The Michael Knowles Show - Ep. 119 - Are Social Media Giants Killing Conservatives? ft. Austin Petersen

Episode Date: March 12, 2018

What Facebook giveth, Facebook taketh away. Big tech giants are clamping down on conservatives, with catastrophic results. We’ll discuss with Austin Petersen, a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate ...in Missouri who was just banned from Facebook for running an AR-15 campaign giveaway. That’s my kind of campaign. Then, my grand theory of Trump headlines, tariffs, the UK deporting that vicious terrorist Lauren Southern, and we come full circle with FDR’s fireside chats on This Day In History!
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Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 What Facebook giveth, Facebook taketh away. Big tech giants are clamping down on conservatives with catastrophic results. For us and for all of society, we will discuss with Austin Peterson, a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Missouri, who was just banned from Facebook for running an AR-15 campaign giveaway. What's the matter with that? I don't know what, what could be, that is my kind of campaign. Great giveaway.
Starting point is 00:00:23 Then, my grand theory of Trump headlines, tariffs, the UK deporting that vicious terrorist, and Southern. You know that hot dude that we had on the show last week, that terrorist? And we come full circle with FDR's fireside chats on this day in history. I'm Michael Knowles and this is the Michael Knowles Show. Today is a good day. It is a good day for a couple reasons. One, we get to keep the lights on here. That's important. We always enjoy doing that. We can do that thanks to Ring. Also thanks to Ring, we can keep neighborhoods safe. We can catch bad guys. We can make sure that your family and your property and your house is safe and you can use technology. These are all very good things, especially catching bad guys. We don't catch enough of them these days, but with
Starting point is 00:01:09 Ring, you can. Ring is, you've heard me talk about these guys a lot, the video doorbell that connects to your cell phone. They have completely changed the home security game with a doorbell. So, you know, in the old days, you would have neighborhood watches and you'd have to go to meetings with like big Jimbo down the street and you'd have to drive around or whatever, do all this stuff. You don't, come on, guys, it's 2018. Don't do that anymore. I am a millennial, which means that I refuse to leave my couch for any reason at all, other than to come sit in this chair for like an hour a day, and then I go back to my couch. So when you have a ring, you can do that. You've got your doorbell right there. Someone rings the bell. You just can talk to them,
Starting point is 00:01:45 right, on your cell phone. Two-way, it gets uploaded to the cloud in case somebody steals your ring doorbell. They think they're clever, right? They're going to take your ring doorbell. Ha-ha, you've already got them on the cloud. Let me set this up for you. Because they've been sending us videos of ring in action, and they're pretty good. One of the aspects of ring is you can share the video instantly with your neighbors, so you see some sketchy looking dude come up, and you can share it and say, watch out for this guy.
Starting point is 00:02:10 So the last one they sent me had a woman in a conspicuously pink knit hat. I wonder, I'm just, I don't know, I'm not saying anything. With this one, a crazy looking guy walks up to a home. The first thing you hear is him kicking in the door and then ring kicks in. Here's the video.
Starting point is 00:02:28 Hello? Leave my house where I'm calling the police. Okay, what you need to do, Tim. Hey, leave my house. house. Stop now or I'm calling the police. Why would you tell me that? Because you're trying to push my door in. Leave now. We're about to smash what's in there. I'm calling the police. Okay. I am the police. Something tells me that guy's not the police. I don't know. I'm not a detective myself, but I suspect that guy is not the police. It's like toothless, crazy person. I hope that guy did
Starting point is 00:03:13 call the cops and pick him up and get them off the streets. This is what Ring can do. Can you imagine that? Forget even protecting your family in your house. You would have the joy of talking to that toothless crazy person trying to rob you and get him to run away. Really, really good. He runs away because that family had Ring. When you see what's going on at the front door, you can really stop crime. And that is pretty empowering.
Starting point is 00:03:39 We're big supporters of our civil rights at the Michael Knowles Show. But, you know, hopefully you don't need to get all the way back to your last line of protection. Hopefully you can have a little fun while you do it too. With the ring floodlight and spotlight cams, you can build a ring of security around your entire property. It lets you protect your home no matter where you are. You can share your clips and keep your neighbors on the lookout for suspicious activity. It's really, really good. All the cool guys I know have them.
Starting point is 00:04:03 Seriously, although like very up-to-date on technology people have them, it is a really good deal. Right now, I don't say I never did nothing for you. You can save up to $150 on a ring of security. kit at ring.com slash Knowles, K-N-O-W-L-E-S, like Jay-Z's wife. That is, ring.com slash knolls. Save 150 bucks when you go to ring.com
Starting point is 00:04:22 slash knolls. This is a really important thing. Ever since we got ours, we've really enjoyed it, and a number of our friends have really enjoyed it, too. I highly recommend it. Okay. Now, just one other bit of housekeeping. I've noticed occasionally,
Starting point is 00:04:38 you know, obviously I'm always waiting for Ben to just come in and fire me and kick me out of his broom closet here. But occasionally I'll check in and see how our numbers are doing. The numbers are way up on the show. So I just want to thank everybody for doing that. And hello to new people who are watching. It's very, very helpful. We appreciate it.
