A Conversation with Matt Schlapp and Mark Meadows

Welcome, everybody, to a very special episode of CPAC Live. We're here in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, named after a really great Kansan, by the way, General Eisenhower, and it's our pleasure to be sitting here with the Chief of Staff to the President of the United States, former Congressman Mark Meadows. Thank you for being with us. Thank you. And great to be with all those that are tuning in, and, you know, obviously, it's always a great day to be a conservative. These are your people. Oh, these are. I mean, I feel at home. You know, I just wish I was there to hug on you personally. It'll happen in the future. Yeah, I'm sure it will. So what we did, just for your information, is because we've all had to deal with the outbreak of Chinese Corona, we've all had to change some of our daily practices, and so we've had less interactions with people. But we kept hearing from people who said, I can barely stand to watch the television because I'm mad about all the coverage and everything, so why don't we just all start talking to each other? So that's how this was born, and the audience has really taken off, and it's kind of one of the innovations. It's what a tragedy with the virus, but some of the innovations that are happening with healthcare, delivery, and the way people are communicating, there will be some small silver linings out of all this. Well, I think there will. I mean, it's a difficult time, and you talked about it being the China virus. If the Chinese government had been more transparent, we wouldn't have had to worry about many of the things that we're having to address today. But more importantly than that, if we look at the opportunities we have to connect with people back home in maybe a different way, I know that I wouldn't normally be doing this. We might be out on a stage with thousands of people out there, but it is changing the way that we do things long term. I know that even going to a restaurant now, you have a different way. You may look at takeout. I look at takeout in a very different way than I ever did before. Well, I'll tell you what I'm doing is going to as many places as I can and just spending money. I think that's just like the American spirit. We're indomitable. We're not going to let this get us down. We're not going to let people that push false narratives get us down. We're going to go out there and do what Americans do. Well, as a people, as the American dream has actually manifest itself in this great place that we call home, we've faced tougher times before. These are tragic times for many families. They're difficult times. But this is by far not the worst challenge that we've ever had to face. We know if you're a student of history, there were much more bleak times than this. And yet the president has been engaged daily to try to make sure that we help those that are hurting most. And as the parent of five daughters, I just want to thank you and the president, Secretary DeVos for giving parents options. You know, it's the state and local that are going to ultimately make these decisions, school boards, principals. But the idea that a parent has the option for in-person education or online education, if that's what they choose, that is really important for people who have working parents, maybe single parents. It's been really welcome. So thank you. Well, it's really key. And it's interesting you mention that because as dads, or if you're viewing in as moms or dads or aunts or uncles or grandparents, there's nothing more precious to you than your kids or grandkids. And so for us to have those options, it's really one of the interesting things. I will tell you, I'll bring you inside the room on the negotiations on the CARES 4 Act. Don't look at the camera. Nobody's here. It's just you and me. Yeah, I got you. So, you know, I will bring you inside the room because what's happening is that as we start to see the Democrats argue, they want to keep everything shut down. Now, they do it under the guise of we need to make sure everything is safe, but they want to make sure that it's shut down. They have been advocating more for homeschooling than I've ever heard a Democrat advocate for. I mean, they're saying, well, we can do online. We can make sure that kids can stay at home and actually be taught. And I find it just, well, rather interesting. I always say that the only time Democrats ever liked homeschooling is when they could force it on all of us. Well, that's what they've been trying to do. And I don't even know that it's forcing you on homeschooling because what they're really talking about is they're trying to protect their main constituency, which is the teacher's union. That's right. This is all about who supports them. And they see it as their primary priority and not the kids and not the children. They've always told us it's about the kids. Yeah. And what we're learning now is it's all about their union priorities, including some pretty radical stuff on the cultural agenda, which they're kind of putting into this conversation about schools, which radical politics and our kids should be fairly separated, if you ask me. Well, it should. But, you know, it's interesting. We're right here in Washington, D.C., and even those in the district here, kids that perhaps come from families who could not normally afford private school, they've got a scholarship program here that gives kids choice. Well, even the Democrats are complaining about that here in Washington, D.C. The biggest fights we've had has been really about any time you take a dollar and you're willing to give it to a parent or, more importantly, to that student, it's a real problem for them. And we just need to advocate strongly. We are advocating strongly on that front. Keep it going. We will. Because I think a lot of people who aren't that political but have to have a life, they're trying to figure out some pretty serious decisions on how to do that. They are. And because of what you and the President and Secretary DeVos, because of what