Best of The Program | Guests: Teeka Tiwari & Rachel Bovard | 1/12/21

41m
Deutsche Bank, Stripe, Shopify, and others have joined the ban on all things Trump. An internet company in Idaho will block Facebook and Twitter for customers who request it. German Chancellor Angela Merkel is mad at Twitter for blocking Trump. Cryptocurrency and Wall Street expert Teeka Tiwari joins to discuss Bitcoin and its current fluctuation. The Conservative Partnership Institute’s Rachel Bovard reviews the current political climate, Big Tech censorship and Section 230, and the moves Republicans should make next.
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Transcript

Honey punches devotees la forma perfecto dependency conto familia.

Cono ju las crucientes and verdad qual niños les encantas.

Ademas delicios os trosos de granola nuesces y fruta que todos vana disfrutad.

Honey punches de votes para todos.

Tod para sabermás.

Hey!

It's another great day in the US of A.

We've got a we have a really, really good show for you today: some laughs,

some guests that talk a a little bit about the future of the Republican Party on where they need to go.

It is incumbent upon them to start leading the way.

I'm not sure they're going to do it.

We outline the plan of how we need to act.

We also show you what this show is quickly becoming.

We give you a big update right off of the beginning of everything that is happening overnight, and it is happening at a breathtaking pace.

Donald Trump just announced another national emergency.

All kinds of sweeping powers come with that for the next president and

they're going to use it.

And I want to explain where you should be all on today's podcast.

And don't forget, you can get a subscription to Blaze TV at blazetv.com/slash Glenn.

Has there ever been a more important time to subscribe?

No, I don't think so.

I don't think so.

Blazetv.com/slash Glenn, they have the $30 off offer is live again right now.

$30 off.

Your subscription to Blaze TV.

It's Blazetv.com slash Glenn.

Promo code Glenn.

You're listening to

the best of the Glenbeck program.

And by the way, that

dope that

was wearing the helmet and standing by the speaker's chair that broke in and was like, Drashed because I'm like a military guy.

No, you're not, dude.

And

he had the zip ties for the handcuffs.

For all the people I'm going to arrest.

Shut up.

Anyway, he is.

He's refusing to

eat any of the prison food or the jail food because it's not organic.

And

well, it sucks to be him.

Stripe.

Most people don't know what Stripe is, but Stripe is extraordinarily important.

Stripe is a processing

system

that if you are doing any kind of business online and it takes a credit card, it's usually done by Stripe or a couple of other companies.

And if you don't have Stripe, you can't process anything online.

Stripe is no longer processing payments for President Trump's campaign website

or any of his

t-shirt sales or anything else.

It's wonderful.

Shopify has taken down all Trump organization and Trump campaign stores offline.

So Shopify, I mean, you can't process your credit card.

And you can't even find the website or you can find the website, but they don't have anything for sale now because Shopify is also another, if you will, plug-in, if you will,

that people use to sell stuff.

So you got that going for you.

The ABC News political director said,

I don't want to quote him here.

Trump will be the ex-president in 13 days.

The fact is that getting rid of Trump is the easiest part.

Quoting, Cleansing the movement he commands is going to be something else.

Oh,

I love it when we talk about cleansing movements.

Nothing ever bad happens like when you use the word cleansing.

I can't remember any.

Seems like it's always worked out right now.

Apparently we've all forgotten.

We've all forgotten things that we said.

Hey, let's not forget this.

We've all forgotten those things.

It's weird.

Yeah.

Again, I think it's a soap thing.

I'm really fuzzy on it, but the word cleansing.

Oh, and by the way, he knew that was bad.

He deleted that tweet.

So we got that going for us.

But he still has his job.

Don't worry.

And he will forever.

Don't worry.

They would never fire the political director of ABC saying, we just need a good cleansing.

Hey, all of you people get into this shower over here.

They'll read into every Republican's comments to say that they were inciting riots.

But, you know, people tweeting about cleansing movements, there will be no repercussions for that whatsoever.

Yeah.

Okay, so the president, I told you, just declared a national emergency

because of what they say is coming.

I think

there are many things that I believe that I shall never say,

but I shall never say the things that I do not believe.

Okay, so there is this event next week,

and they're calling for armed insurrection in all of the state capitals and in Washington, D.C.

