00:00:54.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:01:13.000Others would call it a conference room with two of my very good friends, Jeff Webb and Will Chamberlain, both of which are now partners, you could say, at humanevents, humanevents.com.
00:01:40.000Jeff has spoken at a lot of our Turning Point USA events and is a great thinker and has done a lot of exciting things right now in his life and is also doing some exciting things right now.
00:01:49.000Jeff, what excites you the most of what you're seeing right now in the pro-American conservative movement?
00:01:57.000Well, Charlie, I think, first of all, the resilience is amazing.
00:02:01.000I think everybody or many people predicted there was going to be this kind of depressing, almost hangover from the election, and it'd be difficult for people to come back and get excited about the country and the movement.
00:02:13.000And, you know, we're seeing exactly the opposite.
00:02:16.000I think that it was a very sobering loss.
00:03:21.000Yeah, Jeff, I sense that there's a lot more of an action mindset in the conservative movement right now than I did after Mitt Romney lost to Barack Obama in 2012.
00:03:32.000Will, you have been with Human Events since you bought it.
00:03:44.000What I'm excited about is the fact that the Republican Party has been reoriented to, I think, a much stronger and more popular platform.
00:03:52.000And that's largely due to President Trump.
00:03:55.000You know, when I started being more politically aware, it was frustrating to watch the Republican Party be the party of foreign wars, be the party of neoliberalism generally, and to not be concerned with populist issues and to be kind of ideologically inflexible.
00:04:11.000And now I think we have a party that is much more aligned with American workers, and it's also much more aligned with just generally looking out for their constituents more so than appeasing an ideology.
00:04:25.000I think about where we are in terms of how the right thinks about tech censorship.
00:04:29.000Two years ago, the right was in a position where you even said something about telling a private company that they needed to stop discriminating against conservatives.
00:04:37.000They're like, whoa, it's a private company.
00:04:40.000That's completely changed in two years.
00:04:43.000Non-intervention is now the default foreign policy position, and the Liz Cheneys are marginalized.
00:04:49.000And then on, you know, on economic policy in general, it's much more pro-worker, pro-family, and not inflexible about defending corporations.
00:04:58.000So I think that puts us in a position to win a lot of votes in coming elections.
00:05:02.000Even with all the headwinds of COVID, we only lost, we just barely lost.
00:05:07.000We have a close majority, we have a slight, the Democrats have a slight majority in the House.
00:05:12.000There's a 50-50 tie in the Senate, and we lost by a few tens of thousands of votes in the presidential election.
00:05:17.000We are well positioned coming out of the pandemic and with all the craziness that the left is doing to afford a really popular platform and to take back power in the coming years.
00:05:27.000So I think both of your answers I agree with completely, and that's why we get along so well.
00:05:32.000And you're right, Will, the Republican Party, and I just kind of go to CPAC and also our Turning Point USA Student Action Summit.
00:05:40.000You look at the speakers, especially at our Turning Point USA Student Action Summit.
00:05:44.000And I guess I could speak up on behalf of CPAC too.
00:06:17.000Is in 2019, when we first sat down in January, we said, What are we going to have to do to make populist ideas popular in the Republican Party?
00:06:30.000And I made a comment to you that Tucker Carlson's running the Republican Party, and you kind of chuckled.
00:06:34.000Do you agree with that kind of whole observation?
00:06:37.000Well, I think there's no doubt that the populist movement within the party is winning, and it's irreversible.
00:06:43.000I mean, as Will was alluding to, it has gained momentum.
00:06:48.000You can see it at every step along the way.
00:06:50.000Do we still have some vestiges of the old approach where we were, again, for foreign wars and just lower taxes and really didn't talk about the American worker and about our companies and our factories and our future and our schools, the things that really affect everyday Americans every day?
00:07:12.000It's amazing that people have realized in the short period of time after the election, rather than there being this reflection on, well, President Trump didn't win, so we're going to go a different direction.
00:07:22.000Now we're going, which a few of the old, the old line Republicans did, that's not going to happen.
