The 30,000-foot view of how Bill Clinton started this trade debacle. Today's guest is Alex Shea from Brown University, who asked the questions at the Brown University. We talk about the mistakes Bill Clinton made in the 1990's and early 2000's, why free trade is a bad idea, and why we need to go back to the basics.
00:00:36.000You can email me as always, freedom at charliekirk.com, and get involved with the most important organization in the country, Turning Point USA, at tpusa.com.
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00:01:55.000It is moving so quick we have to basically have five different chats open of different responses from foreign nations regarding tariff threats, regarding reciprocity.
00:02:10.000But instead of going into all the details, because that's just going to change by every five minutes, I think we need to take a step back and reset the foundational framework to reset a 30,000-foot view of exactly what's going on here.
00:02:23.000President Donald Trump has been railing against bad trade deals for the last 30 or 40 years.
00:02:31.000President Donald Trump, as a businessman, identified trade deficits.
00:02:35.000And the way trade is supposed to be constituted is we do what we do best and you do what you do best and we will barter.
00:02:44.000By doing so, you will make us wealthier and we will trade and we will both be able to have a flourishing future.
00:02:50.000What ended up happening in the 1990s and early 2000s, in the 1990s there were three critical mistakes made by Bill Clinton.
00:02:57.000The entrance of China into the World Trade Organization, the NAFTA, and also the repeal of the idea of investment bank and commercial banks.
00:03:08.000That's a whole separate issue for another time, but the conflation of investment and commercial banks allowed the cheap flow of money to go into the capital markets in a way that that specific deregulation I think actually led us through the 2008 financial crisis and the lords of easy money leading us closer and closer to fiscal and financial apocalypse.
00:03:29.000Now, free trade did make the stock market go up.
00:03:41.000I can say this as somebody who is part of the evil 10% of the country.
00:03:47.000When you are on the upper part of the socioeconomic ladder, specifically if you do work that does not involve your hands but only involves your brain, that does not involve your body but only involves your brain, free trade is traditionally a great idea because we became an information economy and a consumer economy and not an industrial one.
00:04:09.000We thought because we were entering into a technological revolution, because that we were entering into a brave new world of unfettered, unapologetic free trade, that we would no longer need to make stuff.
00:04:21.000In fact, that is what the third world does.
00:04:23.000The idea was that the third world will make our products for us and that we will be able to become wealthier.
00:04:31.000Francis Fukuyama famously wrote a book called The End of History.
00:04:36.000The assumption was permanent U.S. dominance.
00:05:44.000In one of them, they said, can you find a single thing when you're walking through a parking lot at Walmart and ask people what they bought that was made in America?
00:06:15.000In fact, what we were told, what I was told growing up, is that free trade would then make it where the Russians will be wearing Levi jeans, eating McDonald's, taking selfies.
00:06:29.000Well, at the time, just listening to iPads, iPods.
00:06:32.000And it's not even that it's a bad thing for other things to be made in other countries.
00:06:58.000Partially, but not mainly, partially as to why the corporate class decided to move these jobs overseas is that unions got very greedy in the 1970s and 1980s.
00:07:09.000This is a lesser appreciated component of this analysis is unions thought that they were too big for their bridges.
00:07:16.000They were like, what are you going to like leave?
00:07:19.000Literally some of the labor unions would look at the corporate class and say, we want a 40% increase in wages.
00:07:49.000In the fact where mass unionization, especially public sector unionization, public sector teacher unions, Public sector janitorial unions, public sector government unions.
00:08:00.000I think that there's a place, for example, a carpenter's union.
00:08:07.000However, there needs to be a balance between capital and labor.
00:08:11.000And what happened, of course, is the capital, the corporate class, having no allegiance to the United States of America and the fact that unions overreached and unions got cocky.
00:08:21.000They looked at the corporate class in the eye and said, we're American labor.
00:08:25.000What, are you going to really go and make that trinket in China?
00:08:28.000And the McKinsey type said, yep, that's exactly what we're going to do, actually.