Don't do it.

But he declared a national emergency because of that.

CNN,

their senior media reporter, is demanding the targeting of conservative media outlets who have ignored their anti-Trump bias in reporting on the president and his administration.

Oliver frickin Darcy

demanded conservative news sources be held accountable, suggesting that they must be squelched.

An expansion of the so-called cancel culture.

TV providers that beam OAN and Newsmax into homes or rush limbaugh, there are a lot of people profiting off of lies and conspiracy theories, but Oliver works for free.

You've heard of Oliver.

I'd like more, please.

He's a poor little orphan.

He just went to CNN because, well, nobody would hire me.

I'd like more, please.

And Brian Stelter said, Oh, I'll give you a ladle full of slop me boy.

There it is.

And little poor Darcy says, Oh,

please, all these people are making profits.

And I and CNN are not looking for profit at all.

He said this informational environment must be cleaned up.

Cleaned up?

Maybe cleansed?

You're on the wrong side, Oliver.

Wake up, dude.

Facebook now has their preparations for Inauguration Day.

Facebook said, we began preparing for Inauguration Day last year.

Oh, I'll bet you did.

But our planning took on new urgency after last week's violence in D.C.

And we're treating the next two weeks as a major civic event.

I think that's

what the inauguration always is, Facebook, is a, quote, major civic event.

We're taking the additional steps and using the same teams and technologies we used during the general election to stop misinformation and content that could incite further violence during these next few weeks.

You know what I love about Facebook is they're so smart.

They are so smart.

Dummies like me thinking, think that if you silence and

call half of the country idiots, morons,

deplorables,

racists,

revolutionaries that just want to overthrow the government, if you do that for a long period of time, and then when they finally say, hey, I'm not that, then you silence everyone.

See, I would think that would make things worse, but Facebook,

they have AI helping them.

So they know better than I do.

Gosh, I'm glad they're in control of things.

We're now removing content containing the phrase stop the steal under our coordinating harm policy from Facebook and Instagram.

We removed the original Stop the Steal group in November and have continued to remove pages, groups, and events that violate any of our policies, including calls for violence.

Strangely, not Antifa.

Strangely, maybe they haven't gotten to the A's.

Maybe they're

starts with the A's.

So,

well, they're just smarter than us.

They have a different alphabet.

They're starting up with the S's, stop the steal.

And A must come after that in the alphabet.

I'm not sure.

Now,

New York State troopers say they're not going to watch the streets of New York.

That's not what they do.

They are not going to replace the cops on the streets of New York.

Oh, well, that's not going to cause any problems.

And you know what?

I support you, New York State troopers.

That's not your job.

You're going to be asked to go in and do things that you have to do and you know are right to keep the peace, but they will tie your hands.

And the first person that tries to beat you to death,

if they're not a Trump supporter, nobody's going to say a damn word about it.

I support you, state troopers, but I warn you, this is going to make things worse.

It's almost as if this has been designed to be bad, right?

Of course, it's not.

An Idaho internet company has blocked Facebook and and Twitter over censorship.

So

they censored because they're a private company and they can censor and say who is on their platform and who is not.

So this internet company said,

yeah,

well, we're a private company and we disagree with Facebook and Twitter, so we're blocking them on our service.

Guess what Facebook and Twitter are doing?

They're suing the internet company up in Idaho because they say they don't have a right to say who could be on their platform and who can't.

Even though they're a private company, they can't do that.

Oh,

really?

Boy, I would hate it if any internet providers would join this Idaho company and

do exactly the same to Facebook or Twitter because I'd just so curious to see how this would work out in the Supreme Court.

Good chance it doesn't work out in our favor.

Who would have thunked that?

But why?

Why wouldn't it work out in our favor?

Hmm.

They can block people because they don't like what they're doing and they can do it because they're a private company.

But this internet provider,

they say

no.

And you know what Facebook says is that's why we need net neutrality.

I get really worried about these restrictions.

Let the private company do what they want.

If the Idaho company wants to say you can't go on Twitter, which by the way, they did give you the option of opting in to getting to Twitter or Facebook, they just changed the choice structure.

And

that's totally okay.

You can ask Cass Sunstein.

Just change the choice structure if you want something to happen.