00:07:29.000And it's amazing that they even felt that way.
00:07:33.000So I think that, you know, I'm just, as we talked about earlier, I'm optimistic about it.
00:07:39.000And I think that, again, you go back two years even, and we're a couple of years into the Trump presidency and the force of his own personality.
00:07:49.000I mean, people were looking at it like this is a many people, this is going to be just during the term of Donald Trump, or that's four years or eight years.
00:08:35.000American Restoration, How to Unshackle the Great Middle Class by Jeff Webb.
00:08:39.000Will, why does it feel as if there's this massive disconnect between the people who are in charge of the Republican Party and the people that are in the Republican Party?
00:08:54.000Why is there this kind of almost two different political worlds that we see operating from where if you want to get an applause line at CPAC, you have to embrace populist ideas?
00:09:07.000If you went to CPAC and said, and now we are going to deregulate American corporations, people would look around, they'd say, what the hell is this?
00:09:19.000Is this the Chamber of Commerce Convention or is this CPAC?
00:09:49.000Even though Liz Cheney voted to appeach the president, well, he built relationships with Liz Cheney and her friends over the course of 20 or 30 years and feels an obligation to maintain that.
00:09:58.000So those institutions are going to be the slowest part of the movement to reform.
00:10:06.000And I think you see that, you know, it didn't happen immediately in 2016, but over the course of the Trump presidency and now you see everybody sort of moving in the right direction.
00:10:16.000And especially when you have politicians that maybe privately disagreed at the time with, you know, interventionist foreign policy, but felt that they couldn't come out and contradict the Bill Crystals of the world.
00:10:27.000You know, Bill Crystal is the least popular person if you actually poll Republican voters, maybe next to Mitt Romney.
00:10:32.000Those people are horribly unpopular now.
00:10:34.000So, you know, that frees up the space for politicians who might have been a little bit more afraid to come out and actually advocate the populist platform that they probably think was right in the first place.
00:10:47.000Look, you've heard me talk about my pillow.
00:10:49.000And if you want to support Mike Lindell, do it through my pillow.
00:10:52.000And a lot of people are saying it's literally changing their life.
00:10:55.000They won't go flat, and you can wash and dry them as many times.
00:10:58.000But all that aside, Mike Lindell, a lot of you are asking me, how do I support Mike Lindell?
00:11:46.000But we have the positives, and I think that the people are with us.
00:11:49.000We narrowly lost, even with the shenanigans and the nonsense and the tomfoolery around the actual election and the stated interference from the Democrat Party, the Time magazine piece, Molly Ball.
00:12:01.000And so now we're at a place right now where Republicans, conservatives, whatever you call them, people that love their country, if we don't give up, if we remain resilient, your word, I believe we can be successful.
00:12:14.000But we must analyze what the biggest challenges are.
00:12:17.000And we must not just analyze, but pinpoint and come up with courses of action.
00:12:21.000Jeff, what do you think are the greatest potential obstacles to us winning again and restoring the American promise, which is something you and I talked about privately, which I just love that phrase, the American promise.
00:12:36.000What is our biggest obstacles for us doing that, legislatively, socially, culturally, or politically?
00:12:41.000Well, I think that you have to look the short term and the long term.
00:12:45.000I think short term, there's this imminent threat, if you will, from this election legislation that the House is trying to move forward on, which would forever change how we conduct elections in this country.
00:12:58.000And to be frank, put the Republicans at a disadvantage, possibly for generations to come.
00:13:05.000So that legislation has to be defeated.
00:13:08.000And everybody needs to be contacting their senators and really putting pressure on them to vote the right way.
00:13:19.000It's scary that between where we are now and really going, you know, going backwards quickly and deeply, you have to rely on two or three moderate, so-called moderate Democrat senators.
00:13:37.000And people have to understand that this is very serious.
00:13:40.000So I think that you look at that in the short term.
00:13:43.000I think longer term, well, it's short term as well.
