The Anchormen Show with Matt Gaetz - May 27, 2020


Episode 12 - Working on Legislation Revising Section 230, Trump Deprives Pelosi of FISA Votes, America First Foreign Policy


Episode Stats

Length

21 minutes

Words per Minute

166.89168

Word Count

3,585

Sentence Count

194

Misogynist Sentences

1

Hate Speech Sentences

6


Summary

Trump kills FISA reform, John Roberts questions the timetable for our troops to return home from Afghanistan, and President Trump says he wants to bring our troops home within 19 years. Hot Takes is a podcast by Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-GA) covering hot takes from the world of politics and current events.


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Welcome to Hot Takes. This is Congressman Matt Gaetz. Let's talk about the news. And the
00:00:21.760 big news is that President Trump has killed FISA reform with a tweet. He writes,
00:00:27.500 I hope all Republican House members vote no on FISA until such time as our country is able to
00:00:33.660 determine how and why the greatest political, criminal, and subversive scandal in U.S. history
00:00:39.040 took place. So President Trump depriving Nancy Pelosi of the Republican votes she would need
00:00:45.120 to pass these reforms. And I'm glad, you know, if you listened to yesterday's podcast, I really go
00:00:51.120 back and describe the basket of reforms that was initially discussed with the White House when
00:00:55.940 Mick Mulvaney was chief of staff. Mark Meadows has been a champion for reforming this process
00:01:00.960 as a congressman and now as chief of staff, I think is only in a better perch to man that fight. And
00:01:07.760 I would like to see far more extensive reforms than what was passed out of the Senate. But it was it
00:01:13.820 was just Richard Burr and Rand Paul voting no out of the Senate. I think every other Republican voted
00:01:18.640 for it. You know, Burr wanted fewer reforms. Paul wanted more reforms. I said I wasn't voting for
00:01:24.320 it because I was of the Rand Paul view that a lot more needed to be done. Hours later,
00:01:28.760 the president kills FISA reform. It remains important to hold people accountable who are
00:01:35.060 involved in Obama-Biden gate and the Russia hoax that distracted our country. And here's the
00:01:41.200 president from Rose Garden maintaining his vigor and his just absolute determination to find out
00:01:47.400 the truth. Greatest hoax in the history of our country. And it was an illegal hoax and a very
00:01:53.080 dangerous hoax. And a lot of bad things have been found out about Mueller and the gang.
00:01:58.360 So I would like to hear that conversation. Yeah, I would like to hear it personally. So
00:02:01.980 whatever they want me to do, I'll do. I think Rick Grinnell has done an incredible job.
00:02:07.520 And things are happening now that I always knew this was the answer. This was a an attempted coup
00:02:15.800 by a bunch of dirty cops and others. These are dirty cops, dishonest slime bags.
00:02:21.840 Let's do better and make sure that we build a system worthy of either political party being
00:02:27.180 in power and not tempted to use the intelligence process that is supposed to protect all of us
00:02:34.180 to try to gain political advantage one way or the other. I broke it down on yesterday's podcast,
00:02:39.040 go take a listen. But President Trump apparently agreeing with the analysis,
00:02:43.280 Rand Paul leading the way, we'll do better, protect individual liberties,
00:02:47.340 and ensure that no president has to go through what President Trump did.
00:02:51.840 We talked a lot about foreign policy on yesterday's episode. And then we saw
00:02:55.740 John Roberts asked the president a question about the timetable for a return home from Afghanistan.
00:03:01.860 Here's John Roberts and the president's fantastic answer.
00:03:05.580 Mr. President, is it your intention to bring American forces home from Afghanistan by Thanksgiving
00:03:11.060 Day? And is the Pentagon drawing up plans to that effect?
00:03:14.840 Well, I think everyone knows we're down to less than 8,000 troops. We're with leadership in many
00:03:23.720 different fields and in many different parts of of that country. We're with we're dealing with the
00:03:30.180 Taliban. We're dealing with the president. The president now has gotten themselves straightened
00:03:35.620 out with the two presidents. But we're dealing with because they had, as you know, they had competing
00:03:40.180 factors and factions. Yeah, I think we want to get within 19 years. We're really not acting as soldiers.
00:03:47.660 We're acting as police. And we're not sent over there to be policemen. But within 19 years.