Starting point is 00:04:55 It helps us keep the lights on, just like ring. If you would, please go to iTunes and leave us a five-star review and leave a review yourself. You could leave a blank review. I suppose that would be kind of funny and coincidental. But whatever you want to say, we really appreciate it. So subscribe and leave a review. Thank you very much. Can we bring on our guests now?
Starting point is 00:05:12 Do we have Austin? Austin Peterson is a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate from Missouri. In 2016, Austin ran for president in the Libertarian Party primary, receiving the backing of erstwhile Republicans, Mary Matlin and Eric Erickson. After the Libertarian Party primaries concluded, Austin endorsed Gary Johnson for president. Last September, during his Senate campaign, Austin was banned from Facebook for giving away a rifle as a campaign promotion
Starting point is 00:05:38 and to highlight Democrat incumbent, Claire McCaskill's terrible record on defending Americans' constitutionally protected civil right to keep and bear arms. It later came out, by the way, that Facebook's C-O-O, Cheryl Sandberg, has just coincidentally donated the maximum amount of money permitted by law to McCaskill's campaign.
Starting point is 00:05:57 It's kind of one of those weird coincidences. Austin, thank you for being here. Hey, good to see you, Michael. Thanks for having me. So there's no bias at Facebook, right? Clearly, there's no, they don't have any bias against conservatives. No, Silicon Valley loves conservatives, right? That's why Dennis Prigger is having to sue YouTube. That's why conservatives all around the country. I mean, I've been here in Missouri, I ask everybody at these little Republican town meetings, you know, old people even that are on Twitter or Facebook,
Starting point is 00:06:22 has anybody here been censored by Facebook or Twitter for being too conservative? And a lot of them raise their hands. So I think there's some bias here. Listen, they're allowed. It's their own platform, private property and everything. But maybe they should be a bit more clear about their bias, or at least honest about it, don't you think? Well, this is where it gets really tricky because I have, obviously, from the media side, I've seen what they're doing to conservative publishers and to publishers in general. On a personal side, I will note, this is just an anecdote. On 2016 on Election Day, I posted a meme to my Facebook page that made fun of Hillary Clinton and said not to vote for her.
Starting point is 00:06:56 I was banned for 24 hours, exactly 24 hours from Facebook. And this is the question of regulation. We're conservatives. We don't like too much regulation. Facebook is the largest publisher in the history of the world. Should Facebook be regulated as a publisher? No, because as much as I don't like their behavior, today's Facebook is yesterday's MySpace, right?
Starting point is 00:07:17 Well, what about Friendster, right? The problem is that right now in urgency, right, we're seeing people like publishers like ourselves. I run a small publishing firm too. And trust me, I know how hard it can be to make a living, especially when they're squashing our views and the algorithms seem to be biased against us. But that creates a market opportunity, right?
Starting point is 00:07:35 The socialists would step in and say, well, it's a market failure and we need to regulate. So let's not give it into their arguments. Let's talk about alternatives, right? Right now, there haven't been a lot of good strong ones. But the last thing we want is an echo chamber. So I think what's going to happen is eventually we will see some sort of open source platform, maybe based on blockchain technology. You just never know what you're going to see in the future.
Starting point is 00:07:55 So I don't want to have government step in and start micromanaging how we communicate with one another. Well, I'm not even saying we should break them up as a monopoly, as I think a lot of people are saying on both the left and the right. What I'm saying is, though, there is something different about Facebook than MySpace because they are in the publishing business. They control all of the ad revenue to publishers. They have a built-in platform called Instant Articles for publishers. They decide what you see in your newsfeed and what you don't. And yet, they're not regulated as a publisher because they do this little dance routine and they say, oh, we're just a technology company. We're not a publisher. Do you think moving forward, I know a lot of people who have already been elected,
Starting point is 00:08:35 are saying they need to start regulating them as a publisher. On that specific regulation, do you think it's still playing too much with fire to get into regulation? Or do you think we should level it out? Yeah. No, I do. And listen, you're talking to someone who is actually harmed by this, right? I run a small website.
Starting point is 00:08:52 I have a small audience and I make a little bit of my revenue from Facebook, from Twitter. But I just think it's really important for us to keep the internet off, get to keep the government off the internet. Right? Because then you kind of get the camel's nose under the tent on some of these things. And it's just like net neutrality, right? Right. It's like, oh, it's sold to us for public good.
