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

Episode Date: April 10, 2018

Mark Zuckerberg will spend two days on Capitol Hill getting grilled over why he had the audacity not to rig social media against conservatives. We’ll analyze why conservatives are so much better at the Internet. Then, Dan DiSalvo joins to talk about the upcoming Supreme Court threat to government unions. Hooray! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Mark Zuckerberg will spend two days on Capitol Hill getting grilled over why he had the audacity not to rig social media against conservatives. I will do the impossible, a thing that kills me to do, I will defend Mark Zuckerberg. Then we will analyze why conservatives are so much better at the internet than lefties. Then Dan DeSalvo joins to talk about the upcoming Supreme Court threat to government unions. Hooray, I'm Michael Knowles and this is the Michael Knowles Show. A lot to talk about today. I can't believe I have to do. defend Zuckerberg that is going to absolutely kill me. That's why we're going to stack it

and talk about how awful public sector unions are at the end of the show and how great this upcoming Supreme Court case hopefully will turn out to be. Before we do any of that, we've got to keep the lights on here. I want to thank everybody for using our sponsors. We have great sponsors on this show and they help keep us in a studio. But much more importantly, this particular sponsor, Blue Apron, keeps me fed because obviously Ben hasn't paid me in, God knows how long. And so at least I get the scraps, you know, that come in. And these are much more than scraps.

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All right, I have to defend Mark Zuckerberg. This is really upsetting. It's happening now. The Zuckerberg hearings are going on right now. He's being dragged before Congress today. Let's just cut live to Mark Zuckerberg's testimony. All right, just stay calm, Frankie. These babies will be in the stores while he's still grappling with the Pickle Matrix. Gavin, glavin. Interesting. Interesting. That's not, yeah, not exactly what I expected from the testimony, but we'll hear a lot more. This is going to be going on for a while. Zuck's testimony began at 2.15 p.m. Eastern Time. The subject is how Facebook protects user data in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The Cambridge Analytica scandal. Oh my God.

No one really knows a lot about this thing. Let me fill you in. In 2014, 2015, 27,000 Facebook users agreed to give an app some of their information on Facebook as well as data from people on their friends list. About 270,000 people. So what they're saying is that this testimony is about that, this awful data breach of 270,000 people, many of whom agreed to give the data anyway. And if you're on Facebook, you're already agreeing to give your data over and give me a break. You shouldn't put anything on the internet that you wouldn't want to read on the New York Times. So that's what they say it's about. It's really just about how awful it was that Facebook let Republicans win an election.

That's all this is. He's being dragged in front of Congress, and it's all about a mea culpa. Get the cat of nine tails and flagellate himself, miserere me, mea, mea calpa, mea maxima culpa. He said in his prepared testimony, we didn't take a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that was a big mistake. It was my mistake. And I'm sorry. I started Facebook.

I run it. I'm responsible for what happens here. the responsibility that he has, the responsibility that Congress expects him to have, is to help elect Democrats. That's his responsibility. And he apparently failed in that responsibility. And they're very upset. If Cambridge Analytica, this awful, terrible, awful group and scandal, if this were associated with George Soros instead of Robert Mercer, you would never hear about this. If this were associated with a left-wing donor and financier, you would never hear about this. By the way, here's my proof of that. Barack Obama did the exact same thing.

He did the exact same thing that Republicans are accused of doing here, except way, way worse and on a much larger scale. And guess what? When that happened, nobody reported on this. That happened in 2012. The Obama campaign encouraged supporters to download the Obama 2012 Facebook app that let the campaign then collect Facebook data

both from the users of the app and from their friends. Friends maybe who weren't on the app. Friends, maybe it didn't support Barack Obama. It let them do that. The MIT Technology Review wrote about this in 2012. That's six years ago. The average friend list size at that time was about 190. One million people downloaded the Obama app.

So that means that upwards of 190 million people had some of their Facebook data scooped up by the Obama campaign without their consent. It was just scooped up in this awful way. We're talking about 270,000 people with Cambridge Analytica. we're talking about upwards of 190 million people with regard to the Obama campaign. Where was the congressional testimony in 2012? Where was the whaling and the gnashing of teeth in 2013? In 2014, oh, that didn't happen because it was Obama. But maybe they didn't know, right?

Maybe people didn't know. Oh, no, they did know because the Obama campaign admitted to it. Teddy Goff, the Obama campaign digital director, said, quote, people don't trust campaigns. They don't even trust media organizations. Who do they trust? Their friends. Their friends.