Well, Cass Sunstein, he's one of those smart guys that, oh, I still respect.

So you're right on that choice structure.

Thank you for reminding me of that.

Yeah, it's been a while since we've been talking about that.

It's been a while since we've been on the

dangerous.

The dangerous path of questioning Cass Sunstein.

It's been a long time since we've been on that dangerous path.

And my gosh, we've learned a lot since, haven't we, Stuart?

Oh, we sure have.

Yeah, we're not going to go down that road, I'll tell you that right now.

This is what I fear about this stuff, though, because you're right.

Taking away the opportunity for a private company to do something stupid brings in the government, giving them the opportunity to do something stupid.

And that does not work out well.

You think that there's no one to run to with Facebook and Google?

Well, wait until Facebook and Google are in bed with the government.

Yeah.

Then who do you run to?

China?

Yeah.

There's a story out today about how Angela Merkel is pissed off that they banned Trump from Twitter.

Yeah.

And you see that and you're like, well, good.

At least someone's standing up.

No, no, no.

No, someone's standing up there.

Don't get in there.

Don't do that.

That was my initial reaction.

I'm like, oh, because it is ridiculous.

Even you could argue, okay, a regular person.

Maybe Twitter wants to moderate in some way.

It's their private company.

But a world leader should be able to be on record.

You know, I want to know what Trump is thinking.

I want to know what Biden is thinking.

You throw them off of Twitter.

We might not know that.

That's an important thing for history, for all of us.

However, that's not what Angela Merkel is saying at all.

No, no, no.

She's saying she's mad that a private company has the ability to censor someone when that should be what the government is doing.

Yes.

The government should be censoring.

How dare you?

That's our job.

That's our job to deperson people.

That's really what she's saying.

And I'm really upset about Deutsche Bank, which I'm pretty sure is German for no longer allowing any loans or any business to be done with any Donald Trump organization.

That's not the right of that German Nazi, that German bank.

Wait, how did you get German out of that?

How did you get German out of that?

Deutsche?

Deutsche,

probably Dutch, probably Dutch.

It probably means Dutch

in German, but it probably means Dutch.

Oh,

got a laugh.

Gotta laugh.

The best of the Glenbeck program.

Bitcoin.

Boy, that's weird.

This is something that the average person is not talking about, but then again, your marriage could be on fire along with your car and your house.

And with everything that's going on in the world, you might not even have time to talk about your house and your car on fire.

So

people have been watching it.

We've been watching it.

It's actually what Tika Tiwari talked about, what, like three years ago, two years ago?

Remember that, yeah.

And he was on.

He said, it's going to go up to 50 grand, it's going to move quickly.

And I said, I believe you, but the timing, you should probably not say real fast because I'm always wrong with timing.

Well, it turns out that he's right.

And there's a reason why Bitcoin

didn't go up.

And we wanted to bring Tika on with us.

Welcome to the program, Tika.

How are you?

I'm doing great, Glenn.

It's great to be back.

Thanks for having me.

So I wanted to talk to you about now that it it has broken, can you explain the

bubble that the Trump administration popped, if you will, in 2017?

Yeah, let me first say that you did warn me when we were on air.

You said, I said Bitcoin will be $40,000.

And you said,

are you sure you want to say that?

Are you really sure you want to say that?

And, you know, something I prided myself on, Glenn, is that if I believe something, I'm not going to hide it.

I know.

I know.

I'm going to say it.

And everything told me that it was gonna go there and when it didn't go there I I was shocked I said you know I had to look in the mirror and say did I just get this wrong and fortunately I stayed the path and here we are you know 33,000 we've been at 40 above 40 so it came to light that Giancarlo who was the former head of the CFTC came out Christopher Giancarlo who came out and said one of the untold stories of the past few years is that the CFTC the treasury the SEC and National Economic Council director at the time, Gary Cohen, believed that the launch of Bitcoin Futures would have the impact of pupping the Bitcoin bubble, and it worked.

So you had some of the most important levers of government policy at work trying to push down Bitcoin.

And that's why we didn't go to 40K, Glenn.

And it finally dawned on me like, oh, okay, so this is what I was up against.

Well, I know this to be true with gold.

In the 1980s, they suppressed gold with tips and everything else.

They found ways to suppress the price of gold because gold was an indicator of how solid is our economy and the dollar.

