00:00:00.000Darren Beattie joins us from Revolver.news to talk about the aftermath of the midterm election and then the case for banning TikTok with Brendan Carr and how that impacted the midterms.
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00:01:27.000Darren, you wrote a piece back in 2020 talking about how we could stop this manipulation, ballot capturing operation of the Democrats.
00:01:35.000I wish more people would have listened to you.
00:01:37.000Now here we are post-midterms, barely getting the House, not having the Senate, and with some of our superstars, after many days of counting and suspicious ballot dumps, look like are not going to be in office absent some aggressive lawsuits.
00:01:50.000Darren, what is your analysis and how should we proceed?
00:01:52.000Well, it's a very troubling situation.
00:01:55.000And the bottom line is really a lack of the basic kind of voting infrastructure that the Democrats have built over a long period of time, but really, really capitalized on the sort of COVID environment and post-COVID environment so as to really enhance the robustness of their machinery that's capable of exploiting the mail-in system.
00:02:22.000And the bottom line is getting out really low-information, low-interest, low-energy votes.
00:02:32.000And it's a tremendous structural advantage.
00:02:34.000And it was clear that that would be the case, irrespective of the question of downright kind of fraudulent activity.
00:02:42.000This is just how the game is structured now.
00:02:45.000And so I think it's like there's an interesting distinction between rigged and stolen.
00:02:51.000And I think we need to think more about the rigged, how things are set up, how the Democrat machine exploits the mail-in system to its profound structural advantage.
00:03:04.000And they do so, and they don't even need good candidates.
00:03:08.000I mean, we're talking about candidate equality, and the Democrats are winning with people like John Fetterman, which is probably one of the ultimate flexes in American political history that you can win with John Fetterman.
00:03:22.000I mean, it seems like they should be embarrassed, but when you really think about it, we're the ones should be embarrassed by that.
00:03:31.000And so, just by the way, some breaking news.
00:03:33.000There's been a new ballot drop in Pinal.
00:03:35.000Abe Homeday now trails by 2,269 votes, which would be incredibly important if we can get Abe Hamaday in more ways than one.
00:03:46.000So sorry, Darren, I want to continue with this, though.
00:03:48.000But Darren, is it time in states where it is legal for Republicans to embrace ballot harvesting?
00:03:55.000Well, I think it's time for Republicans to learn how to learn how to navigate it.
00:04:04.000I mean, I would say it would be better to just eliminate it entirely.
00:04:10.000If that's not an option, then the GOP needs to learn how to game it and to think about what is going to be more kind of politically realistic.
00:04:20.000Is it politically realistic to go back to, you know, part of the piece? that you mentioned, the revolver piece that we ran shortly after the 2020 election, you know, Democrats weren't always these big pro-mail-in ballot people.
00:04:33.000In fact, Jimmy Carter ran a commission and a whole study that basically said how dangerous a mass mail-in voting system would actually be.
00:04:44.000And frankly, I'd recommend people go and look at that Jimmy Carter study, but we need to deal in the realm of what's politically feasible.
00:04:52.000And if it turns out that it's simply a non-starter to get rid of mass mail-in, which it might be, then we need to learn how to play the game as it exists today.
00:05:04.000Yeah, Andrew, what is your take on that?
00:05:06.000Yeah, I mean, I said this yesterday and I still hold to it.
00:05:42.000But the Democrats have the advantage on low agency, low information voters.
00:05:46.000That's why the mass universal no excuse mail-in ballots has been such a thing.
00:05:50.000These drop boxes have been such a thing that they're pushing.
00:05:53.000But to your point, if we do not have the political power to overturn these abuses of our democracy, and I would call it that, then we just have to start investing money, resources, manpower, ground game.
00:06:07.000And this has to come straight from the top of the Republican Party, in my opinion, into equalizing the playing field.
00:06:12.000Because to your point, I think our messaging is better.
00:06:28.000And just if I could interject and add something to that, I think as far as I'm aware, like I really want to look into it more deeply because I'm not quite ready to concede that it's a non-starter in every state that, you know, to that we can't severely diminish, if not eliminate the practice of mail-in.
00:06:50.000I think it's worth like really looking into what that would require realistically, what kind of resources, what the expected benefit that would be versus, and it's not just an easy thing to reconstruct a kind of machinery that can turn out really low interest voters.
00:07:06.000And in fact, you know, an interesting way to think about it, you could say that the GOP version of that, at least after the Trump phenomenon, Trump was the machine that turned out low interest voters.
00:07:24.000Those were the people that never went out.
00:07:26.000And so what the Democrats achieved through a very efficient, well-oiled sort of almost mechanistic machinery of just like literally bussing in like people, it's almost an automated system of bringing in.
