In this episode of the podcast, host Alex Blumbergen talks to media reporter Andrew Yang about the growing tension between the White House and social media platforms, including Facebook and other platforms. They discuss what it means for the First Amendment rights of journalists and what it says about the relationship between the government and the media.
00:00:00.000I read all of the emails exchanged between the White House and other federal officials and Facebook in particular, but also some of the other platforms.
00:00:10.660And I see that the White House and federal officials are repeatedly saying that Facebook and the federal government should be partners.
00:00:21.020We're on the same team. Officials are demanding answers. I want an answer. I want it right away.
00:00:27.600When they're unhappy, they curse them out.
00:00:31.360There are regular meetings. There is constant pestering of Facebook and some of the other platforms, and they want to have regular meetings.
00:00:40.120And they suggest rules that should be applied, and why don't you tell us everything that you're going to do so we can help you and we can look it over.
00:00:49.140And I thought, wow, I cannot imagine federal officials taking that approach to the print media, our representatives over there.
00:01:00.780If you did that to them, what do you think the reaction would be?
00:01:05.560And so I thought, you know, the only reason why this is taking place is because the federal government has got Section 230 and antitrust in its pocket, and it's, to mix my metaphors, and it's got these big clubs available to it.
00:01:22.100And so it's treating Facebook and these other platforms like they're subordinates.
00:01:28.880Would you do that to the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal or the Associated Press or any other big newspaper or wire service?
00:02:02.740Do you think that the print media regards themselves as being on the same team as the federal government, partners with the federal government?
00:02:11.860So potentially in the context of an effort to get Americans vaccinated during a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic.
00:02:17.120And I really think that piece of context, it doesn't change the First Amendment principles, but it's relevant to how they apply here.
00:02:23.100And I think it's important to understand that at this time, this was a time when thousands of Americans were still dying every week.
00:02:28.920And there was a hope that getting everyone vaccinated could stop the pandemic.
00:02:32.580And there was a concern that Americans were getting their news about the vaccine from these platforms.
00:02:36.340And the platforms were promoting, not just posting, but promoting bad information.
00:03:02.920I think this is important because I have the same reaction that you do, that these emails look unusual.
00:03:07.500I think the idea that there'd be back and forth between the government and the media isn't unusual at all.
00:03:11.600When the White House Press Secretary on July 16th is asked about this by the press at the time, what she says is, of course we talk to the platforms just the way we talk to all of you.
00:03:19.920When we have concerns about what you're doing, when we have information that you might find helpful.
00:03:23.720Now, there's an intensity of the back and forth here.
00:03:26.420And there's an anger that I think is unusual.
00:03:28.920But the context for that, I think, is that these platforms were saying publicly, we want to help.
00:03:33.300We think we have a responsibility to give people accurate information and not bad information.
00:03:37.600And we're doing everything we can to meet that goal.
00:03:40.240That's where this language of partnership comes from.
00:03:43.440It's these platforms, which are powerful, sophisticated entities, saying we're doing the best we can.
00:03:47.500And the anger, I think really most of the anger when you read the emails, and I appreciate that you have, because I think you have to look at them in context.
00:03:54.300The anger is when the officials think that the platforms are not being transparent about the scope of the problem or aren't giving information.
00:04:02.660This is the primal scream of a dying regime.
00:04:07.560Pray for our enemies, because we're going medieval on these people.
00:04:11.440The reason I got a free shot at all these networks lying about the people.
00:04:17.080The people have had a belly full of it.
00:11:45.540So my biggest concern is that your view has the First Amendment hamstringing the government in significant ways in the most important time periods.
00:11:58.140I mean, what would you have the government do?
00:12:00.580I've heard you say a couple times that the government can post its own speech.
00:12:04.840But in my hypothetical, you know, kids, this is not safe, don't do it, is not going to get it done.
00:12:12.000And so I guess some might say that the government actually has a duty to take steps to protect the citizens of this country.
00:12:22.160And you seem to be suggesting that that duty cannot manifest itself in the government encouraging or even pressuring platforms to take down harmful information.
00:13:10.400I mean, that was probably the dumbest and most shocking thing I've heard out of a Supreme Court justice in a very, very long time.
00:13:20.000I mean, the fact that she thinks that the government should not be hamstrung by the First Amendment to the Constitution is, I mean, that's really just absolutely shocking.
