Netflix and Warner Brothers are in talks to merge, but is it a good deal or a bad deal? In this episode, we are joined by Alan Bakari, founder of the Foundation for Freedom Online, to discuss this and much more.
00:00:56.000The Charlie Kirk Show is proudly sponsored by Preserve Gold, the leading gold and silver experts and the only precious metals company I recommend to my family, friends, and viewers.
00:01:09.000All right, welcome back to the Charlie Kirk Show.
00:01:31.000So we are here to talk about Netflix and Warner Brothers.
00:01:35.000So Netflix-Warner Brothers merger, yet again, we've talked a bit about this, but you have a new piece in The American Conservative where you say it's quite the headline.
00:01:45.000It's Netflix swallowing Warner Brothers would create a monster.
00:01:51.000So that sounds like a fun discussion to have.
00:02:34.000But there's also the wokeness question.
00:02:35.000I mean, there's the wokeness question here as well.
00:02:38.000Most of Silicon Valley, most social media platforms have been fairly sympathetic to where they've been going over the last three or four years.
00:02:46.000They've, you know, they've gone, they've done a little bit of a U-turn, especially in case of X, on their 2016 to 2024 era censorship policies.
00:02:55.000They've rolled back some of those censorship policies.
00:02:57.000YouTube, for example, has unbanned a number of prominent creators that had banned during the worst of censorship.
00:03:05.000So, you know, many of the social media platforms have rolled back their censorship policies.
00:03:09.000And in a way, social media, you know, it's inherently disruptive to the legacy media, right?
00:03:14.000So even when, even at the height of censorship, when trust and safety departments were banning conservative commentators, the logic of social media was to disrupt the legacy media and the post-war liberal order, which it held up.
00:03:28.000Now, Netflix is not like that at all, because they're a studio first and a technology company second.
00:03:34.000So even though they're disrupting Hollywood, you could say that they've definitely done that.
00:03:39.000Because they're a studio first, they still have that ideological gatekeeping role.
00:03:44.000So in a way, they combine the worst elements of post-2016 Silicon Valley wokeness with Hollywood liberalism to create something that's worse than both.
00:03:55.000So, I mean, I'm not sure why any Republican administration would want to give a company like that more power.
00:04:00.000Yeah, I like this line that you have in your piece where you just say what makes Netflix notable is not just its size, but its ideological consistency.
00:04:09.000So, we saw that Microsoft retreated from its partnership with NewsGuard.
00:04:13.000They've cozied up to the administration.
00:04:15.000Meta, Mark Zuckerberg came out and said, we're dialing back fact-checking.
00:04:19.000We're not going to be the speech police.
00:04:22.000Google's cozied up to the administration.
00:04:33.000You just have to look at Reed Hastings' reaction to Peter Thiel backing Trump back in 2016.
00:04:40.000He sent him an angry email saying, I can't believe you did this.
00:04:43.000You have terrible judgment for backing Trump.
00:04:45.000Whereas someone like Mark Zuckerberg was a lot more even-handed, even when he was aligned himself personally against Trump.
00:04:53.000He put out some statements saying he respected diversity of ideological viewpoints.
00:04:57.000So that really shows that Netflix is all in for progressive ideology.
00:05:01.000And that really makes sense when you consider that they're a combination of a Silicon Valley tech company with a Hollywood studio.
00:05:09.000I mean, those are two types of companies that tend to have very, very woke liberal internal politics.
00:05:16.000And you can see that in the fact that they put Susan Rice on their board in 2018 and brought her back after her stint in the Biden administration.
00:05:25.000Yeah, so Alan, I had kind of more of a basic question, actually.
00:05:29.000And, you know, I was like, why do we even have, why does this company even need to be sold, right?
00:05:34.000I mean, Warner Brothers Discovery, and this is, by the way, it contains assets like CNN, TNT, HGTV.
00:05:44.000Then they have this huge library of content.
00:05:48.000Is there an argument that this company doesn't have to be sold at all?
00:05:53.000Or is that off the table at this point?
00:05:55.000I'm not sure why it has to be sold either.
00:05:57.000It seems nothing more than a power grab by Netflix to increase its market share even further.