That's why they had to go for their friends. Time magazine credited this strategy with helping Barack Obama win that election. The Obama campaign called it a game changer and, quote, the most groundbreaking piece of technology developed for the campaign. By the way, just to make this relationship even starker, the Trump campaign didn't solicit the data themselves. The Trump campaign used the, you know, the various quizzes and things like that. Obama literally solicited this data.

He had his fingerprints far more on this than the Trump campaign ever did. Also, Trump's campaign didn't use the data in the general election campaign. Barack Obama did. Used live data. Used it right up until election day. There are two main differences between how Democrats used Facebook data and how Republicans used Facebook data. What the Democrats did was much, much more egregious. When the Democrats did it, do you remember, they were hailed for winning the race for voter data.

And they connected with young voters. It was the digital campaign. He's the digital candidate. Hooray, hooray, hooray. But not when Republicans do it. Now, when Republicans do it, the other accusation, that's the Cambridge Analytica thing. The other accusation that Facebook has to fend off, and Zuckerberg has to fend off in this testimony, is that Russia used Facebook to hack the election or to rig the election or resist, you know, resist.

And this is not a legitimate president. And he stole the election and Vladimir Putin, blah, blah, blah. So just to jog your memory, I know people have short, short memories these days. Here is what Democrats thought about hacking and rigging before the election. There is no serious person out there who would suggest somehow that you could even, you could even rig America's elections, in part because they're so decentralized and the numbers of votes involved. There's no evidence that that has happened in the past or that there are instances in which that will happen this time. And so I'd invite Mr. Trump to stop whining and go try to make his case to get votes. And if he got the most votes, then it would be my expectation of Hillary Clinton to offer a gracious concession speech and pledge to work with him in order to make sure that the American people benefit from an effective government.

Okay, you saw that. This is Democrats after President Trump got elected. See if you can spot the difference. Donald J. Trump is now president of the United States. 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. That is a subtle difference.

So I don't know if you could tell before no serious person would ever come on stop one. And then. No, that's the difference that happened. I have to agree with Obama. I have to defend Mark Zuckerberg and agree with Barack Obama. No serious person would ever suggest that this election had been rigged or hacked by the Russians or whomever else. It just didn't happen. There's no evidence that it happened.

Now, this brings us to Russia. Russian agents did interfere. They did participate in the election. They've been doing this for 100 years. They bought some advertising to stir up traffic. in the American elections. The way people hear that from the mainstream media is that they poured money

into Facebook just to help Donald Trump and it was all in the Trump campaign and it's this massive amount of money and it swung the election. But that didn't happen. The internet research agency was a little Russian shop that wanted to cause some trouble in American

politics so they bought some ads on Facebook. By the way, these were not ads for Donald Trump. They bought issue ads. They bought issue ads that were specifically on divisive issues. So race or gay rights or gun control, things that Americans are really divided on. That's what they bought ads for. There wasn't actually a lot of interference compared to the usual propaganda. To put this into perspective, Trump and Clinton spent a combined $81 million on Facebook ads during the election. $81 million. The Internet Research

Agency spent $100,000. That is 0.05% of the amount of money spent on just Facebook ads by the candidates during the election. Negligible, nothing. Nobody suggests it had any effect at all, especially because they weren't even ads for Donald Trump. They were just issue ads to divide Americans because that's actually what our geopolitical adversaries want to do. They just want to divide Americans and cause some trouble. I don't think they particularly like Donald Trump, who's expelling their diplomats, slapping them with sanctions, countering them in Syria. I don't think they really like that guy that much. I don't think they really hope that that guy remains president.

They just want to cause trouble with their geopolitical adversaries. They've been doing this for a long time. Russians are trolls. You know what I mean? They are like a land of trolls. So the Facebook data strategy has been around for a lot of years. You know, grabbing data from people. Barack Obama mastered it basically in 2012.

The Russia issue has been around since, oh, I don't know, 1917. They've been messing with us for a very long time. But this time, this is what's different. this time a Republican won. So Democrats have to turn on their own. And he is one of their own. Mark Zuckerberg is one of their own. He is a lefty. Make no mistake about this. If you ever go into the Facebook offices, it is like left-wing candy land 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. Mark Zuckerberg says he's neither Democrat nor Republican. His ideological views are very clear.