you're doing, and in association with what Chad Wolf and the Attorney General is doing to try to bring order to these cities where the victims of a lot of this violence obviously are people of color, people who don't have educational choice, you know, it falls on a lot of families of color who might not have all the resources to make all the education decisions. Well, and I think that's the key, is, you know, when you have the status quo, it's unfair oftentimes to those who can least afford it and feel trapped many, many times. Including immigrants, right? Yeah, that's right. At the beginning of their life. And without reservation, what happens is that you can look at just the way that we try to keep people contained in a certain place, it's just wrong. That's just wrong. You know, it's interesting you mentioned Secretary Wolf, Chad Wolf. I was on the phone with him this morning about the unrest in Portland, and as you know, we've had federal law enforcement officers there trying, literally just trying to protect the courthouse from being burned down. I know that the media had it very different, but they were just trying to protect the courthouse. Which is their duty. It is. Well, we have federal protective services at every courthouse across the country. But we had unbelievable rioting that was taking place there in Portland. We've got two law enforcement officers that probably are permanently blinded by lasers from these, you know, quote, peaceful protesters. They're not peaceful, and they're not protesters. They're anarchists that need to be dealt with. And we're seeing even the local police in Portland have a real tough time. And the President's been very clear. He wants to make sure that we have safe communities, and he's willing to do whatever is necessary to make sure that we do that. Including making sure that not only do we not defund the police, but that we actually refund the police and get them back to where they need to be. I have kind of a sign that I want to make. Chad over chop. And I like the idea. That one will sell. I might make it in my garage. Let's whip through a couple of quick issues here. First of all, job, new job numbers, this comeback, this really great American comeback in the American economy. What's your reaction to what's going on? Listen, Secretary Mnuchin and the President have done an unbelievable job of trying to make sure that we keep this as a V-shaped recovery. It was really a shutdown that was put in place to try to save lives and do that. And so it put people in a very difficult spot because their jobs disappeared, many of them overnight. But with the numbers, this President has not only created a robust economy, he's doing it again in record time. Most of the economists were saying that we would be at 25% unemployment. They said that being able to get to single digits by any time this fall, we're a little over 10 right now, I think that we'll be in single digits by the next report, the next monthly report. Hopefully we'll be at single digits there. But this President is doing what it takes to make sure he can put people back to work. Our point of view at the ACU has been, this has been unprecedented. We've never done anything like this before. Without a doubt, yeah. And it really was an economic taking. So as conservatives are looking at this as, hey, is this just a bunch of Keynesian spending? It's actually, and I have to give Secretary Mnuchin a lot of credit, it's actually making sure that people are compensated for the money that was essentially taken from them for this forced shutdown. Well, that's a great constitutional argument because anytime you start talking about trillions of dollars, it's painful to us as fiscal conservatives. And so as we look at that, I think that the key is that we're in the throes of hopefully our final negotiation. The Democrats have not been reasonable. In fact, they have it as a liberal wish list that's going to, they started at $3.4 trillion and they're now up to $4 trillion and suggesting that it's the Republicans that are not being negotiable and reasonable. Yeah. I have a lot of comments there. I might let it pass because I might give my Irish up. But we're glad, I can't tell you how glad we are that you're sitting there. Well, thank you. Because it gives people a lot of confidence that we'll do the right things and try to come to something reasonable. The president has had some posts taken down. You have all these questions about what big tech is doing in terms of politics. We don't have to get into the election, but just generally, with these big companies picking sides about what party they're for, the agenda they're for, this is like the last frontier where there could be equality or at least some fairness given to our side, but we seem to be losing it rapidly. What's your reaction to it? Well, we are losing it very rapidly. The president has, as you know, put forth a few executive orders, but even in this package, we're looking at, and we'll make news here, we're looking at what do we do with regards to some of the protections that social media companies have. We ought to address that in this package right now. You mean in the emergency package? In the emergency package, because it's an emergency on behalf ... Listen, we're talking about freedom of the press, freedom of expression, and yet what we have are a number of companies that have decided on what should be communicated and what should not be communicated, and it is very troubling. We've seen some videos taken down, some posts taken down, and ultimately, if you're allowing the social media companies to be the determiner of free speech, you're in a very dangerous place, and so I spoke to the president last night about actually addressing that in this particular package, and so maybe we made news right here. Well, it's great news to make, because they don't get to have it both ways. They don't get to say, oh, it's an algorithm, we don't have any control over this, these things just happen, and then literally aggressively taking down conservative content. You don't get