the proper remedy for that is ultimately going to be a movement that pushes for changes in the law.
00:13:32.000And I like that term power base because that's exactly right.
00:13:35.000And that's what was so unfortunate about losing Georgia and what all these people that were calling for a boycott of Georgia were too stupid, if I may say, or they just didn't care because they're like, oh, they're all a bunch of rhinos.
00:14:14.000And we were just unable to communicate that.
00:14:17.000So now we lose Georgia and the tech company said, this is our chance.
00:14:22.000And they're almost doing this like, Will, as if they're never going to, they think we're never going to get back into power, which is the scariest thing.
00:14:30.000They almost are doing this with so much confidence that we are going to wipe you out and you're never going to rise again.
00:15:00.000There also is the fact that the liberals have made no bones about the fact that they want antitrust investigations of these companies and antitrust prosecutions and to change antitrust law to punish them more.
00:15:11.000I think we should be, we should, I don't know why we would want to stand in the way of that.
00:15:15.000I mean, what if these companies don't think that's the same?
00:15:17.000If they use that, though, well, I think they've been used, some of them, the activists, the smart ones, are using that as a threat to get the censorship they want.
00:15:27.000And I mean, that's, that's also, you know, what we could have done.
00:15:29.000We could have been threatening much more aggressive things just get them to stop censoring or we could have put in place laws to protect ourselves.
00:15:35.000I think, you know, in many ways, that's the big missed opportunity here.
00:15:38.000We did have power at the right time if we had gotten, you know, if we had gotten our act together and realized what needed to be done.
00:15:45.000I mean, the censorship really ramped up after 2018 when we lost unified control of the government.
00:15:50.000So I don't want to be too harsh on everybody, but that, you know, I've talked about before, like going forward, I think it's just, this has got to be like, if you're, you know, how Grover Norquist made it, if you're a Republican, you have to be for tax cuts.
00:16:11.000And how we're going to achieve that, I'm not totally sure.
00:16:14.000I want to unpack that with you just from a pragmatic perspective, but I want to get to this parlor thing because it's super, it's super creepy.
00:16:57.000And I think they'd admit that at times their app can be a little buggy and they're still trying to figure it out and they're not as capitalized as they'd like to be.
00:17:11.000But what's been the most interesting thing over the last 72 hours is that, remember, the libertarians told us, Will, well, just go create a competitor.
00:19:23.000Yeah, there's no way that is, I mean, now that there's an antitrust issue, right?
00:19:27.000If they're collecting, you know, if they're acting in concert in restraint of trade, there might actually be under current law, some antitrust companies.
00:19:34.000I've said this all along that the discrimination route is never going to pan out well for us in the courts.
00:19:40.000Go after how these companies are trying to stifle competition in the market.
00:19:58.000Like we need, we need to change the law as it goes as regards discrimination.
00:20:01.000Under current law, antitrust is the best available alternative.
00:20:04.000But even then, I mean, antitrust, there's a lot, you know, antitrust law has been, you know, largely due to the conservative movement been shaped in a way to be very favorable to the larger companies.
00:20:13.000Because they used to be on team right.
00:20:41.000That's where your social media account is.
00:20:43.000And so Amazon in the late 1900s, like nine times, 1990s, I should say, they were not a very valuable company, but Bezos bought something called merchant.com and they started, they wanted to actually create what is now called Shopify.
00:20:58.000And they, in 2000, they slowly realized that most of the infrastructure, most of the infrastructure for the internet hasn't been built yet.
00:21:05.000And that they just started buying up server space wildly.
00:21:09.000And it really wasn't successful until 2013.
00:22:46.000Like, I mean, maybe we, I think everybody needed to take that red alert more seriously that like once if it can happen to them, that it will creep, right?
00:22:54.000Like assume because, you know, people would always make, oh, well, that's a slippery slope.
00:23:15.000And so the issue now is parlor, which is supposed to be a competitor and was having massive amounts of traffic coming to it, might collapse at any moment because they don't have server space.
00:23:29.000I think Amazon is granting them a couple of days to go find new servers.
00:23:34.000The migration, the replication, no one really knows what's going to happen at this.
00:23:38.000I've been talking to some programmers.
00:23:39.000They're like, yeah, the whole thing could just like fall apart or just, you know, someone with 4,000 followers could just end up having 400,000 followers.
00:23:46.000Like no way, the whole thing can get messed up in that kind of a migration, right?