00:13:48.000But the power of big tech and the threat to our individual liberties and our freedoms and conservative thought is frightening.
00:13:59.000And then I think you get into what's happening in our educational institutions.
00:14:04.000I mean, here we are with so many children.
00:14:07.000I heard a horror story today about a young woman, a student who has several, has different kinds of emotional problems, trying to get through college, but not even in class.
00:14:51.000I think sometimes you have to get to the darkness before you see the dawn, right?
00:14:55.000And I think that the pandemic and the effects of the pandemic and how it's affected the everyday lives of our citizens has given people a determination that things are going to be different and they're going to be better.
00:15:09.000I think there's a lot of wisdom there.
00:15:11.000And the short term, which ends up being a long-term threat, is HR1, House Resolution 1.
00:15:17.000And I'm not one to be alarm bells on pieces of legislation.
00:15:33.000And I think that that actually was probably a strategic win for Republicans in the sense that we've actually saved a lot of potential political capital because we really haven't organized on a legislative fight yet in this new presidency.
00:15:50.000We've let them sign a bunch of, we've complained about Keystone XL, complained about the border, but I'm talking about an Obamacare style fight where we really vocalize our opposition.
00:16:03.000HR1 is an existential threat where you would register every single person, not citizen, in every state, the Bureau of Prisons database, the DMV, publicly available databases.
00:16:20.000So Will, what do you believe are the biggest threats to the movement?
00:16:24.000We had a really fun private discussion recently, and I actually, I almost wish it was recorded because it was such a robust conversation where we said we need to change a trajectory of the nation, right?
00:16:35.000And it's like almost like turning around a freighter in the ocean.
00:16:38.000It takes a little bit of a while, but a two-degree turn can be a 200-mile difference a couple weeks later.
00:16:43.000What do you think are the biggest threats and obstacles to our movement?
00:16:48.000So, you know, the biggest threats are always going to be for us right now, the structural ones, and then perhaps ignorance of the big structural problems among Republican congressmen and congresswomen.
00:17:01.000That's a structural change to the way our government works that would exclude Republicans from power, that would facilitate voter fraud and make it much, much easier than it currently is.
00:17:10.000Everything should be going the opposite direction.
00:17:13.000You know, election integrity should be like Caesar's wife beyond question.
00:17:18.000You know, that's just the integrity beyond question, rather.
00:17:24.000I mean, that's the way it works in most other countries in the world.
00:17:27.000France banned mail in voting for this reason.
00:17:29.000I mean, because the obvious and transparent integrity of election means that people don't fight over the end result.
00:17:36.000But also, it's just if you can't win an election, then it doesn't really matter like how, because the other side is cheating, it doesn't really matter how great your policies are.
00:17:46.000We need to be moving in the direction of more integrity, not less.
00:17:48.000Another structural issue, as I see it, is the free speech issue and the ability to speak freely on social media.
00:17:54.000Because if you don't have the ability to speak freely, then on substance, one side of the debate is going to be underrepresented and the other side is going to be overrepresented, which means you have this inexorable poll leftward.
00:18:04.000You also have people just in fear to express themselves generally because the sword of Damocles is hanging over everybody's account.
00:18:12.000And I think that it's very, very important to not lose on this free speech issue and to fight back very hard against what the Democrats are trying to do, which is use the threat of antitrust enforcement to coerce them into being more aggressive in terms of censoring free speech.
00:18:29.000And then I think the third thing that's a sort of smaller potential pitfall, but it's still there, is that Republican legislators won't grasp that these are the two big issues.
00:18:36.000I mean, I saw something today about the House GOP pushing an estate tax repeal.
00:18:43.000I mean, I don't, I understand there are compelling arguments for an estate tax repeal, but that's a first world problem and a type of thing that is just like has to be 30th or 40th on the list of GOP concerns.
00:18:56.000It won't impact the majority of our base.
00:19:00.000Even if you can make some sort of fairness argument about double taxation, like it's just not the first thing that should be on the agenda.