00:08:32.000And it was made easier by this decision.
00:08:35.000Understand what President Donald Trump is doing is fixing and remedying the mistakes of past.
00:08:41.000If you had to go look at what is the original sin as to why we are in the place that we are in, there are many places, there are many decisions, but the one where we actually have it on tape, rarely do you have the original sin on tape.
00:08:57.000And that is when we decided to make what was then a third world and maybe a second world country to have entrance into the World Trade Organization.
00:09:11.000We did not do this to try and make us have greater harmony with China.
00:09:15.000In fact, you could make an argument that our relations with China were probably better before China went into the World Trade Organization.
00:09:22.000The free trade zealots told us that trade will bring us peace.
00:09:26.000In fact, it turns out that mass trade with China brought us closer and closer to conflict.
00:09:33.000President Donald Trump is fixing this problem from Bill Clinton.
00:09:38.000The WTO agreement will move China in the right direction.
00:09:42.000It will advance the goals America has worked for in China for the past three decades.
00:09:48.000And, of course, it will advance our own economic interests.
00:09:52.000Economically, this agreement is the equivalent of a one-way street.
00:09:57.000It requires China to open its markets with a fifth of the world's population, potentially the biggest markets in the world, to both our products and services in unprecedented new ways.
00:10:09.000All we do is to agree to maintain the present access, which China enjoys.
00:10:14.000Chinese tariffs from telecommunications products to automobiles to agriculture will fall by half or more over just five years.
00:10:22.000For the first time, our companies will be able to sell and distribute products in China made by workers here in America without being forced to relocate manufacturing to China, sell through the Chinese government, or transfer valuable technology for the first time.
00:10:39.000We'll be able to export products without exporting jobs.
00:10:46.000There's still joint technology transfers.
00:10:51.000We are not allowed to sell our products in China.
00:10:53.000Our technology companies are not allowed to sell in the interior of China.
00:10:59.000Charlie Kirk here, and this new year, it's going to be exciting.
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00:13:10.000He said, finally, someone is giving the middle finger to the corporate class and they're going to defend those of us that work for a living.
00:13:19.000Us blue-collar workers have a fighter in the White House and we've been waiting for it.
00:13:24.000Now, I'm not even saying one is right and one is wrong.
00:13:26.000They both are very valued constituencies.
00:13:28.000One is the capital class and one is the labor.
00:13:30.000And properly understood and properly balanced, You have hopefully some brokered equilibrium between capital and labor.
00:13:40.000Understand, the top 10%, which I am part of and many of the audience are part of, own about 88% of the equities.
00:13:46.000Now, it's a little deceiving because a lot of teachers and a lot of janitors and a lot of people that have 401ks, they might get blended into a major wealth management fund.
00:14:01.000Nobody is happy with what's going on with the stock market.
00:14:04.000But again, 10% of Americans own 88% of equities.
00:14:07.000The next 40% own 12% of the stock market.
00:14:37.000I trust Stephen Miller, and I trust Susie Wiles, and I trust Scott Besson, and I trust J.D. Vance, and of course, most importantly, I trust President Trump.
00:14:47.000There is a gamble involved in all of this.
00:14:49.000But the greater risk would be if you run on tariffs and you don't apply them.
00:14:55.000That would be the end of democracy as we know it.
00:14:59.000That means you could pander to a constituency endlessly to just go get their votes and you don't do it.
00:15:07.000That, to be perfectly honest with you, is far more horrifying and terrifying to the health of our politics than the stock market going down.
00:15:17.000And I know the stock market right now going down is hurting a lot of people.
00:15:22.000And look, this could go terribly wrong.
00:15:24.000Europe and China are gonna be the main countries.
00:16:27.000And that is what Donald Trump embodied, which is why, regardless of what Trump said or how they attacked him, the working class continued to rise up in record numbers.
00:16:39.000And now President Trump is delivering it.
00:16:45.000The idea of these tariffs is to smoke out behavior targeted at American exports.
