00:00:45.000His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:00:53.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:01:34.000Tell us about this piece of legislation.
00:01:36.000Well, Charlie, thank you very much for having me on.
00:01:39.000Anything that Senator Bernie Sanders does in relation to health care, as we know, is intended to increase government control over every decision we make affecting the way we choose to take care of ourselves, what doctors we want, what medicines we can predict, how much we're going to pay for them.
00:01:56.000So his bill, S1339, is a quote-unquote reform bill related to pharmacy benefit managers who help serve 275 million Americans, save them an average of $1,040 every year on the cost of their prescription drugs.
00:02:14.000And the entire arrangement is voluntarily made by employers, unions, state and local governments, even the federal government, to have the pharmacy benefit managers negotiate prices so that their employees or members can save money.
00:02:34.000And Senator Sanders wants to say, no, we're not going to allow you to do this in the way you've been doing it.
00:02:39.000So it will cost everybody more and add on layers and layers of more regulations across the healthcare system.
00:02:46.000Yeah, and so this sounds like something Bernie would be pushing, which of course is try to get us closer to a socialized healthcare, private property confiscation system.
00:02:55.000And, you know, we've been educating our audience about this.
00:02:58.000And Senator Sanders is using his newfound power in the Senate.
00:03:02.000He's always cared about healthcare more than anything else, right?
00:03:05.000He's always cared about the erosion of liberty and freedom.
00:03:09.000So talk about what this would mean concretely if this were to pass, right?
00:03:15.000And in fact, we have a call to action for our audience here that I know that we're partnering with you on that I want to make sure people are aware of.
00:03:27.000Well, it means that the pharmacy benefit managers who use tools like rebates and pharmacy networks, they review drug utilization, formularies, specialty pharmacies, they use every tool that they can to help lower prices.
00:03:42.000Otherwise, why would so many employers and unions and associations and governments use them?
00:03:48.000They don't have to, but there's evidence that the Government Accountability Office found in 2019 that under Medicare Part D, when the pharmacy benefit managers are utilized, it helps save money.
00:04:00.000Federal Trade Commission, not this Federal Trade Commission under Lena Kahn, but in 2005 and again in 2014, the Federal Trade Commission also said that pharmacy benefit managers help save money.
00:04:13.000So no matter what Senator Sanders says about this quote-unquote reform or it will reduce prices, everything he does is intended to set price controls, whether it's to impact research and development of new drugs.
00:04:28.000He tried to add another list of drugs when they were negotiating the debt ceiling.
00:04:33.000He's now trying to impact the transfer of technology from universities to pharmaceutical companies.
00:04:39.000Again, it would interfere with the development of new drugs.
00:04:42.000It's all about the government controlling everything related to healthcare.
00:04:59.000Why is Bill Cassidy and some of these other people, Mike Braun, partnering with a communist from Vermont?
00:05:07.000Well, I think there's another issue involved.
00:05:10.000They are trying to pass legislation that would cap the price of insulin, which is a totally different issue.
00:05:17.000And then they're trying to tie this in together.
00:05:20.000That's what may occur as early as next week on the Senate floor.
00:05:23.000That's why we're trying so hard to stop this from coming to the floor and make sure that Republicans understand that they can either stand with Bernie or stand with the taxpayers, stand for government-run health care, or stand for healthcare choice and let individuals decide what they want to do about how they take care of themselves, what doctors they choose, what kind of pharmacy benefits they want through the people they work for or with.
00:05:54.000I haven't asked them, but I think that they see quote-unquote reform and they think maybe this is a way to try to set some boundaries, but it's just more regulations.
00:06:04.000And again, everything about price controls raises prices.
00:07:08.000And that's just something else they're trying to do.
00:07:10.000I just don't get why any Republican would want to do that.
00:07:13.000It's over-regulation, again, would cause people to pay more, cut off the savings they're getting from the pharmacy benefit managers, and just create more controls over healthcare.
00:07:25.000And so, if you were, again, I don't trust Bernie Sanders at all, and I know our audience doesn't either.
00:07:30.000So, if you wanted to have nationalized health care, if you wanted to try and nationalize all the drug companies, wouldn't you then want an intermediary step which makes things more expensive and more chaotic to then one day justify socialized health care?
00:07:46.000This is, again, a way for him to interfere with what's working.
00:07:51.000It is an area of the healthcare system, the pharmacy, pharmacy benefit managers that save money, proven to save money, found by federal agencies to save money, including one that would get more ability to regulate it, the FDC.
