The Michael Knowles Show - Ep. 136 - It’s Not Zuckerberg’s Fault Dems Can’t Internet

00:00:00.000 Mark Zuckerberg will spend two days on Capitol Hill getting grilled over why he had the audacity

00:00:06.220 not to rig social media against conservatives. I will do the impossible, a thing that kills me to

00:00:12.760 do. I will defend Mark Zuckerberg. Then we will analyze why conservatives are so much better at

00:00:17.400 the internet than lefties. Then Dan DeSalvo joins to talk about the upcoming Supreme Court threat

00:00:23.180 to government unions. Hooray! I'm Michael Knowles and this is The Michael Knowles Show.

00:00:30.000 A lot to talk about today. I can't believe I have to defend Zuckerberg. That is going to

00:00:38.560 absolutely kill me. That's why we're going to stack it and talk about how awful public sector

00:00:42.960 unions are at the end of the show and how great this upcoming Supreme Court case hopefully will

00:00:47.400 turn out to be. Before we do any of that, we've got to keep the lights on here. I want to thank

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00:03:01.720 Apron, by the way, goes really good with a nice glass of chilled covfefe. It really sets it off

00:03:05.740 beautifully. Blue Apron, a better way to cook. All right, I have to defend Mark Zuckerberg.

00:03:11.760 Look, it's, this is really upsetting. It's happening now. The Zuckerberg hearings are going

00:03:16.640 on right now. He's being dragged before Congress today. Well, can we, let's just cut live to Mark

00:03:22.120 Zuckerberg's testimony. All right, just stay calm, Frankie. These babies will be in the stores while

00:03:28.120 he's still grappling with the pickle matrix. Gavon, gavon. Interesting. Interesting. That's not,

00:03:34.860 yeah, not exactly what I expected from the testimony, but we'll hear a lot more. This is going to be going

00:03:39.280 on for a while. Zuck's testimony began at 2.15 p.m. Eastern time. The subject is how Facebook

00:03:46.480 protects user data in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The Cambridge Analytica scandal.

00:03:53.080 Oh my God. No one really knows a lot about this thing. Let me fill you in. In 2014, 2015, 270,000

00:04:01.600 Facebook users agreed to give an app some of their information on Facebook, as well as data from

00:04:09.260 people on their friends list, about 270,000 people. So what they're saying is that this testimony is

00:04:16.180 about that, this awful data breach of 270,000 people, many of whom agreed to give the data anyway.

00:04:22.900 And if you're on Facebook, you're already agreeing to give your data over and give me a break. You

00:04:26.440 shouldn't put anything on the internet that you wouldn't want to read on the New York Times.

00:04:29.640 So that's what they say it's about. It's really just about how awful it was that Facebook let

00:04:34.460 Republicans win an election. That's all this is. He's being dragged in front of Congress and it's

00:04:39.640 all about a mea culpa to get the cat of nine tails and flagellate himself. Miserere me, mea culpa,

00:04:45.780 mea maxima culpa. He said in his prepared testimony, we didn't take a broad enough view of our responsibility

00:04:52.160 and that was a big mistake. It was my mistake and I'm sorry. I started Facebook. I run it. I'm

00:04:57.920 responsible for what happens here. The responsibility that he has, the responsibility

00:05:04.780 that Congress expects him to have is to help elect Democrats. That's his responsibility. And he

00:05:09.020 apparently failed in that responsibility and they're very upset. If Cambridge Analytica, this,

00:05:14.420 this awful, terrible, awful group and scandal, if this were associated with George Soros instead of

00:05:21.760 Robert Mercer, you would never hear about this. If this were associated with a left-wing donor and

00:05:27.760 financier, you would never hear about this. And by the way, here's my proof of that. Barack Obama did

00:05:32.760 the exact same thing. He did the exact same thing that Republicans are accused of doing here, except

00:05:38.520 way, way worse and on a much larger scale. And guess what? When that happened, nobody reported on this.

00:05:43.240 That happened in 2012. The Obama campaign encouraged supporters to download the Obama 2012 Facebook

00:05:50.360 app that let the campaign then collect Facebook data, both from the users of the app and from

00:05:56.020 their friends. Friends maybe who weren't on the app. Friends maybe who didn't support Barack Obama.

00:06:00.720 It let them do that. The MIT Technology Review wrote about this in 2012. That's six years ago.

00:06:06.460 The average friend list size at that time was about 190. One million people downloaded the Obama app.