00:16:50.000And some of it is direct tariffs, but it's not only that.
00:16:54.000There's a lot of howling going on right now, and some of it is understandable.
00:16:57.000A lot of countries got used to the existing system.
00:17:01.000Well, Trump is starting our thousand mile journey with a great big leap.
00:17:06.000But most importantly is he's fulfilling the promises that he made.
00:17:12.000And you want to see a much more dramatic, horrifying political moment if President Trump would have just said, ha, just kidding, just like ever the politician.
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00:18:31.000So I have a new obsession, which is I believe the fight of the 21st century is going to be a fight against the bureaucracy.
00:18:39.000Not just the bureaucracy and government, but bureaucracy in general.
00:18:43.000Very similar to how men, as they get older, middle-aged men, develop an intractable, seemingly irreversible beer belly, middle fat.
00:18:53.000It seems as if government, churches, charities, companies, and of course colleges develop that kind of mid-level management, job justification, paper shuffling, desk worker.
00:19:08.000Industry. In fact, bureaucrat literally means desk worker from its original French.
00:19:13.000Doge exists to try to get rid of the bureaucracy.
00:19:16.000What do you do here is the lethal weapon against bureaucracy.
00:19:23.000The question of what do you do here might be the most effective weapon against bloat that I have seen.
00:19:33.000Well, we have a very special guest, someone that goes to Brown University, so obviously he's very smart, and he decided to do something I love.
00:19:44.000He's Brown University class of 2027, software engineer and a journalist.
00:19:48.000So what he decided to do, he's a sophomore at Brown University, which is incredibly liberal, as you know.
00:19:54.000He decided to email 3,800 Brown staff members with a very simple question.
00:20:02.000Describe what tasks you performed in the past week.
00:20:05.000Shay said he got about 20 responses to his email, including one of them was F off.
00:20:10.000Shay created a website called Bloat at Brown, where he listed off every employee at the school and used AI to rate their jobs in terms of legality, redundancy, and so-called BS.
00:20:21.000Shea has pointed out that Brown still has dozens if not hundreds of obvious DEI jobs and direct defiance to President Trump's executive order.
00:20:29.000So why should Brown keep on getting taxpayer money?
00:21:16.000And this was even before, like a few days ago, the Trump administration just announced that they're going to take away Brown's federal funding because of DEI and antisemitism.
00:21:43.000And it's pretty much like you said, 3,805 non-faculty staff members.
00:21:48.000These are not professors who are teaching the classes.
00:21:51.000These are people who sit at desks and they push around papers and nobody exactly knows what they do because they won't tell me.
00:21:57.000No, I just, first of all, I love this.
00:22:04.000And I want to just say as a macro point, when high IQ driven That's fair to say.
00:22:22.000And so you have a you have yet you have a you score jobs for BS jobs that waste money.
00:22:28.000So basically, you are the customer at Brown for $93,000 a year.
00:22:33.000You're a journalist, you're trying to figure out what the heck are we paying all this money for in Providence, Rhode Island, you are the client.
00:22:40.000Brown employs more than 4,400 employees but fewer than 1,000 are instructors of any kind.
00:22:48.000So that means 75% of jobs at Brown are not instructors.
00:22:52.000What BS jobs have you found at Brown University?
00:22:58.000So at our website right now, bloats.brownspectator.com, we have about 49 people that are dedicated to DEI roles.
00:23:05.000And again, these are the people that just cost Brown $510 million from the Trump administration because they're refusing to comply with the directives about DEI.
00:23:16.000But just in general, it's like there are multiple people, Charlie, that are dedicated to ad sales for the Alumni Magazine.
00:23:22.000I didn't even know that the Alumni Magazine I think?
00:23:38.000general. But the funny thing is that I couldn't find that many articles that were written by these seven-time full-time staffers because they make freelancers and students write the actual articles.
00:23:46.000So it's just bloat like that in the alumni magazine, in all of these various offices that as a student, I wouldn't even think...
00:23:55.000To think that we had such a thing, that these offices existed, because...
