00:00:21.000His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:00:29.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:00:42.000We're honored to be here with Brendan Carr from the FCC, board member of the FCC.
00:00:47.000We're going to get into all sorts of really fun and interesting issues today.
00:00:51.000You guys can email us your questions, freedom at charliekirk.com, and make sure you type in Charlie Kirk Show right now to your podcast provider, hit subscribe.
00:01:00.000Do you guys want to beat the 1619 project on New York Times?
00:01:13.000Well, it's a really exciting time to be at the FCC.
00:01:15.000So there's five of us that are commissioners of the FCC, and we regulate everything from the rollout of 5G, trying to make sure that the U.S. can establish leadership in wireless.
00:01:24.000So everyone that turns on their phone or fires up their laptop, a lot of people think that that just happens with magic or pixie dust, but there's a lot behind the scenes that we do at the FCC to help the private sector build out that internet infrastructure that we all rely on today.
00:01:39.000So you were outspoken recently in favor of the president's executive order on social media.
00:01:46.000And you spoke out and some people thought it was meaningless or superfluous.
00:01:51.000Tell us why you supported the president's executive order on the tech companies and the importance of free speech online and in digital communication.
00:02:01.000Yeah, I really welcome the president's executive order on social media.
00:02:04.000Look, free speech is under threat right now.
00:02:08.000There are some of the most powerful corporations in the history of the world, social media companies.
00:02:15.000They have more control over speech today than any entity that history has ever known.
00:02:22.000And what the president's executive order would do would call for the FCC to take a look at a law called Section 230.
00:02:29.000And Section 230 is a law passed in the 1990s that singled out one set of actors, social media companies today, for special treatment.
00:02:39.000And it takes that group and it gives them legal immunity that other political actors don't enjoy.
00:02:44.000And look, Twitter, Jack Dorsey, all these other companies, they have every right under the First Amendment to speak their own minds.
00:02:53.000What we're seeing, though, what appears to be happening, is they're running roughshod over their own terms of service in taking action against the president of the United States with his own tweets.
00:03:03.000They were putting up this fact check about glorification of violence that when you look at the president's tweet, it just didn't seem to even line up on its face.
00:03:13.000So they have every right to express their political views.
00:03:15.000What they don't have the right to do, what no business in this country has the right to do, is run roughshod over its legally accountable terms of service.
00:03:22.000So the executive order would look at the Federal Trade Commission to take a look and see whether some of this conduct falls under the traditional unfair deceptive business practices conduct.
00:03:31.000And at the FCC, whether there's a need to take a look at Section 230 as well.
00:03:36.000So let's talk about the deceptive business practices.
00:03:38.000That's very interesting because 230 has kind of now gotten into the zeitgeist.
00:03:42.000And I wrote an op-ed to the Washington Post saying that 230 should be repealed, platform versus publisher.
00:03:47.000When you talk about deceptive business practice, what you're saying is the misapplication of the terms of service by these tech giants, the way that they actually pretend to be fair and impartial.
00:03:58.000They could be classified as a fraudulent enterprise.
00:04:01.000I think just recently, one of the commissioners at the Federal Trade Commission raised this very point about analyzing some of this conduct through unfair deceptive trade practices perspective.
00:04:11.000So, look, any business in this country that holds itself out is accountable.
00:04:15.000These platforms have made very public representations that they don't engage in systemic political bias.
00:04:22.000They represent this to Congress, they make the statements everywhere else.
00:04:25.000People rely on those statements to use their platforms.
00:04:28.000Well, if it in fact turns out that they are engaged in sort of systemic political bias, then that is something that could be looked at through the lens of an unfair deceptive business practice.
00:04:36.000Again, this has nothing to do with Twitter or Jack Dorsey's own First Amendment rights.
00:04:41.000But if you are going to hold yourself out as a politically neutral platform, you should be held accountable to that.
00:05:03.000You can't be out there representing to users, we don't engage in sort of political bias and then behind the scenes, engage in political bias.