00:06:12.900 So that means that upwards of 190 million people had some of their Facebook data scooped up by the

00:06:20.020 Obama campaign without their consent. It was just scooped up in this awful way. We're talking about

00:06:25.560 270,000 people with Cambridge Analytica. We're talking about upwards of 190 million people with

00:06:30.420 regard to the Obama campaign. Where was the congressional testimony in 2012? Where was the wailing and the

00:06:36.220 gnashing of teeth in 2013? In 2014? Oh, that didn't happen because it was Obama. But maybe they didn't

00:06:42.080 know, right? Maybe people didn't know. Oh, no, they did know because the Obama campaign admitted to

00:06:46.000 it. Teddy Goff, the Obama campaign digital director, said, quote, people don't trust campaigns. They

00:06:51.560 don't even trust media organizations. Who do they trust? Their friends. Their friends. That's why they

00:06:56.320 had to go for their friends. Time magazine credited this strategy with helping Barack Obama win that

00:07:02.140 election. The Obama campaign called it a game changer and, quote, the most groundbreaking piece of

00:07:07.920 technology developed for the campaign. By the way, just to make this relationship even starker,

00:07:15.660 the Trump campaign didn't solicit the data themselves. The Trump campaign used the, you know,

00:07:19.860 the various quizzes and things like that. Obama literally solicited this data. He had his

00:07:24.660 fingerprints far more on this than the Trump campaign ever did. Also, Trump's campaign didn't

00:07:28.900 use the data in the general election campaign. Barack Obama did. He used live data. He used it right up

00:07:34.260 until election day. There are two main differences between how Democrats used Facebook data and how

00:07:39.080 Republicans used Facebook data. What the Democrats did was much, much more egregious. When the Democrats

00:07:44.940 did it, do you remember? They were hailed for winning the race for voter data and they connected

00:07:50.220 with young voters. It was the digital campaign. He's the digital candidate. Hooray, hooray, hooray.

00:07:56.440 But not when Republicans do it. Not when Republicans do it. The other accusation, that's the Cambridge

00:08:00.980 Generalitica thing. The other accusation that Facebook has to fend off and Zuckerberg has to

00:08:05.440 fend off in this testimony is that Russia used Facebook to hack the election or to rig the election

00:08:11.360 or resist, you know, resist. And this is not a legitimate president. And he stole the election

00:08:16.620 and Vladimir Putin and blah, blah, blah. So just, just to jog your memory, I know people have short,

00:08:21.600 short memories these days. Here is what Democrats thought about hacking and rigging before the election.

00:08:27.520 There is no serious person out there who would suggest somehow that you could even, you could

00:08:36.180 even rig America's elections in part because they're so decentralized and the numbers of votes

00:08:45.320 involved. There's no evidence that that has happened in the past or that there are instances

00:08:51.860 in which that will happen this time. And so I'd advise Mr. Trump to stop whining and go try to make his

00:08:59.780 case to get votes. And if he got the most votes, then it would be my expectation of Hillary Clinton 1.00

00:09:08.440 to offer a gracious concession speech and pledge to work with him in order to make sure that

00:09:15.660 the American people benefit from an effective government.

00:09:20.660 Okay. You saw that this is Democrats after president Trump got elected. See if you can spot the difference.

00:09:27.660 Donald J. Trump is now president of the United States.

00:09:30.660 What a great honor to be able to introduce for the first time ever, anywhere, the 45th president of the United States of America, Donald J.

00:09:47.660 That is a subtle difference. So I don't know if you could tell before no serious person would ever come on, stop one.

00:09:56.960 And they're Donald. And then, no, that that's the difference that happened.

00:10:01.700 I have to agree with Obama. I have to defend Mark Zuckerberg and agree with Barack Obama.

00:10:06.100 No serious person would ever suggest that this election had been rigged or hacked by the Russians or whomever else.

00:10:14.800 It just didn't happen. There's no evidence that it happened. Now, this brings us to Russia.

00:10:20.000 Russian agents did, you know, interfere. They did participate in the election. They've been doing this for 100 years.

00:10:25.600 They bought some advertising to stir up trouble in the American elections.

00:10:30.720 The way people hear that from the mainstream media is that they poured money into Facebook just to help Donald Trump.

00:10:37.560 And it was all in the Trump campaign. And it's this massive amount of money. And it swung the election.

00:10:42.160 But that didn't happen. The Internet Research Agency was a little Russian shop that wanted to cause some trouble in American politics. 0.63

00:10:51.240 So they bought some ads on Facebook. By the way, these were not ads for Donald Trump.

00:10:55.920 They bought issue ads. They bought issue ads that were specifically on divisive issues.

00:11:00.360 So race or gay rights or gun control, things that Americans are really divided on.

00:11:05.280 That's what they bought ads for. There wasn't actually a lot of interference compared to the usual propaganda.

00:11:13.620 To put this into perspective, Trump and Clinton spent a combined $81 million on Facebook ads during the election.

00:11:21.780 $81 million.

00:11:22.800 The Internet Research Agency spent $100,000.

00:11:27.820 That is .05% of the amount of money spent on just Facebook ads by the candidates during the election.

00:11:34.660 Negligible. Nothing. Nobody suggests it had any effect at all.

00:11:38.760 Especially because there weren't even ads for Donald Trump.

00:11:41.820 There were just issue ads to divide Americans.

00:11:43.760 Because that's actually what our geopolitical adversaries want to do.

00:11:46.880 They just want to divide Americans and cause some trouble.

00:11:49.480 I don't think they particularly like Donald Trump, who's expelling their diplomats, slapping them with sanctions, countering them in Syria.

00:11:56.520 I don't think they really like that guy that much.