00:08:05.000So I just wouldn't do anything that Bernie Sanders wants to do in relation to healthcare.
00:08:11.000We know his underlying philosophy is socialism.
00:08:16.000So again, we're encouraging everybody across the country to go to lowermydrugprices.com, contact your legislator, your senator.
00:08:24.000It'll connect you once you put in your name and address, and you can send them a letter saying, don't stand with Bernie.
00:08:30.000Stand with us as taxpayers and keep him away from regulating healthcare.
00:08:35.000So in closing, what is the timeline here?
00:08:37.000This thing, they're really pushing this forward quickly.
00:08:39.000So walk us through what the timeline looks like here.
00:08:43.000Well, majority leader Chuck Schumer has talked about bringing up this insulin bill and then tying in this other bill, S1339, as early as next week, meaning the week of July 10th.
00:08:53.000So we are trying to make sure this does not happen.
00:08:56.000We need to convince enough Republicans, even some of those who have already co-sponsored this bill.
00:09:01.000Again, not sure why they want to stand with Bernie and the Federal Trade Commission and not the taxpayers.
00:09:06.000But that's the message we're trying to convey.
00:09:28.000Look, it is time to consider a rollover of that 401k into an IRA.
00:09:34.000The investment world is completely different in 2023, and you cannot do the same thing as last year.
00:09:39.000Woke companies are aggressively implementing ESG.
00:09:43.000Interest rates are going up and inflation is still lingering.
00:09:46.000If you have over $150,000, now is the time to move your money to a biblical responsible investing strategy with my friends at PAX Financial Group.
00:11:25.000The problem is, and I will grant this one, I don't think it's for racism to blame, but it's a big problem, is the failing government schools in inner cities.
00:11:34.000Maybe we can agree on that, where we can have school choice and actually have a real movement against the cartel unions, but the Democrats don't want any of that.
00:11:42.000I want to live in a country for the founding fathers envisioned in the Declaration of Independence.
00:11:47.000You're made in the image of the divine, not the image of your skin color group.
00:11:52.000So we've said for a while that Joy Reed, and it's so funny, we were saying this jokingly, but it's so obvious that Joy Reed is an affirmative action case, and people would attack us.
00:12:52.000I just happened to be really nerdy and smart and have really good grades and good SAT scores.
00:12:56.000But someone came to Denver, Colorado to look for me.
00:12:59.000A Harvard recruiter flew to Denver and I met up with her at the Village Inn restaurant and did a pre-interview to get to pull me into Harvard.
00:13:20.000We don't have the whole thing where she says, and then all throughout my freshman year, all these students in class said, people like me are only here because of affirmative action.
00:14:08.000Because Joy Reed knows she's not that smart.
00:14:10.000She has some self-awareness of her lack of intellect.
00:14:13.000So she always had to try to prove herself because people saw through it because they said, this person's a moron.
00:14:19.000Obviously, she doesn't reach the standard threshold here.
00:14:23.000She's here because of an affirmative action case.
00:14:27.000Affirmative action gives weight and preference to people that otherwise would not, like she said it herself, I had no business going to Harvard.
00:14:36.000The left will always misdiagnose the real problems in education, rejecting actual solutions in favor of fake ones that make things worse at at least four times the cost.
00:14:48.000And Harvard, apparently, she said, I didn't have any test prep.
00:14:53.000Lots of nerdy people that shouldn't be going to Harvard.
00:14:56.000But no, what Harvard did is because of white guilt.
00:14:59.000So they sent out their recruiters, Harvard did, under white guilt and a hyper-academic regime of we must make our student body more diverse.
00:15:48.000Back-check me, look at NAD and see what it could do for you.
00:15:50.000Well, look, I take NAD every single day.
00:15:52.000Strong Cell is a scientific breakthrough in cellular health replenishment that combines NADH, CoQ10, and marine collagen to boost your body's cellular function.
00:16:01.000I personally take Strong Cell every day, and so do a ton of Kirk listeners.
00:17:02.000Well, this is the biggest and the most encouraging story in the country, I would say.
00:17:07.000And usually the biggest story is not terribly encouraging.
00:17:10.000So we should count our blessings in this case because this is one of the most positive developments for free speech in America in a very, very long time.
00:17:19.000And I know you've covered this on your program in earlier segments, so I'll share the summary.
00:17:25.000But I just have to encourage everyone listening: if you have time and you should make time, go and read the memo or at least skim it, because there are some absolute whoppers in there.