00:05:13.000And if they were to come forward and say, yeah, we're in the tank for a Republican or we're in the tank for a Democrat, then all of us can make our decisions against that sort of background principle, whether it's regulatory decisions or decisions as individual users.
00:05:25.000Yeah, so the equivalent would be misleading business practices of any sort where you tell the consumer something you are not.
00:05:33.000It would be an airline that says that they are going to be on time and they know they won't.
00:05:37.000It would be deceiving the consumer or misapplication of standards of labeling or anything.
00:05:42.000The FTC does all sorts of different front-facing consumer advocacy.
00:05:47.000I think they go too far, quite honestly, too many times as a limited government, you know, free market guy.
00:05:52.000But I also believe believe one of the reasons I believe in limited government as a philosophically is I believe in limited power.
00:06:01.000Because government, as the founders theorized, was the ultimate form of power.
00:06:07.000Now, what if the tech companies are more powerful than government?
00:06:10.000Does that warrant using instruments of government power or courts to then go after these tech companies?
00:06:20.000I think I start from the position of limited government.
00:06:25.000And I don't support regulatory action that's going to make problems at the end of the day worse.
00:06:30.000What we have to realize is the immense enormity of the power that these social media companies have developed, I think, do merit the scrutiny they're now getting.
00:06:39.000And frankly, this is a bipartisan issue.
00:07:03.000He's doubled down on this recently as well.
00:07:05.000Many people right now, their North Star when it comes to political or legal issues is Orange Man Bad.
00:07:11.000And so when President Trump says it, there's a lot of people that push back, but there is a bipartisan call for taking a look at Section 230.
00:07:19.000Biden says it should be revoked immediately.
00:07:21.000Why would Biden say that, do you think?
00:07:23.000Because a lot of his biggest contributors are the tech companies.
00:07:27.000You know, look, if you look back at the 2016 election, the far left has been hopping from hoax to hoax to hoax to try to justify their loss at the ballot box.
00:07:40.000One place that they've been looking is social media companies for the crime, in their view, of staying too neutral in the 2016 election.
00:07:48.000So what has been happening since then is a working of the refs from the left to try to persuade social media companies to not stay on the sideline in 2020.
00:07:58.000And so some of what I think you're seeing Biden and others pushing back on is concerns from the left about some of the activities and that they're not going far enough in pursuing the agenda that they want them to engage in.
00:08:11.0002020 has been a year that none of us will forget.
00:08:14.000Impeachment, the Chinese coronavirus, race riots, who knows what's next?
00:08:19.000What better time to try to get to the source?
00:08:22.000Senator Ted Cruz and Michael Knowles got back together in D.C. this week for the first time in months.
00:08:28.000Their podcast, Verdict with Ted Cruz, topped the podcast charts earlier this year with their inside look into impeachment hearings, and now they're back at it again.
00:08:36.000As 2020 gets even crazier, this is your chance to go behind the scenes in Washington to see what's really happening.
00:08:42.000You can't get much closer to the action than this.
00:08:45.000Go check out the podcast, Verdict with Ted Cruz, and be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen.
00:09:23.000This is when people had Prodigy messaging boards of the day.
00:09:27.000That is when Congress passed Section 230.
00:09:29.000They had Prodigy Messaging Board in mind.
00:09:31.000And it said, good faith, what is that's a whole separate podcast?
00:09:38.000The law says if these platforms are engaged in good faith conduct, good faith in the statute, then it gets these special treatments, these special legal immunities that other political actors don't get.
00:09:49.000By implication, that means there is a category of conduct that Congress identified called bad faith conduct.
00:09:54.000Well, again, flash forward 20 plus years.
00:09:57.000The Prodigy Messaging Board is now the most powerful social media companies in the world.
00:10:03.000And there's been virtually no guidance about that line that Congress drew.
00:10:07.000A lot of people, when Trump put his executive order out there, when I put my statement out there, have been collapsing the First Amendment analysis onto the statutory analysis.
00:11:06.000If Twitter deleted my profile completely, what happens to all the intellectual property?
00:11:13.000In law, you could have a precedent almost of squatters' rights.