00:11:58.420 I don't think they really hope that that guy remains president.

00:12:01.100 They just want to cause trouble with their geopolitical adversaries.

00:12:03.660 They've been doing this for a long time. 0.99

00:12:05.080 Russians are trolls. 1.00

00:12:06.300 You know what I mean? 1.00

00:12:06.540 They are like a land of trolls.

00:12:09.040 So the Facebook data strategy has been around for a lot of years.

00:12:12.920 You know, grabbing data from people.

00:12:14.560 Barack Obama mastered it basically in 2012.

00:12:16.640 The Russia issue has been around since, oh, I don't know, 1917.

00:12:20.580 They've been messing with us for a very long time.

00:12:23.960 But this time, this is what's different.

00:12:25.800 This time, a Republican won.

00:12:27.360 So Democrats have to turn on their own.

00:12:30.100 And he is one of their own.

00:12:31.060 Mark Zuckerberg is one of their own.

00:12:32.740 He is a lefty.

00:12:33.620 Make no mistake about this.

00:12:35.100 If you ever go into the Facebook offices, it is like left-wing candy land.

00:12:39.060 And, you know, Facebook is always touting all of these lefty things, lots of rainbows and, you know, pro-immigration and pro-amnesty and all this.

00:12:47.600 Mark Zuckerberg says he's neither Democrat nor Republican.

00:12:50.560 His ideological views are very clear.

00:12:53.200 I should preface this.

00:12:55.200 The Facebook PAC, the Political Action Committee, actually donated a little bit more to Republicans than to Democrats in 2012.

00:13:02.040 Mark Zuckerberg donates to both parties because he's a businessman.

00:13:05.140 He's the fifth richest person in the world, so he's maxed out, for instance, to Sean Eldridge, his friend, Orrin Hatch, Marco Rubio, Paul Ryan, Chuck Schumer, Cory Booker.

00:13:14.660 You know, both sides of the aisle, although a particular type of Republican and certainly not a hardline conservative Republican.

00:13:21.760 And he has to do that.

00:13:22.880 That's just what businessmen do.

00:13:24.600 Mark Zuckerberg also runs Forward.us, a 501c4 that lobbies for amnesty for 11 million illegal aliens.

00:13:31.220 And Zuckerberg is trying to push blame on this whole thing.

00:13:33.860 He's trying to blame Alexander Kogan, who is the Cambridge researcher that created the personality app that scooped up users' information.

00:13:42.480 So the way this worked, I think people still don't understand. 0.97

00:13:45.620 This awful, nefarious plot of Cambridge Analytica to grab all of the users' information involves some stupid little Facebook quiz. 0.99

00:13:53.420 You've seen them all the time. 0.99

00:13:54.240 And then you click it and it says, you know, do you drink three cups of coffee or four?

00:13:58.080 And you click that and it's like, you're a EP7J and you're whatever, you know.

00:14:02.040 It's just like those little things.

00:14:03.700 But when you click to that, you've consented to give all of your information away.

00:14:07.260 So this isn't exactly a nefarious thing. 0.99

00:14:09.100 It's just some stupid little Facebook poll. 0.99

00:14:12.420 Republicans have always been better at the Internet. 1.00

00:14:15.320 That's, I think, what's underlying all of this.

00:14:17.780 This is the first time that we've won the presidency since social media has been around.

00:14:21.640 So it's getting a lot of play.

00:14:23.660 Republicans have always, always been better at the Internet.

00:14:26.500 A little exception.

00:14:27.520 Obama was better at collecting Facebook data in 2012.

00:14:30.040 We didn't get around to doing that until this cycle.

00:14:33.740 But we have always been better at the Internet.

00:14:36.540 I'll give you an example from my own life.

00:14:38.860 I may have alluded to this a few times.

00:14:40.580 In 2010, I was an intern on a congressional campaign in New York with my very good friend Nan Hayworth,

00:14:45.920 who was a challenger candidate.

00:14:47.520 She was running against John Hall, who was the incumbent.

00:14:51.480 And he was a member of this rock band in the 70s called Orleans.

00:14:55.140 They were the guys who did, like, still the one that do, do, do.

00:14:58.600 You know, and they did dance with me.

00:15:00.900 I want to be your partner.

00:15:02.220 You know, they were some 70s rock band.

00:15:03.800 So anyway, I decided to just be a troll when I was 18 and start the Young Voters for an Orleans reunion tour.

00:15:10.520 And so, you know, I kind of ripped off his song a little bit.

00:15:12.940 I rewrote it.

00:15:13.700 And all the lyrics were about getting John Hall to get fired from Congress because he was a terrible congressman.

00:15:18.320 Just this little thing, cost very little to produce, had a viral impact on the Internet because it provoked the Democrats.

00:15:25.060 They reacted poorly to it.

00:15:26.600 And it got us a lot of free publicity.

00:15:28.960 We ended up winning that race, but it got us a lot of free press.

00:15:31.620 In 2012, I, again, did a commercial with the rent is too damn high guy.

00:15:35.940 It was called The Debt is Too Damn High.