Starting point is 00:09:10 But there's always these unintended consequences that come at us later on down the line. So, you know, I just, I really wish that Facebook would stop. I would really just like some clarity, right? Just be honest about your biases. You know, a lot of times, you know, we get this like fake news, right, that comes from the left and they're trying to pretend like their objective, right? Just be honest about your biases. But you know, Ben Shapiro says that all the time, actually. You know, he's like, hey, I'm honest about my bias.
Starting point is 00:09:33 I'm biased, but I'll tell you that I'm biased, right? And then let's discuss the facts. So I would rather just have Facebook be clear about their terms of service. And when it comes to banning us, they said before it was okay for us to give away the rifle. Now it's not okay. Just be honest. Tell us what's going on. This is, I think a lot of people don't understand this who haven't been in publishing on Facebook.
Starting point is 00:09:53 There are, and at all of these tech companies, there are so many levels of people that exist just to make their terms of service seem unclear to the people who use their platyxious. platform. So you call them and they say, oh, no, well, we'll run it up the flagpole. And their whole point is not to make it clear. Now, on, you brought up blockchain. And this is, you have an accomplishment in this regard. You have received the national record for the largest Bitcoin donation in American campaign history. The downside of this is that was back when Bitcoin was trading at around $16,000 per coin. And the cryptocurrency is now in a slump of about 44%. So two questions. One, would you prefer if people donate cash from now on? And two, on the larger point,
Starting point is 00:10:39 on the political point, libertarians in particular have embraced cryptocurrencies. Do you think these sorts of technologies are a fad like the tulip bubble or does Bitcoin have a future? And how do you get your 44% back? Well, you know, actually the tulip bubble was kind of an overblown story. A lot of people used that, but it wasn't quite as bad a bubble as many people said. So you should definitely check that out. The economist kind of debunked that recently. But when it comes to crypto, donate it. Yeah, we actually get more value out of Bitcoins than we do of Federal Reserve notes because all of the publicity that Bitcoin gets, whether it's up or down, really does bolster us. And it gives me the chance to talk about federal monetary policy, which I don't
Starting point is 00:11:17 get to talk about. You know, I usually got to stick to God's gun, God guns and weed, right, when you're talking about big issues of the day. At least two of those are important. Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, I mean, listen, medical marijuana being on the ballot here in Missouri, this is going be an issue, right? I didn't tell you which too, Austin. I didn't say, no, I'm sorry, go ahead. Good point. Good point. Well, just I was going to say a nine-year-old woman the other day asked if I was for it and I was like, yes. And she's like, high five. It's true story. But no, it gives me an excuse to talk about monetary policy. And I don't know if Bitcoin is going to be the crypto of the
Starting point is 00:11:51 future. We don't know. But what I think is just really exciting is that a lot of the sort of libertarian and conservative economists, Milton Friedman and Friedrich Haich, they kind of predict. this in a sense before the digital revolution happened where they would talk about like baskets of currencies so in a way what we're what we're doing is we're experimenting to determine what is the best form of money and Hayek actually wrote back in the day that we don't know what good money is because government controls the tap the supply you know the amount of money into the into the money supply with the interest rates but Bitcoin doesn't have a central bank they can't tell us what it's worth
Starting point is 00:12:26 so it's fluctuating yeah it goes up and down but that's gonna happen you've got to let the market determine. There's other competitors stepping in. Who knows what will be the currency of the future? I just want to let them determine what it is on the free market. That's a beautiful thing. And it's a great way for me to talk about it. And we raise quite a bit of money. That is an interesting point because I, you know, I'll joke that the currency could be down 50% on a day. But there are these ancillary benefits of you get a bit of publicity for it because you're clearly leaning into this technology. And whenever conservatives can talk about monetary policy, that is a wonderful thing. And it isn't that.
Starting point is 00:12:59 sexy, I'll totally admit it isn't, but if it's in the news constantly, I know our pal Tai Lopez has a Bitcoin podcast that always does very well. If you can tie it into something that's very newsy, that's probably a good way to talk about it. You've got... Sure, yeah. And go ahead. Well, I want to, on the political side of things, this, this libertarian Republican tension does create some problem. You've got some powerful endorsements behind you in your campaign, Bob Barr, Joe Walsh, from what I can tell, a lot of others. But the big McGillah in the room, President Cofafe, the Donald, as well as Vice President Pence and Leader McConnell, have endorsed your opponent, Josh Hawley. Why is that, do you think? And do you think you can sway their support?