00:11:17.000What happened to all that work I put into that platform?
00:11:21.000Do you think that there's any possible legal word I'm looking for, just potential legal analysis to go after legislative reform, I should say, towards being able to say that you as a human being have poured into these companies intellectually.
00:11:38.000I know that you might sign or check some box, but is it really, did they really participate in the creation of my 42,600 tweets?
00:11:47.000Well, I think some of this goes to the bait and switch.
00:11:49.000When these platforms are out there, whether it's YouTube or others, that say, come here, to your point, pour your heart into this, pour your money into this, create this conduct, build this business that can support your family.
00:12:00.000And the idea that it can be pulled away from you, even if you do basically nothing wrong, I think that's troublesome to a lot of people.
00:12:07.000That's why I think at this point in time, doing nothing is just not an option.
00:12:13.000I think that's why it was welcome news for the president's issue, Section 230.
00:12:17.000Look, in DC, there are a lot of sort of trade associations, sort of think tanks that fall into what I would call, I think I've heard you talk about it, sort of this fundamentalist libertarian view that say we shouldn't touch 230.
00:12:33.000We shouldn't do anything about the powerful corporations and their control over speech because they say these are private platforms.
00:12:48.000And at this point, though, what's odd, though, is they're not advocating for a free market, defending a skewed market.
00:12:55.000And not only just 230, think back to competition law.
00:12:58.000So if you look back from, for instance, if you go back to the Obama-Biden administration, 2008 to 2016, that was one of the greatest run-ups in terms of accumulation of power and size of big tech social media companies.
00:13:13.000And we had antitrust policy and competition policy that I don't think was fit for what we were seeing.
00:13:33.000We had this Sprint-T-Mobile merger that we reviewed.
00:13:36.000A lot of people saw Sprint and they said it's a fourth competitor.
00:13:39.000We don't want to lose a fourth competitor.
00:13:42.000But if you actually look and see where Sprint was headed as a company, it was not going to be a strong fourth competitor for very long.
00:13:48.000We have two big competitors in Wireless, ATT and Verizon, and T-Mobile was sort of an upstart competitor.
00:13:54.000But Sprint was kind of barely hanging on.
00:13:56.000So if you look at the future, you could see that combining Sprint and T-Mobile, creating a stronger third competitor to ATT and Verizon is a good thing.
00:14:04.000But a lot of the antitrust theory would assume and take the snapshot in time that Sprint stays alive.
00:14:08.000Flashback to when Facebook buys Instagram.
00:14:13.000A lot of people look at that and they say, well, Instagram is an interesting photo sharing app.
00:14:17.000Little did they know that given three or four years' time or less than that, it would have been an immense competitor to Facebook.
00:14:25.000So in fact, I think the Federal Trade Commission right now is doing a look back to take a look at some of that.
00:14:29.000All that goes to show is when you're defending the status quo, you're defending it against an already tilted regulatory regime.
00:14:37.000So I think whether it's 230, whether it's antitrust law, when you are saying there is no action the government should take, I don't think that's the path forward.
00:14:45.000Well, and the Sherman Antitrust Act and antitrust and monopoly laws were written for a very specific purpose of consumer exploitation when there is vertical monopolizations created in the early of 20th century, Rockefeller, Carnegie, and there's even some fundamentalist free markets from marketeers.
00:15:03.000And I've read a lot of these books and they're quite compelling.
00:15:05.000I don't know if I fully agree with them that think that Rockefeller and Carnegie actually weren't exploiting people and they've gotten a bad rap in history.
00:15:42.000They're actually selling you to a company.
00:15:45.000So, when you flip through that Facebook feed or flip through Twitter feed, based on what you like, based on your behavior, based on what you might dictate actually into your phone, all of a sudden they use that pote-parie of data and sell it back to XYZ company or benefactor cause.
00:16:05.000And so, the issue is that the laws are literally 100 years old and don't necessarily apply to a company that doesn't charge basically anything to the consumer.
00:16:16.000Yeah, I think that's part of some of the fresh look that has to be taken into account from a competition perspective when it comes to big tech.