to have it both ways, and it's really hard for me to see the content they take down on the left, these people fanning the flames of violence, fanning the flames of violence against police, and what's going on with CHOP and Portland and all these areas. Maybe if I saw it on both sides, I could feel better about it, but you don't see it on both sides. Well, you don't see it on both sides, and these- And the president of the United States, come on. Well, I mean, listen, he's got a big bullseye on his chest that they go after each and every day in trying to make sure that they're making a political point instead of a logical, reasonable, reasoned approach to addressing it, but I will say this. As much as I'm a guy that says that the social media companies should be able to have their own, what I would call Wild Wild West way of doing it, why it developed so quickly, why we have these platforms, I'm over it. This censorship has gotten to the point where if they're going to censor, then I am going to make sure they're regulated. And the other thing, don't forget, is that if a corporation is so involved in a campaign, they're literally picking sides, they are obligated to file with the FEC their express advocacy for a candidate. So there's a lot of ways to go here, and I encourage people that believe in a free debate, in an open debate, to look at all of these things and see the ways in which we can just get back to some fairness. It's perfectly fine for every employee of those social media companies to advocate personally for their candidate of choice, whether it's the far left or the far right or someone in between. That's America, right? That is America. But it is totally inappropriate for those same people who work at a company to allow the company to put really the market cap and the power of these big social media companies on that level, on that scale of justice, to say, we're going to determine what you see and what you view and what is right and what is wrong, it's inappropriate. And now you have this question of China, right? You have a lot of, unfortunately, interrelation with some of these big tech companies and the communist government in China. We've seen what Secretary Pompeo has said about TikTok, and what I think a lot of Americans, including our CPAC audience, doesn't understand is China has a lot of these, basically, government-owned corporate entities, right? And so they say, oh, no, that's a private company. But when you get on the guts of, if you might say, the incorporation setup, it's really controlled by the government. And I think the Trump administration is really shining a light on all the ways that China is trying to implement this Belt and Road goal of a really global domination, not just from a military standpoint, but from an economic standpoint. Well, listen, we're all about free markets and being able to enjoy those. And yet what we are seeing is, and TikTok's a prime example, listen, I've never done a video on TikTok. You could make news of it today. I have not either. Oh, you haven't? I'm amazed. And I don't let my kids either. But you're right to not let your kids, and here's the reason why. All that data right now is being collected, even though they're suggesting, the Chinese government is suggesting that that's not what they're doing. Every bit of it is being collected. And can you imagine having all your personal data collected by a foreign entity that seeks to do harm to the American way? And that's what this is all about. Honestly, I'd love to see TikTok be an American company that actually does a great job, allows people to post the videos, and continues to have the number of followers. But what I don't want is when my children are doing TikTok videos, it's for their facial recognition. Listen, the younger generation that's all about civil liberties, they are losing those without giving permission, whether it's their facial recognition, whether it's their personal information and they're signing up. It's ending up in the hands of a foreign adversary. So you've had this job for something like five months, right after CPAC, which by the way, they tried to call it the conservative corona and CPAC, they've tried every way to monitor this thing. They tried. I don't think they're succeeding. They'll blame anybody. They'll blame CPAC. They just won't blame China. They won't blame China. I guess I should take it as something of a compliment. But you've had five months on this job and we hear this characterization of the president. He doesn't read. He's uninterested. He has executive time. He doesn't spend very much time on the job. All he does is like maybe get on golf courses and such. He's not literate about what's going on. Could you poke a hole in the media? There's not a hole. It is about this. The Grand Canyon hole? I don't know that your viewers can see it, but you can tell my eyes are bloodshot because what happens is he will interact around the clock. He's the hardest working. He's not a 12 hours a night sleep guy. There are days when I wish he was a 12 hour guy, but really he believes that serving the American people is a 24 hour, seven day a week kind of job and he treats it that way. There are days, you talk about reading, there are days when I wish he didn't read because he'll come up, he'll say, well, I read this so-and-so. Can you take care of this? And so I get my to-do list from his reading from either the night before or the morning and I'm having to run out and get it done. And then we start over again the next day. And so he's, you know, and he does remember previous conversations. This is what I don't like about him because he has done everything. And what happens is, is I can remember one story where he kept asking me the same question. I said, well, maybe he's just not, you know, he didn't remember me giving the answer. So he had asked me this question, but they're test questions. And so he'll ask me a question and ask me a question and ask me a question. And one time I had given him the same answer for several months. And then he asked me the same question