00:03:54.700 And yeah, I think that's enough. And they understand that we're having very positive talks. We want to
00:04:00.960 bring our soldiers back home. We want to bring them back home. And we're not only talking about there,
00:04:06.440 we're talking about other countries also. We bring our soldiers back home. We can always go back if
00:04:11.700 we have to. If we have to go back, we'll go back and we'll go back raging. And then we'll go back as
00:04:16.120 warriors, fighters. But right now we're policing. And we're not meant to be a police force. We're meant
00:04:21.780 to be a fighting force. So again, you can hear my response back and forth to both sides of the argument
00:04:27.500 on yesterday's episode. But I thought the president laid it out perfectly. You heard the president
00:04:32.540 mentioned Syria, and I am so glad he did. In Syria, you remember, John, on the border,
00:04:37.300 when I took the soldiers out of the border, everyone said, oh, that's so terrible. Well,
00:04:41.240 I spoke to President Erdogan yesterday of Turkey. The border's been fined without us.
00:04:46.220 They've been policing their border for 2,000 years. All of a sudden, we had thousands of soldiers
00:04:50.880 there doing their work. For what? Guarding Syria and Turkey on a border, a very long border?
00:04:58.000 No, we want our troops back home. We took them out. That was a year ago. I was criticized. Nothing
00:05:04.660 happened, except they're watching their own borders now. We kept the oil. But at some point,
00:05:11.840 we'll take care of the Kurds with respect to the oil and get out. I was disappointed, though,
00:05:16.520 in many of my Republican colleagues, a majority, in fact, who joined with Democrats in a resolution
00:05:22.420 condemning the president's action to remove our country functionally from the Syrian civil war to
00:05:29.240 get us off this border where armies of tens of thousands have been fighting each other for like
00:05:34.980 100 years. And I was the only Republican in Congress who took to the floor to defend the president's
00:05:42.960 actions. In fact, the Republican that was managing the time, Chairman McCaul, for our side,
00:05:49.820 he was actually arguing with the Democrats. He was one of the sponsors of the resolution
00:05:53.980 condemning the president. But here was my argument back when the president took the action in Syria
00:05:58.940 that he just referenced in the Rose Guard.
00:06:00.900 If Turkey is not acting like a NATO ally, perhaps the sensible solution is to remove Turkey from NATO
00:06:07.380 rather than keeping the United States inserted in Syria, presumably forever. This is why I oppose
00:06:13.780 this resolution. I've heard my colleagues say we should not leave Syria without a strategy. Perhaps it
00:06:19.100 is equally logical that we should not stay in Syria without a strategy, because in Syria, we have
00:06:24.540 tens of Americans stuck between armies of tens of thousands who have been fighting each other for
00:06:30.460 hundreds of years and who will likely be fighting each other hundreds of years from now. Our mission to
00:06:35.860 deprive ISIS of caliphate land has largely been accomplished with the help of the Kurds and with over
00:06:41.340 $9 billion being paid to the Kurds. The Kurds have been fighting bravely where they live, but they have been
00:06:47.180 trained, funded, and equipped by the United States. And we cannot accept the proposition that if we
00:06:53.020 support a group of people because our interests align in one case, that this somehow morally binds our
00:06:59.420 country to every conflict that they have past, present, or future. To do this would constrain the
00:07:05.340 utility of America's future alliances, not strengthen them. The blood of America's patriots is among our
00:07:11.340 nation's most sacred currency, and it must be spent only when absolutely vital to protect American
00:07:17.420 interests. We are not the world's police force. We are not the world's piggy bank. I support an America
00:07:22.620 first policy on a foreign policy, and I oppose this resolution. I yield back. We have spilled so much
00:07:27.420 blood, so much treasure, and it is nice to see a president wanting to have our best people here in our
00:07:35.020 country contributing to their families and their communities and our resources committed to the
00:07:40.300 successes of all Americans. We do not have an America first objective in some of these countries
00:07:46.620 where we have extensive troop presence, and it's great to see the president share that view that