00:16:24.000To your point, the amount of data that is now collected by these companies, even today, people really don't even know.
00:16:30.000So, if you have a Google or an Android device, even if you're not connected to a network, it is constantly taking data on where you are.
00:16:38.000If you get into a car, your phone can know that because it has barometric pressure sensors in it that can know when a car door closes, it knows when you're going up an elevator.
00:17:12.000And the FCC back then was actively running interference effectively for big tech and saying big tech doesn't actually get to see that much data on you.
00:17:21.000What we need to be concerned about is the internet service providers.
00:17:24.000And so, at this time that they were ramping up, that they were growing, they were collecting massive amounts of data, you had Democrats in power who were telling people to look the other day, look the other way.
00:17:34.000The revolving door between the Obama administration and Silicon Valley simply never stopped swinging.
00:17:42.000And some of those very same people are now backing Vice President Biden's run.
00:17:46.000And I don't have an opinion in terms of who should win the presidency, and I'm legally prohibited from expressing such an opinion, but I do think it's worthy for people to take a look and see, you know, these are the same people that were running the government during this run-up to big tech growing.
00:18:05.000Are you guys being crushed by the cartel of the colleges?
00:18:08.000Well, to get people with student loan debt out of student loan debt, that's why Credible is there.
00:18:13.000Credible is an online marketplace that gets you pre-qualified student loan refinancing rates from up to 10 different lenders.
00:18:20.000They help people get out of student loan debt.
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00:18:32.000You can consolidate all your student loans in one place.
00:18:34.000And Credible customers have given awesome reviews about how much better their lives have been after refinancing their student loans.
00:18:39.000You might not have student loan debt, but if your friend does, your son, your daughter, your grandson or granddaughter, you can go to credible.com/slash Charlie.
00:18:50.000On Credible, you see actual pre-qualifying rates from up to 10 different lenders, whereas with some other marketplaces, other online marketplaces that won't be named, you'll get ranges of rates or ballpark estimates.
00:19:01.000It only takes a couple minutes to check rates, and checking rates does not impact your credit.
00:19:06.000They never sell your data, so you will not receive spam and phone calls from dozens of lenders.
00:19:31.000Who do you think is more powerful, the United States government or Google?
00:19:35.000When it comes to free speech, you certainly see big tech exercising a lot more influence over what people can say.
00:19:42.000And I speak about this a lot from a free speech perspective to, in some ways, to differentiate it from the First Amendment, right?
00:19:48.000So we have private platforms to which the First Amendment doesn't apply.
00:19:54.000But we've never seen an entity, government or otherwise, in this country that has more control over speech.
00:20:00.000And I think this ties into another point that we're seeing right now.
00:20:03.000Whether we call it cancel culture or other types of terms, this idea of groupthink is making a very quick and dangerous spread across this country.
00:20:16.000And I think this organization sees it more than anyone else.
00:20:19.000You know, this sort of started, I think, on college campuses, this idea of safe spaces, this idea that a diversity of thought and information is something to be avoided.
00:20:28.000I mean, how did universities go from places where you should be exposed to diverse views to pushing back on diverse views?
00:20:35.000Well, that culture moved from college campuses to a lot of social media companies that then replicated that same type of culture.
00:20:43.000And then you now see it in sort of institutional, established media organizations, the New York Times being one of them, their editor stepping down, resigning, whatever the conduct was, for the crime of exposing people to a different view, an op-ed by Senator Cotton.
00:20:58.000You have the progressive editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer who put out a piece that I think said Buildings Matter 2, which is a reaction to some of the looting and vandalism that was taking place.
00:21:13.000And what's actually really ironic, and I learned this recently, the modern day op-ed was developed by no institution other than the New York Times.
00:21:27.000There was an editorial board member by the name of John Oakes, and he was looking in the 1950s and the 1960s to this sort of groupthink that pervaded then, this sort of Maoist thinking that pervaded then.
00:21:39.000And he said, we need to push back on that.
00:21:42.000And he said that diversity of opinion is the lifeblood of democracy.
