- Hi.

Thank you very much for asking a question.

- Hello.

- Hello.

- [Attendee] I just wanted to thank you for all the information that you give.

I watch you a lot.

I have a question that I've never really understood the rationale of that corporations are people too.

I don't understand the logic behind that.

Can you clue me in?

- So the question is how can corporations be considered people too?

I assume you're referring to the Supreme Court case of Citizens United, decided about 10 years ago, in which the Supreme Court did recognize that corporations, organizations, and labor unions have First Amendment rights.

So I don't know if they said they are people, but they said they have the same First Amendment rights that people have.

- I think it was The Mitt Romney line, right, that was the corporations are... - Do you think that might have anything to do with the Powell Memo of 1971?

- Say it again?

- Powell Memo?

- No, I don't know about the Powell Memo.

Tell me more.

- He was a Supreme Court judge.

Is it Lewis Powell Jr.?

- Lewis Powell, yes.

- And in 1971, because of, you know, all the hippies and the uprising in Lyndon Johnson's great society and all these things, well, the Republicans got a little upset and he did.

He was from Virginia.

And so he set about the alarm and said, oh, corporations, we need to get our act together because we've got all these activists.

And the people are gonna get all the money we need, and so we need to make sure.

And so he literally set out a plan for them to take over.

They said we need to organize, we need to get together, we need to have propaganda out there.

And it was for the economic welfare of them and not to let the people, and I can't remember the terminology, but it scares you.

Oh, it was everything.

I mean, media education.

- So do corporations play a role in this disinformation conversation?

- I think so.

And thank you for that question.

I mean, one thing that I talk about in the book and one thing that I have certainly seen is in the decades since then, since the '60s, we have seen this huge spread in income disparity.

And I think that is something that really drives it.

And part of it is because of this.

It's not just capitalism, maybe I'm capitalist, right?

Capitalism makes society go, but capacious capitalism, the idea that corporations get all the tax cuts.

CEO pay is off the charts.

Jobs have gone overseas.

And so instead of confronting that reality, I think what some in politics wanna do is tell voters the real people to blame are those other people, right?

It's immigrants.

It's the LGBTQ community.

It's minorities.

- The othering of everything.

- Yeah, they're the ones that mean that you don't have a life as good as your parents did and why you can't afford your own home.

It's all those other things.

Meanwhile, they don't wanna ask too many questions about all of the other things.

And people are even willing to vote in favor of tax policies that disfavor them if they can feel like I've been empowered and I'm above somebody else in society.

And so I do think this divide-and-conquer strategy is an effort to separate working-class white people from working-class other people by othering them and keeping working-class white people in the fold.

Because if but for this disinformation about, you know, the economy and what's really in your financial best interest, those groups would all naturally, you know, band together and defeat corporate interests.

And so I think there is some incentive there in trying to protect the the golden goose.

- [Host] That's a great point.

Karen.

- Welcome back to Austin.

- Thank you.

- Can you touch on what you see as any national security risks with TikTok?

- Oh yeah.

- And let us hear about that.

Thank you.

- TikTok is a great topic, I think.

So Christopher Wray is the FBI Director, and I know, love him or hate him, I think he's a straight shooter when it comes to this.

He visited Michigan Law School; and when he was there about a year ago, I asked him very candidly, tell me about TikTok.

And he didn't say anything that he hasn't said in his public remarks, but the concern with TikTok is that it is owned by a company called ByteDance, which is affiliated with the Chinese government.

And there is concern in national security circles that the Chinese government is trying to do a couple of things: one is engage in economic espionage to try to catch up in some of the research and development in technology with the United States.

So that's one concern.

And the other is taking people's private data.

Now, you know, Facebook has my data, Twitter has my data, X has my data.

I suppose in some ways, it's easy to throw up your hands and say my data's already out there, what's the big deal?

But when it's a hostile foreign adversary who has your data, I think there are different concerns about that.

And so I think that in a rare show of some solidarity, we saw the House have this vote the other day.

I think what they'd really like to do is have TikTok sell, or ByteDance sell TikTok, because it's very popular and there are a lot of people, businesses and others, who use it.

I mean, young people- - So An American buyer, that would be a solution, an American buyer.

- I think so, and now Steve Mnuchin is talking about putting together a group of buyers.

What could possibly go wrong?

- Yeah.

Right.

(audience laughing) Trump's former Treasury Secretary, right.

- Just what we need, another diabolical billionaire, right, who owns tech.

- How funny.

Alright, well, we gotta get Barbara on the road.

We have to get on the road.

Give her a big hand.

Thank her again.

(audience applauding) Thank you all for coming.