00:00:20.000Sorry, high school or college chapter today at tpusa.com.
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00:03:33.000And there seems to be more and more black voices that are supporting Trump and supporting conservative values.
00:03:41.000Talk about your story in addition to this kind of fun saga that we've seen the last couple of days.
00:03:47.000I sort of red told myself my story starts with me having conservative values, but not knowing I was conservative.
00:03:55.000I thought that I was pretty liberal just because, you know, I always believed in the mantra, I'll defend your right to say it, even if I don't agree with it.
00:04:03.000But it used to be a fairly liberal mantra, I guess, until they went pretty far left.
00:04:08.000Now their mantra seems to be either agree with me or that you're a bigot or you're a racist or you're a sexist or you're any other sort of slur they want to call you.
00:04:26.000I started seeing where this country was going and I didn't agree with it.
00:04:30.000You know, I tell people all the time, I voted for Obama twice just because I thought that this was the direction I wanted my country to go in.
00:04:38.000And pretty quickly, I disagreed with everything he was saying and everything he was doing.
00:04:45.000And I guess conservative voices started preaching to me and started, I started agreeing with everything they were saying.
00:04:56.000I'm for law and order, which seems to be more and more right-leaning views.
00:05:04.000So the more I started reading, the more I started doing my research, the more I started reading Thomas Sowell, who I'm a huge student of, I started allowing myself more conservative, right-wing values.
00:06:05.000You know, this white supremacy boogeyman is out there lurking around the corner, is hiding under your bed trying to get you.
00:06:12.000So I think if more children were exposed to Thomas Sowell at a younger level, I think they'd be more agreeing with what he would have to say.
00:06:22.000I have an eight-year-old daughter right now, and all I do is talk to her about self-responsibility and just being in control of your own fate, your own future.
00:06:31.000And these are things that I read from Thomas Sowell, and this is what I'm teaching her now.
00:06:35.000So she's starting to get on that path.
00:06:37.000And I have young nieces and nephews, but I'm starting to talk to them about that as well.
00:06:41.000And they're starting to get on that path.
00:06:43.000So we as conservatives, we have to get to them while they're young because they're being indoctrinated by the schools.
00:06:49.000They're being indoctrinated by the TVs.
00:06:51.000They're being indoctrinated by things as innocent as we used to think as things like Sesame Street.
00:06:56.000And we have to show that we're the prevailing voice, not their friends, not their teachers, not Sesame Street, not the media.
00:07:46.000And illegal immigrants are being put back in.
00:07:49.000And I think they're just taking a good look around and going, you know, we didn't have this under Trump.
00:07:54.000And they're not falling for the left-wing gaslighting where the left is trying to say, oh, you know, your life is so much better while we're in control.
00:08:02.000Your life is so much safer while we're in control.
00:08:05.000Look at all the money you're saving while we're in control.
00:08:08.000And I think more and more black folk are looking in their pockets and going, no, I don't have money anymore.
00:08:13.000You know, I can't play it from my house anymore like I was younger.
00:08:17.000You know, it's costing me now more and more at the pumps.
00:08:21.000So I think more people are just taking a good looking around and going, you know, maybe I should listen to what Trump has to say.
00:09:41.000Because like I said, you know, we get up every day, we put out boots and shoes on.
00:09:45.000We get to, we go to work, and we're able to take a look at the world around us.
00:09:49.000You know, a lot of the BLM propaganda is geared towards black women, saying that you don't need a man in the house, saying that you can get out there and survive by yourself, that you can do anything a man can do.
00:09:59.000And when you have that message geared towards the women, you're going to lose a lot of the men because the men are saying, I am valuable.
00:10:11.000I want to be involved in my sons and daughters' lives.
00:10:13.000So all the BLM propaganda, all the left-wing propaganda saying you don't need a man, all the toxic feminism that's out there that falls into Miss Andrew, that's out there saying that men are nothing but predators, that men are no good, that all men are going to do is cheat on you and hurt you.
00:10:29.000That's going to lose a lot of men, no matter what color you are, no matter what your background is.
00:10:34.000So I think a lot of black men in particular are getting tired of these messages.
00:10:38.000They're getting tired of these constant battering from the BLM and the leftists, and how the Democrats every four years only remember black voters are out there every four years.
00:10:50.000So I think a lot of black men in particular are getting really tired of that message.
00:10:53.000And they're starting to now agree with a lot of what conservatives are saying.
00:10:57.000And I just wish the conservatives would really take advantage of this and get out there and start really recruiting so that even beyond 2024, we can take our country back.
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00:12:31.000By the way, we move up on the podcast charts almost always when Andrew fills in.
00:12:35.000So we should have Andrew fill in more often.