00:07:52.060 foreign policy restraint can do a great deal more to advance the interests of our country.
00:07:56.540 Twitter yet again is choosing to enter the political fray as a fact checker now, indicating that on
00:08:05.660 President Trump's tweets they are going to provide their analysis of whether or not they believe the
00:08:10.140 content of those tweets to be true, and it really is quite something. I agree with Donald Trump Jr.'s
00:08:16.460 analysis. How about Twitter go and review all those blue checkmark folks who were saying that there was
00:08:22.700 collusion with Russia, you know, that the president was going to be indicted, that his son was going to
00:08:27.900 jail. You know, all that turned out to be nonsense, and none of that was fact checked. But now that we're
00:08:33.020 coming up on the election, now that coronavirus has impacted the way that we can gather, and obviously the
00:08:39.740 Trump campaign can assemble and gather an energy that we didn't really see in the Biden campaign, and so
00:08:46.460 digitally we see the stakes higher than they've ever been. More and more I think that the way
00:08:53.260 communication is going to occur will involve an enhanced digital element. And President Trump has
00:08:59.740 a number of people across America onboarded onto his digital platforms, whether it's Twitter, Facebook,
00:09:06.380 his web platform, people who get his emails. And so it is an important question not of politics,
00:09:13.420 but of policy. Are we going to continue to treat entities like Twitter, like Facebook, like Google,
00:09:21.340 as unbiased platforms? Or are they going to take on more the role of a news organization,
00:09:28.140 an aggregator, someone who is creating, enhancing, limiting various content? And the initial play from
00:09:35.980 Twitter seems to be that they're not merely going to provide a place for people to share their ideas.
00:09:43.340 They're going to add their analysis to those ideas, whether you like them or not.
00:09:48.220 And we're perhaps left to wonder whether or not that's going to impact who sees them, and when they
00:09:53.420 see them, and how frequently they see them. If you go and Google my name, Matt Gaetz, and Twitter and
00:09:59.020 Vice News, we'll throw it up on our social media after the podcast posts, you'll see that four members of
00:10:06.220 Congress during the heat of battle in the Russia hoax were shadow banned by Twitter. Devin Nunes,
00:10:13.820 Mark Meadows, Jim Jordan, and Matt Gaetz. When Vice News first reported this, I initially had to
00:10:19.820 actually go and explain to Jim Jordan and Mark Meadows what shadow banning was. It was not something
00:10:25.260 they were familiar with. They believed if they put out content, it would be treated equally to other
00:10:29.420 content. And so Twitter puts out this statement that says, oh, well, it was a bug. It was a glitch
00:10:33.980 in our system. So I mean, does anyone really believe that? I mean, does anyone believe that
00:10:38.620 during the Russia hoax, the only four members of Congress that happened to receive this particular
00:10:44.460 bug or this particular treatment were myself, Meadows, Jordan, and Nunes? I mean, come on.
00:10:49.260 And so I guess when whoever Twitter decided to do that, I guess they didn't count on Mark Meadows
00:10:56.140 becoming the chief of staff at the White House one day. And I suspect that now Mark is far more
00:11:00.940 educated on the subject, having himself been a victim than had he not been. And I think he's got
00:11:05.340 a unique perspective that will help advise the president. We see reporting coming out that the
00:11:11.420 administration and the president are considering assembling thought leaders to go over what actions
00:11:16.860 could be helpful in dealing with these online platforms. And I want to get into that policy
00:11:23.100 analysis now. A lot of people don't know that Facebook and Twitter, you know, these entities,
00:11:30.380 like you see Twitter, disadvantaging the president, they enjoy liability protections that are not enjoyed
00:11:37.580 by your local newspaper or your local TV station or Fox News or CNN or MSNBC. They have special benefits
00:11:45.660 under Section 230 of the Communication Decency Act as digital platforms. You see,
00:11:51.340 because they're not creating content for which they should be liable. They're not making decisions
00:11:55.740 about content. They're simply saying, come one, come all with your content. And as a consequence of
00:12:01.500 that, they're getting a bunch of protections. Well, now it really begs the question with what Twitter's
00:12:07.660 doing. Do they deserve that? Do they deserve it? And I would suggest that they don't. I mean,