00:21:48.000The minute we insist that everybody think the same way that we think, our democratic way of life is in jeopardy.
00:21:56.000This was an editorial board member of the New York Times.
00:21:59.000He was the one that launched the modern day op-ed in 1970, September of 1970.
00:22:06.000They want to invite diversity of opinions, and they expressly said this stuff is not going to always represent views that we agree with.
00:22:15.000Flash forward 50 years, 1970 to 2020, rest in peace for that type of embrace of diversity of views.
00:22:24.000New York Times invented the op-ed and then it kills the op-ed.
00:22:54.000So what amazes me is that some of the fundamentalists, and by the way, a lot of these companies will fund and will hide behind libertarian dogma, but they don't actually even believe it.
00:23:06.000They use it as sensationalist shields to protect their corporate incumbency, basically.
00:23:13.000I mean, not for a second are we supposed to believe when Google or Twitter funds some of these fundamentalist libertarian think tanks, does Sergey Brin actually believe in libertarian philosophy?
00:23:28.000It's foolish if you think that these CEOs that are funding it because they are striking an intellectual and philosophical consistency nerve of the prior base of the conservative movement that allows it to be a shield for their corporate incumbency.
00:23:44.000But do they actually believe in Locke and natural rights?
00:23:50.000Nothing in their entire ideological worldview does it, or their philosophical worldview, I should say, does it reflect that?
00:23:56.000And what's amazing to me is the very same people that have just kicked Gone with the Wind off of HBO Max, the very same people that have taken cops off of television, the very same people that have fired that Serbian soccer player for the Los Angeles Galaxy for something his wife wrote, the very same people that just fired the Sacramento Kings announcer, the very same people that have just fired the CrossFit CEO or made him resign.
00:24:23.000That same philosophy is now running Google.
00:24:29.000We're supposed to act now that the Google employees are going to never act impartially, whereas this same mob acts impartially everywhere.
00:24:39.000Look, I think diversity of thought has rarely been under as much assault as it is right now.
00:24:47.000And there are all sorts of ways in which ideas are being shut down.
00:24:51.000Let's look at political memes to start.
00:24:55.000I have this saying that is disinformation is the new disinformation.
00:25:00.000And what I mean by that is people have realized, whether it's after 2016 election or otherwise, that people are sensitive to this concept of disinformation and shutting down disinformation.
00:25:11.000And what you see are people taking political memes.
00:25:14.000One of the first ones that I saw do this, I think you guys may have been involved.
00:25:17.000This was a viral video of Nancy Pelosi tearing up the State of the Union speech.
00:25:24.000You had political actors step in and call it disinformation misinformation.0.52
00:25:43.000It is effective because it sidelines traditional gatekeepers and speaks directly to the people.
00:25:51.000And so what you're seeing now are these established media gatekeepers who've been sidelined by political memes because political memes, whether they're funny or otherwise, they draw people into the political discussion.
00:26:03.000You don't need that middleman to translate for you what's going on because the political meme draws you into the conversation.
00:26:10.000So we now have the Washington Post fact checker that's giving four Pinocchios to different memes.
00:26:16.000I spoke out even on the Bloomberg campaign.
00:26:19.000He issued an advertisement where he had a one-liner that he liked at one of the Democratic debates and he inserted in there the sound of crickets to indicate that his Democratic candidates had no response to what it was that he said.
00:26:51.000They're not going to think that people actually crickets came to the stage.
00:26:55.000What they're concerned about is that it's going to be effective.
00:26:58.000They're concerned that their jobs, their place in terms of determining the political narrative is getting minimized.
00:27:05.000And so I do think that we see, whether you call this, you know, war on memes or otherwise, it is merely an attempt to control the political narrative.
00:27:15.000That's a very different point that I've heard recently, and it's a very important one.
00:27:19.000Because what you're saying is that the fact-checkers aren't actually worried that this might be swaying public opinion one way or the other.
00:27:28.000Instead, they're worried that their opinion isn't more predominant in the zeitgeist.