00:17:36.000It's a grand tour through the entire sordid bowels of the censorship industrial complex, from all of the actors personally, institutionally, to all of their most egregious,
00:17:52.000greatest hits of censorship, ranging from COVID lockdown to masks, to vaccines, to, of course, the Hunter laptop, which the government pressured socials to censor on the pretext that it was some kind of Russian disinformation operation,
00:18:12.000all the way to this shadowy group that is now exposed to the disinfectant of sunlight called CISA and the EIP and their machinations and what they were doing to suppress conversation regarding the integrity of the 2020 election.
00:18:30.000And in fact, I've been very, very closely involved with this and following it very closely.
00:18:37.000And Revolver is featured prominently in the Election Integrity Partnership report called The Short Fuse, in which they chronicle in great detail how so-called conspiracy narratives can take off.
00:18:53.000And they chose, of all narratives, Revolver News's color revolution reporting, which was a big thing in the lead up to the 2020 election.
00:19:02.000They featured that very prominently, and it was even taught at universities and so forth as an example of how dangerous disinformation can spread.
00:19:11.000But what we've learned through the Twitter files and through excellent reporting from, I would have to say, Revolver News, also organizations like Foundation for Freedom Online, is it wasn't just the Yole Roth type.
00:19:23.000It wasn't just the censorious Commissar trash embedded within the trust and safety departments of the respective social media companies.
00:19:34.000The bigger story here was this was a result of bullying coming directly from government agencies themselves.
00:19:42.000And there's some fantastic information in this memo chronicling how Biden officials would really just bully Facebook.
00:19:52.000Like they would, there's to a Biden White House official, the COVID czar, he would send a message to some Facebook Media employee, say, I still see some posts skeptical of vaccines.
00:20:22.000It was a relationship that was far more brutal than you would expect from, like an evil foreman at a factory how they would treat his employees.
00:20:33.000This was totally brutal, totally one-sided, and it was to the point where Facebook would just flailingly and desperately say, oh I'm so sorry, let us know, we'll incorporate best practices and in fact, they even went to the length of censoring and deboosting, throttling information that didn't violate their terms of service, which were already restrictive, simply to please their government censors.
00:20:58.000So this judge who made the ruling made the right call.
00:21:02.000This is a clear violation of the first amendment and a result of this injunction is basically a restraining order.
00:21:11.000Just in the same way as you might want to put a restraining order between Biden and and and young people.
00:21:17.000This is a restraining order between Biden administration officials and institutions and social media companies saying you can't contact them for the purpose of flagging information anymore.
00:21:29.000This is this is an excellent injunction.
00:21:31.000However, i'm starting to see whispers of this, and this is a predictable outcome and it's a separate case.
00:21:37.000So attorney general of Arizona, Chris May, says she's just going to ignore the Supreme Court Darren, the Administrative State.
00:21:43.000I just think they're going to ignore this injunction, and if they do, then it's kind of the old adage, well, let them enforce it.
00:21:56.000If the Administrative State ignores this ruling or this injunction, then what?
00:22:02.000Because I think they're going to ignore it right.
00:22:06.000Well then, you got to hit them in other places, then you have to hit them in funding, and I think that's going to be the next volley here.
00:22:13.000The next stage of the battle is uh, bring to bear a very sophisticated and detailed understanding of these organizations, funding sources and go after that.
00:22:24.000So you know, make no mistake, this ruling is not, you know, the war being won, but I think it is a majorly positive uh development in terms of pointing out and taking a step toward correcting the constitutional abuses that have occurred in the Biden White House and that major component of the censorship story, of which there were many components.
00:22:50.000I just my fear is that this is going to invoke a constitutional crisis now technically, if they willingly ignore a court order, they could be held criminally uh, for a contempt, but that would take the Department OF Justice and all this.
00:23:07.000But Darren I, I think the, the liberals demand conformity and obedience.
00:23:13.000Unless it's a decision they don't like, then it's all out.
00:23:16.000Resistance absolutely absolutely no, I mean look, you know, if A version of your objection, which is totally valid, is to say it's basically hard, if not impossible, to get anything meaningful done unless we actually control the institutions implicated.
00:23:46.000At the very least, it occupies this is something that's occupying far more of their focus and attention and resources than anything in recent months and years.
00:23:57.000And that, you know, at least takes up some bandwidth that they would otherwise be using to censor the next thing.
00:24:03.000So it's a tough battle when you don't control any institutions, which is basically the position that we're in.
00:24:12.000And so, given that asymmetrical underlying reality, this is one of the most encouraging things I think hope for.