00:23:54.000And so the question is then, what do we do about this?
00:23:57.000The president has now been completely kicked off of all these platforms.
00:24:01.000I'm starting to try to, I went on an investigative hunt, Will, in the last 24 hours of any entrepreneur that's trying to create any wacky thing to either create hardware or servers.
00:24:11.000And quite honestly, I should have been doing this four years ago, but I was too busy, you know, building turning point.
00:24:15.000But where were our VCs going out and doing this four or five years ago, right?
00:24:20.000I mean, we just, we assumed it wasn't necessary.
00:24:22.000People, it had never been to happen before.
00:24:25.000You know, we assumed that they wouldn't discriminate this badly.
00:24:42.000Like, and my analysis was always, I mean, I always saw an issue with Parler.
00:24:47.000Like, once I started using it and the alternatives had some issues to them, one of the big issues I thought, especially with Gab was their incentive structures messed up with regards to the conservative movement writ large, because they do better when we are getting more censored, which is not ideal.
00:25:02.000And I think Gab's leadership at one point was actually pushing to try and get people blocked on Twitter so that they could route over to, you know, router with Gab.
00:25:10.000And I always thought it was more important.
00:25:12.000Like we didn't want to fight to be segregated in our own like second-rate social media services.
00:25:16.000I thought we should always fight to be where the debate is happening, where everyone is, and fight for our right to be a part of that.
00:25:23.000But I still didn't predict, you know, like any, even the hint of competition from Parler and bam, they're just off of everything.
00:26:21.000And so then I think, I guess the argument then is, well, you're not doing enough to enforce your rules or they're not strict enough, right?
00:26:29.000But I mean, you think about it, like, and they're, you know, everybody's pointed to like, look at Lynn Wood.
00:26:45.000Like I think I tweeted something along the lines of, you know, he was he was kept on the platform just long enough to lose us the Senate seats.
00:26:51.000Yeah, to be helpful and then get him off.
00:27:14.000On a Friday and like in the middle of the biggest traffic spike they've ever had.
00:27:19.000I mean, like if they're actually, if they were making this, you know, request of them in good faith, they would be a little more patient than just a unilaterally 30 days or something, right?
00:27:38.000But like what here's here's where I want to think strategically with you, though, Will, is that absent, you know, a mass like all of us just disappearing, there's still 65, 70 million of us.
00:28:41.000Like, I mean, these and billions and billions and billions of dollars.
00:28:45.000And to come up with a completely adversarial set of corporations while fighting against these massive Goliath monopolies that already are in power.
00:28:54.000And by the way, we'll have the assistance of the federal government, which will be doing their bidding too, probably, especially to squash the like conservative alternatives to everything.
00:29:05.000I mean, we can't like, you know, if these companies were able to do that just by snapping their fingers, what are they able to do to any fledgling competitors with the assistance of the federal government?
00:29:16.000It's like a state like South Dakota, you know, floats a 10-year note to basically interest-free build servers if you migrate your business to it.
00:29:42.000And over a decade, they're going to say, we're going to have server space and you can rent it from us, but we're going to float the front of it.
00:29:48.000Like we're going to front the cost and it's going to be, it's going to be the state owned by the state of Texas for free.
00:29:55.000You know, whatever you want to do with it, we're just not going to kick you off.
00:30:26.000I mean, like, you think about like, it's a big thing to decide you want to be adversarial.
00:30:31.000You know, one of the entrepreneurs wants to be explicitly adversarial to the existing tech companies plus the existing and plus the federal government.
00:30:40.000I mean, but oof, it would be, it's really challenging.
00:30:43.000But I think, yeah, I mean, we should, you know, at the state level, they should, that should be done.
00:30:47.000We should also be thinking about local level legislation and trying to enforce like consumer protection legislation.
00:30:54.000You know, I mean, there's, there's arguments to be made that, you know, the representations made by Twitter and Facebook to users were fraudulent and that you could sue them under consumer fraud statutes.
00:31:05.000State law is trying to make it so their users, state users have a right to be on these platforms.
00:31:09.000They probably conflict with 230, but you got to try it.
00:31:14.000I mean, it's not, we're not in a great position.
00:31:16.000And like, I still, you know, I ultimately think, you know, the solution to collective, mass collective private discrimination is ultimately federal law making that discrimination illegal.
00:31:29.000I still think that's, you know, that, you know, that's the end goal that puts an end to this nonsense.