00:28:33.000And so there's people that are wondering what legislatively or what realistically is going to happen with this issue.
00:28:42.000Because the cynic side of me is that these companies are more powerful than our government.
00:28:47.000They spend $30, $40 million a year on lobbying, of which is political contributions indirectly through lobbyists.
00:28:54.000They control public opinion immensely.
00:28:58.000What's going to prevent them from shutting us all down?
00:29:01.000Look, there's no question that they're tremendously powerful.
00:29:03.000And if you look at Jack Dorsey in particular, he sent out an article some time ago, favorably retweeted an article that said it is the end of bipartisanship.
00:29:14.000Republicans must be thoroughly defeated.
00:29:18.000This is the same person who says, if you have an issue with content moderation at Twitter, I am ultimately the one responsible.
00:29:23.000And how much confidence does that give people that these are decisions that are being made impartially based on the plain application of terms of service?
00:29:48.000I think after the 2016 election, when people said that a handful of advertisements on Facebook swayed the election, I think you saw Zuckerberg immediately express some skepticism about that.
00:29:57.000Subsequently, I think Facebook made him sort of turn heel and take a different approach on that.
00:30:03.000He's taken a different approach than Twitter.
00:30:05.000He's embraced this idea that candidates should get to speak directly to people through their ads and people should get to decide for themselves whether they want to believe it or not, that Facebook's not the arbiter of truth.
00:30:16.000Because here's the thing: there is no oracle of truth.
00:30:20.000When you talk about content moderation on social media, these are people in power that are making these decisions.
00:30:26.000And they're people that are either fallible or they're biased.
00:30:30.000That's why I embrace this concept of more speech, more ideas, empowering users.
00:30:35.000So one idea that I've talked about is this idea of turning off the bias filters.
00:30:39.000So rather than having Facebook immediately fact check your feed and either have MSNBC do it or Fox News do it, you should have the ability to turn that off.
00:30:48.000If you want MSNBC to check everything before you see it in Facebook, fine, go into your settings, you know, flip that button.
00:30:54.000But if you don't, if you want to be able to decide for yourselves, let's empower people to make that decision for themselves.
00:30:59.000That's one reform that I've put out there.
00:31:01.000I think this Section 230 executive order is going to be very important.
00:31:05.000I think the Federal Trade Commission signaling through Commissioner Wilson that they can take a look at this and it's important.
00:31:11.000The FCC, where I work, is going to get a petition on this issue that we are going to take up.
00:31:18.000I mean, there's problems with this solution I'm about to probe, propose, I should say, or talk about, but it's not perfect in any sense, but it's better than what's now, which is what if every citizen, every person of the country had a correlated social security number or whatever it is, a social ID number, and it would actually get rid of a lot of the anonymous accounts,
00:31:44.000which I think would be refreshing because I think there's a lot of the issues with social chatter and a lot of the, let's just say, problem.
00:31:52.000And then, of course, you have an issue of international actors that are also on the platform and all that.
00:32:18.000But doesn't the Constitution say that you have a right given to you by God to petition your grievances and redress your government?
00:32:25.000And so, how could you possibly, in this world, communicate with your lawmakers without having access to these platforms?
00:32:38.000You know, there's an interesting area of law that I think you've talked about, which is sort of public accommodation law.
00:32:46.000And there's not many states that have this, but in DC, their public accommodation law says that you can't discriminate based on political viewpoints.
00:32:56.000And it's an interesting question that I've not fully grappled with or explored myself.
00:32:59.000But do those types of public accommodation laws apply to social media platforms?
00:33:05.000And if so, if you are accessing it through DC, does the DC public accommodation law, which prohibits political discrimination, does that apply?
00:33:13.000Is that something that can be looked at through Section 230 when the FCC takes that petition up?
00:33:18.000I think those are interesting avenues.
00:33:19.000Well, I think if every American citizen got a social media ID that is correlated with their social security number and you can't be kicked off the platform, but you're not allowed to create anonymous, and it's not a perfect solution.
00:33:31.000I've said there's plenty of downfalls with this, the least of which being how do you regulate people that are not citizens of the country and all that?