Starting point is 00:13:47 Do you think their support will matter in the race? I think that it probably, of course, it helps in the primary, but it may hurt in the general, right? Imagine that, you know, Claire McClure Caskell and the left, they can easily tie whatever the president does, whoever the candidate is, right? But sort of being sort of independent, such as I am and just calling shots like Ben Shapiro does, I think actually makes my case a little bit stronger because I'm trying to be a statesman, not just some pander bear to the, you know, the establishment interest. And just remember, I mean, Mitch McConnell and Carl Rove were the people who bragged that they pushed Josh Hawley into the race, right? So I think the thing with the president, the president isn't paying attention
Starting point is 00:14:24 to the primary in Missouri, right? He's got Mike Pence and he's got those people like McConnell saying, hey, do us a favor, Mr. President, just back this kid. And he, you know, he doesn't know. He doesn't know who's running. And of course, I did try and run in 2016 as a libertarian. So maybe there's a little bit of angst on some people. But, you know, conservatives and libertarians have a lot in common. This is something, you know, I think you want to talk about perhaps the future of the conservative movement, the GOP, where it's at and where it's going. So I would just say that, you know, having a conservative libertarian alliance going forward is a good way to sort of springboard from where we're at. which is just sort of bland populism without principle in some ways. And if we want to go forward with a real intellectual revolution and sort of complete the promise of the Tea Party days, then a conservative libertarian alliance is the way to go. Do you think as a political matter that your affiliation with the libertarian party is going to hurt you with Republicans, or do you think it might actually help you with people who don't necessarily care much for the Republican Party? Well, Missouri actually has a pretty strong liberty Republican base. Ron Paul did pretty well in the caucuses out here. So there's a strong constitutionalist streak and conservatives, they're not like conservatives from Alabama. They're not like, you know, conservatives from Massachusetts, right? Like the Midwest Republican conservatives are really sort of true constitutional conservatives in many ways. So they're very attracted to my candidacy, a lot of them. I'll tell you a brief little anecdote. The other day I was at a meeting, a Republican meeting, this guy came up, he said, are you more libertarian or are you?
Starting point is 00:15:52 you're more Republican. And I go, well, call me a conservatarian, right? You know, I'm the set of pro-life. I'm pro-constitution, right? And he didn't like it. He's like, Ron Paul caused a lot of trouble here in Missouri. And I'm like, well, you know, maybe they deserved it. I wanted to say, but I didn't, I didn't, of course.
Starting point is 00:16:08 I just was diplomatic. But then a guy who was standing right behind him who was leaning in said, conservatarian, he's like, that's what I think. That's what I believe. He's like, I wasn't even going to come here tonight. He's like, you got me and my whole family's votes. We're going to go out and put out signs for you. So there's a lot of.
Starting point is 00:16:22 of people, some people are curmudgeonly, some people don't like freedom too much. It's a scary thing. Freedom is dangerous as hell. Frankly, I prefer it to the alternative, but young people, you know, people who are paying attention, they tend to like the conservatarian approach. It's, it's the hit new thing. It's popular, man. It's cool. We're cool guys. We're just cool guys, you know. We're cool. Us and that 90-year-old woman. Now, I do want to talk about one thing that we have in common, which is totally separate from the monetary policy and the political issues on the ground. I've been in a number of little indie movies that nobody has ever seen and in plays and things like that. The Republican Party has run a lot of actors for office. Arnold Schwarzenegger,
Starting point is 00:17:04 Fred Thompson, Alan Autry, Fred Grandi, George Murphy, Jack Kelly, Clint Eastwood, Sonny Bono, and Ronald Reagan, just to name a few. You graduated from Missouri State with a degree in musical theater. You've appeared in sketches on Late Night with Conan O'Brien. You've executive produced a feature film. Why is there so much overlap between politics and show business? Well, you know, politics is just show business for ugly people. I wasn't going to say it. I wasn't going to say it.
Starting point is 00:17:31 Right, right, right. I couldn't just can hack it as an actor because I didn't have the face for it, right? I've got the face for radio. No, I think that, you know what it is, is that the reason why I was actually, I think, so successful in politics transitioning from a show business career is because most people in Washington, D.C. and in politics have backgrounds. They're all lawyers or they're all poly-side degrees, right? But if you actually have somebody who understands conservative principles and can communicate them and who can produce videos and journalism and who can be, you know, as a television producer for Judge Napolitano at Fox News, right, that actually kind of gives you a little bit of an advantage because most of the people in D.C. are doing something else, right? So there's a little bit of a value ad having a background, a creative background. Plus, people are so sick and tired of these sanctimonious Hollywood actors telling, you know, blowing people up by, you know, blood by the gallon. And then, you know,
Starting point is 00:18:20 telling us we can't have guns while making money on the backs of it, right? So, I mean, there's a lot of people like Chuck Woolery. There's a lot of good Republican actors. Clint Eastwood, you know, pen and teller, right? Some of the biggest libertarian, some of the biggest celebrities in the world, right, both libertarians. So I think it's actually kind of attractive to have somebody who can communicate the message and he's not a filthy, stinking comment. Right, right.