00:15:37.240 It's probably on YouTube somewhere.

00:15:38.820 And same thing.

00:15:39.960 It cost barely anything to produce.

00:15:41.920 Very low bar to enter.

00:15:43.400 You put it on the Internet.

00:15:44.140 You air it on TV in the middle of nowhere, and it gets this huge viral push.

00:15:49.100 Those are just examples from my own life.

00:15:51.460 Other Republicans have done way more than my modest efforts.

00:15:56.300 The reason that Republicans are so good at the Internet is because we could never get a fair shake in the mainstream media.

00:16:01.580 We could never get a fair shake in the mainstream press.

00:16:03.640 Both the producers and the consumers, the political operatives and the cultural operatives could never get a fair shake.

00:16:10.700 But also conservative viewers who just want, like, a normal thing on their TV and not Jimmy Kimmel crying tears of rage because we're not going to raise taxes or something.

00:16:20.520 You know, we just, we can't, even consumers can't get that.

00:16:24.000 So there was a lot of talent out there, but there were no outlets.

00:16:27.920 So conservatives just exploded when the Internet really took off and became the vehicle for all of our information and our entertainment and our politics.

00:16:36.020 I think an analogy of this is sort of like black actors in Hollywood.

00:16:39.400 Black actors in Hollywood, just about every black actor you see in a movie is a phenomenal actor, whereas some white actors you see in movies aren't that great or they're fine or whatever.

00:16:49.500 This is just a numbers game.

00:16:51.160 This is because there are a lot of good black actors, but there are very few black roles.

00:16:55.740 So when the black role comes around, you've got these incredible performers who can take it, whereas there are a gazillion white roles. 0.81

00:17:02.960 And so just the average talent is going to be lower.

00:17:05.440 That's just numbers.

00:17:06.520 It's the same thing with conservatives on the Internet.

00:17:08.240 Very few outlets for conservatives before the Internet and especially before social media.

00:17:15.060 Now we have a chance, so conservatives absolutely killed it.

00:17:18.020 There are social scientific data that back up my anecdotes and my own experiences in this field.

00:17:24.300 In 2010, Fast Company, this is eight years ago, ran a big headline, Republicans dominate Democrats in social media.

00:17:31.600 This is in the age of Obama.

00:17:32.800 This is when Republican candidates for the Senate had over four times as many fans on Facebook.

00:17:38.900 They had over six times as many followers on Facebook.

00:17:41.900 You'll recall we killed it in that election.

00:17:44.040 That was a big year.

00:17:45.460 That was the same year I was doing the congressional race.

00:17:47.560 According to an Axios study done by Newswhip, which measures social media engagement, it is conservatives, not lefties, who even now continue to see huge growth of new high-traffic websites and web pages.

00:17:59.640 Even now, even as Facebook is trying to kill us, we're seeing huge growth in these websites.

00:18:04.900 Why is that?

00:18:05.560 Because there's a hunger for that information and it's not being supplied by the mainstream media.

00:18:10.360 The Drudge Report.

00:18:11.440 Drudge is basically as old as the Internet itself and it has never changed.

00:18:15.140 It's that same white page with the hyperlinks.

00:18:17.980 Drudge drives more traffic to news sites than all but five companies in the entire world.

00:18:23.620 Drudge drives more traffic to news sites than Google News.

00:18:27.320 That's the Drudge Report that is explicitly a right-wing news outlet and news aggregator.

00:18:32.920 The left cannot keep up.

00:18:34.360 They can't keep up on this.

00:18:35.600 This is why, by the way, the left is much more likely to block and unfriend conservatives on social media.

00:18:42.120 Much more unlikely.

00:18:43.340 According to one survey, lefties are three times more likely to unfriend or block or ban conservatives than conservatives are to do that to lefties.

00:18:52.440 Why is that?

00:18:53.840 Because I see a bunch of lefty nonsense in my news feed and at dinners and at parties and in the culture all day long. 0.79

00:19:00.380 I can deal with it.

00:19:01.460 I think, okay, that's not true.

00:19:02.880 That isn't true.

00:19:03.440 Here's why that's not true.

00:19:04.500 Oh, that gave me something to think about.

00:19:06.240 Okay, that made me think that my view is even more right than I thought it was.

00:19:09.200 Okay, do-do-do-do-do, right?

00:19:10.880 But the lefties just aren't that strong.

00:19:13.360 They're not like, I don't mean that only to be insulting.

00:19:16.260 I mean, they haven't been training.

00:19:19.520 They haven't been working those muscles.

00:19:21.160 They haven't had to defend themselves.

00:19:22.940 And so they're just kind of weak.

00:19:25.100 They're intellectually weak and they're emotionally weak.

00:19:27.480 The culture has made them weak.

00:19:29.200 It's because the culture is so oppressively on their side that they haven't been able to work out their muscles and defend themselves.

00:19:35.520 So they just unfriend, unfriend, can't take it, don't want to hear it, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop.

00:19:39.460 This is also why lefties at tech companies are now trying to cheat and censor conservatives and kick them off.