00:06:03.000Like I said, it's already the biggest company in the market for streaming, and this would make them even huger.
00:06:11.000And like you said, it also gives them more power over the news cycle in addition to a monopoly on storytelling and entertainment franchises with their ownership of CNN.
00:06:21.000Yeah, well, and so that's the interesting.
00:06:23.000I kind of wonder what's going to happen with CNN in this mad dash to sell.
00:06:29.000So I think we've seen this where there's been pressure where they might just have to spin it off or change that or dial it back.
00:06:35.000And I do wonder if that could be the cheap way that they satisfy the administration is this administration, I think it would be fair to say they President Trump, he's a very television-age person.
00:07:20.000And I guess I would express the worry that if we just see this as a CNN thing, when it's really much more about who's controlling the commanding heights of popular culture.
00:07:30.000Yeah, it's the cultural economy, and we shouldn't underestimate that, the power of storytelling, especially its influence over young people.
00:07:40.000I mean, if you go on X and you search for Netflix adaptation, you'll see all sorts of jokes about, oh, Netflix is going to adapt Beowulf, and then they're going to make Beowulf into a black lesbian immediately.
00:07:54.000These companies really are probably the most liberal and progressive companies in America today.
00:08:01.000And, you know, if you really want to give companies like that more power, I think we should be thinking more about how we're going to disrupt, how the market can disrupt Hollywood, disrupt these big entertainment studios and their chokehold over culture and the gatekeeping role that they play over, you know, the major, you know, the great Western stories that they all control through these IP controller contracts.
00:08:23.000And, you know, I think there's Silicon Valley definitely has a role there, especially with AI.
00:08:27.000But Netflix is definitely not a disrupting agent like some other tech companies have been.
00:08:33.000So to bring the audience up to speed here, so Netflix had the winning bid at $72 billion cash and stock deal for the studios, HBO Max, DC, and gaming assets.
00:08:46.000So this excluded the cable networks and the expectation was going to close in 12 to 18 months pending regulatory approval, which is a big, a big weight, a big, big thing there.
00:08:57.000So then Paramount comes in with a hostile counter on December 8th, so earlier this week, an all-cash, $108.4 billion offer for all of W Warner Brothers Discovery at $30 per share.
00:09:12.000So, and this is backed by the Ellison family, Jared Kushner's Affinity Partners, and Middle Eastern Sovereign Funds.
00:09:19.000So it promises a faster closure and $6 billion in synergies, but raises antitrust flags due to further dissolves.
00:09:27.000Is it better to have the emir of Abu Dhabi on HBO?
00:09:33.000I mean, you probably wouldn't get as many trans quids and gay, trans, you know, whatever character adaptations.
00:09:42.000And so President Trump has weighed in demanding CNN's sale in any deal.
00:09:48.000So to Blake's point, I mean, that's where we find ourselves.
00:09:51.000So, you know, it was interesting as well, Alan, when on the other side of this break, so ponder it now.
00:09:57.000You know, you got President Trump come in and kind of took a shot at Paramount CBS with 60 Minutes and Leslie Stahl, and he's demanding an apology.
00:10:07.000So he's sort of applying pressure equally on both on both sides of this ledger.
00:10:12.000So it'll be interesting to see how this does play out.
00:11:59.000And, you know, just to put this in context, the EU Digital Services Act is probably the most dangerous censorship law in the world when it comes to online speech.
00:12:07.000It was brought in a couple of years ago, actually with the cooperation and encouragement of the Biden administration.
00:12:13.000And X has become, was the first company to be investigated under the DSA after months and months of threats from European bureaucrats.
00:12:22.000That actually began right after Musk took over the company.
00:12:25.000So as soon as Musk took over Twitter, turned it into X, and started talking about how he's going to dismantle its internal censorship process.
00:12:32.000That's when the threats from European bureaucrats started.
00:12:36.000X became the first company to be investigated, first company to be fined.
00:12:45.000And if X doesn't comply, then the EU has the power to impose periodic penalties of up to 5% of a company's average daily worldwide turnover for each day of non-compliance.