And so they have suppressed it.

Gold should be probably $3,000 to $5,000 an ounce if you had the restrictions on it, the fewer restrictions on it that we had in the 1980s.

The concern here is, I mean, it was up to, what, 42 last week?

42.

Yeah, it's down to 33.

By the way, I took your advice.

I bought more, and I'm thrilled that I did.

But

the scary thing is, is, again,

they're starting to, it's coming down.

I don't know why.

Do you know why it's coming down?

Yeah, I mean, Bitcoin's got up 380% over the last year.

It needed to take a breather.

I mean, if you look at stocks like Amazon, Apple, Google, when they were in their early growth phases, they would go through processes like this, even Tesla, where it would be hated and then they'd knock it down and you'd get this exchange from weak hands to stronghand, and then it would move up again.

I'm actually very happy, Glenn, to see Bitcoin take a breather here because parabolic straight moves up don't happen.

They crash.

And so they crash.

So this is great.

I would love to see even Bitcoin coming a little bit more, trade sideways for a few months, have people tell me I'm an idiot for buying it.

Would love to see that.

You know, right now I'm the most popular guy at the party.

I never like that.

So I would love to see more skepticism growth around that.

I agree.

I would like to see it at 25, quite honestly, because I think that's really healthy and then take another spurt towards it.

Is this being called digital gold now, that a new generation looks at this as digital gold?

This is not what we saw the first time that it hit 20,000 when everybody was like, I'm mortgaging my house and buying Bitcoin.

This is not happening at the low-level investor.

And by the way, you can still buy Bitcoin, even if you have $100.

You just don't buy one.

You buy a fraction of one.

But that's not what's happening here.

This is actually big investors, right?

We're seeing the institutionalization of Bitcoin.

And if you remember in 2018, I was on your show and I begged everyone, I said, don't believe these institutions.

Remember, Jamie Dimon called Bitcoin a Ponzi scheme that he'd fire anybody that was trading it.

Well, guess what?

They just put out research saying that Bitcoin's worth $146,000.

And I called that in 2018.

I said, once these guys have the regulatory framework in place, they're going to come out and they are going to put their marketing machine behind Bitcoin.

Citigroup, which three years ago said that Bitcoin was worthless, just came out and said that Bitcoin's going to go to 300K.

City group, Glenn.

Citigroup.

So everything we talked about in 2018 is starting to happen.

I wish it happened faster.

Of course, we always wish these things happened faster.

But I would say anybody listening today is don't focus on the day-to-day.

Focus on the trajectory of this asset and focus on the people that are buying it now.

And the people that are buying it now are people like Mass Mutual, that has $230 billion under management, 169-year-old insurance company, companies like Michael Saylor, who's put a billion dollars into this through his public entity,

the major banks that have now been given clearance to both custody, trade, and create products around crypto, which they could never do before.

So now that they figured out a way to make money from it, Glenn, guess what?

They're going to write reports about it.

They're going to get their clients into it.

And you will see.

Again, I'm not going to paint myself in a corner like I did last time,

but I think we will see $60,000 $60,000 Bitcoin far faster than most people imagine.

And at some point here, I'm not saying it's going to happen this year, but we'll see $100,000 Bitcoin.

At the end of the day, there is no other asset that can hedge you the way that Bitcoin can.

Sure, gold can to a certain extent, but gold's already a $10 trillion market, right?

You're not going to see gold go up 10 or 12 or 15 or even 8x anytime soon.

And as you said, gold's a political metal.

It's really depressed by government, overt government policies.

Bitcoin still has a great deal of freedom because it is decentralized.

It's much newer.

It's much smaller.

And we've seen that no matter how many shots you take at Bitcoin, it keeps coming back.

The other thing I would say is if people keep calling Bitcoin a bubble, how many bubbles going do you know that are 10 years old are worth a half a trillion dollars or more and keep making new highs?

At what point do we say, okay, this isn't a bubble.

This is a new asset.

So it sure goes through booms and busts, but

it's not a bubble asset.

I do believe this is the cotton gin, the internet.

This is going to change the financial world.

And it is one of those things that

the average person could invest in right now.

And at this point, it still could be game-changing for your family, game-changing.