00:19:44.040 We know from James O'Keefe that Twitter is shadow-banning conservatives.

00:19:47.120 Looks like they might have shadow-banned Ted Cruz.

00:19:49.260 We know that Facebook is censoring conservatives like, what are their names?

00:19:53.580 Those two excellent Trump supporters, those women, I forget. 1.00

00:19:57.340 What are their names?

00:19:58.340 Diamond and Silk.

00:19:59.220 Diamond and Silk, yeah, they're so good.

00:20:01.540 Really, yeah, they're censoring them.

00:20:03.780 They're censoring all of these people.

00:20:05.380 They're trying to kick them off.

00:20:06.740 YouTube is censoring all of my videos practically.

00:20:09.920 Everything that comes out of the Daily Wire,

00:20:11.500 where we could give a dissertation on, I don't know, the history of, you know, Francis Bacon or something.

00:20:17.440 And France is Bacon, the country's Bacon.

00:20:19.760 No, you know, you could give a history on basically the most boring subject in the world,

00:20:23.280 and they would still censor it.

00:20:24.960 And it's because they don't like us.

00:20:26.380 They don't want us to get our views out there.

00:20:28.520 And this brings us to fake news.

00:20:31.100 Do we have time to cover it?

00:20:31.740 Yeah, we'll cover this right at the end, and we'll cut to our interview with Dan.

00:20:34.120 Now, this brings us to fake news, because that's kind of underlying all of this.

00:20:39.640 The fake news.

00:20:40.740 Facebook's helping the fake news, and the conservatives, and Trump was fake news,

00:20:44.400 and he uses the term, blah, blah, blah.

00:20:46.720 There are two kinds of fake news.

00:20:48.520 There's traditional fake news, and there's new fake news.

00:20:51.400 There's the traditional media, and there's the new media.

00:20:54.000 There's the old media.

00:20:55.120 There's the social media.

00:20:56.420 The traditional fake news has been around a long time.

00:21:00.060 Fake news is not a new phenomenon.

00:21:01.660 There's nothing new.

00:21:02.500 Now, I will tell you, a lot of what you see in mainstream news reporting and on the internet

00:21:07.060 is fake.

00:21:09.100 It's not, maybe the stories aren't fake, maybe the sentiment isn't fake,

00:21:12.160 but it's really hyped up.

00:21:13.580 It's astroturf.

00:21:14.900 The term astroturf is the opposite of grassroots.

00:21:18.400 A grassroots campaign is when people just kind of, of their own accord,

00:21:22.740 decide to bubble up and rise up and create a movement.

00:21:25.440 That's like the Tea Party, for instance.

00:21:26.820 The Tea Party was a real grassroots movement.

00:21:28.460 Astroturf is when operatives go in and they try to make it look like that.

00:21:34.020 Try to create the appearance of a grassroots movement, even though it's really just three

00:21:37.940 guys behind computers creating fake accounts and liking and whatever, doing all of that.

00:21:43.160 The largest, this is a news story that just came out today, I think.

00:21:46.460 The largest Black Lives Matter page on Facebook, 700,000 Facebook fans, is fake.

00:21:53.780 That's not a Black Lives Matter page.

00:21:56.180 Just totally fake.

00:21:57.800 There's 700,000 Facebook fans.

00:21:59.720 It's a scam tied to a middle-aged white guy in Australia.

00:22:03.460 Middle-aged white Australian Lives Matter.

00:22:06.100 It's a middle-aged white Australian guy who appears to have pilfered $100,000 from fundraisers

00:22:12.540 on the Black Lives Matter page.

00:22:14.100 The hub of Black Lives Matter on Facebook just isn't real.

00:22:17.900 It's just a fake thing.

00:22:19.080 Some guy saw that he could make some money.

00:22:20.820 Every single political campaign in America does this sort of thing.

00:22:24.860 I promise you that.

00:22:26.640 So many of the groups and the pages on Facebook are created by political operatives who want

00:22:32.860 to be able to wrangle people, marshal public opinion, get clicks to different websites,

00:22:36.380 raise some money, fake accounts, fake likes, astroturfed campaigns.

00:22:40.820 There are whole agencies that do this.

00:22:43.280 I've been on a lot of campaigns.

00:22:45.180 I've dealt with a lot of these guys.

00:22:46.660 I've seen it happen.

00:22:47.800 It happens all the time.

00:22:49.000 This is not really anything new.

00:22:51.060 It's new to happen on Facebook.

00:22:52.540 In the old days, it was just the mainstream media who would do this.

00:22:55.720 The mainstream media would do this exact same thing, except far worse because it would

00:22:58.900 be beamed into everybody's living room and they would see all of these every night. 0.88

00:23:03.540 One way they do it is ridiculous polls.

00:23:05.960 So they, you know, these so-called expert polls.

00:23:08.580 The mainstream media, I think it was two nights before the election in 2016, ran a Princeton

00:23:14.100 analysis that showed a 99% likelihood of Hillary Clinton winning in 2016. 0.64

00:23:20.320 They analyzed all the polls, all of the experts from Princeton, no less, and Ivy League University.