00:13:07.000One of them, as you said, was subscriber check marks.
00:13:11.000The second two things, number one, not giving researchers, quote-unquote researchers, access to Twitter's ad repository and not giving those same researchers access to Twitter's data or language that is to scrape the platform for data.
00:13:26.000Now, all three of those things are directly related to online censorship, even if they don't seem so at first.
00:13:32.000The subscriber check marks is how Twitter insulates itself from advertiser pressure because it gives us a stream of revenue that's not connected to ad revenue.
00:13:41.000So ad boycotts have less of an impact.
00:13:43.000Number two, making sure researchers have access to ad repositories.
00:13:48.000That's so the so-called disinformation researchers, who are the foot soldiers of censorship, they're the ones who build lists of disfavored content, who build lists of speech to censor and lists of advertisers to pressure for boycott.
00:14:03.000That's why they need access to X's ads so they can see what ads are running.
00:14:07.000And they also need access to Twitter's public data so they can analyze it at scale, figure out which users are talking about the wrong things, which narratives are going viral.
00:14:16.000Without that access, disinformation researchers are blind, and disinformation researchers are essentially the Stasi of the worldwide censorship complex.
00:14:26.000That's been funded by the previous administration and is funded by Western governments to control the internet.
00:14:40.000The German government funded this guy named Travis Brown to scrape the data off of, I believe it was still, it was Twitter at the time, off of Twitter and then X.
00:14:51.000And then he would just give this to people aligned with Antifa to dox people.
00:14:56.000So for example, I believe when Libs of TikTok got doxed, it was with information that he got off the website.
00:15:55.000I mean, they seem wholly committed to censorship.
00:15:59.000Yeah, I mean, the European Union has, and European bureaucratic elites have the most incentive to shut down online free speech because look at what's happening in their countries.
00:16:06.000France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden.
00:16:09.000In all of these countries, young people are turning towards the populist right, and they're turning towards the populist right because they have free speech on the internet, because they can see information that challenges mainstream narratives.
00:16:21.000And European elites know if they don't shut that down, it'll be over for them and the parties, the political parties that support them.
00:16:27.000They'll just melt away as young voters take over.
00:16:31.000Yeah, I mean, you would know better than us.
00:16:34.000However, what's happening in these countries is truly remarkable, Alam.
00:16:38.000And I mean, you're seeing the disintegration of the Christian West by mass migration, and young Europeans are fed up with it, as we are, honestly, in the United States.
00:16:48.000However, we do have a more robust free speech culture.
00:16:52.000The whole world sort of looks to American conservatism to get their talking points, to get their inspiration.
00:16:59.000Alam, we hope you'll join us again as this story unfolds.
00:17:02.000I know there's going to be more twists and turns in the coming weeks.
00:18:21.000And I would say that of all the sort of divisions or projects within Turning Point, Charlie was potentially the most excited about Frontlines.
00:18:31.000I can't say that for sure, but there was times, I remember conversations when we were dreaming up what Frontlines was going to be and could become.
00:18:41.000So why don't you just describe what TPUSA Frontlines is as a starting point?
00:18:45.000Well, first and foremost, I mean, Charlie was the original Frontlines reporter, right?
00:18:49.000I mean, he was out there demonstrating what it's like to be a man in the arena.
00:18:54.000And we're just carrying on that mission, right?
00:18:57.000So out of the 2020 riots with BLM and protests and all that stuff, a couple years into it, Frontlines emerged as this like on-the-ground journalism wing of Turning Point USA where we're going out and covering these protests, these riots, and we're getting this exclusive, raw, unfettered, on-the-ground footage and posting it directly to social media so that way people are getting the real truth of what's happening out there instead of the mainstream media, which I was working for at the time.
00:19:26.000They would cut away from these protests and these riots and they would show the more peaceful side of things.
00:19:34.000So, you know, Frontlines was one of those guerrilla journalism style teams that was giving you the raw access to what was happening on the ground.
00:19:46.000It was a half-hour show where we would kind of break down the news through original reporting.
00:19:51.000But now we've grown into this nationwide network of videographers and journalists emphasizing truth, objectivity, and integrity, you know, through the turning point lens.