00:12:13.740 let's look first at what the Trump campaign said. This statement comes from the Trump campaign,
00:12:20.780 Brad Parscale. We always knew that Silicon Valley would pull out all the stops to obstruct and
00:12:25.340 interfere with President Trump getting his message through voters. Partnering with these biased fake
00:12:29.900 news media fact checkers is only a smokescreen Twitter is using to try to lend their obvious
00:12:34.940 political tactics some false credibility. There are many reasons the Trump campaign pulled all of our
00:12:39.820 advertising from Twitter months ago, and their clear political bias is one of them. Again,
00:12:45.020 that's a statement from Brad Parscale. Now, I don't think this is good for our country,
00:12:48.460 for our politics, regardless of how you feel about a particular campaign. That is newsworthy in that it
00:12:54.220 is an allegation that this is not legally a platform. And so I am currently working with my Republican
00:13:01.580 colleagues on the Judiciary Committee to draft legislation to say that if you are going to
00:13:07.580 opine as to the truth or falsity of that which is put on your platform for the sake of its viewers,
00:13:14.220 you do not get the protections of Section 230. You are not a platform. You are doing something else.
00:13:19.900 You are editorializing. And thus, if Twitter is going to, you know, fact check President Trump,
00:13:26.940 well, you know, that really begs the question who those fact checkers are. And if there are groups
00:13:31.660 of people that have shown bias against the president, if they're the same folks who told us
00:13:35.660 that the president was a Russian agent, then I think that, you know, the American people are being
00:13:40.540 deprived of the opportunity to hear directly from their president. And so I'm not favoring a special
00:13:48.380 attack on Twitter as a consequence of their action. But I do think that what they're doing ripens
00:13:54.620 this real question in the law. And that is, should a digital platform that advances or, you know,
00:14:03.420 has some discriminatory effect on content that is posted, you know, should they get liability
00:14:10.300 protections that are not provided others that are making those types of editorial-based decisions?
00:14:16.540 I say no special carve-out in our law for big tech. I am currently working with House Judiciary
00:14:22.220 members to revise Section 230 so that we do not have this type of election interference from companies
00:14:28.460 like Twitter going forward. Are U.S. big tech companies going China first and selling out to
00:14:36.060 America's biggest competitor? CNBC's Arun Karpal has a good write-up on this comprehensive report
00:14:43.020 by Top10VPN. And it really ripens this question that I want to talk about on the podcast.
00:14:48.140 U.S. technology companies, are they really going to be able to do business here and also do business
00:14:56.940 for the Chinese Communist Party? I mean, are we okay with an open relationship with U.S. technology
00:15:03.820 companies, with our government, our country, our market, and the Chinese Communist Party? Or would we
00:15:10.780 prefer monogamy with the way things are going, with critical infrastructure and technology and
00:15:16.300 communication being so central to who is going to win the 21st century? Are we cool with those U.S. tech
00:15:24.620 companies engaging in this type of work for China that I'm going to talk about? And whether we decide
00:15:29.900 we want the monogamy or the open relationship, I think we at least need to have the talk. And so here
00:15:35.820 in this Top10VPN report, we learn that in the Xinjiang province, we have a hotbed of some of the most
00:15:43.580 egregious human rights abuses. Uyghurs, other ethnic minorities. I mean, they've got 1.5 million people
00:15:52.860 in concentration camps. They call them re-education camps, but they're essentially
00:15:57.340 concentration camps. And how are they able to keep 1.5 million people locked up, rounded up and locked
00:16:04.620 up? I can't even keep my boomer parents from going to the grocery store during the coronavirus,
00:16:11.020 even though I'm like half an hour away and have told them I will go whenever they want me to.
00:16:16.620 China's able to get the job done because they have a high-intensity surveillance regime.
00:16:22.380 Facial recognition, identity checks, retinal scans. I mean, China is one of the leading investors in
00:16:29.580 the world in the technology that's even going to surveil our genetics. I mean, why do you think
00:16:35.340 that Chinese companies like TikTok and Zoom deploy here to be able to gather information? We talked