00:23:24.960 They found that there was a 99% chance that Hillary would win. 0.98

00:23:28.460 And what that really means is don't go to the polls for public.

00:23:31.280 It's over.

00:23:31.880 Don't go.

00:23:32.480 You don't.

00:23:32.780 Who cares?

00:23:33.240 It's not going to matter.

00:23:34.140 Stay home.

00:23:35.040 Stay home.

00:23:36.240 Public opinion polls.

00:23:37.180 These are public opinion polls that are meant to shape public opinion.

00:23:40.640 They're not polls of public opinion.

00:23:42.100 They're polls to create public opinion, and they're to demoralize Republicans.

00:23:46.320 This isn't to say the polls are always wrong.

00:23:48.300 Sometimes they're right.

00:23:49.060 In 2012, the polls were basically right.

00:23:51.240 But very frequently, they're used in races around the country to push public opinion.

00:23:56.260 This is why, by the way, political campaigns commission polls.

00:23:59.920 Polls are very expensive to undertake, and campaigns do it so that they can push public opinion.

00:24:05.440 They can change the wording of questions in such a way that you get a number, then you report

00:24:09.260 the number.

00:24:09.600 And if you're a Democrat, the mainstream media tout the number, and they try to convince Republicans

00:24:13.560 to stay home because it's a lost cause.

00:24:15.320 The other way that the mainstream media do this is the wonderful phrase, critics say.

00:24:19.980 That's what they do.

00:24:20.760 They say, you know, Donald Trump's economy is doing great, and he's handling North Korea

00:24:24.700 wonderfully.

00:24:25.360 And it appears that that trade war with China that we were saying was going to destroy the

00:24:28.320 global economy actually has forced China to make concessions, even though we didn't

00:24:32.200 think that that would happen.

00:24:33.200 And everybody thinks he's doing a great job. 1.00

00:24:35.120 But critics say he's still a jerk and we hate him. 0.99

00:24:38.580 Critics say is mainstream media jargon for we. 1.00

00:24:42.780 It just means we.

00:24:43.780 There's no, they don't name the critics.

00:24:45.660 It's just we.

00:24:46.640 Now, because of the internet, because of social media, this is much, much less one-sided.

00:24:51.360 There's still fake news.

00:24:52.720 There's still going to be a little Russian person trying to sow division. 1.00

00:24:57.100 There's still going to be Democrats freaking out.

00:24:59.180 There's still all of these things.

00:25:00.380 But this Mark Zuckerberg trial is a show trial.

00:25:04.160 This testimony is a show trial.

00:25:06.300 It's meant for him to say, I'm sorry, I'm sorry that Republicans finally won. 0.99

00:25:10.440 I know that we don't like Mark Zuckerberg on the right because he's a huge jerk to us and 0.99

00:25:14.040 he's a big lefty. 0.99

00:25:16.080 We have to defend him on this.

00:25:17.680 This is just absolutely outrageous because this entire, entire episode is about punishing

00:25:24.160 Facebook for not punishing conservatives.

00:25:26.640 That's all this is about.

00:25:27.540 Okay, we have got to talk about what we can only hope is the imminent demise of public

00:25:34.700 sector unions in the United States.

00:25:36.560 We're going to do that with Dan DeSalvo, fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

00:25:40.720 But first, I got to say goodbye, don't I?

00:25:43.680 We've got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.

00:25:45.640 It's that time, folks.

00:25:46.340 Sorry.

00:25:46.960 If you are on Facebook or YouTube, it's probably all shut off now.

00:25:50.200 The Democrats have finally said, you know, we've had enough, Mark.

00:25:52.320 We've had enough until you start electing more Democrats.

00:25:54.500 It's all over.

00:25:55.280 So, it's too bad, but I guess I'm just talking to the wall right now.

00:25:58.760 Please go to dailywire.com.

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00:26:15.720 The conversation's today, isn't it?

00:26:16.900 Conversations at 5.30 today, 2.30 Eastern time with the one and only, the inimitable Andrew Klavan, the supreme lord of the multiverse.

00:26:26.340 There is still time.

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00:26:39.480 We will answer any and all questions from politics to the personal.

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00:27:15.620 Join the conversation.

00:27:17.260 But that doesn't matter.

00:27:18.420 You get this.

00:27:18.880 The leftist here's Tumblr.

00:27:20.340 You saw that woman. 0.58

00:27:21.480 You saw that woman who just screamed, no, no, no, Trump won.

00:27:25.080 There are more election victories coming, folks.

00:27:26.800 There are more coming because we're really good at the internet and the internet is the future.

00:27:29.980 Make sure you get this or you will drown and everybody will be very, very sad.

00:27:34.040 Go to dailywire.com.

00:27:35.360 We'll be right back.

00:27:35.940 Okay, we've got to get to Dan DeSalvo, who is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute

00:27:51.320 and associate professor of political science in the Colin Powell School at the City College of New York.

00:27:56.680 I sat down with Dan to discuss the upcoming Supreme Court decision in Janus versus American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, Council 31,

00:28:06.180 which could seriously, finally, hopefully weaken government unions in the United States.