00:13:33.040And so I imagine because she's so intellectually honest that when President Trump is back in the White House after January 20th, 2025, and he has Mike Davis, his viceroy of D.C.
00:13:47.980Because I can't be the attorney general, so I'm going to be his viceroy.
00:13:50.480And I am calling Facebook and Google and Amazon and Apple and saying, you know what, I think these BLM messages are really dangerous for kids.
00:14:01.120And I think these pro-immigrant messages are very dangerous to kids.
00:14:07.520And Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson said that not only can I be persuasive, I can be a little bit coercive to do it because it's protecting kids.
00:14:15.180And then I can use that to take down BLM's website and these pro-immigration websites.
00:14:20.340I bet you she'd be perfectly fine with that.
00:14:24.060First off, we're going to take a break.
00:14:30.900When you start doing the Irish ironic humor, they take it seriously.
00:14:33.920So now we're going to have Mike Davis is saying on War Room, Bannon's talked to Trump, and he's too radical to get confirmed as attorney general.
00:14:42.500They're going to appoint him viceroy of the District of Columbia.
00:17:03.300Yeah, I sat in on the oral argument this morning at the Supreme Court and then participated in a rally that Children's Health Defense sponsored outside the court.
00:17:12.740So I want to give sort of the upside first.
00:17:15.580So it's a triumph on a certain level, Steve, to be in the Supreme Court.
00:17:21.260Most COVID cases have either been declared moot or they've been rejected on standing.
00:17:26.000And this case started in the Western District of Louisiana Federal District Court.
00:17:31.060And Judge Terry Doty on July 4th, Independence Day, issued a decision in 2023 saying this is a massive censorship industrial complex, effectively.
00:18:30.760So the good news is that this case about this censorship industrial complex, which was documented in 20,000 pages of evidence from the district court, got to the Supreme Court.
00:18:44.460And I'm reminded today of the saying that's attributed to Mahatma Gandhi is first they ignore you, then they mock you, then they fight you, and then you win.
00:18:54.780And so I think what is the case today is they were battling so-called misinformation.
00:19:00.440They were censoring information about the election, information about the Biden family, and information about COVID.
00:19:07.040Children's Health Defense was deeply engaged in putting out truthful, well-sourced information about everything that was going on in COVID, about the shots, about the masks, about the lockdowns, about the testing.
00:19:26.160We were deplatformed from just about anything you could be on a platform for.
00:19:29.620So we had a direct interest in this, and we put in a friend of the court brief, and our case, the Kennedy versus Biden, which is directed specifically at these individuals in the Biden administration, that's been consolidated at the trial court.
00:19:46.540What was disappointing today, Steve, was that the court wasn't outraged by the extent of this censorship industrial complex that has come to exist over the last four years.
00:19:57.140I was hoping to see that kind of outrage, because the First Amendment is the First Amendment for a reason.
00:20:04.620Free speech is the fount of all other rights, of assembly, of conscience, of everything.
00:20:11.760And so I didn't feel the kind of outrage that I had hoped to feel.
00:20:17.800I don't think all hope is lost, but I didn't see the kind of the sentiment of free speech is the most important value that we have or one of the most important.
00:20:30.220Yes, there are certain things the government can do in an emergency, and there are tests for what a government can do.
00:20:36.560But our view, based on a Supreme Court decision that's called Norwood, is that the U.S. government cannot do by proxy what it cannot do on its own.
00:20:47.600And it's very clear that they were outsourcing this censorship to the social media platforms, because they knew they couldn't do this directly.
00:21:18.220And no matter how the Supreme Court comes out on this, we know that the threat of a kind of totalitarian censorship is real worldwide at this point, being escalated even and outsourced further, potentially to the World Health Organization,
00:21:33.000that has put misinformation at the forefront of this idea of health.
00:22:24.660How many people unnecessarily suffered and died during COVID because of scientists being censored by the regime?
00:22:34.580How many people, whether it was the bogus six-foot rule that wasn't based upon science, the useless face masks that don't stop the spread of COVID?
00:22:47.340If these face masks did not work, cloth face masks did not work for the first year of COVID before we got the vaccine, and the vaccine doesn't stop the spread of COVID?
00:23:10.720And, oh, by the way, everything we said in the teachers and the unions and the education poobahs in New York said was wrong about the spread of COVID.
00:23:18.660I mean, Mary Holland, they torched the children's health defense for even bringing this up.
00:23:23.420Naomi Wolf, they made her a leper for even talking about it.