00:19:06.000And so, you know, if Republicans are doing that instead of focusing on, we're going to talk about making sure they don't, you know, stop making sure the elections are fair and that there's as much election integrity as you can.
00:19:17.000Stop what the Democrats are doing at the federal level.
00:19:36.000That's a great way to win over the iron worker in Western Pennsylvania who has negative $30,000 in credit card debt.
00:19:44.000His kid just borrowed another $100,000 to go to Penn State to go learn about North African lesbian poetry.
00:19:51.000What matters to him is to make sure that the billionaire can transfer his or her wealth to the next generation.
00:19:58.000Like is the goal here that George Soros should have more money to donate to progressive causes and that his son should as well?
00:20:04.000I mean, you know, is the billionaire class really on the side of the Republican Party right now?
00:20:09.000That's not at all clear to me in general.
00:20:12.000And so, you know, perhaps like if they, you know, if these people want an estate tax repeal, they can start, you know, not censoring us on social media.
00:20:22.000Instead, the Republicans say, oh, wait, all the corporations are taken over by woesters.
00:20:27.000Coca-Cola is telling people that all white people are racist.
00:20:31.000The vast majority of upper middle class people are donating to BLM Incorporated, or they get massive donations from upper middle class people.
00:20:39.000And Bezos and Zuckerberg and the Louis Vuitton guy, they all hate you and your value system, House Republicans.
00:20:47.000But the most important thing is an estate tax repeal.
00:20:50.000That is going to be the compelling reason to give us back the House in 2022.
00:20:54.000It sounds like a Chamber of Commerce created policy item.
00:20:58.000Jeff, you have an opinion on the Chamber of Commerce.
00:21:00.000Talk about that and just wherever it takes you.
00:21:04.000Yeah, so having had the good fortune to build the business from scratch to be something, thank you, something very considerable.
00:21:14.000You know, as I look at the landscape, if I was a young man really starting to, are really focusing on trying to start a company right now, it would be a hell of a challenge.
00:21:31.000And then you, you know, I always thought as I was building this company, the Chamber of Commerce, because I related to the local Chamber of Commerce, frankly, in Memphis, Tennessee.
00:21:41.000Good people, you know, really behind me.
00:21:43.000But then as I began to look at the National Chamber of Commerce and what they stand for and who they help, they are not for the American worker.
00:22:05.000So people should not be, they shouldn't be misled and they certainly shouldn't contribute to the National Chamber of Commerce.
00:22:15.000I think that small business has been particularly hurt during the pandemic, disproportionately hurt.
00:22:22.000And we can put on our real cynical hats and say that perhaps the extended lockdowns are intentional because they are hurting the small businesses and the people that work for them.
00:22:35.000And it's something that should be unacceptable to all Americans.
00:22:39.000I mean, you look at the big companies who are able to stay open.
00:22:42.000Look at how some of these major corporations have flourished during the pandemic.
00:22:47.000It also makes you wonder, I can't help, but I'm just going to say this will make me some enemies, I think.
00:22:51.000But, you know, you look at the targets in the Walmarts of the world, right?
00:22:54.000Well, they got to stay open because they had groceries and they had pharmaceuticals, right?
00:23:09.000Why couldn't they, if Walmart is open?
00:23:11.000If you really, if you think this is really a problem, we have certain things, we have to have groceries, drugs, pharmaceuticals, and so on, fine.
00:23:18.000You know, put up a barrier between those parts of the store and the rest of the store, if you want to be fair.
00:23:24.000If we'd have done that, we might be surprised about how fast things would have been opened.
00:23:31.000In fact, that would have been adequate protection for the small businessman and say, you know what, you can come here to get peppers and carrots, lettuce, and soup, but you just can't come here and go buy something that very well might also be accessible for pick one of those cities up there, Macomb, Quincy, all of them have Walmarts.
00:23:53.000And they also have small businesses that almost don't exist anymore.
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00:25:00.000I think one of the biggest fears, if I were to contribute to the conversation, is the Republican Party needs to make a very conscious decision, a pivot, outside of just the public speeches they give at CPAC or at Turning Point Student Action Summit, but actually show it in policy that we're not the corporatist party.
