On today's episode of Human Events Daily, we discuss the latest in the Edward Snowden case, President Trump's interview with Rupert Murdoch, Tulsi Gabbard's confirmation of her appointment to the House Armed Services Committee, and more!
00:02:40.300They're just giving a complete round-robin press conference inside the Oval Office, sending those executive orders.
00:02:48.820And look, the president there, he's willing to say what needs to be said.
00:02:53.660Tulsi Gabbard, boom, she's going to be getting in at D&I.
00:02:57.100Ash Patel, boom, going over to the FBI.
00:02:59.620And he said, well, I'm going to have to straighten them out.
00:03:01.860You know, just going to have to straighten them out.
00:03:05.240Because you see, boys and girls, the problem now, the problem now that we have with the FBI is they are not acting in the sense of greatness.
00:11:42.280So I think for a couple of, look, not just a couple of years, for 40 years, with one very obvious exception, I think that we have had successive administrations who have not recognized that America's economic power is not just a source of prosperity, but is also something that we should be willing to put to use to make the American people safer and healthier.
00:12:04.720And unfortunately, we have had, especially at our southern border, a southern neighbor, and I think an important ally if they want to be, who has not taken their basic responsibility seriously about securing their own border and doing basic law enforcement within their own country.
00:12:22.740What's happened is that even in communities like East Palestine, you have seen a massive explosion in the amount of deadly, poisonous fentanyl that exists in this country.
00:12:32.260We've seen the toll in orphaned children and families who have lost loved ones and over 100,000 lives per year, most of which have come, excuse me, 100,000 lives per year, lost to drug overdose, most of which have come from the fentanyl problem.
00:12:48.560Mexico has got to do a better job, and President Trump's message is very simple.
00:12:57.520I talked to the president very briefly about this.
00:13:00.580He spoke with the president of Mexico this morning, and the president of Mexico committed to putting 10,000 additional Mexican troops on that southern border, our southern border, of course, the Mexicans' northern border, to take law enforcement more seriously, to go after those Mexican drug cartels a little bit more aggressively.
00:13:17.640So for literally three days, I heard the far left in this country say that these tariffs would make Americans' lives worse off.
00:13:26.720And what actually happened is the Mexican government was so afraid of the tariffs that they actually are taking their border enforcement and their anti-cartel activity more seriously.
00:13:36.380That is not a pathway to making Americans worse off.
00:13:39.200That's a pathway to making Americans better off.
00:13:41.400Now, the president has also been very clear that we have to rebalance our trade relationship in this country.
00:13:49.920If you look even at our northern neighbors, Canada, do Americans realize that the Canadians charge massive, massive tariffs on our products that go into the country of Canada, including on our great agricultural products that people right here in the state of Ohio depend on?
00:14:06.360Well, if the Canadians are going to use their economic power to penalize Americans, I think it's totally reasonable for the American president to say, we're done being taken advantage of.
00:14:16.320We, of course, want to have a great relationship with Canada, but that goes both directions.
00:14:20.740And that's all his conduct and his activity of the last few days was about.
00:14:26.300We're done being taken advantage of in this country.
00:14:29.180We have got to rebalance the trade relationship between ourselves and our allies, ourselves and our adversaries.
00:14:35.580President Trump is committed to that, and tariffs is one tool that he's going to use to accomplish it.
00:14:41.400Yeah, listening, talking to folks today and over the last few years, the biggest thing they heard is they don't want this to happen in another community.
00:14:47.440What are some of those action items you heard talking to the folks during your visit today?
00:14:51.380You can take back to D.C. kind of, all right, let's hit the ground running on these things.
00:14:55.540Most of what I heard today was actually concerns about economic development.
00:14:59.500Okay, but of course, I've been to East Palestine.
00:15:01.200This is my, I think, fifth or sixth visit.
00:15:02.800I've heard a lot about the concerns related to rail safety.