00:23:26.400Today, oh, upon further review and analysis, it's right, but it's years afterwards.
00:23:32.600So I think what people are missing was some of the outrage of some of the superstar justices to light people up in that room and put big tech on notice that not only deep staters, but big tech is part of the problem.
00:23:45.780This is the Mike Davis, the reason you started Article III and are living hand-to-mouth instead of being some $5 million-a-year lawyer at a white shoe law firm, sir.
00:23:54.900Well, I'm too crazy to get hired by those law firms, but I would say this.
00:23:59.780Where are all these Democrats who pretend to care about these disadvantaged kids, particularly these black kids, in these schools that were shut down, right?
00:24:12.400You didn't have teachers looking out for these kids to make sure that they weren't being neglected, to make sure that they weren't being abused.
00:24:19.160And, you know, these black kids in these inner-city schools are already behind their counterparts in the white suburban schools.
00:24:32.100Today they said that, but I didn't hear that in the court.
00:24:34.580Mary, you guys were vilified about the very thing the New York Times said today is because the issues at the court.
00:24:40.780But I didn't see anybody really standing up for the fact – and that didn't even get to a stolen election.
00:24:45.820That was just on the COVID part of it, ma'am.
00:24:48.300So one of the things that was so disturbing today, Steve, was that none of the lawyers or the justices brought out that truthful information was knowingly being censored.
00:24:58.700And that was at the behest of the government and with the knowledge of the social media platforms.
00:25:03.460We were telling the truth about the emergency use authorization nature of these shots.
00:25:08.920Nobody knew if they were going to be safe.
00:25:10.660Nobody knew if they were going to be effective.
00:25:12.260In fact, there were probably people who knew that they weren't safe or effective and that they wouldn't stop transmission before they ever even hit the marketplace.
00:25:18.880That point wasn't really effectively made.
00:25:21.580But exactly what – to Mike's point, these kids, so many people were so injured.
00:25:37.240There was no free expression on the internet.
00:25:39.940And none of the courts seemed to really, really, really get into that.
00:25:43.880That is what happens when you restrict speech.
00:25:46.420That is precisely why there has to be free speech.
00:25:49.520And none of the justices really picked up that torch in a way that at least in oral argument we could see.
00:25:55.280It doesn't mean that they won't come out with a ferocious decision.
00:25:58.620And I hope they do because really our country is founded on free speech.
00:26:03.460And there are – it is to protect individuals' speech.
00:26:07.980And what the government did here in collusion with social media, as joint actors with social media, but the government on its own, they were suppressing third-party speech.
00:26:18.120And they were restricting what we, the people, could learn about the truth, about hydroxychloroquine, about ivermectin, about the efficacy of masks.
00:26:27.320All of that was suppressed in favor of this government orthodoxy.
00:26:33.540And today in the courtroom, they said twice, this was the pandemic, a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic.
00:26:38.800Well, do these people not know that they're going to be creating a pandemic preparedness industry that is now moving into the White House?
00:26:46.740It's moving into the World Health Organization.
00:26:48.980This is the paradigm going forward so that governments will be able to shut things down at a moment's notice on their own say-so.
00:26:57.580And fighting so-called misinformation is central to this new paradigm.
00:27:02.460And, again, I didn't hear that urgency from the lawyers or, well, from the lawyer for Missouri who was arguing or from the justices that what is the future harm of what has happened in the last four years is portentous.
00:27:28.520What are you looking for when she says a righteous decision?
00:27:31.580What would you look for to be the appropriate decision here we'll see in June?
00:27:37.020Well, I'm not optimistic about this decision.
00:27:39.880But what I would say is I think that the Supreme Court should hold that these big tech platforms control the online public square.
00:27:47.900And that online public square is government-created, government-sponsored, and government-controlled through Section 230, through antitrust amnesty, through these big federal grants.
00:27:59.900And when these big tech platforms censor Americans, I think it's a First Amendment violation on its own.
00:28:06.160But certainly when the government pushes them to do it.
00:28:08.700Mike, where can people go to get you to get more information about this?
00:32:05.060What's happening at the World Health Organization with these international health regulations and treaty is way outside the scope of what normal Americans living their lives are looking at.
00:32:15.280And yet this could have profound implications for our lives.
00:32:19.320The reason that the whole COVID lockdown started was because of a public health emergency declaration by the Secretary General of the World Health Organization back in 2020, four years ago to the week.