00:12:38.000Andrew's going to say, no, he does a great job.
00:12:41.000So I went to Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, and, you know, there was all this chatter about the protests, and there were protests there.
00:12:50.000And we'll talk about that in a second.
00:12:52.000But what kind of blew me away was the attendance.
00:12:56.000So the way this works is I'll show up on a college campus and I'll set up a card table and we have conversations and we film it and everyone's welcome to film it.
00:13:04.000They can film me and we film them and we post kind of some of the interaction sometimes online.
00:13:10.000And it's good for our turning point chapter.
00:13:13.000It's good for students that might feel isolated or might feel as if there is very little ideological community for what they for where their worldview is.
00:13:24.000And let's just 122, let's put 122 up on screen.
00:13:28.000Typically our Change My Minds will have 20, 30, 40, 50 people.
00:13:33.000I mean, that's easily 500 to 600 people that attended right on campus.
00:13:38.000And the amount of enthusiasm and response that we received for Turning Point USA for our message, let's play B-roll cut 121 so people could get kind of a little bit of a picture there.
00:13:56.000And you're trying to tell me that there's no conservatives on these campuses.
00:14:00.000And this goes to show me that the macro polling that we are seeing, New York Times, Sienna, Washington Post, that young people, in particular, young men are becoming more right-wing is correct.
00:14:13.000I mean, this is at one of the most liberal schools in the country.
00:15:36.000On the same day, we hosted the largest ever Turning Point USA high school event in Georgia.
00:15:42.0001,200 high schoolers attended a basically maximum capacity filling out all the bleachers of a high school auditorium in Northern Georgia.
00:15:52.000The day before, Candace Owens filled up an auditorium at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, UNC Chapel Hill, and we had to turn away another thousand people that could have filled that room.
00:16:07.000The day before that, we sent Candace Owens to University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
00:17:00.000When I start talking about homeownership and inflation, even the radicals get a little quiet because they know that they are being robbed on a daily basis.
00:17:11.000And then I have to give Turning Point USA credit and Turning Point Action credit.
00:17:14.000Every day we go to work and we do the tough stuff.
00:17:24.000The RNC, the establishment, the moderates, they hate us, but the results speak for themselves.
00:17:28.000There's something profound happening on these campuses.
00:17:33.000For years, I've been talking about how our nation's public schools have been captured by progressive ideologues, especially true if you're a Christian family.
00:17:39.000For those of you worried about the best educational path for your kids and grandkids, I want to tell you about how Turning Point Academy is working with the Herzog Foundation, how you at home can also benefit from it.
00:17:48.000They have an online publication called The Lion, and also Making the Leap, the Herzog Foundation offers a wide range of advice and information for Christian parents to make the best education decisions for your kids.
00:18:53.000Well, I thought we saw, I thought we witnessed a clear example of what it can do just in the past day.
00:18:59.000I mean, you had kids with the mere threat of potentially having this ban or having this off the market.
00:19:07.000You had kids calling in threatening things from ranging from suicide or that they were going to be overly depressed or, or even, I think there was even some who said they were going to assassinate sitting members of Congress.
00:19:20.000So I think the effects of it are pretty clear.
00:19:23.000And I think it's hard to discount the fact that this is a very, very addictive substance.
00:19:28.000I mean, this is well documented throughout all, throughout all medicine.
00:19:32.000I'm not, I think what yesterday demonstrated was that, yes, this is clearly something that is akin to digital fentanyl for kids.
00:19:42.000Do you believe that there's an intentionality on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party via Byte Dance to get this into the hands of America's youth?
00:19:50.000Just given the connection between Byte Dance and China, I can't see how you can separate the two.
00:19:57.000So even if it's, I can't, I can't even, I was trying to think of a way around like, is there a, is there a reasonable argument to say that the Chinese government doesn't have an interest in it?
00:20:07.000It's just the way the corporate, the way Byte Dance operates and the way it operates with TikTok, it's hard to imagine that they don't want this to happen.
00:20:16.000And look, case in point, yesterday they literally put out a push notification on their app to call every representative and tell them that and tell them to stop this ban.
00:20:28.000When in all reality, that's we they got something way more than they bargained for.
00:20:32.000They basically got a bunch of kids to admit that without them, they're going to commit suicide.
00:20:39.000What has it done to, let's just say, people's self-image, depression, anxiety?
00:20:46.000Has it further accelerated these negative mental health trends?
00:20:51.000The stats are getting harder to just prove the opposite.
00:20:54.000So in reality, I think that we are seeing just the interest of social media in general.
00:21:00.000And we just had a hearing on this a couple of weeks ago, or maybe not a few weeks ago.