And especially when the dollar begins to really lose value, people are going to be looking for something of other value.

And that's gold, silver, Bitcoin, land.

I mean,

it's hard assets like this.

Everybody listening today, whether you buy Bitcoin or not, I would tell you, do you want to own an asset, cash, that got diluted by 23% last year?

It's okay to dilute an asset if you've got offsetting growth, but we don't have offsetting growth.

23% more dollars were printed last year and the economy went down.

Like that's a recipe for a destruction of buying power.

You owe it to your family to protect your buying power.

Maybe you'll do it in land.

Maybe you'll do it in some type of equipment.

I'm doing it in Bitcoin.

That's my choice.

Tika, one of the, and there's trillions of dollars more to be printed here in the coming Biden administration.

Trillions.

one of the things I think is interesting to me and also I think the audience when it comes to Bitcoin is the idea that this, it's a currency that can't be printed forever.

There's only going to be what, 21 million of them

of all time, and then there's nowhere to go but the value to be up.

There's scarcity there.

In addition to that, though, there are reports that up to 20% of the existing Bitcoin are lost.

and will never be recovered.

You think it's more than that?

It's at least six or seven million Bitcoins are gone forever.

Oh my my God.

Never have.

So that means there's maybe 11 million in the active float right now.

That's it.

There's 35 millionaires in the world.

And if every one of them want to own a Bitcoin, they can't.

Think about that.

They can't.

Wow, that's amazing.

I mean, you just think as this goes on, there was only a few more million Bitcoin to go.

And many are lost.

Many more could be lost.

The scarcity is really something that it almost seems like inertia is going to push this thing higher no matter what happens.

When I have been the truth,

look at 2009 to now.

Look at it.

You didn't have to be a genius.

You just bought a new hold and didn't worry about the 80% drops.

Shut up.

That's going to continue.

Shut up.

I figured this out the other day.

When Mark Andreessen, I sat with a private meeting with Mark Andreessen and he told me.

This story makes me sick.

Oh, yeah.

He told me, you got to buy Bitcoin.

It was under a dollar at the time.

No.

When I heard it again,

it was $32.

I did the math.

If I would have taken the small investment that I made,

you know, three years ago, four years ago, whenever,

it would have been worth $250 million

today.

Oh, my God.

$200.

You think I'd be here?

I'd be

gone.

Gone.

And I think.

Yeah, I know.

But I'd be happier.

The thing is, is that

I don't think this

is any different than that.

And people will see it's $33,000 a Bitcoin.

You don't have to buy a Bitcoin.

You can buy a little bit of one.

And it's well worth it, I think.

I think.

One last question.

I see the stock, I could be wrong, but I think the stock market after the inauguration

will have a correction as well and possibly a big correction.

And it doesn't, and I don't want to get into the timing because I'm always wrong, but it's coming.

And that's usually when a big correction comes.

People who have a lot of money and buy on margins have to sell their gold, have to sell their assets, and they dump them.

So should we be looking for another big dip in Bitcoin if the stock market comes in?

I am praying for one.

I don't know if my karma is good enough to get one.

I'm praying for one.

I would love to see 25K.

I know that'll freak a lot of people out, but I would love to see 25K and I would love to buy some more.

The bottom line is there's never been a,

if you've had at least a three to four year time frame, there's never been a bad price to own Bitcoin.

Think about that.

How many assets can you say that's true for?

None.

Tika, thank you so much.

God bless.

Glad to have you on again.

Thank you.

This is the best of the Glenn Beck program.

We welcome Rachel Bavard on with us.

She is the senior director of Policy Conservative Partnership Institute, the co-author of the book, Conservative, Knowing What to Keep.

She's really, really good at looking at

where we are in the political landscape and where do we go from here.

So we wanted to get her on.

Rachel, how are you?

I'm doing well.

Thanks for having me.

You bet, you bet.

Let's just talk about the political landscape here for a second.

You know, there's a national emergency that has been declared by the president.

They are trying to impeach the president.

The reason why he, in case you don't know this, I know you do, but in case the audience doesn't know this, the national emergency revolves around

this big,

you know, carry your guns to the state capitol next week and

surround your state capitol and come armed to the inauguration.

I mean, it's just a horrible idea that will end with the Second Amendment being decimated if, God forbid, there's any problems.