and I changed, I gave a very different answer that was 180 degrees from what I, he said, well, that's not what you said four months ago. Oh, I mean, I just, yeah, so it's, he has an incredible memory, an incredible work ethic, and he's been really ridiculed in such a way, falsely, but he's not raging about it. He understands that's the way they're going to play the game and he's going to play it hard back. He does. He's, he's a counter puncher and, and yet he has a compassion and a love for the American people that I wish that every person that's tuned in here could actually see. It's touching. It's, it's, he's a fighter, but he's also someone who would take money out of his own pocket and have to support people that never get reported. Yeah. And doesn't always tell folks about it. He won't. In fact, in fact, he gets mad and he may be mad that I shared this because he, he, he believes that his generosity and his support of, of others should be something that's done in private and that doesn't get a big headline. Yeah. Well, that's something they'll probably punish him. Another thing they'll punish him for in New York, which is why we're so happy he's a Floridian now. Mark Meadows, we appreciate you taking the time out of your busy schedule to be with all your fans at CPAC. Oh, it's good to see you. You know, it's no longer the conservative movement. It's just bigger. It's just people who love America. I agree. And everything about it. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for loving America. Yeah, I do. All right. We're going to be right back to finish up the show. We have a conversation with Dan Schneider, Facebook and Twitter took down a Trump video post in which he had said children are quote, almost immune from this disease. As in the virus that is considered harmful misinformation. Before it was taken down, it was viewed by 450,000 times. Were those people who viewed it put in danger? Were they harmed? Is our society at risk because of those couple of words? I don't think so. What those people saw was a statement of fact. Children are less susceptible to the virus. They are less likely to get it. Viewers saw the president discussing back to school. Reopening the schools is a big election issue. And so is his performance on the virus. And yet he is censored. That is, he's silenced. Whatever happened to Facebook as a free speech platform? Mark Zuckerberg took that position. He told Congress last week Facebook aims to be a platform for all ideas. I guess he caved. He has now censored the president's campaign. It makes you wonder who really runs Facebook. Just who decided that saying children are almost immune is harmful misinformation? Who did that? And why did they do it? In the words of the president's deputy press secretary, quote, another day, another display of Silicon Valley's flagrant bias against this president, where the rules are only enforced in one direction. Well, what a great conversation that was with a man that I think both of us truly admire, Mark Meadows, someone who's graced the stage of CPAC literally all over the world and obviously every year at our big conference in Washington. And now he has, you know, which might be the most important staff job in the world, the chief of staff to the president of the United States. I'm joined by our executive director at ACU. By the way, that's not a vaulted enough title for you. We have to get that fixed. The staff calls me the grand poobah. Dan runs ACU. As you all know, I do this in a volunteer capacity. And I pop in and out, which the staff really loves, because I get to pop in and change things and then leave. And I think there's some gnashing of teeth after that. But Dan's in there kind of on a constant basis. And, you know, part of the big turnaround at ACU is a lot of the work you have done. We've raised a lot more money because of the generosity of great Americans out there. But also, I think we're just trying to be as effective as we can be. And that's kind of like your call to the staff and to me and everyone is to constantly rethink what we do, make sure it's effective and not just do what every conservative group just kind of falls in the habit of doing. Yeah, you know, we had, you know, ACU's been around for decades, but we really have a joint enterprise and more than just us and got a great board and a great staff. But every single person... We now have a great board. We now have a great board and a great staff. And every single person at ACU is committed to this idea that we have to continue this great American dream, this idea of America, the ideas of our nation's founding. And those ideas have never been in greater risk, not only in America, but worldwide. Yeah, I agree with that. So we just obviously talked to Mark Meadows and the chief brought up this fact that they're actually talking about what's going on in these social media platforms and big tech in the negotiations for maybe a new aid package, emergency aid package. This is these are issues that you've really delved into. We work with we have worked with some of these companies, some better than others. We're trying to find... Some are quite hostile. There's a lot of reports on how hostile they are, which is fine with us. I'm still quite proud of the fact that one of the biggest of those, at least at one point, considered me enemy number one. Really? Oh, yeah. Oh, that's good. That's a nice thing. Yeah. The what's your reaction to what conservatives are considering, including the Trump administration, doing in terms of this? Censorship is the word I'm going to use. It's not the right legal word, but the idea of stopping conservative speech, encouraging liberal speech, looking like they're picking sides in campaigns and elections, you know, throttling back. Sometimes I see a tweet that I send out. It just takes off. And out of nowhere, it just dies. And I always wonder. Twitter has been clear that they have a vested interest in the outcome of this election. Obviously, there's no debate about that. But Mark Meadows is really interesting that he said enough. It