00:16:41.900 about the dual-use technology with Chinese drones on a prior episode. Matter of fact, episode 10,
00:16:47.580 we talked about how China buys off US politicians. Now we're seeing potentially how they buy off US
00:16:53.660 tech companies. And so they've got these intense surveillance systems and the CCP has developed a
00:17:02.540 regime and a protocol around using technology as a tool of repression. And that's really something
00:17:08.860 important for Americans to think about and orient to because I think for a lot of us, technology,
00:17:14.220 we don't view that as like our government repressing us. In a lot of ways, technology liberates us. It
00:17:18.860 liberates us to have a car come pick us up wherever we are or have something delivered to us that we no
00:17:23.980 longer have to go get or communicate with someone in an easier and more efficient way than we had before.
00:17:29.980 So we view technology almost as a tool of liberation, but that is very much not the case in
00:17:36.380 joyless China. In China, you've got technology fused with the government in a way to hurt people
00:17:43.580 and keep them confined and keep them from speaking out. And so with technology playing that role,
00:17:50.620 you know, you really have to ask yourself, are we okay with the results of this top 10 VPN report
00:17:57.100 that tell us that Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Norton, Twitter, Facebook, I mean, these US companies
00:18:05.100 that you know, providing websites, email, content, authentication, different companies doing
00:18:11.900 different things sort of within that that collage of services. And, you know, would we would we have
00:18:18.460 been okay with, you know, US companies engaging in, you know, the back end build out for communist Russia,
00:18:27.020 for the Soviet Union? Probably not. But with these tech companies, you know, that the argument was,
00:18:34.940 well, if we engage China with US companies, and they get used to the flow of US capital,
00:18:42.300 of US investment structures, of Western marketplaces, that that will draw China into the modern world.
00:18:48.780 But if the reality has not been that, if anything, China is more, I think, in a period of reversion to
00:18:58.700 their their most dangerous nationalism. But instead of technology having this this effect that we were
00:19:05.660 told that would it would have by all the free trade pro China crowd, the technologies that we have
00:19:11.900 developed in our country are being used to create more efficient systems in China for them to repress
00:19:18.860 their people. And I mean, look at how they're treating their own their own people, these Uyghurs and
00:19:24.460 other minorities in their country. I mean, heck, those are their neighbors. Those are the people
00:19:28.620 they live with. You know, if China took control, how do you think they'd treat people from a far away
00:19:34.140 land? You know, how do you think they'd treat us if they had total control over us? I hope we never
00:19:39.180 have to get to that, that world. And that's one reason why I think that we've really got to have an
00:19:46.540 honest discussion in this country about what constitutes critical technology and critical
00:19:54.220 knowledge that we don't want to export. I mean, there are certain elements of our defense supply
00:19:58.860 chain that we do not allow to be sold to foreign entities. And frankly, China, China's already trying
00:20:04.540 to violate that enough. But should we view tech companies the same way? And are we cool with the
00:20:10.940 open relationship? Because that's what we have now. And I think there are a lot of Americans that would
00:20:15.660 have more monogamy with our own company in these circumstances. And it's really rich that like
00:20:21.980 Democrats spent years and tens of millions of dollars, and they got all of America in this
00:20:28.460 big uproar over Russia interfering in our election supposedly to hurt people. But then their big tech
00:20:35.180 donors are interfering to help an oppressive regime like China overseas. And there doesn't seem to be
00:20:43.580 as much a pushback against China from the left. And so I hope that with President Trump really
00:20:49.580 understanding China in, I think, the most complete way of any American president during my lifetime,
00:20:56.780 that we'll certainly see the role that US technologies can play in assuring that we reassert ourselves
00:21:02.780 and meet China with with the clarity and with the sense of purpose that the challenge requires.
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