Starting point is 00:18:41 And there's so many, you look at all the lawyers and you think, all right, it was another lawyer running for state assembly or whatever. But I've always also felt, obviously there's a performance. aspect to politics and you've got to look good on camera and you've got to sound good and everything. But there is also fundamentally in the craft of acting and in the craft of statesmanship or politics, it seems to be focused on the human condition, on the eternal questions that people have thought about through all of history. And you also have to like people. You have to enjoy people if you want to create characters and if you want to talk to voters and represent them in Washington.
Starting point is 00:19:16 There seems to me, even beyond all the glib, you know, we have to look good and everything, There seems to me a significant, a profound relation between those two things. But this leads to another question. Oh, I'm sorry, go ahead. Well, can I just, yeah, let me just say one thing on that. I'll let you get your question. Well, just remember, the ancient philosophers and statesmen were also playwrights, right? And even some of the later ones as, you know, 17th or 18th century writer, not Tartouf,
Starting point is 00:19:43 the guy who wrote Tartuff and Candide, right? Voltaire, right? He was a leading political philosopher, but he was also a playwright, and he wrote award-winning plays. So it didn't used to sort of be some sort of church and state sort of separation between entertainment and politics, right? Many of the greatest intellectual thinkers of the time would also delve into playwriting into, you know, propagandizing their ideas, right, once film became a medium.
Starting point is 00:20:06 So it's definitely not so separate as many people would think. That is an excellent point. And it goes all the way back to Sophocles. And I mean, this is a trend throughout time. Why does show business always break left? It seems like some of the most successful show business people to go into politics are conservative, and yet the vast majority of people in show business also going back to just after Sophocles are all left wing. Why is that?
Starting point is 00:20:31 Great question. And I mean, I know why, because I spent so much time in the theater department, right? All my friends from college or from musical theater department now hate me, right? They're all lefties. But I think it's because it's empathy first, right? in order to be like a good actor to a moat, right, you go to a part of your brain that sort of avoids things like rational calculations, right? Rather than using like the kind of cold, hard logic that's necessary in order to make
Starting point is 00:20:55 determinations on like fiscal policy, right, you're going to go towards what feels good. So I think that that's really what it is, is you're leading with your heart. And there's that old Winston Churchill quote, right? If you're young and you're not a socialist or, you know, a liberal, then you've got no heart. If you're old and you're not a conservative, then you have no brain. And I say if you're not a libertarian by the time you're 90, you've got no part and no brain. But that's, but you do a pot.
Starting point is 00:21:16 But that's my right. But there you go. There you go. So I would just say that that's why, right? It's a strong empathy thing. And we stand to, we could learn a lot, right, from the left in that sense. It's many times libertarians and some conservatives, we come off as cold and heartless and calculating when we really do need to empathize.
Starting point is 00:21:33 I believe in the Second Amendment and I totally feel for what happened to those kids down in Florida. But there's no tragedy, no matter how great that justifies taking away rights from innocent people. Right. That's, I think, the best way to package this message. And of course, you could also say mass shootings have declined a lot. School shootings have declined a lot. Gun homicides are way down in this last several decades. And it all seems to bounce right off because you have Hollywood celebrity.
Starting point is 00:21:55 You have Jimmy Kimmel crying on television. And he says, you don't care, you don't care. It's a tough conundrum. And some of the best conservative leaders that we've ever had, like Ronald Reagan, were able to match both of those things together. The reason and the empathy and the communication. Austin. Thank you for being here. can people find you? Yeah, AP for Liberty on Twitter. If you send me a message on Facebook, I won't
Starting point is 00:22:18 get it because I'm banned for 25 more days. But it's AP for Liberty. And of course, if you want to win the gun, you can just go to Austin Peterson.com slash AR15 underscore Raffle. Please register there. I really appreciate the time, guys, and the revolution continues. That is, I've just got to write that down, obviously. I won't find you on Facebook, but I do want the gun. That is one of the best political fundraisers I've ever heard of. Austin, thank you for being here. We've got to on to news. Thanks, Michael. Got it. All right, let's get in some news first. I want to get into a little bit of news, then I'll probably have to sign off in a little bit. But first, before we sign off, I want to talk about steel tariffs, gun confiscation, the world is coming to an end. Donald Trump
Starting point is 00:22:59 is going to take away everything. This is it. This is the pivot to the left. It's all over. This is my working strategy with regard to Donald Trump. Whenever Trump says anything or does anything, I get a thousand text messages from my never Trump conservative friends and from my never Trump conservative friends and from my lefty friends. They say, see, now are you going to disavow him? You have to disav. Come on, do it, do it, do it. My strategy with regard to Donald Trump, keep calm and cofefefe.