00:15:05.760And I think there are a few very basic common sense things that can be done.
00:15:09.920And look, some of this the railways are already doing, but some of this I truly believe is going to have to happen through things like the Railway Safety Act.
00:15:16.760Number one, you've got to inspect these cars more before they go off.
00:15:20.140You've got to better use technology to monitor when a train is about to have a catastrophic failure.
00:15:25.480These are all things that were sort of built into the infrastructure of the Railway Safety Act, and it's something we're going to keep on working on.
00:15:33.340As much as I believe in East Palestine, and I really do believe in this community and its people, what they're rebuilding through shouldn't have happened.
00:15:41.300Stop buzzing in my ear about the boring people at your office.
00:15:44.820I'm trying to listen to the new human events with Jack Posobiec.
00:15:48.460All right, Jack Posobiec, we are back here.
00:15:57.840Let's continue with J.D. Vance in East Palestine.
00:15:59.580Confidence that they can raise a family in health and safety here in this community.
00:16:05.680Now, I believe that's true, but the only way that other people are going to believe that's true is if folks like Lee Zeldin at the EPA and the broader administration take those health and safety concerns seriously.
00:16:16.120I promise the people of East Palestine, we are taking those concerns seriously, and we will do so for the remainder of President Trump's administration.
00:17:00.360We remember, of course, when President Trump visited back two years ago.
00:17:04.060This really was a turning point in, I want to say, President Trump's 2024 election, even though, of course, it took place in 2023.
00:17:14.000This was just a huge turning point in the Biden administration, where so many people across the spectrum, across the aisle, were just upset.
00:17:23.440They were incensed that the Biden administration and Josh Shapiro, the wine, would allow this huge explosion of gaseous chemicals out into the public, that they weren't doing anything for these people.
00:17:35.860Of course, it exploded across social media as well, at least in terms of the aftermath, and so many people asking questions about the health, about the safety, about what was going on there.
00:17:47.420There were so many problems and people really wanting to do something about it, and that really set the tone for the new Trump administration.
00:17:57.720This idea that it isn't going to be business as usual.
00:18:01.620It's going to be full-on nationalist populism, and that's exactly where he came down, and that's exactly what you're seeing now, whether it be Panama, whether it be these tariffs, Canada, Mexico, whether it be Greenland, whether it be the rest of it.
00:18:16.320It's what benefits the American people first.
00:18:19.960Now, I wanted to talk communications a little bit because there was big news that just popped over at the FCC that a huge, and Semaphore's got the piece, a large critic of big tech is taking a top legal position at a key agency that could target Google, Meta, and their rivals.
00:18:43.480Oh, sorry, Zuckerberg. Uh-oh, I don't know about that, because you've got Adam Kandaub, an architect of one of the efforts to revoke legal protections for social media, is now going to be general counsel of the FCC.
00:18:59.340Well, here joining us to talk about all of this and more is Alan Bakari.
00:19:03.900He is the managing director at the Foundation for Freedom Online.
00:19:09.320How's it going, Jack? Great to be on your show.
00:19:13.480So talk to me about some of the things that you guys are working on over at the Foundation for Freedom.
00:19:18.600Everybody knows, of course, Mike Benz over there.
00:19:21.120People know your background well, by the way, leaking the Google video back in 2016 saying that we're never going to let Donald Trump win again.
00:29:21.220And it's, I mean, it's just one of the most wonderful things I've ever seen.
00:29:24.340All of the worst people are completely activated.
00:29:28.920But, Alan, this is something that I think we all should focus on.
00:29:32.580Because, look, I think that Elon buying X has led to a sort of general de-emphasis on the censorship question.
00:29:44.340So a de-emphasis on wanting to fight back against censorship.
00:29:49.320And certainly a de-emphasis on having the government come in and actually put some controls on social media.
00:29:55.840Like, for example, an Internet Bill of Rights for the user or questions about who controls your data when it comes to online, your online activity.