00:07:40.000Trump achieved this, I think, in a much more noble way and inspiring way by actually re-engaging lowest interest people in the political process.
00:07:50.000Now, as people are want to say in the technical world, Trump is a unique political phenomenon.
00:07:58.000Trump is not necessarily scalable into the indefinite political future.
00:08:04.000And so I do think we need to start thinking about what type of machinery we need.
00:08:09.000Otherwise, it's like we don't have a chance unless we're running like once in a generation political talent.
00:08:17.000And even there in 2020, it didn't work out for us.
00:08:20.000So it's definitely something to look at.
00:08:25.000But I think the mail-in will always have a kind of disadvantage to the Republican side.
00:08:33.000Stephen Miller actually had an insightful tweet on this that I kind of added to.
00:08:38.000And he was saying, when it's a competition among who can best turn out the lowest interest voters, lowest engagement voters, that really changes the nature of what democracy is.
00:08:51.000And as students of history know, the original understanding of how voting worked in America was not just anyone could vote.
00:08:59.000You had to have property, you had to be a man and all these kinds of things.
00:09:03.000And a lot of these criteria are probably not appropriate for today.
00:09:07.000But I think the basic idea that one had to have some sort of investment in the system to vote, that you needed some kind of skin in the game, the last vestige of this was the system that at least gave a sort of structural advantage to people who cared.
00:09:25.000And even that now is undermined by the practice of mass mailing and voting.
00:09:30.000So it actually substantively changes the nature of what our democracy is.
00:09:34.000So we're at a place right now where the Democrats accuse you of voter disenfranchisement of suppression just because you're worried that mass mail and ballots in every direction that could be captured by Alinskyite community organizers.
00:09:52.000Yeah, the last kind, like you said, the last vestige of trying to have someone who's voting to care would be, I don't know, election day, getting in your car, going somewhere.
00:10:11.000Well, I want to stand by and see what the announcement is.
00:10:15.000But assuming that he does announce, which in all probability he will, but you never know because, you know, you just never know with Trump.
00:10:45.000And, you know, Trump, when he's bringing it, when he's running on all cylinders, is a formidable and unique political force.
00:10:55.000And so we just need to hope the better angels are guiding him and that we see some of that magic that so many of us became addicted to from the 2015-2016 campaign.
00:11:08.000Yeah, the feedback I'm receiving from a lot of people, and I think we're going to be streaming tonight his speech and also kind of our reaction to it tonight.
00:11:16.000The reaction I'm getting from a lot of people is that they kind of want to see a little bit of that spark that they kind of grew fond of in 15, 16, and 17, and even parts of his presidency as well.
00:11:29.000I'm receiving a lot of negative incoming of his communications towards DeSantis and Junckin.
00:11:39.000I think Darren's point about Trump being a unique political animal in the sense that he can turn out those voters that we just haven't seen any other Republican be able to turn out, especially at the national level.
00:11:55.000People are frustrated with some of the attacks on Yunkin and DeSantis.
00:11:59.000I think DeSantis has now officially responded to those.
00:12:03.000He's been asked about them in the press conference.
00:12:04.000I'm not sure if we have that clip yet.
00:12:06.000But, you know, I think we have to hope, to your point, that the better angels come out and that he channels his unique gifts in a way that really uplifts the party and gets people out to vote.
00:12:18.000I mean, at this point, I still think it's a hard row to hope for anybody to beat him in a primary, but, you know, we're still early days here, you know.
00:12:28.000So we're going to be watching really intently and seeing kind of his message.
00:12:32.000And if he's forward-looking, I think that's a really interesting first step.
00:12:35.000Yeah, Trump at his best is vision casting and is really painting a picture that gets people inspiring, getting people inspired.
00:12:43.000Darren, also, you're keeping your eyes on the Twitter saga.
00:13:12.000A lot of the people responsible for content moderation who just added unnecessary friction to the kind of conversational space on the global public square.
00:13:23.000And many people have joined Twitter, and that has resulted in skyrocketing engagement and dynamism on the platform.
00:13:36.000But, you know, it's still in cautiously optimistic mode because I think we'll need to see how he ultimately resolves the content moderation problem.
00:13:47.000Now people are seeing a spike in engagement, but that's largely a result of firing the people who would have been censoring things and also just an influx of a massive amount of users.
00:14:00.000But it doesn't speak to the sort of underlying and enduring content moderation policy that I think is still under active consideration.
00:14:09.000And that will be contingent on some, I think, key personnel decisions over the next couple months.
00:14:30.000Too often, we find ourselves arguing about whether or not America is great or not, or whether we should be ashamed or whether we should love America.
00:14:39.000For too many years, too many of our schools have been neglecting to teach young people about our great heritage of liberty, presenting them instead a dishonest narrative of America as a fundamentally unjust or racist country.