Tell me about the political landscape and where do conservatives stand right now,

and then we'll move forward.

Well, I think you have a couple of things going on here.

You know, the first is obviously that the violence at the Capitol was appalling.

And I think, you know, those protesters failed at their goal and the result will be to marginalize a lot of the voices that I think have very legitimate aims.

And, you know, but I think that speaks to a broader point, which is that, look, I think while we should not condone what happened at the Capitol, we should denounce it, we should still seek to understand why thousands of people, you know, drove to the United States Capitol, spent their own money, you know, to bring

legitimately held feelings of disenfranchisement, of, you know, grievance about how their politicians were not representing them.

The majority of those people were not violent.

And I think it's incumbent upon the Republican Party and Democrats as well to understand what it was that drove those people.

I said on Wednesday night, there are

many reasons that need to be explored, but there are no excuses for what happened.

But there are many reasons, and we have to talk about those reasons because they're only making things worse.

That's right.

And that's where I think you see now the opportunists

on the Democratic side, in Congress, in the media,

at levels of corporate power, basically using what happened as an excuse to do what they've always wanted to do, which is to silence their opposition, to silence any meaningful debate or trying to understand what happened, trying to find a clear way forward.

They want these people out of public life, and they're going to use every lever of power that they control to do so.

And that is going to serve to just inflame the situation.

And it's going to bring more destruction, more marginalization at a time when we need to be doing some deep thinking about why this happened.

So is there any moderating force at all in the Democratic Party?

I mean, yesterday I hear, oh, it's time for healing and coming together.

And we're going to give, you know, the stimulus package to everybody except white men.

And I was like, what are you doing?

What are you doing?

Is there any moderating factor at all that we can count on or that we can hope for?

This is the scary thing, is that it's very hard to point to any moderating influence at this point because you have politicians, big, you know, Democratic politicians now working in tandem with corporations and the news media.

So we're not just dealing with a political party here.

We are dealing with an operation of collusive power to try to silence a group, not just individuals, but entire swaths of the American people because they hold views they don't like.

There's a reason that Michelle Obama didn't go to Congress to say, shut down this rhetoric.

She went to big tech.

She made a public appeal to Mark Zuckerberg to eliminate political opposition.

Same with Joe Manchin, did the same thing.

Alexander Ocasio-Cortez tried to get Twitter to remove her previous tweets supporting protests.

Okay, this is the level of collusive power that we're seeing, and it's dangerous.

Okay, so let's stop there for a second because you've just written a really great article on Section 230.

You know, there's a lot of people that look now at

the conservatives and they're like, you guys haven't done jack.

You haven't done jack on any of this stuff.

But they're kind of in a rock and a hard place because we don't want more government regulation.

That, I think, is what Mark Zuckerberg wants.

They want more regulation because they'll help write the bill.

Section 230 is kind of this unicorn out there that we're all hoping, you know, that, you know, pigs can fly and wishes are horses, that this will stop and

turn things around.

Do you believe in Section 230?

Is there anything we can do that can stop them, that won't bite us in the ass

in the end?

So I think the conversations around Section 230 were useful and instructive because it is a government subsidy that goes to these industries.

But to your point, I do think it presents a lot of challenges.

And I think at this point, it's almost child's play.

I think we've almost moved beyond Section 230 for reigning in big tech.

I think we've seen how powerful they are.

And

I'm on the right and I'm screaming for antitrust enforcement after what those companies have done to parlor and other alternatives.

Is there anyone on, I mean, I know Elizabeth Warren wants, you know, harsh regulation.

Is there anyone that's proposing anything on the left that we, that is acceptable to us that you have seen?

So I haven't seen anything on Section 230 that I think from a conservative perspective solves any problems for me.

I think it's probably worse.

But I do think there is some bipartisan cooperation on antitrust.

And I'm I'm not suggesting a politically motivated enforcement.

I'm talking about using the laws that we have on the book.

Because remember, antitrust enforcement is law enforcement, right?

It's not new regulation.

It's saying,

are there laws being broken in the market?

If there are, we should prosecute those.

We don't tolerate amnesty in any other area.

Why should we tolerate it, you know, for big tech?

And so there is some cooperation on that point.