I should preface this. the Facebook PAC, the political action committee, actually donated a little bit more to Republicans than to Democrats in 2012. Mark Zuckerberg donates to both parties because he's a businessman. 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, Corey Booker, you know, both sides of the aisle, although a particular type of Republican, certainly not a hardline conservative Republican. And he has to do that. That's just what businessmen do. Mark Zuckerberg also runs Forward.us, a 501c4, that lobbies for amnesty for 11 million illegal aliens. And Zuckerberg is trying to push blame on this whole thing.

He's trying to blame Alexander Kogan, who is the Cambridge researcher that created the personality app that scooped up users' information. So the way this worked, I think people still don't understand. This awful nefarious plot of Cambridge Analytica to grab all of the user's information involves some stupid little Facebook quiz. you've seen them all the time, and then you click it and it says, you know, do you drink three cups of coffee or four? And you click that and it's like, you're a EP7J and you're whatever, you know. It's just like those little things. But when you click to that, you've consented to give all of your information away.

So this isn't exactly a nefarious thing. It's just some stupid little Facebook poll. Republicans have always been better at the Internet. That's, I think, what's underlying all of this. This is the first time that we've won the presidency since social media has been around, so it's getting a lot of play. Republicans have always, always been better at the internet. A little exception, Obama was better at collecting Facebook data in 2012.

We didn't get around to doing that until this cycle. But we have always been better at the internet. I'll give you an example from my own life. I may have alluded to this a few times. In 2010, I was an intern on a congressional campaign in New York with my very good friend Nan Hayworth, who was a challenger candidate. She was running against John Hall, who was the incumbent, and he was a member of this rock band in the 70s called Orleans.

They're the guys who did like, Still the one that do do do, do, you know, and they did dance with me. I want to be your partner. You know, there's some 70s rock band. So anyway, I decided to just be a troll when I was 18 and start the young voters for an Orleans reunion tour. And so, you know, I kind of ripped off his song a little bit

or rewrote it and all the lyrics were about getting John Hull to get fired from Congress because he was a terrible congressman. Just this little thing costs very little to produce. had a viral impact on the internet because it provoked the Democrats, they reacted poorly to it, and it got us a lot of free publicity. We ended up winning that race, but it got us a lot of free press. In 2012, I again did a commercial with The Rent is Too Damn High guy. It was called The Debt is Too Damn High. It's probably on YouTube somewhere. And same thing. It costs barely anything to produce, very low bar to enter. You put it on the internet, you air it on TV in the middle of nowhere, and it gets this huge viral push.

those are just examples from my own life. Other Republicans have done way more than my modest efforts. The reason that Republicans are so good at the Internet is because we could never get a fair shake in the mainstream media. We could never get a fair shake in the mainstream press. Both the producers and the consumers, the political operatives and the cultural operatives, could never get a fair shake,

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, you know. We can't, even consumers can't get that. So there was a lot of talent out there, but there were no outlets. 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. I think an analogy of this is sort of like black actors in Hollywood.

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. This is just a numbers game. This is because there are a lot of good black actors, but there are very few black roles. So when the black roll comes around, you've got these incredible performers who can take it, whereas there are a gazillion white roles, and so just the average talent is going to be lower. That's just numbers. It's the same thing with conservatives on the internet. Very few outlets for conservatives before the internet, and especially before social media, Now we have a chance, so conservatives absolutely killed it. There are social scientific data that back up my anecdotes and my own experiences in this field. In 2010, Fast Company, this is eight years ago, ran a big headline, Republicans dominate Democrats in social media. This is in the age of Obama. This is when Republican candidates for the Senate had over four times as many fans on Facebook, they had over six times as many followers on Facebook. You'll recall we killed it in that election. That was a, that was a, that was a, that was a,

a big year. That was the same year I was doing the congressional race. According to an Axiost study done by NewsWIP, which measures social media engagement, it is conservatives, not lefties, who even now continue to see huge growth of new high traffic websites and webpages. Even now, even as Facebook is trying to kill us, we're seeing huge growth in these websites. Why is that? Because there's a hunger for that information and it's not being supplied by the mainstream media. The Drudge Report. Drudge is basically as old as the internet itself, and it has never changed. It's that same white page with the hyperlinks. Drudge drives more traffic to news sites than all but five companies in the entire world. Drudge drives more traffic to news sites than Google News. That's a drudge report.