00:31:36.000And I hope the private efforts work, but I think that like, you know, I'm going to spend my time.
00:31:41.000I'm not going to spend my time in the private efforts.
00:32:01.000And, you know, that like, I mean, hopefully, and hopefully these 20-year projects work.
00:32:06.000I think, I mean, I'm all for starting them up and doing what people think is necessary to just basically have, you know, states subsidize the creation of a competing infrastructure for their users.
00:32:29.000But he was making the point about how if you're a foreign government and you see that Twitter took off Donald Trump, why do you think Twitter wouldn't take off your leader?
00:32:37.000And then can you, as that government, trust, like let yourself be held hostage by an American corporation social media apparatus?
00:32:47.000So maybe the Indian government decides, you know, we need our own national social media monopoly platforms, right?
00:32:53.000That we have control of, that our people are never going to be kicked off of.
00:32:57.000That also is a potential threat to Twitter and Facebook and might get them to change their ways in the sense of, you know, because if the Indian government say decides to say, not only is this going to happen, but we also mandate that every single mobile phone sold in India comes pre-installed with the India government social media apps.
00:33:46.000I don't know if they passed it, but I was actually, I was joking.
00:33:49.000I was talking with, I said on Twitter, I was like, they have to be following my account because this is literally what I said six months ago.
00:33:54.000And I had some Polish MP come up to me.
00:33:55.000He's like, yeah, we follow your account.
00:37:52.000Probably make Maryland's probably a little easier because Virginia is sort of across the river.
00:37:56.000But, you know, if that's all, if we get to that place, right, where they're like, well, you have all this representation without, you know, all this taxation without representation.
00:38:17.000And you can make a pretty compelling argument that it's unconstitutional, actually, to make D.C. a state that, like without a constitutional amendment, because it lays out the federal district there.
00:38:26.000And I mean, there are really good reasons to have a federal district.
00:38:29.000Like, think about when, you know, Ramp Hall and other senators were walking home from a White House event and were attacked.
00:38:36.000The idea is that when a state government might be obnoxious or antagonistic towards the federal government, so it should have its own place that it runs.
00:38:44.000If we're talking about what ideal policy is, it's to take away D.C. home rule and take away the power of Muriel Bowser and return it to Congress.
00:39:31.000And that should be just general, the general idea, like we are not going to tolerate any federal meddling, oddly enough, any federal meddling in state elections, especially to liberalize mail-in voting, which is so vulnerable to fraud.
00:39:45.000And I mean, we have to fight hard on that, push Manchin not to be willing to get rid of the filibuster for that.
00:39:50.000Like, you know, I think we have to really be smart and pick our spots, do a little better than the Democrats did in how they use the filibuster.
00:39:57.000Like, we should basically, the filibuster needs to be for the structural changes to the government, right?
00:40:03.000Like, that's what we need to preserve it for.
00:40:06.000Like, we're going to be a little more, I mean, if we're fighting on every single issue, tooth and nail, the filibuster, they'll just eliminate it.
00:40:38.000I think we, because we have to realize like what the, you know, we didn't use our power particularly well in terms of trying to set the table for ourselves.
00:40:47.000I mean, if we really tick them off, because, you know, the filibuster has been weakened enormously, right?
00:40:52.000No longer for Supreme Court justices, no longer for cabinet appointees, no longer for appellate court judges.
00:41:00.000I feel like we're really close to losing it for the legislative branch.
00:41:04.000And so we have to be careful with how we use it.
00:41:58.000And so I think, you know, and ultimately, I, you know, I don't think the Democrats are as strong as they want to be.
00:42:04.000I mean, with a 77-year-old president who will be 81 as an incumbent and a very unpopular vice president, I think, you know, if we learn the lessons of the Trump era, we can come back in four years and take the federal government back and do the right thing for our, you know, for the conservative base.
00:42:21.000Yeah, I have hope in the sense that the Democrats almost always overshoot, almost always by default.
00:42:32.000And some will be intimidated and some will get despondent.
00:42:34.000But I also think some people are, you know, I'm talking about the true classical liberals are going to be very scared of what these people want to do to our country.
00:42:56.000Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
00:42:58.000Email us your questions, freedom at charliekirk.com.
00:43:01.000If you want to support us, go to charliekirk.com slash support.
00:43:06.000And as always, I encourage you to get involved with Turning Point USA, where we play offense with a sense of urgency to win America's Culture War at tpusa.com.
00:43:15.000Thanks so much for listening, everybody.