00:25:43.000I think blitzkrieg, you know, counter-lawfare is absolutely an advisable strategy.
00:25:49.000And I think it's worth a substantial amount of resources dedicated to this.
00:25:53.000You know, there's not a dearth of money rolling around in the conservative world and the GOP world, but the issue is deploying that capital efficiently to the highest leverage pain points with respect to our opponents.
00:26:10.000And I think this is absolutely something that deserves a substantial amount of resources and focus to keep them.
00:26:19.000They're kind of on the defensive, which is not really a posture they've been in in a very long time.
00:26:24.000And I think we need to keep up this momentum across all fronts.
00:26:28.000So absolutely, I would advocate a very, very aggressive law fare posture to basically sue the hell out of these guys.
00:26:36.000Yeah, because remember, this complaint was brought forward by the Attorney General's Office of Missouri, Missouri v. Biden.
00:26:42.000And so they are probably asking in relief for a suspension of this policy, which is fine.
00:26:49.000But what we need now is the victims, myself, Bongino, and others, that can then say, okay, now you have to pay money or whatever sort of damages because the federal government acting in this way, and I'll be honest, Darren, we'll talk about this after the break.
00:27:06.000I think we're barely touching the surface of how deep their censorship tentacles go.
00:27:12.000I don't think We're at less than 1% of how widespread the federal government has become in policing speech, becoming traffic cops for wrongthink.
00:28:30.000Okay, I want to, Darren Beattie continues us.
00:28:32.000So, Darren, you have some other stories I want to go to, but I just want to close this.
00:28:35.000Darren, what is to prevent active measures of censorship in 2024?
00:28:42.000I think what we need to do, and this is my advice to the senators, is they need to now subpoena these agency officials and get them on the record that they're following the court order because they're going to defy it because there's some workarounds, Darren.
00:29:04.000Well, yes, there were multiple workarounds and loopholes that really are inconsistent with the charges that serve as the basis for the injunction in the first place.
00:29:15.000You know, the Hunter Biden laptop issue was censored on the pretext of national security, effectively, of foreign disinformation, of foreign election operation.
00:29:28.000And that's one of the carve-outs for a legitimate reason that the government would communicate with lean on social media company for the purpose of censorship.
00:29:38.000So they're already abusing the notion of national security.
00:29:43.000I think, just throw it all out, we know that they're not protecting legitimate national security interests.
00:29:48.000So just take that off the table completely.
00:29:50.000Don't even leave that open as a loophole because they've already proven that they're not sufficiently responsible to stick within the actual purview of legitimate national security interests.
00:30:01.000It's simply a concept that they can abuse in order to censor Americans.
00:30:05.000That's been proven time and time again.
00:30:08.000Another interesting loophole was specifically foreign election interference, which again is the three pillars that they mentioned in this election integrity partnership thing.
00:30:20.000They featured, you know, I mentioned they featured Revolver News coverage prominently.
00:30:24.000They tried to associate with us with Russian misinformation.
00:30:28.000That's already something that's been abused and was detailed very thoroughly in the memo itself.
00:30:35.000And then finally, I have to say one thing says for things that are illegal in relation to election interference.
00:30:45.000Well, what's illegal these days is memes mocking Hillary Clinton.
00:30:49.000We just had an American citizen who was found guilty for election memes mocking Hillary Clinton for disinformation.
00:31:00.000And so the loopholes, it seems to me, you know, I wanted to be positive at the beginning because we have so few opportunities to be positive.
00:31:09.000But you're absolutely right about these loopholes.
00:31:11.000Is that when you look carefully at the loopholes, each single loophole was already the basis of pretextual abuse that enabled the violations that serve as the reason for the injunction in the first place?
00:31:25.000So there has to be some other measure because they could simply say we're complying with the injunction and do the same thing they've always done, invoke national security, invoke election interference, the same things that they did the Hunter laptop, same things with COVID, same thing they did with the 2020 election.
00:32:19.000Her name is Renee DeResta, and she has a decorated resume in terms of being involved in the dirtiest operations imaginable.
00:32:28.000And just to give you a sense of the type of person who makes a career out of censoring Americans for so-called disinformation, this woman was involved in an organization that set up fake Russian accounts.
00:32:43.000Those fake Russian accounts supported Roy Moore, who was a candidate in Alabama election.
00:32:50.000And they used that, the support of the fake accounts that they were controlling as the basis to say that Roy Moore was supported by Russia.
00:32:59.000That is the cyber equivalent of the Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping case.
00:33:02.000She's getting kidnapped by federal agents that we're funding.