Congressman Ken Buck from Colorado is a Republican, a conservative member of the House Freedom Caucus, has really taken a leadership role on this front.

He doesn't agree with some of what Democrats want to do, but he has proposed areas where I think Republicans and Democrats can work together.

Because look, these companies are now changing our democracy.

They're changing the way that we live together and interact.

They're changing who can speak, not only that, but who can hear, right?

And that is having dangerous effects, I think, on how we live as a free society.

So there has got to be action on this front.

And I'll tell you, you know, one other thing about antitrust.

I don't have a problem in theory with companies deciding who speaks on their platform, right?

The companies do have First Amendment rights in that regard.

The problem I have with it is that Facebook isn't doing it for 20% of the world.

They're doing it for 99% of the world.

And that is a problem that I think needs to be looked at.

And so antitrust can play a role here.

I think Republicans have to get serious about it.

So there is an internet company, North Idaho Internet provider,

and

they've now banned Facebook and Twitter from

their services.

So

they're not carrying those.

They're blocking them in northern Idaho and the Spokane area.

And immediately,

Twitter and Facebook said, you can't do that.

And they said, well, wait, we're a private company.

If you can say this, why can't we say this?

I mean, I would love to see, I'd love to see a bunch of internet providers do this so we could go to court with it.

But is there a difference between this that you can think of?

Well, this is the double standard that exists for tech and for everyone else.

It's not just ISPs, right?

It's technical isn't subject to the same liability that newspapers are, that other First Amendment actors are because of Section 230.

They occupy a privileged position in many ways.

And I think the hypocrisy that you're pointing to here is that, you know, ISPs, to a certain extent, operate like common carriers.

They can discriminate, but it's very difficult difficult for them to do so.

But again, you have Amazon web services, which is almost de facto a common carrier at this point, yet they don't have to operate by the same rules.

And that is something I think that is going to be a point of debate on the right in the months to come is have these companies risen so powerful and become so you know

the scale is so large that they now sort of control the public square.

If that is true, should they be subject to some sort of responsibility, liability, compliance responsibility that they aren't now?

And that's, I think, going to be a question that's going to be posed to the right in the foreseeable future.

Let me ask you a very

important question.

And if you're not,

if you have any doubt on

being exact in your language on this, just pass on the answer and I accept that.

Rachel, I am

very concerned.

I have to every day come on and

talk to people who are very angry, justifiably so, see their country being torn apart, see what could very well be the beginning of what happened in Venezuela,

and they want to do something.

There are forces

on the right and the left and the fringe that say it's revolution time.

It is not revolution revolution time.

But what can the average person do?

I mean, they feel like they've run out of options.

Well, I agree with you that it is not revolution time.

And I say this having spoken to people that have come from countries that have recently undergone revolution.

Yeah,

we do not want that here.

It's awful.

You know, so I do not endorse that in any way.

But

I feel for them because I think a lot of us feel like our voices are not being heard.

But at the end of the day, our politics is what needs to save us.

Our politics, our process of government, our self-government has always been how we have worked out these problems.

It fails when we don't debate.

It fails when we don't vote, when we don't have a forum to air these concerns in a self-government representative way.

I think Republicans take a lot of blame for that.

When you shut down and you dismiss your voters, you aren't giving them the voice that that our republic demands.

And so I think we need to rely, we cannot lose faith in our political system.

We have to demand debate.

We have to demand deliberation.

We have to demand representation.

Well, that is really

violence.

That doesn't mean armed insurrection.

That's

demanding it rhetorically.

This is going to be incumbent on the Republicans.

They have to stop hating their own voters.

They have to stop dismissing them, thinking that they're a a bunch of local yokels

and they have to

realize who they represent and talk to them in real terms.

It's really going to come down to them.

And I hope that we have some leadership that understands that.

Do you see it on the horizon?

Because I don't see it anywhere.

Well, I think you're absolutely right.

The Republican Party has a huge problem in the fact that it despises its own base.

And that is, you know, again, our elections have to mean something going forward because, you know, if we can vote these people out, our republic still matters.

And I think that's what it's going to come down to.

Rachel, thank you so much for

a difficult conversation that needs to be had.

And I'd love to have you on

much more often here in the future.

We need to have a dialogue and look to the future and see what we can do.

Thank you.

Thank Thank you.

You bet.