That is explicitly a right-wing news outlet and news aggregator. The left cannot keep up. They can't keep up on this. This is why, by the way, the left is much more likely to block and unfriend conservatives on social media. Much more unlikely. 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. Why is that? 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. I can deal with it. I think, okay, that's not true. That isn't true. Here's why that's not true. Oh, that gave me something to think about. Okay, that made me think that my view is even more right than I thought it was. Okay. Do to do to do. Right. But the lefties just, aren't that strong. They're not like, I don't mean that only to be insulting. I mean,

they haven't been training. They haven't been working those muscles. They haven't had to defend themselves. And so they're just kind of weak. They're intellectually weak and they're emotionally weak. The culture has made them weak. 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. So they just unfriend, unfriend, can't take it. Don't want to hear it. Boop, boop, boop. This is also why lefties at tech companies are now trying to change. cheat and censor conservatives and kick them off. We know from James O'Keefe that Twitter is shadow banning conservatives. Looks like they might have shadow banned Ted Cruz. We know that Facebook is censoring

conservatives like what are their names? Those two excellent Trump supporters, those women, I forget. What are their names? Diamond and Silk. Yeah, they're so good. Really. Yeah, they're censoring them. They're censoring all of these people. They're trying to kick them off. YouTube is censoring all of my videos practically. Everything that comes out of the daily wire, we could, give a dissertation on, I don't know, the history of, you know, Francis Bacon or something and France is bacon, the country's bacon. No, you know, you could give a history on basically the most boring subject in the world and they would still censor it. And it's because they don't like us. They don't want us to get our views out there. And this brings us to fake news. We have time to

cover it. Yeah, we'll cover this right at the end and we'll cut to our interview with Dan. This brings us to fake news because that's kind of underlying all of this. The fake news. Facebook's helping the fake news. and the conservatives, and Trump was fake news, and he uses the term, blah, blah, blah. There are two kinds of fake news. There's traditional fake news, and there's new fake news. There's the traditional media, and there's the new media. There's the old media.

There's the social media. The traditional fake news has been around a long time. Fake news is not a new phenomenon. There's nothing new. Now, I will tell you a lot of what you see in mainstream news reporting and on the internet is fake. It's not maybe the stories aren't fake. maybe the sentiment isn't fake, but it's really hyped up. It's astroturf. Term astro-turf is the opposite of grassroots. A grassroots campaign is when people just kind of of their own accord decide to bubble up

and rise up and create a movement. That's like the Tea Party, for instance. The Tea Party was a real grassroots movement. AstroTurf is when operatives go in and they try to make it look like that. Try to create the appearance of a grassroots movement, even though it's really just three guys behind computers creating fake accounts and liking and whatever doing all of that. The largest, this is a news story that just came out today, I think. The largest Black Lives Matter page on Facebook, 700,000 Facebook fans is fake. That's not a Black Lives Matter page. Just totally fake. There's 700,000 Facebook fans. It's a scam tied to a middle-aged white guy in Australia. Middle-aged white Australian Lives Matter. It's a middle-aged white Australian guy who,

appears to have pilfered $100,000 from fundraisers on the Black Lives Matter page. The hub of Black Lives Matter on Facebook just isn't real. It's just a fake thing. Some guy saw that he could make some money. Every single political campaign in America does this sort of thing. I promise you that. So many of the groups and the pages on Facebook are created by political operatives who want to be able to wrangle people, marshal public opinion, get clicks to different websites, raise some money, fake accounts, fake likes, astro-turfed campaigns. There are whole agencies that do this. I've been on a lot of campaigns. I've dealt with a lot of these guys. I've seen it happen. It goes, it happens all the time. This is not really anything new. It's new to happen on Facebook. In the old days, it was just the

mainstream media who would do this. The mainstream media would do this exact same thing, except far worse, because it would be beamed into everybody's living room and they would see all of these every night. One way they do it is ridiculous polls. So they, you know, these so-called expert polls. The mainstream media, I think it was two nights before the election in 2016, ran a Princeton analysis that showed a 99% likelihood of Hillary Clinton winning in 2016. They analyzed all the polls, all of the experts from Princeton, no less, an Ivy League University. They found that there was a 99% chance that Hillary would win. And what that really means is, don't go to the polls republic. It's over. Don't go. Who cares? It's not going to matter.