Starting point is 00:23:23 Keep calm and cofefefe. That is it. He told us a week or two ago that he was going to confiscate our guns and then we'll have due process later because we don't have time. About 12 hours later, he sent out a tweet and he said,
Starting point is 00:23:37 respect to the Second Amendment. Now we have a gun bill that he's pushing that does not even raise the age to buy these guns. It is simply about arming people who were in schools, allowing people who were in schools to carry guns to present these awful shootings that we've seen. Works for me. If I had freaked out the minute he said he was going to steal all my guns,
Starting point is 00:23:57 if I had started ripping my hair out, if I did that every time he sent out a tweet, I would have a very miserable life. But because I wait a little bit, because I keep calm and co-fefefe, it's very nice. Everything in politics is going just dandy, much more conservative than we've seen in decades.
Starting point is 00:24:12 That is fine. We're seeing this with the tariffs. We were told on these steel and aluminum tariffs that Trump has been threatening for a while and that now it appears that he's instituting that this was going to cause crazy trade wars. The global economy is going to plunge our allies, our trading partners are going to turn on us.
Starting point is 00:24:29 He's already rolling back the tariffs. And good Trump observers knew this from the beginning. They predicted this. They said, yeah, this isn't going to happen the way that we're seeing it happen. So what does it look like? We were told that the U.S. auto industry was going to crash because of these tariffs. Analysts on Wall Street are already predicting. They're already seeing that this won't really hurt the U.S. auto industry. The market's a little bit confused on it still. We're not going to have a market apocalypse because of this.
Starting point is 00:24:57 And Donald Trump is going to exempt Canada and Mexico. Okay, so where else do we get steal from? He's going to exempt our major trading partners, Canada and Mexico. He said that other allies can negotiate for an exemption on the tariffs, and he's really referring to the European Union here. So, let's, from what we know about Trump, from what we know about the art of the deal, as the book is called, what do we think that means? It means you need to start paying up for NATO. It means you need to start changing some of your trade restrictions. That's not like the European Union has totally free trade. They have plenty of trade restrictions as it currently stands. Maybe he's trying to do what he's been saying for a decade, which is he wants to renegotiate trade deals. Seems much more like
Starting point is 00:25:37 a Trumpian threat and Trumpian leverage than something else. But what about that other steel partner, China? This entire move is clearly aimed at China, which illegally subsidizes its steel industry. That is not free trade. The Obama administration actually filed a complaint with the World Trade Organization because China's subsidizing its steel industries,
Starting point is 00:25:58 but nobody cared because Barack Obama was weak and they knew that he wouldn't take any retaliatory action and he had no credible threat of violence or trade violence. This is the same thing that we've been seeing from Trump all along and if these tariffs are only poised to target China, that might not be the worst thing in the world. If they're really just being used as leverage to renegotiate deals with China
Starting point is 00:26:20 and try to get China to stop breaking the law and to stop violating the terms of the World Trade Organization, that's a very good thing. Candidates of both parties have been talking about this for a long time. This is the first one, first president we've seen in a while who's actually doing it. Okay, I've got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube. And I get, you know, it's funny,
Starting point is 00:26:37 because I keep getting killed on YouTube, from the YouTube side of it, but the numbers keep going up. So whatever you're doing, keep slipping through. I don't know if you're paying off people at the YouTube headquarters or something, but we appreciate it. Our next episode of The Conversation is coming up on Tuesday, March 13th, at 5.30 p.m. Eastern, 2.30 Pacific, featuring the one and only, the big boss himself, Ben Shapiro.
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Starting point is 00:27:45 5.30 p.m. Eastern, 2.30 Pacific, and join the conversation. All right, but forget about all that stuff. What you really need, look, you subscribe to the Daily Wire. You get me, you get the Ben Shapiro show, you get the Andrew Plavent show, you get, you know, take the conversation, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You get the leftist to yours Tumbler. And let me tell you, if Austin Peterson sends you an AR-15 from this, Facebook raffle, you are going to need this because all those tears are going to be pouring out
Starting point is 00:28:11 of Menlo Park, Cheryl, whatever her name is, at Cheryl Sandberg at Facebook is going to be weeping lefty tears and you're going to want to collect them. This is the only FDA approved vessel for leftist tears. Go to Dailywire.com. We'll be right back. Let's try to get to some other news before we have to go here. This is a particularly good one. Lauren Southern. Do you remember Lauren Southern? She's that hot dude we had on the show. You know, that YouTube star who's making a movie about farmlands in South Africa. Well, Lauren was banned from the United Kingdom for suspicion of terrorism,
Starting point is 00:28:55 which I actually think for the UK's part is evidence of transphobia. I think that's a clear. No one's talking about that, but UK has become very transphobic in recent days. Let's do a little recap. Lauren Southern, YouTube star, just talks about how feminists are kind of crazy.