00:14:50.000Hillsdale College is weighing in for America, the wonderful Hillsdale College, by offering a free online course, such as The Great American Story, A Land of Hope, Constitution 101, The Meaning of History of the Constitution.
00:15:03.000As we get closer to Constitution Day, September 17th, I encourage all of you to enroll in one of these wonderful free courses from Hillsdale.
00:15:09.000And even better, encourage your friends and family to sign up too.
00:15:12.000Begin your Hillsdale course today at charlie4hillsdale.com.
00:16:22.000Underneath, it operates as a very sophisticated surveillance tool.
00:16:26.000It's pulling everything from search and browsing history, keystroke patterns.
00:16:30.000It reserves the right to get your biometrics, including face prints and voice prints.
00:16:34.000Up to now, TikTok officials have said, don't worry, this is all stored outside of China.
00:16:39.000And then a couple of months ago, there was a bombshell report that got a hold of internal TikTok communications that said, quote, everything is seen back in China.
00:16:50.000One is all that data flowing back into China, which they can use for espionage purposes.
00:16:57.000But the other part of it, I think you alluded to, is the content that's coming back to us from these algorithms that are designed and built in Beijing.
00:17:05.000And if you look at the version of TikTok called Doyan, a separate app that operates inside China, it feeds children there science experiments, museum exhibits, educational materials.
00:17:17.000Here in the U.S., what does it feed our children?
00:17:19.000The Blackout Challenge, which encourages kids to suffocate themselves.
00:17:23.000And there was just a court case that a court said, even assuming that TikTok intentionally fed to a 10-year-old girl a blackout challenge who did it and then died, they're not liable for it.
00:17:34.000So this is a very disturbing application that's a problem from a national security perspective, but also a mental health perspective for America's youth.
00:18:16.000And what's the problem with that, among other things, is we're locked in a battle right now with Beijing when it comes to artificial intelligence or AI.
00:18:24.000They want to dominate there and they want to use it for authoritarian purposes.
00:18:27.000And what we're doing when we're sending our data back to Beijing is we're feeding, training, and improving China's AI.
00:18:34.000And that's a threat for us, again, outside of TikTok itself that we're going to come to regret if we don't cut that off soon.
00:18:41.000And so, you know, our show is a conservative program.
00:18:44.000And Brendan, I know that you have to, you know, have your position at the FCC, but I think that this is something you can comment on more broadly.
00:18:51.000Do you think it's fair to say that the values on TikTok definitely benefit Democrats or left-wing causes, that the ideological composition of TikTok is not exactly fertile ground for conservatives?
00:19:05.000You know, there's some reporting out there that says one of the reasons why the Biden administration is potentially hesitating on taking tougher action on TikTok as there's at least some people counseling them that it's a good means for reaching out and motivating their base.
00:19:19.000I don't know if that's true or not, but there's the argument that's out there.
00:19:22.000But the reality is the concern here is bipartisan.
00:19:25.000You've got a Democrat Senator Mark Warner, chairman of the Senate Intel Committee, who has said, and this is a guy that gets daily intelligence briefings that would probably result in you and me having to change our shorts afterwards in terms of the seriousness of the threat.
00:19:39.000And he has said that it is TikTok that, in his words, scares the dickens out of him.
00:19:43.000Democrat Rep Schakowsky in the House has written to Apple and Google raising concerns about TikTok.
00:19:50.000So I think the tide is moving out on TikTok.
00:19:52.000There is conservative concern, but there's bipartisan concern.
00:19:55.000And right now, where things are is the Biden administration's Treasury Department has an operation called Syphius, which is a committee on foreign investment.
00:20:28.000So can it be done just through the executive branch, just a stroke of the pen to completely ban an app that 100 million Americans are using?
00:20:57.000And the idea there is that they are going to basically shift a lot of this to Oracle servers here in the U.S.
00:21:02.000But there's several problems with that.
00:21:04.000One, there was, again, leaked material that had a TikTok official in LA meet with another TikTok official outside of business hours, outside the office, ask detailed questions about the location of those Oracle servers and other details that strike me as casing those Oracle servers.
00:21:23.000Another leaked material coming out of TikTok's DC office had them describing that Project Texas move and saying, at the end of the day, it remains to be seen if Beijing can still get access to it because these are their tools.
00:21:36.000So this idea that we're simply going to move this to Oracle and that's going to solve the problems, TikTok doesn't seem to think that that's the case.
00:21:43.000And I think that we should believe TikTok on that.
00:21:44.000Tristan Harris was on 60 Minutes and said something rather profound, PlayCut 315.
00:21:51.000In their version of TikTok, if you're under 14 years old, they show you science experiments you can do at home, museum exhibits, patriotism videos, and educational videos.