00:21:05.000Sorry, the days are blending together and these hearings are blending together, where you have a bunch of parent groups coming to the table here and coming to Congress saying our kids are more depressed.
00:21:21.000We're seeing higher and they're seeing higher depressions in teenage women of all, of all the different populations.
00:21:27.000And we're also seeing them engage in behaviors that aren't normal for kids.
00:21:31.000Like, I mean, it's kind of weird when you walk down the street and see a one kid doing a weird dance that they, and then you walk down the street and see a kid that may be completely independent of that kid doing that same exact dance.
00:21:44.000It's just, it just seems to me that there is a, it also seems to me there, I think there's, it's well documented that there are individual folks, there are individual institutions pointing out that there is a connection between the addiction that these kids feel on the addiction that these kids have on these apps and their behaviors.
00:22:04.000What, so it's this is currently bubbling up in the House of Representatives.
00:22:09.000And the big question is the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary and Controlled Applications Act.
00:22:17.000Walk us through the proposed legislation that just cleared the Commerce Committee.
00:22:21.000Yeah, I think the first thing to note today, like on March 7th, we saw something historic happen.
00:22:26.000And like, and again, it had nothing to do with, say, the union, thank goodness.
00:22:30.000So like in a time like immense political division and an election year, both Republicans and Democrats came together to pass an act that would make it unlawful for an entity to distribute or maintain or update any app that is controlled by a foreign adversary in the United States.
00:22:49.000Well, in common parlance, it's basically if the act would have the practical effect of preventing, let's say, a Chinese-based tech company with clear ties to the Chinese government, let's say, I don't know, ByteDance, to have any ownership interests in a social media app targeted at Americans.
00:23:06.000And let's just pull something out of the hat here, maybe like TikTok.
00:23:09.000That not only would the act proscribe that specific interaction, it would also mean that if TikTok doesn't divest out of ByteDance, it will not be allowed to operate in the U.S., nor could Apple or Google post it on their app stores, plain and simple.
00:23:27.000So would that potentially apply to like Telegram that has Russian owners as well?
00:23:34.000Or is this, why don't they just do a bill targeted at TikTok?
00:23:37.000Why do they have to make this so abstract?
00:23:40.000Well, look, quite frankly, there have been a lot of pushback from more left of center groups and also more libertarian groups who have put First Amendment charges on this.
00:23:54.000And I think what you're seeing is that the bill is specifically targeted at a specific type of harm.
00:24:02.000And so, in general, the First Amendment does allow for any action that may have an implication of free speech to abridge whatever free speech rights are, which I don't think there really are here.
00:24:18.000But again, I think Congress is trying to be very careful about that.
00:24:22.000And they were trying to make sure that this was targeted to a specific harm.
00:24:25.000And that specific harm is happening on social media in general.
00:24:30.000So I think that's why you're seeing them go for apps over just the wide array of communication sectors.
00:24:36.000But to be clear, we have done this before.
00:24:42.000For instance, Huawei and ZTE, which were Chinese-based, trans-based companies that had significant ties to the CCP, are not allowed to get licenses at the FCC.
00:24:52.000They're not allowed to receive any federal funding that comes through what's called the Universal Service Fund programs that the FCC administers.
00:25:00.000So we have done these types of bans in other aspects and other parts of the stack.
00:25:04.000I think this is just the next step in that larger scheme to shore up our national security.
00:25:12.000So one of the pillars for your organization, DigitalProgress.tech, is privacy for every consumer.
00:25:18.000Talk about TikTok's questionable privacy protocols.
00:25:22.000Yeah, well, thankfully for me, it's really an easy case to make.
00:25:27.000I mean, they've been like since even since its first iteration, what it was called Musically, they have been under the ire of both administrations on privacy violations.
00:25:37.000The Federal Trade Commission, for instance, has what's called consent decrees on By Dance Now TikTok to prevent them from sharing kids' data to advertisers.
00:25:51.000Then you have the other issue of state legislators or CAG's office rather suing them for circumventing the wiretap.
00:26:01.000These guys are trying to get in every aspect of your every aspect of your life, whether that's through your phone, whether that's through whatever, whether your tablets, at all times, TikTok wants your data and they specifically want kid data.
00:26:15.000So this is, so again, I think that the track record speaks for itself.
00:26:21.000Like you have consent degrees up the wazoo when it comes to TikTok.
00:26:25.000And so frankly, I really don't even need to make the case.
00:26:29.000People can just easily just look at TikTok's track record and they'll see privacy violation after privacy violation and promise after promise broken time and time again.
00:26:38.000So what do you think is the likelihood of this then passing?
00:26:42.000What are the political prospects, the legislative prospects here?