00:32:31.480That could happen again on a regular basis if, in fact, these international health regulations go through the World Health Assembly, which is meeting at the end of May.
00:32:41.220So we at Children's Health Defense and other organizations like Sovereignty Coalition and other groups, Door to Freedom, we're all focused on what's happening right now in that sphere.
00:32:51.000We've got to make sure that countries around the world say, no, we're democracies.
00:32:56.000We decide what happens with our own health.
00:32:58.840We decide what the measures are that we use in any kind of pandemic or any other health crisis.
00:33:05.580It's not going to be some secretary general who's not even a doctor who's in Geneva.
00:33:09.860It's going to be our citizens and the people that we elect and people who are accountable to us.
00:33:15.700It's not going to be some faraway bureaucracy that has no accountability that's incredibly insulated with liability protection in some remote place.
00:33:25.860That's just not just it just makes no sense in terms of human rights and in terms of health and in terms of democracy.
00:33:34.800Mary, where do people get all the content from Children's Health?
00:33:59.900We're on social media, Children'sHealthDefense.org.
00:34:02.820I want to thank the young filmmaker, Claire Dooley, who was our camera operator today in the world room and one of the great young filmmakers.
00:34:44.200Steve, I'm not a constitutional attorney, but I am a journalist.
00:34:47.340And we at the Star News Network have been throttled by Facebook and Google and NewsGuard.
00:34:53.520I didn't hear a lot of arguments, a lot of questioning from any of the Supreme Court justices to defend my right to publish the truth and not be throttled.
00:35:04.580I'm pessimistic about how that's going to turn out.
00:35:17.160We're going to talk to some folks in Chicago whose lives every day get worse because there's 9 million, 10 million illegal alien invaders in this country and more coming because of the Biden regime.
00:35:28.480Yeah, on my radio show, the Michael Patrick Leahy Show, heard on the John Fredericks Radio Network, 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. on 760 a.m. here in Nashville, I interviewed the former U.S. Special Envoy to Haiti, Dan Foote.
00:35:44.520And Dan confirmed everything that Todd Benzman told you on Saturday, that indeed the United States scuttled the 2021 free and fair elections in Haiti.
00:35:58.000And that scuttling was really the proximate cause of the current failed state in Haiti.
00:36:05.820And it is I mean, it's interesting because you broke this and it became significant over the past week with the disasters in Haiti.
00:36:15.540But look, everything Todd Benzman told you about the forced repatriation of 15,000 Haitian immigrants in 2021 from the Del Rio camp, migrant camp were true.
00:36:56.660He resigned in protest and he's not gone back since.
00:37:03.500Michael Patrick Leahy, where do people go to get to your news network? Where do they go to get your show?
00:37:07.640The Tennessee Star dot com, the Tennessee Star dot com.
00:37:12.660And you can follow me on social at Michael P. Leahy.
00:37:15.880Michael P. Leahy, that's that's Twitter, Getter, True Social, all of the above.
00:37:23.600Leahy, thank you so much. Thank you for the great work you're doing.
00:37:26.180We're going to pull the clip from Foote, who who basically confirmed what Benzman said.
00:37:30.100Matt Gaetz has just put out he's demanding the Biden call at the United States Navy to act as a shield to the state of Florida and return to repatriate.
00:37:40.320Not to let folks go to Gitmo, not to let them go to Key West, but to repatriate them back to Port-au-Prince right now to get the Coast Guard out of the way or acting as escort vessels.
00:37:53.340These heart rendering videos you've been playing of the citizens of the United States in Chicago that are being abused by the Biden regime and the in the administrative state to bear the brunt of this illegal alien invasion.
00:38:32.980And yet they're giving millions of dollars to illegal aliens who are here, who are not a part of this country, who have never spent one penny.
00:38:41.160And to the American people and patriots across this country, it's time for us to be one America.
00:38:46.120No longer can we sit back and say, I'm a white American, I'm a black American.
00:38:50.900We have to be Americans right now and stand up to the tyranny that we see that the Democratic Party is doing in our community.
00:39:11.680And I just think the American people need to stand up right now, push back and say no more to the Democrats.
00:39:18.220Say no more to those who are stealing money and taking money, especially the black politicians and the black community across this country who will not stand up for the black community.
00:39:28.780Because if the black politicians stood up and answered the call and asked questions why and said no, that we will not have the illegals here.