00:33:39.000Because you can only create law for the sovereign of our country.
00:33:43.000However, I think there is something to be said, though, that the worst parts of social media are anonymous accounts.
00:33:48.000Like that's the worst experience of it.
00:33:52.000Secondly, every human being should have the right to be able to speak where the conversation is happening.
00:34:02.000So when the founders wrote the declaration, their idea was that you should have equal access to be able to voice your concerns, your religion or whatever it is.
00:34:13.000But if you're only able to voice your concerns now in the physical world, not the digital world, you're only touching 1% of the population if that.
00:34:22.000Whereas in the world of the 1780s, the comprehension of a digital space was just, it wasn't even in the, it was 150 years removed.
00:34:33.000And so the precedent of case law probably does not exist for that constitutionally.
00:34:38.000But for me, it makes a very clear argument because if you are kicked off a social media platform, you're basically useless to protest your government, basically.
00:34:49.000Yeah, I mean, look, there's some challenges, obviously.
00:34:52.000So anonymous speech actually has protections from sort of a First Amendment perspective.
00:35:45.000Again, you know, there's some tricky issue here having to do with speech.
00:35:48.000There's tricky issues here having to do with private platforms.
00:35:51.000But that's part of why I think this step that the president took in the executive order made so much sense, which was bringing the Federal Trade Commission in because put their speech rights to the side.
00:36:00.000You know, they should be accountable like any other business in this country for their conduct.
00:36:04.000I think another thing that I wanted to touch on is if you look at Facebook, they've recently stood up this, what they call an oversight board.
00:36:15.000If you look at who is on this, so this is a group that they've stood up in the run-up to the 2020 election to make what they call the toughest content moderation decision.
00:36:23.000So you think, okay, maybe there's progressive people on there, but they're probably pretty neutral.
00:37:05.000You have this activist, Manny Kai, I believe his name is, who has said that President Trump is the crown jewel in the sort of fascism, xenophobic white nationalist movement.
00:37:19.000There's people on there that are connected to the sort of George Soros network of left-wing groups.
00:37:27.000I don't mean any offense, by the way, if I mispronounce it, but that's a tough one.
00:37:31.000So, look, if you were to create a board specifically for the purpose of tilting an election against an incumbent president, I don't think it would look much different than the board that Facebook has put together.
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00:40:24.000And Twitter and Google have been the worst by far.
00:40:28.000Look, I think these aren't isolated incidences.
00:40:31.000When you look at the New York Times and their editor getting taken off his job for putting a diversity of views out there, Philadelphia Inquire, Drew Brees, this is part of Scott with the Wind, LA soccer player, CrossFit CEO.
00:40:48.000Yeah, there is a strong movement to shut down opposing ideas.
00:40:51.000In fact, it's spilled over to the FCC.
00:40:53.000So there was a group, ironically enough, named Free Press that filed a petition at the FCC asking us to take regulatory action against television broadcasters that carried the president's daily coronavirus briefings.
00:41:07.000You remember when this was an issue a few weeks ago, maybe a month ago at this point?
00:41:10.000You mean when the country wasn't burning?
00:41:13.000There was a movement to pressure these television stations to stop letting the president of the United States speak directly to the people.
00:41:20.000And that's a private sector debate that can take place.
00:41:22.000But one group decided to file a petition at the FCC and asking us to take a look at this rule having to do with broadcast hoaxes and tell us to investigate and take action against broadcasters that carry the president.
00:41:35.000And of course, we turn the petition away.
00:41:37.000But what I think this is, is this particular group, Free Press, is sending a signal.
00:41:41.000And it says, look, if they get control of the FCC, if they get the votes there, whether it's Republican or not, they are going to look to take the levers of government and shut down speech they disagree with.
00:41:55.000And so is it philosophically okay for conservatives to now use the levers of government to protect speech?
00:42:08.000And I think my position is we want more speech.
00:42:11.000And the reforms that I've seen talked about with 230 are about more speech, which is to say, get out of the content moderation business, or at least should you be getting out of the content moderation business when it comes to sort of your own political views.