00:26:46.000The good news is that we had a unanimous vote.
00:26:49.000I think that's pretty historic that you have a in a time when it's an election year, no one wants to give the other party or their side a political win.
00:26:58.000We saw a 50 to zero vote to get it to get it moving to the next stage.
00:27:30.000And so right now, I think the focus for congressional members is to get it through the House.
00:27:36.000But just given the clear endorsements that you're getting on both sides of the aisle on the House side, it's pretty hard for it not to go through all the way the legislative process to the president.
00:27:46.000My more cynical take on who might be pushing for this.
00:27:49.000I mean, if I was Facebook, I would want TikTok to be potentially be banned.
00:27:55.000But just kind of to go a previous question, this very well could be applied to other applications as well, Rumble, Twitter, and because Twitter, for example, has Saudi Arabian investors.
00:28:08.000So I think that the cornerstone of the law, as I understand it, is that there has to be an ownership interest.
00:28:18.000Yeah, so like 17% is owned by Saudi Arabia.
00:28:21.000So again, I think that there are, it also has to go through a different separate process than being in as part, I think it has to go into an NC list as well.
00:28:30.000It's not just like, oh, you have ownership, therefore you're bad.
00:28:33.000There has to actually be an investigation, like we do with literally every other communication system.
00:28:40.000They do have foreign ownership rules to make sure that the foreign ownership isn't above a certain percentage.
00:28:46.000And again, I don't see those thresholds here.
00:28:49.000I think it's a more involved process than just saying you're owned by the Saudis, therefore you're already out of here or you have to divest.
00:28:59.000The issue, as I see it, is that you have to be part of a known entity list before you can even get to the remedial aspects of it.
00:29:14.000If I was Google and Facebook and losing market share in the short video consumption market, of which both are trying to compete with Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts, I would want to try to use the legislative blunt force instrument to go after my competitor, TikTok.
00:29:35.000So I think there's a lot of concerns raised, and there are obvious competition plays here.
00:29:40.000But I think in general, what this really builds off of it is like almost half a decade long of a record from TikTok showing that it is under a little bit more, more of the control of ByteDance, which is by extension in control of the CCP.
00:29:55.000I think that that's driving more of the conversation than the competition elements of this.
00:30:00.000But I think I completely agree with the idea that this market is highly concentrated and that the role of social media over our information is abhorrent.
00:30:10.000And I think that at some point we are going to have to talk, have serious conversations about competition issues over this.
00:30:16.000I mean, we're already starting to do that.
00:30:17.000I mean, with strong antitrust enforcement with Google and with Google search, you're seeing that.
00:30:22.000You're seeing that there's more ire coming under Apple.
00:30:25.000And I just, but I don't think that's the driver in terms of this, as it relates to this conversation.
00:30:32.000And it's a very odd push if that's how you wanted to go about it.
00:30:37.000So then the legislative kind of future in front of it.
00:30:40.000So then who'd become again, the old bill is the old bill.
00:30:43.000Is this then go to the Department of the Secretary of Commerce to enforce?
00:30:51.000Who actually then ends up having the power to do this?
00:30:55.000So the way I read the bill, it looks like it's more geared towards AGs, but I do believe that there are multiple angles of that.
00:31:06.000But my general guess, well, my general view is that I think it's, I believe the Department of Commerce, and I think that there might be other roles that other agencies have.
00:31:14.000Again, this bill came out a couple of days ago.
00:31:18.000And so we're all just trying to piece together all the enforcement, all the enforcement pieces.
00:31:23.000But my understanding is, yes, it's basically going to work through a few different agencies, state AGs in particular.
00:31:29.000In closing here, I want you to talk more about your great group, the Digital Progress Institute, and your kind of core pillars and what you're trying to aim and achieve.
00:31:38.000So in general, like the Digital Progress Institute is really just an organization that's trying to find agreement among instead of looking at where we disagree.
00:31:47.000Our general mission is that we are a bipartisan org that tries to push for incremental progress in the tech and telecom space.
00:31:56.000And so we push for five basic categories of things or five different categories where we think there is bipartisanship.
00:32:27.000So trying to figure out to make sure how everyone can be able to use broadband to access great shows like yours and be able to have as much interaction with the internet as possible.
00:32:37.000We also go for holistic internet regulations.
00:32:39.000So that also means Section 230 reform is on the table.
00:32:42.000We certainly are looking at common carriage and public accommodations.
00:32:45.000And we're trying to apply that more broadly onto the internet ecosystem.
00:32:49.000And so those are the general pillars of our org.
00:32:52.000And so we, again, we are really focused on where we agree and we want to make sure that we push good, solid policy.