must not continue. So what he was kind of saying is conservatives. I get the fact that we have a philosophical underpinning to our ideas, but they have to be based in the fact that we are losing this battle quickly. And if we lose the battle of social media speech after having lost control of almost every media company in the globe and when we go overseas, these conservatives in these other countries are saying the same thing, like we can't get any real news. Well, what conservatives need to remember, conservatives all know that everything is tilted against us in social media. But what we have to remember is the social media platforms really are our only chance of getting to the American public because all the big media companies are owned by the left. So what are the remedies? And right now, there's a real debate within the conservative movement. Do you use the antitrust laws for things that historically was not considered antitrust violations? Or do you use Section 230 of the Communications Act making reforms there? That seemed to be antitrust. I think people understand like breaking down with something that would be considered a trust. And in Google's case, in that particular company's case, Alphabet, Google, whatever you want to call it, they have an overwhelming monopoly on advertising and search. And the search leads to them being able to sell advertising, which is their financial model. Yeah. So the Borkians, Judge Bork, going back to the Reagan era, would say that Sherman Antitrust, Clayton Act, those sort of antitrust tools in the law are to be used when there's consumer harm, meaning price fixing, gouging, market manipulation of prices. And now lots of conservatives are saying, well, maybe it should be used for additional harms like censorship. Other conservatives would say, well, that's what Section 230 should be amended. Which means an individual or an entity could actually have a greater chance to succeed in the lawsuit. Yes. Right now, if some slanderous thing is posted on a Google ad or Facebook ad or on Facebook, those big platforms are immune from liability. But if you're a newspaper, you're subject to liability. So it's basically, should platforms be treated more harshly? What about my idea, which could be all wet? I have a lot of ideas that are all wet, but I come from the world of politics. And the Supreme Court has allowed corporations to expressly advocate in all elections, but they have to file with the FEC that they're doing that. These companies have picking sides left and right, and they're all liberal candidates, socialist candidates. There's no filings to the FEC for everything they try to do to jigger and rejigger the algorithm to help one side and harm the other. And it's both media companies. You know, you can't turn on MSNBC without pure advocacy to oppose. Pure advocacy. And the other side is shut down on CNN and MSNBC. Big corporations, these big corporations, non-media corporations. They, too, are in it. And for many of them, they're run by liberals and the boards are dominated by liberals and others are just terrified. Afraid of the left and their boycotts. And being called racist and being called all those other things. So what these corporate boards know is that conservatives don't really engage in boycotts, but the left does. So the corporate boards cave to the left and ignore the right. That's right. So, you know, this is welcome news. I think that the president is kind of walking into this minefield about what could actually just allow this conversation, including conversation about politics on social media, allowed to have some kind of some principles and how that debate can continue. We are quickly losing the ability to have these principles. Yeah. And there's a national security issue now, too, because we see how the Chinese Communist Party and its various strangleholds on their own corporations, whether they're technically government owned or not, how they're utilizing or taking advantage of Huawei and Tencent and these other things. And there's now serious concern that some of these Chinese corporations have not only altered election outcomes in, say, South Korea, but are they going to try to target U.S. the U.S. election now? So what I hear you saying is we have conservatives in South Korea that are worried about the communist government in China using these social media, you know, really weapons to impact their elections. And we were told forever that it was about Russian collusion in this country. I actually do think Russia has tried as much as they can to sow division. I think they've actually been somewhat successful in fanning those flames of social division and political division here. But the real the real culprit here is the communist government of China. Yeah, I know that this analogy is overused, you know, chess versus checkers. Maybe the Chinese have been playing or rather the Russians playing chess. Whereas I wish there was a video game derivative of that. So more people would understand what the Chinese just run in a tank right over the top of the chessboard. That's right. It's just very blatant and in your face. Yeah. Well, look, it's been our great honor to sit here, as I said, in the Eisenhower executive office building. I should know the history of the room we're in. I used to work in this building. Dan spent a lot of time and worked in this building back in the previous Republican president's administration, George W. Bush. It's great to be here. It's our honor to be here. And it's great to have as we're walking down the hall, run into so many of our great conservative friends. I mean, if we walk out this hall, you'd be so happy to know the types of people who are working here. It's not just Mark Meadows, but it's so many people, including my former assistant who's working for the vice president. So it's it's it's really great to see our government in action reflecting our values, our American values. And we love it when you join us on CPAC Live. We were so appreciative to be able to bring you the show today. And we'll talk to you again next week.