00:25:18.000And it will be a blend of traditional conservatism, Teddy Roosevelt, kind of pro-American policy, always trying to say that we don't want to go in the socialist direction.
00:25:30.000But that also means we're not going to say that whatever Walmart or Target or Google wants is necessarily good for the country.
00:25:37.000You touched on something, though, Will, that now I remember I really want to focus on, which is challenging big tech and what the states can do and what the states are doing.
00:25:46.000You tweeted out one tweet that actually was sent to me of yours was that you praised Governor Abbott for what he was doing on the tech companies.
00:25:52.000This is also something, Jeff, you and I have talked about.
00:25:54.000Will, walk us through what you think the states can do and should the states get into an active posture on this fight against big tech and the corporate oligarchy running our country.
00:26:03.000So yeah, I'll take those questions in turn because they're both good ones.
00:26:05.000I mean, on substance, you know, it's hard to know exactly what, I mean, the Republicans can do right now because they're not really fully in power.
00:26:14.000But there's something very symbolic and simple they can do.
00:26:16.000They can stop taking money from Google and Facebook and all the big tech companies.
00:26:21.000They wouldn't take money from George Soros.
00:26:23.000They wouldn't take money from Chinese-affiliated companies.
00:26:26.000So don't take money from companies that are censoring and harming your consumers, that treat the president of your own party as anathema and a horrible person.
00:26:36.000That means, okay, you've decided to be adversarial to our political movement.
00:26:39.000We're not taking your money and we're going to treat you that way.
00:26:43.000So any GOP legislators who are still taking money from Google, they need to stop.
00:26:48.000If they can give back the money, they should give it back.
00:26:51.000And then make a point that the next time they take money from Google, they better hear about how Google has decided, has put in place a complete policy to prevent conservative censorship going forward.
00:27:03.000Now, and then that sort of translates into what I'm seeing on the state level against big tech.
00:27:08.000I'm very, very optimistic because it's not just what DeSantis did in Florida.
00:27:12.000I was very optimistic about what Abbott did in Texas and what the Texas legislature is proposing.
00:27:17.000They're proposing to say that political viewpoint censorship by the social media companies is going to be a tort.
00:27:24.000That if you are an individual user who is wrongly censored, you can walk into court in Texas, say to the judge what happened.
00:27:32.000The judge will grant you an injunction.
00:27:33.000They will grant you your attorney's fees and they will impose an order on Google or Facebook or Twitter, whoever censored you to say restore the content.
00:27:43.000And if they don't, they'll pay a fine.
00:27:45.000That is what I've been proposing for a long time because I'm not a big believer in big government, right?
00:27:50.000I may be a little more willing to use government to do things, but I don't like big government agencies.
00:27:55.000But there's an example of how to protect speech that doesn't require new government agency.
00:28:00.000You know, you already have the right to speak freely in a public park or a public university.
00:28:04.000And whenever some public university tries to shut down a speaker, no matter how offensive, they lose.
00:28:20.000You just need to create a new right of action.
00:28:22.000That's what that's called, a new private right of action for American citizens when they're wrongly censored, that they can go to court and get this injunction.
00:28:29.000Totally, totally agree with what Will's saying.
00:28:32.000And, you know, I wrote an article for Human Events on kind of the federalist approach and how we're left, you know, because we don't have any of the three branches of government that we are left to the states to fight the fight.
00:28:45.000The good news is, the good news is that in 23 states, we have the governorship in both houses of the legislature.
00:28:52.000This can be done, but it's going to take leadership in these states.
00:28:56.000They can't just sit and deal with minor issues.
00:28:59.000They have to understand that the national issues affect their state and their citizens as well.
00:29:05.000And they are our last line of defense right now.
00:29:09.000And so I think, as Will was saying, what Governor DeSantis is doing, what Governor Abbott is doing, let's get all of the states, especially where we have the trifecta, and let's get this organized.