00:30:14.900Do you think that that's something that these latest moves from hiring the professor to be general counsel, to have Brennan Carr over there as well, who's been a huge advocate for this?
00:30:24.460Do you think that there's action that the FCC can and should still take on the censorship front?
00:30:33.180And not just the FCC, but also the FTC when it comes to collusive behaviors like advertising agencies getting together and boycotting social media platforms because they don't, because they're opposed to what American social media users are saying.
00:30:47.540When they act in concert as an industry that is very anti-competitive behavior, which is right in the FTC's jurisdiction.
00:30:55.340I think the FCC can also do a lot here because, you know, there have been regulations in the past that, you know, made companies, for example, under the Obama administration, actually.
00:31:06.380There was net neutrality, which made Internet service providers common carriers and that subjects them to all sorts of requirements about what they can and cannot carry.
00:31:17.440So I think there's a lot of there's a lot of area where the FCC can provide scrutiny.
00:31:22.620And and I think I think the thing about you mentioned Elon Musk taking over X and how that sort of ushered in a new era of free speech on social media.
00:31:33.340It would be one thing if, you know, coming back to Microsoft, it would be one thing if they scaled back their censorship programs.
00:31:40.600So Mark Mark Zuckerberg, you know, do I necessarily believe he's completely sincere in, you know, the changes in his political opinions over the past six months or so?
00:31:51.780Not necessarily. I think he's a very pragmatic guy.
00:31:54.220But Facebook has made some real changes.
00:31:56.540It's, you know, scaled back some of its content moderation policies.
00:32:01.140Zuckerberg's even gone on Joe Rogan and talked about in, you know, pretty, pretty a fair amount of detail about how the government pressured Facebook to censor and how Biden officials would call up Facebook officials and yell at them and get them to censor content.
00:32:15.000So they've actually taken concrete steps to, you know, stake out a position against censorship.
00:32:30.320And look, there's huge questions when it comes to what should be done for the user online.
00:32:37.340By the way, you know, that Internet Bill of Rights, when we talk about the data of every individual that currently is just being sold on the market, you know, why not allow people to at least get a piece of that?
00:32:49.240So, hey, if you want your data sold, hey, this is how much I'm willing to, you know, I'm willing to pay for it or willing to willing to sell it for and you've got to pay for it or some something like that.
00:33:00.120I mean, there's there's this whole question of our relationship with big media, with big tech, with all of these platforms.
00:33:08.460They're getting, of course, fabulously wealthy.
00:33:11.320By the same token, they're using these as large language models to train their various AI.
00:33:16.760We already know that's how Grok works.
00:33:19.960But I do think that what President Trump has given us is ability to just press reset on all of these various questions and allow people to step back and say, you know what?
00:33:29.680But this is what we want our government doing.
00:33:32.760These are things that actually directly directly affect us and directly affect our lives.
00:33:38.380And no, we're not so focused on these forever wars and things that are going on all over the world.
00:33:44.460No, let's actually do something that affects us, that affects our families, affects our children.
00:33:49.140Well, you know, what worries me about the tech companies, and I know some of them have gotten better in the past few years, largely thanks to the trend that Musk started.
00:33:59.460But Americans still have no recourse under the law if their account gets taken away.
00:34:04.320Tech companies can still destroy someone's livelihood, destroy their public platform, and you have no recourse.
00:34:12.160Like if you get kicked out of a physical property on spurious reasons, say if you own a business and your landlord kicks you out for spurious reasons, you can take them to court and say, hey, they kicked me out for dodgy reasons.
00:34:23.100You can't do – but if you're on a social media platform and your entire business is based there, you don't have similar protections under the law.
00:34:30.400So, you know, there's no protections under the law for American social media users or any social media users really against, you know, arbitrary deplatforming on the one hand or, as you said, data collection.
00:34:42.780They have no protections over how their data is used either.