00:28:13.200 Here is our conversation.

00:28:14.160 An Illinois state child care specialist has decided that he does not want to pay his $45 per month fee to his union bosses.

00:28:25.540 He never had a choice in the matter.

00:28:27.140 They just started taking it out.

00:28:29.300 And a lot of times with Supreme Court decisions, this has gone all the way up to the Supreme Court,

00:28:33.240 a lot of times they have a little something to do.

00:28:36.700 There's like a nice providential twist on the name.

00:28:39.380 So, you know, the case of Loving versus Virginia is a case about who you can marry.

00:28:46.240 And, you know, you have Barack Obama trying to, the Little Sisters of the Poor suing the Obama administration.

00:28:53.080 You couldn't make a better name than that, Little Sisters of the Poor.

00:28:56.240 And I really like that this is a child support specialist because it's a guy who doesn't want to have money taken out of his paycheck.

00:29:02.320 The Supreme Court will soon decide Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, Council 31.

00:29:12.420 This is being billed as the most important labor decision in decades.

00:29:16.100 We are joined by Dan DeSalvo.

00:29:18.320 Dan, what are the stakes here?

00:29:19.860 Well, the stakes are very high.

00:29:21.820 This case portends to have the biggest impact on public sector labor relations in probably two generations.

00:29:29.720 I think it's important to stress that this isn't going to change anything in the private sector labor market, which is where four-fifths of workers are.

00:29:39.220 But it will have a big impact on state and local government employment.

00:29:43.100 You know, no less a labor advocate than Franklin Delano Roosevelt opposed public sector unions or government unions.

00:29:50.580 He observed famously that it is impossible to bargain collectively with the government because nobody in that negotiation really has anything at stake except for the taxpayer, who obviously is not at the bargaining table.

00:30:03.400 How did we even get public sector unions in the first place?

00:30:06.640 Well, they took a long time and their trajectory has been totally different than private sector unions.

00:30:12.380 Private sector unions were around since the late 19th century and really took off in the 30s under FDR.

00:30:18.080 But public sector unions really didn't get going until the 60s and 70s, and that's because they're governed by state rather than federal laws.

00:30:27.160 So the legal regime is different and their historical trajectory is completely different.

00:30:33.460 Speaking of those states, in 2005, then-Governor Mitch Daniels got rid of public sector unions with the stroke of a pen, and there wasn't much hubbub about all of that.

00:30:43.240 Then six years later, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker tried to do it, and he ended up getting recalled because of it.

00:30:50.320 He ultimately won that recall election, but he was protested.

00:30:54.240 There were crazy demonstrations all over Wisconsin.

00:30:57.000 How has public opinion changed over time on this issue?

00:31:00.860 And maybe more importantly, how has the legal opinion changed over time?

00:31:04.340 That's a great question.

00:31:05.300 What's changed is the public's become aware of this arrangement, which is collective bargaining in the public sector.

00:31:12.380 You could say that from their creation in the 60s and 70s, public employee unions were really operating sub-ROSA.

00:31:19.940 Unless you were a public employee or had one in your household, you probably weren't really aware of their existence, and they grew up to become powerful political players.

00:31:29.160 And it really wasn't until about 2005, or really in the early parts of this century, that people started to take notice of the power that they were wielding in politics, and some people, like Mitch Daniels, started to want to do something about it.

00:31:43.520 Then Governor Scott Walker came along with Act 10, which is his signature piece of legislation, and that obviously brought the issue to national and international attention.

00:31:53.420 So I think the public is now much better informed than they were 10 years and certainly 20 years ago about what public sector unions are and how they operate.

00:32:04.840 That is certainly true, and even talking to people in politics, they don't always understand the distinction.

00:32:09.540 They just hear union, and they say, oh, well, I'm in a union, or my father was in a union, or something like that.

00:32:14.180 You argued in the New York Daily News that public sector unions are not only bad for the taxpayer, which they doubtlessly are, but they're also bad for the workers as well.

00:32:24.300 How's that?

00:32:24.920 Well, it's bad for some workers, like Mr. Janus.

00:32:28.400 That is, in states like New York and elsewhere, people don't want to be a member of the union.

00:32:33.540 Well, they can't be forced to be a member, but they can be forced to pay the union as a condition of employment.

00:32:39.400 And it's a curious relationship, because there's not many other sectors of employment where you're forced to pay into a group that's so extensively involved in politics, just in order to take your job, which may or may not have anything to do with politics.

00:32:54.900 So that's one thing that's really unique about it.

00:32:58.200 And I think that's why, for some workers, it's not a great deal.

00:33:02.280 You could also say that certain bargaining strategies that the unions employ, while they're trying to represent all workers equally, that may mean that high-performing workers who might benefit from higher salaries or deserve them, aren't going to earn those higher salaries because the union's strategy works against that.

00:33:22.800 That's right.

00:33:23.220 The union's strategy of basically putting a ceiling on what they could perhaps get otherwise.

00:33:28.080 And this is maybe why you see a discrepancy in some numbers.