00:39:37.480If the black politicians said no, we're not going to have homosexuals and transgenders in our schools.
00:39:43.560It's up to the black politicians to stop this, but they haven't.
00:39:47.720So I'm telling black people across this country, we can no longer vote for the Democratic Party.
00:39:52.880We can no longer sit back and let them, allow them to destroy our community.
00:40:13.360There was no illegal immigrants in our country.
00:40:16.320Trump did what he needed to do to secure the borders.
00:40:18.840And now that the Democrats are in office, our whole country has gone to hell in a handbasket.
00:40:24.760And if the American people and patriots across this country, especially Christians, those who say they love God and Christ,
00:40:32.200if we don't stand together and become the body of Christ to stop the evil that we see, then we're going to lose this country pretty much, Ben.
00:40:44.340Hang on, Pastor, the black community has been the foundational element of the Democratic Party.
00:40:52.380The Federal Reserve chairman has said that the central reason they allowed these 10 million illegal alien immigrants in was to drive down labor costs,
00:41:01.940to basically drive down because the working class wages were the problem in inflation.
00:41:05.540What say you to that, that this has been a well-thought-through, not chaotic, this has been a well-thought-through invasion of our country,
00:41:13.380planned and exacerbated by the Democratic Party to destroy the wages of black African-American working-class families?
00:41:25.900And I think it was a bigger plan, yes, to destroy the black community, to push wages down to zero of nothing, to take jobs out of our community.
00:41:36.440But the biggest issue that I can see, this is a spiritual war, Mr. Banyan.
00:41:41.560This war is being fought, and it's time for Christians to stand up.
00:41:45.220It's time for pastors to come together and take their rightful place and say no to this government and what they're doing.
00:41:51.820And if we don't understand where we're at right now, and the American people and patriots across this country don't come together and deal with this issue,
00:42:08.480The math proficiency is in the low teens.
00:42:11.040Reading, reading, all of these things are against what the American people and the American way of life that have been for us for so many years.
00:42:19.460And I just think that it's time that all Americans get together.
00:42:23.240We have to stand together and unify ourselves, and we have to get the Democrats out of office.
00:42:29.220And that's why I'm telling black folks across the country, we need a checkup from the neck up.
00:42:34.680We need to get them out of our community.
00:42:38.980We need to put somebody in the community.
00:42:41.040And make sure we change the leadership locally so that we can get all the things that we deserve opposed to our money going to all of these illegals
00:42:49.060and nothing coming back to our communities here in America.
00:42:52.280Yeah, and Steve, I think Bob Israel, I know you could jump in on that as well.
00:42:56.180And I want to get Terrence in here as well.
00:48:56.020Do you know how it makes me feel as a man when they have these stereotypes that there are no strong black men in our community, no strong black women in our community?
00:49:04.200This right here is a show that we are strong and we are caring about our community.
00:49:08.920But when we lift our voices, no one is listening.
00:49:12.180The politicians that we put in office, they're not doing their jobs.
00:49:15.260So as we were speaking earlier today, what we're going to do is we're going to hold them responsible for their actions.
00:49:23.200We're going to expose them for the corruption and things that they're not doing.
00:49:27.460We should be able to get the same type of treatment that you're giving people that are not even American citizens.
00:49:59.000Immigrants being in the community, we have to understand that we don't own a community.
00:50:03.800And we have to start holding local politicians accountable.
00:50:08.520Once we do those things, start owning the community and hold politicians accountable, these type of things won't be thrust down our throat.
00:50:16.320We have to understand and fight back on the local level.
00:50:19.500Yes, I understand it's a political, I mean, not a political, a presidential election coming up.
00:50:25.060But we need to understand, we need locally, locally we need to understand our mayors, our senators, our congressmen, our aldermen.
00:50:32.840We need to understand that these are the people who's really allowing these things to happen.
00:50:37.060And when we look at our community, we need to understand you can't complain about people coming and intruding on your community when you don't own a community.
00:50:45.460They're going for the highest dollars.
00:50:47.200It's the messed up thing to say, but that's just what it is.
00:50:51.020When you could put a person out who was paying you $600 rent and the government telling you, I would pay you $2,000 rent for this illegal, that's just what it is.
00:52:08.820As a matter of fact, I saw at Home Depot, they're trying to get jobs.
00:52:11.280They're standing outside Home Depot asking people to pick them up and give them jobs, paying cash, while they're being paid by us, while they're living in a housing that we're paying for.
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