Starting point is 00:29:10 She is banned. She is detained and banned from the UK. Who has the UK allowed into their kingdom in recent years? Let's go back a few decades. The six Iranian Arab gunmen who seized the Iranian embassy in London in 1980 took six hostages and murdered two of them. They were allowed in.
Starting point is 00:29:27 Abu Nidal, who killed the Israeli ambassador in London in 1982. He was allowed him. Mustafa Mahmoud Mazé, who blew himself up with two floors of a London hotel while trying to murder British author and former Muslim Salman Rushdie for insulting Islam. Four Muslim terrorists who murdered 52 people and injured 700 by targeting public transit during rush hour in 2005. Those guys got in. Bilal Abdullah and Kaffil Ahmed, who rammed a jeep filled with gas canisters through the Glasgow airport doors in 2007. They also were allowed in, also to the airport, I guess, because they ram their way in. Two Muslim extremists who murdered and decapitated the British
Starting point is 00:30:05 soldier Lee Rigby in 2013, Mu Haidine Meyer, who attacked three tube travelers with a knife while shouting, this is for Syria in 2015. Salman Abadi, who was radicalized in Syria. before returning to the UK and murdering 22 people and injuring 250 at an Arianna Grande concert in Manchester last year. The three Muslim terrorists who rammed 48 people in a white van across London Bridge, after which they leapt out and started stabbing people.
Starting point is 00:30:32 Also last year, they were allowed in. And Ahmed Hassan, an 18-year-old Iraqi, who blew up the tube stop at Parsons Green, injuring 30 people. Also last year. They were all allowed into the country, and Lauren Southern was not. Also allowed into the country for decades.
Starting point is 00:30:48 are those Middle Eastern immigrants who groomed upwards of 1,000 children in Britain's worst-ever sex abuse scandal, which was just being reported on today, where sex gangs targeted girls as young as 11. What the British do here is they call them Asian men, but they're not, what that means is Middle Eastern men, Muslim immigrants into the United Kingdom, but they call them Asian for fear of racism. The British authorities reportedly and intentionally failed to record details of the Middle Eastern abusers of these many, many very young girls for fear of racism. And it cuts both ways. It's, I think, on the authorities part, fear of being called a racist and losing your job
Starting point is 00:31:26 and your status and being probably deported at this point in the UK. But also it's the fear that if they say the identity of these people, if they talk about the identity of these abusers, then other Muslim people will be unfairly targeted. Mind you, this does not happen in large scales ever after any of these attacks. The number of attacks that happened in the United States on Muslims after September 11th is not shocking for how many there were. There were some. It's shocking for a few there were. There were so few you would expect a big backlash.
Starting point is 00:31:55 The big backlash has never come. The left always warns us of this awful Islamophobic is the term they use backlash. It has never happened in the West. This is similar to German girls who were raped by Muslim immigrants and refugees in Germany. And they lied to the police and they said they were raped by German men because they didn't want to see. seem racist. They didn't want to give away the identity of the people who had committed crimes even against them. The UK authorities were so scared on this point of being called racist and of a seeming racist. They failed to investigate one case here, five separate times until a member
Starting point is 00:32:30 of parliament intervened. This has been going on since the 1980s. One 18-year-old Middle Eastern immigrant at that time in 1985, I think, abducted a 14-year-old forced her to have sex with hundreds of men threatened to abduct her sisters and kill her parents if she ever spoke up. This is not an isolated case, but it's been going on for a long time. Girls were forced to take the abortion pill multiple times per week. Multiple forced abortions on all of these girls. And those rings were covered up for 40 years. They're just coming to light now.
Starting point is 00:33:01 But Lauren Southern. But Lauren Southern. Cute little 20-something who makes YouTube videos about how crazy feminists are, she cannot be allowed into the country. gang rapists and terrorists, they can probably make it in. Little YouTube star, criminals, criminals, criminals for 40 years. Lauren was detained in the French port town of Calais Sunday night by UK authorities under the Schedule 7 Anti-Terrorism Act for reasonable suspicion of terrorism. And I knew it. The minute I looked at that girl, I knew, you look like a terrorist, Lauren.
Starting point is 00:33:37 You look, you look, you don't look like a dude, but you look like a terrorist. They took away her cell phone. They accused her of distribution of racist material. British immigration authorities banned her from entering the country. I wonder if that's because she's making a movie about South Africa. She's made this movie talk to her last week. She's making this movie about some of the farm murders in South Africa. The South African Parliament voted to take away the land from white people and redistribute it to black people in the country.
Starting point is 00:34:05 And she's made a movie about some of the murders that have been going on over the past few years. I wonder if that had anything to do with it. because I can't point to episodes of Lauren Southern ramming cars into people or calling for the death of novelists like Salman Rushdie or calling for the death of entire countries and peoples. I don't hear any of that. I just see her making a movie about what's happening in South Africa. Maybe the UK should get its priorities in order.