00:20:02.000And, you know, our videos are often going viral.
00:20:07.000We're picking up content that is the mainstream media is now forced to recognize because of its virality.
00:20:15.000And, you know, it's just a really exciting time.
00:20:18.000We, you know, we've obviously have made an impact.
00:24:08.000He covers a lot of Seattle and Portland stories.
00:24:11.000He's embedded with all these different underground networks where he's getting leads and often breaking these stories again that nobody else has.
00:24:21.000He infiltrated two Antifa book fairs recently with one of our other contractors, Kevin Calb, 6'7, Kevin.
00:24:29.000And they went and discovered where these militants plan and recruit for direct action.
00:25:28.000Which is ironic because her travel always gets disrupted.
00:25:31.000So it just goes to show that, you know, there's something with her.
00:25:35.000But she's really good with covering immigration.
00:25:38.000You know, she's exposing black markets that have been on a thing for decades, but she's actually showing it in real time and showing how when the police come or ICE comes, they have a really operate like a way of, what do they do?
00:25:57.000They like pack everything up and then get out of the situation really quickly.
00:26:01.000And then oftentimes, some of these big city police departments, they're complicit in it.
00:26:06.000Like they'll turn it away and she's exposing that.
00:26:21.000Yeah, so Julio is a new addition to the team.
00:26:24.000And he was recently embedded with Border Patrol in Louisiana for Operation Catalua Crunch.
00:26:31.000Where yeah, he got a couple of the arrests happening in real time, some of the protesters.
00:26:38.000He was also in Mexico City recently covering that Big Gen Z protest riot that erupted against this younger generation that are fed up with the cartels down there.
00:26:48.000Yeah, well, and Julio was also, I think he was in Kenosha for Kyle Rittenhouse.
00:26:55.000He was one of the journalists on the ground, yes.
00:28:57.000Yeah, I mean, she's primarily at the White House, but if there's a protest happening or if there's like some sort of man on the street interview that we want her to get, we now have access to the Pentagon.
00:29:06.000We're part of the new Pentagon Press Card Print, sorry, Pentagon Press Corps.
00:29:11.000And she will be covering that as well if there is any major breaking news happening.
00:29:16.000Last but not least, and maybe I'm forgetting somebody, but 295, this is Vicki Richter.
00:31:23.000You can hear her breathing because she's just chasing down these ICE agents that are, you know, going after these protesters and rioters that are disrupting.
00:32:14.000I'm not going to be a bogus scientific wind right there during the break.
00:32:16.000I mean, you are kind of like the token intellectual that we have around.
00:32:21.000The white paper guy, the white paper guy.
00:32:24.000So because Charlie was always, we're not a think tank, we're a battle tank.
00:32:34.000No, I think I think that's this leads into my question, though.
00:32:38.000It's inspired by an actual question, which is, as you guys have grown, how do you determine your editorial decisions where you're deploying these now nine reporters across the country?
00:33:02.000You know, we'll look into protests and riot, potential protests and planned riots online to see how big they're actually going to get based on social media engagement.
00:33:38.000So when you guys are diving into the underworld, the underbelly of the modern left, you're saying you sort of realize the emperor has no clothes.
00:33:48.000You're sort of realizing just how unimpressive, as you said, it is.
00:33:53.000Yeah, I mean, it's the same song over and over again, right?
00:35:03.000Yeah, I mean, what are we doing from a, I mean, there's got to be a lot of stories that you don't pursue because they, they, it's just, you can't guarantee the safety of the team, right?
00:35:18.000Some of that, I mean, you guys are considering their well-being, obviously.
00:35:22.000And then reporters have discretion, whether they'll accept the story or if they want to pursue one, maybe you guys have to say, no, no, no, don't do that one.
00:35:54.000My last question for you is: if we have a lead, if somebody out there in the audience has a lead and they want frontlines to cover, how did they get in touch with you guys?
00:36:00.000You could reach out to us frontlines at tpusa.com.
00:36:05.000So just that you have an email frontline at tpusa.com.
00:36:08.000There's a tip sheet on our Turning Point website, and you could always contact through X as well.