00:22:03.000And they also limit it to only 40 minutes per day.
00:22:06.000Now, they don't ship that version of TikTok to the rest of the world.
00:22:10.000So it's almost like they recognize that technology is influencing kids' development, and they make their domestic version a spinach version of TikTok, while they've shipped the opium version to the rest of the world.
00:22:23.000Is that a fair way to say, is this the new opium wars, Brendan?
00:22:27.000Yeah, I mean, what I've said is TikTok is China's digital fentanyl.
00:22:31.000And when you look at the very different picture that they are sending to their own youth and the picture that they're sending to ours, I think it's not, it doesn't take much of a leap to see that just even the divisiveness that they insert into this country, let alone the unhealthy viewing habits.
00:22:44.000Again, like I said, the blackout challenge that they're feeding to kids that have literally resulted in young U.S. girls killing themselves based on the content that's being fed to them from TikTok.
00:22:57.000There was another recent report that had a Beijing-based group for TikTok's parent company attempting to surveil the locations of specific Americans not employed by TikTok through this app.
00:23:09.000And so it's like we're in a situation now where almost every week another shoe drops.
00:23:13.000I feel like we've had 17 or 18 shoes and the evidence just keeps mounting.
00:23:16.000That's why I said I just do not see a path forward for the Biden administration to somehow bless TikTok to continue to operate here.
00:23:25.000Yeah, I mean, and so for parents that are a little skeptical out there and they say, oh, my kid likes TikTok.
00:27:30.000Now, when crypto really became a big thing two years ago, FTX became extremely prominent and Mr. Becker Fried, which I will refer to as SBF, became extraordinarily rich with his estimated wealth peaking around $26 billion.
00:27:46.000Until last week, his wealth was estimated around $16 billion.
00:27:50.000Now, I remember seeing an article about this guy, Sam Becker Friedman, Freed, I'm sorry, Sam Becker Freed, about how he's this major Democrat donor and how he wants to use his money and his resources to reshape America.
00:28:04.000And I just, I didn't really think much of it.
00:29:00.000Now, a crypto adjacent expert that we know on this program put it this way: quote, Sam Bankman Freed is basically Verbal Kint in the movie The Usual Suspects, talking about the, quote, Kaiser Soze.
00:29:13.000It's who is Kaiser Soze at the end of it actually ends up being Kevin Spacey.
00:29:17.000Sorry, spoiler alert if you've never seen Usual Suspects, one of my favorite movies of all time, by the way.
00:29:21.000He went to Congress and lectured them about other financial institutions using customer funds to make risky bets while he was actually stealing customer funds to make him hugely dangerous bets himself.
00:29:32.000He went to Forbes in June and said other exchanges were secretly insolvent while he was actually secretly insolvent.
00:29:39.000The esteemed senator from New Jersey, Corey Booker, was gushing all over him in the committee room.
00:29:44.000Now, the reason this gets even more interesting if you're not into crypto is that Mr. Bankman Freed was a massive, massive, massive Democrat donor.
00:29:54.000Now, he spent more than $30 million on the midterms, and he said he would spend a billion dollars in 2024 if Trump ran.
00:30:03.000There's also this Ukraine connection as well that I'm trying to understand, but there's something with like Ukrainian aid and a connection there.
00:30:11.000Of course, now it appears that these donations may have been funded by stealing user funds on FTX.
00:30:19.000Now, another interesting thing is Mr. Bankman Freed was a promoter of effective altruism, the Silicon Valley adjacent meme ideology of sorts, which claims to promote rational forms of altruistic behavior.
00:30:31.000This is a big tent movement that allegedly takes many forms, but it basically means that you're justified in taking massive risks and huge risks and being extremely dishonest because it would let you maximize your wealth so you could give it away for altruistic causes.
00:30:49.000SBF or Sam Bankman Freed is like that hypothetical paperclip making robot, hypothetical paperclip making robot that goes rogue and turns the world into a pay-per-click maping machine.
00:31:03.000He relentlessly optimized for one dimension at the expense of all else, maximizing his wealth so that he could give it away anyway.
00:31:11.000So look, that's very confusing in one way.
00:31:26.000And by the way, he probably spent even more than $30 million on the midterms if you count some of the other dark money organizations that we may never know of are business investments.
00:31:38.000This is one of the biggest stories, and people are losing everything.
00:31:43.000Now, there is a connection between FTX and Ukraine that I'm not going to have time to kind of connect to.
00:31:50.000Some people say that Ukraine was an investor, but I do not think that they were an investor.
00:31:54.000I just think Ukraine got money via FTX, I believe.
00:31:58.000And SBF gave all this free money to Ukraine users after the invasion.
00:32:02.000So he was very good at exploiting news and stories like that.
00:32:06.000Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
00:32:07.000Email me as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.