00:23:59.000They don't really interact with students.
00:24:00.000They're pretty much just behind the scenes.
00:24:02.000But they're raising the cost of tuition that are making schools like Brown, like again, they always say that the Ivy League is supposed to be an economic ladder, you know, that poor kids can go to the Ivy League schools and they'll turn out successful in life.
00:24:18.000But that is really being put to the test by this enormous price tag and sort of disregard for financial planning of any sort.
00:24:29.000Alex, you have, there's two components here I want to make sure we cover.
00:24:32.000First, I want to go through these five categories because I think it's hilarious and so astute.
00:24:35.000And then I want to talk about the disciplinary inaction.
00:24:38.000And then I have a third point that I do want to make.
00:24:40.000So you have these five buckets, if you will, that you have distilled of trying to organize what these people do.
00:24:56.000So, Charlie, I know that you're a conservative, but these categories were actually jumped up by David Graeber, who is an anthropologist, and he's hardly conservative.
00:25:06.000But I think this is sort of one of the issues, really, that should be apolitical, that people at both ends of the political spectrum should see, is that there are a lot of these people with sort of confusing jobs.
00:25:15.000And just to run through them, the flunkies are people like administrative assistants.
00:25:20.000There are a lot of assistance for these mid-level bureaucrats.
00:25:24.000Why all of these mid-level bureaucrats need assistance, again, is unclear.
00:25:55.000Yes. And in particular, the Brown spokesperson has been putting a lot of misinformation out about me in the press because he's been saying that this site is using confidential information.
00:26:09.000He's been telling that to all the reporters.
00:26:11.000And that's not true, but we can get into that later.
00:26:15.000But your title, your job description, that's not confidential.
00:26:18.000The duct tapers are the third category.
00:27:54.000So there are 3,400 people that are either flunkies, goons, ductabers, box tickers, or taskmasters for $93,000 a year.
00:28:05.000And look, this would be even more hilarious if it wasn't tragic.
00:28:09.000And by the way, Alex, you are a great example as to why they do not want the Ivy League to be based in merit, why they don't want Asians or whites to come to the Ivy League.
00:28:40.000We should have one at Stanford where students just start mass emailing the entire faculty and saying, I go to school here and I pay $100,000 a year.
00:31:13.000Now, in Rhode Island, where Brown is, is we have a state law, even, that called the Student Journalist Freedom of Expression Act, which protects student journalism, like is in my case.
00:31:23.000I think this is really just evidence of double standards that Brown has.
00:31:29.000I don't know if your audience knows this, Charlie, but Charlie Kirk is also banned from Brown University's campus.
00:31:35.000This was because of an incident that happened.
00:31:36.000a few years ago where Brown told him he couldn't film.
00:31:40.000And so Charlie Kirk came to our campus and he wasn't filming.
00:31:45.000He was compliant with all these rules.
00:31:46.000But some other students were filming him and those got posted online and And that was deemed to be in violation of Brown's filming policy.
00:31:54.000And so now Charlie is unfortunately banned from Brown's campus.
00:32:14.000And they actually got arrested and charged with that.
00:32:16.000And then Brown just decided to drop the charges because they didn't want to inflame tensions or something like that.
00:32:21.000Then when there was the encampment, the people who were in the encampment, they struck a deal with the Brown administration that they wouldn't be held to the normal disciplinary proceedings and that expulsion and suspension would be off the table for all of them.
00:32:37.000And again, I think this just shows that there is a clear double standard here about how people are treated.
00:32:42.000I mean, like myself and Charlie, it's just speech.
00:32:51.000As long as they're on the left, they're pretty much protected.
00:32:54.000Yeah, so just to be clear, instead of asking the people that you employ what they do all day long, if you would host, I don't know, like a Students for Justice of Palestine encampment in the middle of Brown's campus, then that's perfectly fine.
00:33:22.000Would you say that Brown is a place where, I don't want to, again, scam is kind of my thing, college scam, but how would you describe Brown now after this experience to the country, to the nation?