Starting point is 00:34:32 This brings us all the way full circle to this day in history. On this day in history, this is all the way back from the beginning of the media trying to shut down different voices and what's appropriate for the president, what's not appropriate for the president. On this day in history in 1933, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave his first fireside chat broadcast directly from the White House. Here's a clip. Ladies and gentlemen, the president of the United States. My friends, I want to talk for a few minutes with the people of the United States about banking. to talk with the comparatively few who understand the mechanics of banking,
Starting point is 00:35:20 but more particularly with the overwhelming majority of you who use banks for the making of deposits and the drawing of checks. I want to tell you what has been done in the last few days and why it was done and what the next steps are going to be. I recognize that the many proclamations from state capitals and from Washington, the legislation, the Treasury Regulations, and so forth, couched for the most part in banking and legal terms, ought to be explained for the benefit of the average citizen. I owe this in particular because of the fortitude and the
Starting point is 00:35:58 good temper, with which everybody has accepted the inconvenience and the hardships of the banking holiday. That's a little dry. It's a little, I could use a couple sad exclamation points or something like that. The 1930s were a little more stayed time. At that time, though, well, when FDR started giving these addresses. 25 to 33% of the U.S. workforce was unemployed. FDR gave many, many, dozens more broadcasts throughout his presidency. He reached upwards of 90% of American households. He used these chats to push his New Deal policies,
Starting point is 00:36:32 to push it past the media, which generally liked him, but to even go straight to the American people. He tried to push vast government expansion, court packing, adding his own judges to the courts so that they would stop striking down his anti-constitutional laws, pushing his own candidates in primaries. All the while, he did say, he said, I'm not asking the voters to vote for Democrats,
Starting point is 00:36:56 but it'd be cool if you did. But, you know, like he doesn't, I mean, it's so transparent what he's doing. And he's pushing that during the party primaries. Radio was the Twitter of the 1930s and the 1940s, and FDR used it. Was it below the stature of the president to go on radio? Maybe. I don't know. Maybe it was. Maybe it wasn't. I'm sure people said that at the time. Was it a threat to a free press to have this propaganda coming straight out of the White House? I don't know. The press was flacking for him anyway. The most important question is, was it effective? Well, FDR did serve four terms. He served until his death. Probably could have served four more terms if he hadn't died in office. He probably would have stayed and been the American king that he envisioned himself to be. Democrats always used new technologies and then they tell us not to do it. So in 2008, Barack Obama was the digital candidate.
Starting point is 00:37:46 You remember, he's running the digital campaign. Now we're being told, after Donald Trump took that away from Democrats, that Trump manipulated social media to win. Obama's the digital candidate. Trump manipulated social media. Barack Obama and FDR both use the bully pulpit to comment on cultural issues and to push the culture in America to the left. But then we're told that Republican presidents should never comment on cultural issues, like, say, the NFL players disrespecting their own flag. That, oh, that you can't do.
Starting point is 00:38:14 The only Democrats get to comment on the culture. The left constantly tells us to unilaterally disarm. And some people on the right take the bait unbelievably. They say, oh, yeah, no, you're right. We shouldn't. No, that's a good idea. Absolutely not. Absolutely not.
Starting point is 00:38:27 We should use the same tools, the same technological and the same cultural tools that these guys use. We should use those tools to push our values, to push our vision of the world, to push the moral framework that informs the world that we live in. But we should use the same tools. we shouldn't unilaterally disarm. That would be crazy to do. There's plenty of precedent for this. And by the way, some of the propaganda
Starting point is 00:38:49 that came out of FDR's fireside chats, some of the anti-constitutional propaganda that came out of those chats, makes Donald Trump look like a schoolboy. It makes those tweets look tame. So, as was the case when we're talking about the tariffs and the gun confiscation, this and that and this and that, maybe let's keep calm and cofefe and keep an eye
Starting point is 00:39:07 on these social media platforms where they created the new media and then the new media went right wing and now they're trying to kill the new media. Don't let them do it. Keep sneaking out. Keep getting those words out. Keep applying pressure.
Starting point is 00:39:18 And I'll have to disagree with my guest on the show today. I think we should regulate these guys like publishers. They're the biggest publishers in the history of the world. We should regulate them like that and hold their feet to the fire. We should not allow this opportunity to get away from us. Okay, that's our show. We'll be back tomorrow. We've got some excellent topics and guests this week.
Starting point is 00:39:38 So tune in. I won't spoil the surprise. I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Nulls Show. I'll see you then. The Michael Noles Show is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production. Executive producer Jeremy Boring. Senior producer Jonathan Hay. Supervising producer, Mathis Glover. Our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
Starting point is 00:40:00 Edited by Alex Zingaro. Audio is mixed by Mike Coramina. Hair and makeup is by Jesua Olvera. Copyright Forward Publishing 2018.

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