Stay home. Stay home. Public opinion polls. are public opinion polls that are meant to shape public opinion. They're not polls of public opinion. They're polls to create public opinion. And there's a demoralize Republicans. This isn't to say the polls are always wrong. Sometimes they're right. In 2012, the polls were basically right. But very frequently, they're used in races around the country to push public opinion. This is why, by the way, political campaigns commission polls. Polls are very expensive to undertake. And campaigns do it so that they can push public opinion. They can change the wording of questions. in such a way that you get a number, then you report the number. And if you're a Democrat,

the mainstream media tout the number and they try to convince Republicans to stay home because it's a lost cause. The other way that the mainstream media do this is the wonderful phrase, critics say, that's what they do. They say, you know, Donald Trump's economy is doing great and he's handling North Korea wonderfully. And it appears that that trade war with China that we were saying was going to destroy the global economy actually has forced China to make concessions, even though we didn't think that that would happen. And everybody thinks he's doing a great job. But critics say he's still a jerk and we hate him. The critics say is mainstream media jargon for we. It just means we. There's no, they don't name the critics. It's just we. Now, because of the internet, because of

social media, this is much, much less one-sided. There's still fake news. There's still going to be a little Russian person trying to sow division. There's still going to be Democrats freaking out. There's still all of these things. But this Mark Zuckerberg trial is a show trial. This testimony is a show trial, it's meant for him to say, I'm sorry, I'm sorry that Republicans finally won. I know that we don't like Mark Zuckerberg on the right because he's a huge jerk to us and he's a big lefty. We have to defend him on this. This is just absolutely outrageous because this entire episode is about punishing Facebook for not punishing conservatives. That's all this is about. Okay, we have got to talk about what we can only hope is the imminent demise of public sector

unions in the United States. We're going to do that with Dan DeSalvo, fellow at the Manhattan Institute. But first, I got to say goodbye, don't I? We've got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube. It's that time, folks. Sorry, if you are on Facebook or YouTube, it's probably all shut off now. The Democrats have finally said, you know, we've had enough, Mark. We've had enough until you start electing more Democrats. It's all over. So it's too bad, but I guess I'm just talking to the wall right now. Please go to Dailywire.com. If you're at Dailywire.com, thank you very much. you help us keep the lights on here. It's a very, very kind of you. You keep Coffefe in my cup. If you're not, you can join it's $10 a month, $100 for an annual membership. You get me.

You get the Andrew Claven show. You get the Ben Shapiro show. You get the conversation, which is coming up. The conversations today, isn't it? Conversations at 530 today, 2.30 Eastern Time with the one and only, the inimitable Andrew Claven, the supreme Lord of the multiverse. There is still time. It's not too late for you. You can log in, subscribe to the DailyWire, log in right now, go to the mailbag page, and you will be able to get the monthly Q&A and ask questions hosted by Alicia Krause. We will answer any at all questions from politics to the personal. Andrew Claven will tell you how to run your life, and then you can take the opposite advice, and then you'll be all right. Only subscribers get to ask the questions. It's free

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really good at the internet and the internet is the future. Make sure you get this or you will drown and everybody will be very, very sad. Go to dailywire.com. We'll be right back. Okay, we've got to get to Dan DeSalvo, who is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and Associate Professor of Political Science in the Kolan Powell School at the City College of New York. 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, which could seriously, finally, hopefully weaken government unions in the United States. Here is our conversation. An Illinois state child care specialist is decided that he does not want to pay his $45 per month

fee to his union bosses. He never had a choice in the matter. They just started taking it out. And a lot of times with Supreme Court decisions, this has gone all the way up to the Supreme Court, a lot of times they have a little something to do. There's like a nice providential twist on the name. So, you know, the case of loving versus Virginia is a case about who you can marry. And, you know, you have Barack Obama trying to, the little sisters of the poor suing the Obama administration. You couldn't make a better name than that, little sisters of the poor. 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. The Supreme Court will soon decide Janice, the American

Federation of State County. and municipal employees, Council 31. This is being billed as the most important labor decision in decades. We are joined by Dan DeSalvo. Dan, what are the stakes here? Well, the stakes are very high. This case portends to have the biggest impact on public sector labor relations in probably two generations.

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. but it will have a big impact on state and local government employment. You know, no less a labor advocate than Franklin Delano Roosevelt opposed public sector unions or government unions. 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. How did we even get public sector unions in the first place?