00:29:20.000Let's get together and let's fight the fight because that's where we can win.
00:29:24.000So in closing, I'm going to ask you guys a surprise question.
00:29:46.000And then you guys can go any direction.
00:29:48.000It could be political, it could be social, it could be anything.
00:29:51.000What I learned in the last year is a deeper point, which is that unfortunately, people want to be taken care of more than they want to be free.
00:30:02.000And I never, I always grappled with that, but I thought that there would be more backlash, more pushback against the lockdowns, the erosion of small businesses, the closure of schools.
00:30:14.000And it's hard for me to admit this, but it also goes to show that freedom is a value and it's not the natural state of condition.
00:30:19.000That if you don't tell people the need to be free and you don't teach them that, then they'll just kind of be in their natural sedentary, sloth, lazy state.
00:30:27.000That's what I learned in the last year.
00:30:31.000Yeah, I mean, interestingly, that's an area where I felt like I was actually a little bit prescient.
00:30:36.000I was much more of a hawk on coronavirus.
00:30:39.000And it was partially due to my views on the severity of the disease, but also partially because I looked at the polls and I was like, people really want us to lock down.
00:30:49.000And I know in our space, that doesn't feel right at all that the people in our circles, but the polling was pretty clear that that was a solid 60-40, 70-30 issue, that people were much more in favor of restrictions than not.
00:31:01.000And I was very, very deeply worried about the most important, being on the wrong side of the most important issue that was a 70-30 issue.
00:31:08.000And so I don't think that helped the president.
00:31:11.000I guess what I learned, though, is it just that I guess maybe I knew this before, but not as obviously.
00:31:17.000How hypocritical the left was going to be on violence and rioting.
00:31:23.000I never expected that the left would turn on a dime from peaceful protests to calling what happened in the Capitol on January 6th an insurrection and calling for the full force of the security state to be brought down on the protesters, completely in ignorance of the fact that over the summer, violence was just all you know throughout American cities.
00:31:44.000And I mean, the way they'd go to try and distinguish, you know, well, it was at night when they attacked the Portland courthouse as opposed to during the daytime in Washington, D.C.
00:31:56.000It just demonstrated that there's no underlying principle there other than we should have power and you guys shouldn't.
00:32:04.000And it reminded me, I guess, yet again of, okay, well, if that's the way you view things, then we also need to be somewhat ruthless on our own end and then focus on making sure we don't lose these structural issues.
00:32:14.000So, Will, I think there's a lot of wisdom there.
00:32:22.000Well, I think one of the things that I'd learned that one of the things that really surprised me is how many people in a very, very important election that really has a lot to do with the direction of our company, our country, will vote based on personality.
00:32:39.000That if you really, if you, if you say that the country is pretty much equally divided between the right and the left, and you take the 10% of the people, say from 50% to 40% that voted for the Democrat, and you separate them and you say, here are the policies of this particular party, this candidate, and you line those out.
00:33:04.000What you find out is most of them are more aligned with the right, but did not take the time.
00:33:11.000Either A, did not take the time to really understand the issues, or they didn't care as much about the issue.
00:33:17.000They didn't think that they would be affected, or they let their dislike of President Trump and his personality dominate their decision.
00:33:29.000I think we need to really, and look, the media did a great job of making it about Trump's personality.
00:33:37.000And they did it for four years, frankly.
00:33:40.000And I think it's just, I think it's a shame.
00:33:42.000I think people need to be looking at what are the policies, where's that country going?
00:33:46.000And frankly, I've already heard from some of my friends on the left, barely on the left, who have been very disappointed in what's happened on the border and have surprised at what's happened in the first few weeks of the Biden presidency.
00:34:12.000That's the one thing all three of us have in common, and we all love our country.
00:34:15.000Will Chamberlain, Jeff Webb, and you guys can check out pieces from all three of us, basically on a weekly basis, and some very exciting things happening soon.
00:34:23.000People say all the time, where can I find good news?
00:34:26.000Humanevents.com is a good place to start.