00:33:30.860 There are almost 15 million union members in the United States, 14.8.

00:33:36.160 And there's a huge difference between the number of private sector and government worker union membership.

00:33:42.680 So 6.5% of private sector workers belong to a union.

00:33:46.760 Over 30% of government workers belong to a union.

00:33:50.180 Now, is this because union busters in the private sector are preventing the workers of the world from uniting?

00:33:56.380 Or is this because workers don't want to shell out their hard-earned money for the political activities of their union bosses?

00:34:04.140 Well, the private sector story is, again, really different.

00:34:07.280 I think one of the points that needs to be stressed is just how we're talking about really two different worlds here.

00:34:12.540 And for years, people saw public and private sector unions as the same thing.

00:34:16.120 And that was one of the justifications for importing the private sector model into the public sector.

00:34:21.460 The reality is the private sector, the economy has changed dramatically from the 50s when private sector unions were at their pinnacle.

00:34:31.560 And the economy's changed.

00:34:34.220 Industries, businesses come into business.

00:34:36.560 They go out of business.

00:34:37.620 They're facing international competition.

00:34:39.880 The service sector economy has been notoriously hard to organize.

00:34:43.680 So private sector unionism has suffered multiple and different challenges over the last 30 years.

00:34:49.920 The public sector, in comparison, is an island of stability.

00:34:54.160 That is because government doesn't go out of business.

00:34:56.460 It's largely a monopoly provider of many services.

00:35:00.860 So it's not facing any competition from employers abroad or other business firms.

00:35:06.480 So it's really a different reality in the public and private sectors.

00:35:10.340 My final question is basically a political question, though I suppose it's a legal question, too.

00:35:15.580 I think Justice Gorsuch, during your oral arguments, has been quiet.

00:35:20.780 And that could be a good thing.

00:35:22.000 That could probably just be a good thing.

00:35:24.300 Are we going to see another 5-4 decision here?

00:35:27.640 And if so, should conservatives throw a ticker tape parade for Donald Trump?

00:35:31.360 Well, I think we're probably very likely to see a 5-4 decision in this case, in part because

00:35:37.460 the case was in some sense already heard two years ago in a prior case called Friedrichs

00:35:43.440 versus California Teachers Association, which was in many respects identical.

00:35:48.240 And due to Justice Scalia's untimely death, the court deadlocked four to four.

00:35:54.140 Now, we don't know how, which justices constituted the four opposed and the four against on the

00:36:00.060 decision.

00:36:00.680 I wonder if I had a crystal ball.

00:36:03.060 I think we have a good supposition that it was lining the four conservative justices against

00:36:07.540 the four liberals.

00:36:08.740 So really, in this case, Justice Gorsuch is the only, let's say, swing vote.

00:36:13.540 But I think people that follow the court closely see him as probably pretty solid on this.

00:36:18.860 And his not asking any questions in this case isn't really telling either way.

00:36:23.520 And we're likely to see a 5-4 decision running against the unions.

00:36:27.900 That, is there any better news to leave on?

00:36:30.440 That is a really wonderful, wonderful bit of news.

00:36:33.620 Dan, thank you so much for being here.

00:36:35.460 We really appreciate the analysis because, you know, when you look at these issues, for

00:36:40.800 so many decades, people couldn't really tell, what is this union?

00:36:43.720 How is this different?

00:36:44.560 What is that, you know, people only want to look at the really saucy Supreme Court decisions.

00:36:49.540 But issues like this, collective bargaining for government union workers or government

00:36:54.400 workers, they can have huge, huge effects on federal budgets and on how our government

00:37:00.600 works and our relationship to the government.

00:37:02.680 So it's good that we have probable good news coming out.

00:37:05.980 Thanks for being here.

00:37:07.340 My pleasure.

00:37:08.960 That's some good news to end on.

00:37:10.380 That is some really good news to end on.

00:37:12.020 And before I go, I would be really remiss if I didn't send out a special message.

00:37:17.320 It's a special day.

00:37:18.520 If you've been on Twitter, you've seen it's National Siblings Day.

00:37:21.560 So I'd just like to wish a happy National Siblings Day to my twin, Rachel Maddow.

00:37:27.440 It's been really, it's been really nice having you around all these years.

00:37:32.000 And so happy National Siblings Day to you, sis.

00:37:35.940 That's our show.

00:37:36.980 I'm Michael Knowles.

00:37:37.920 This is The Michael Knowles Show.

00:37:39.420 I will see you tomorrow and we'll do it all again.

00:37:42.020 The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.

00:37:50.240 Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.

00:37:52.380 Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.

00:37:54.280 Supervising producer, Mathis Glover.

00:37:56.440 Our technical producer is Austin Stevens.

00:37:58.760 Edited by Alex Zingaro.

00:38:00.500 Audio is mixed by Mike Coromina.

00:38:02.520 Hair and makeup is by Jesua Olvera.

00:38:04.940 Copyright Forward Publishing 2018.

The Michael Knowles Show - April 10, 2018

Ep. 136 - It’s Not Zuckerberg’s Fault Dems Can’t Internet

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