Well, they took a long time and their trajectory has been totally different than private sector unions. Private sector unions were around since the late 19th century and really took off in the 30s under FDR, 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. So the legal regime is different, and their historical trajectory is completely different. 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. Then six years later, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker tried to do it and he ended up getting recalled because of it.

He ultimately won that recall election, but he was protested. There were crazy demonstrations all over Wisconsin. How has public opinion changed over time on this issue and maybe more importantly, how has the legal, opinion changed over time? That's a great question. What's changed is the public's become aware of this arrangement, which is collective bargaining in the public sector. You could say that from their creation in the 60s and 70s, public employee unions were really operating sub-Rosa.

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. 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. 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. So I think the public is now much better informed than they were 10 years and certainly 20 years

ago about where public sector unions, what public sector unions are and how they operate. That is certainly true. And even talking to people in politics, they don't always understand the distinction. 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. 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. How's that? Well, it's bad for some workers like Mr. Janus, that is, States like New York and elsewhere, people don't want to be a member of the union. Well, they can't be forced to be a member, but they can be forced to pay the union as a condition of employment.

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. So that's one thing that's really unique about it. And I think that's why for some workers, it's not a great deal. 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. That's right. The union strategy of basically putting a ceiling on what they could perhaps

get otherwise. And this is maybe why you see a discrepancy in some numbers. There are almost 15 million union members in the United States, 14.8. And there's a huge difference between the number of private sector and government worker union membership. So 6.5% of private sector workers belong to a union. over 30% of government workers belong to a union. Now, is this because union busters in the private sector are preventing the workers of the world from uniting? Or is this because workers don't want to shell out their hard-earned money for the political activities of their union bosses?

Well, the private sector story is, again, really different. I think one of the points that needs to be stressed is just how we're talking about really two different worlds here. And for years, people saw public and private sector unions is the same thing. That was one of the justifications for importing the private sector model into the public sector. The reality is the private sector, the economy has changed dramatically from the 50s when private sector unions were at their pinnacle.

And the economy's changed. Industries, businesses come into business. They go out of business. They're facing international competition. The service sector economy has been notoriously hard to organize. So private sector unionism has suffered. multiple and different challenges over the last 30 years. The public sector in comparison is an island of stability. That is because government doesn't go out of business. It's largely a monopoly

provider of many services. So it's not facing any competition from employers abroad or other business firms. So it's really a different reality in the public and private sectors. My final question is basically a political question, though I suppose it's a legal question too. Justice Gorsuch during your oral arguments has been quiet. And that could be a good thing. That could probably just be a good thing. Are we going to see another 5-4 decision here? And if so, should conservatives throw a tick or tape parade for Donald Trump?

Well, I think we're probably very likely to see a 5-4 decision in this case, in part because the case was in some sense already heard two years ago in a prior case called Friedrichs versus California Teachers Association, which was in many respects identical. And due to Justice Scalia's untimely death, the court deadlocked four to four. Now, we don't know how which justices constituted the four opposed and the four against on the decision. I wonder. I had a crystal ball.

I think we have a good supposition that it was lining the four conservative justices against the four liberals. So really, in this case, Justice Gorsuch is the only, let's say, swing. vote. But I think people that follow the court closely see him as probably pretty solid on this and his not asking any questions in this case isn't really telling either way. And we're likely to see a 5-4 decision running against the unions. Is there any better news to leave on? That is a really wonderful, a wonderful bit of news. Dan, thank you so much for being here. We really appreciate the analysis because, you know, when you look at these issues, for so many decades, people couldn't

really tell, what is this union? How is this different? What is that, you know, people only want to look at the really saucy Supreme Court decisions, but issues like this, collective bargaining for government union workers or government workers, they can have huge, huge effects on federal budgets and on how our government works and our relationship to the government. So it's good that we have probable good news coming out. Thanks for being here. My pleasure. That's some good news to end on. That is some really good news to end on. Before I go, I would be really remiss if I didn't send out a special message.

It's a special day. If you've been on Twitter, you've seen it's National Siblings Day. So I'd just like to wish a happy National Siblings Day to my twin Rachel Maddow. It's been really nice having you around all these years. And so happy National Siblings Day to you, sis. That's our show. I'm Michael Knowles. This is the Michael Knowles show.

I will see you tomorrow and we'll do it all again. 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. Edited by Alex Zingaro. Audio is mixed by Mike Coramina.

Hair and makeup is by Jesua O'Vera. Copyright Forward Publishing 2018.