00:42:25.000If Jack Dorsey has a political perspective, fine, speak your mind, donate your money.
00:42:30.000But should he be weaponizing his company to go after whether it's the president or another political candidate that he doesn't like?
00:42:38.000So one other fight you guys at the FCC picked really early was net neutrality.
00:42:52.000So net neutrality is a spectacularly misnamed sort of left-wing political agenda.
00:43:00.000Net neutrality, in of itself, is a concept, is actually not that disagreeable.
00:43:05.000So, it's basically, you know, you should be able to go on the internet where you want to go, you know, not get throttled if that's not being disclosed.
00:43:41.000In fact, the story of the internet infrastructure in this country is one of the great, I think, undertold success stories of the administration.
00:43:50.000Since the end of 2016, internet speeds in this country are up 85%.
00:43:55.000Since the repeal of net neutrality, when we were told net neutrality was going to, the repeal was going to end the internet, speeds are up 70%.
00:44:02.000In 2015 and 2016, the U.S. was at really serious risk of ceding global leadership in 5G and the billions of investment, millions of jobs it can create to our global counterparts, including China.
00:44:17.000President Trump, Congress, the FCC, where I work, we flipped the script.
00:44:21.000And now the U.S. has secured the strongest 5G platform in the world.
00:44:25.000And it's a great private sector success story.
00:44:53.000And there's a group of people who are going to believe these conspiracy theories about 5G regardless of the facts that are presented to them.
00:45:00.000So one of the things you hear is people say there's been no studies on the health and safety of RF emissions.
00:45:08.000There have been dozens upon dozens of studies regarding the safety of RF emissions.
00:45:13.000In fact, the FDA, which runs point on this, their scientist, epidemiologist, recently put out a 113-page report that went through 10 years of these epidemiological and other scientific studies into RF emissions with the bottom line that these emissions are safe.
00:45:37.000We get a lot of emails about this at freedom at charliekirk.com on 5G that says, we have no reason to believe 5G is safe from the scientific American blog network.
00:45:46.000And the guy who wrote it is pretty respectable.
00:45:49.000And he says this: he says, 5G will employ millimeter waves the first time.
00:45:54.000Given limited reach, 5G will require cell antennas every 100, 200 meters, exposing many people to millimeter wave radiation.
00:46:01.000He continues by saying millimeter waves are mostly absorbed within a few millimeters of human skin.
00:46:08.000And he says, research suggests that long-term exposure may pose health risks to the skin, the eyes, and tests, and so on and so forth.
00:46:42.000We have rules at the FCC designed to protect health and safety that go up to 100 gigahertz, which is above the millimeter wave spectrum that's being talked there.
00:46:50.000A lot of people also talk about this study from the National Toxicology Program.
00:47:46.000So here's what it says in the article.
00:47:48.000In 2018, the U.S. Gold Standard NACS National Toxicology Program, NTP, confirmed clear evidence that cell phone radiation caused heart tumors in rats as well as DNA damage.
00:47:58.000Within days of the report's release, well-placed articles appear debunking the findings.
00:48:02.000Bizarrely, this $30 million government study, as well as others linking phone radiation to tumor promotion, memory, and behavioral changes do not appear.
00:48:10.000So basically what she's saying, and it continues on, that there was the study and then there was a counter study right after it.
00:48:18.000This is Dr. Deborah Davis from IB Times.
00:48:21.000Yeah, so if you look just at the NTP study, not whatever came after, just at the authors of that study themselves, they say exactly what I'm saying.
00:48:27.000They exposed lab rats to RF at 75 times the level at humans get from our interactions to attempt to see if at those power levels there could be some sort of link.
00:48:41.000They said themselves it cannot be extended to humans based on the fact that it was 75 times level.
00:48:47.000There's also a number of anomalies from that NTP report.
00:48:50.000So there's four categories of animals that were used there.
00:48:53.000Male rats, female rats, male mice, female mice.
00:48:57.000Only one of those categories actually showed a negative finding.
00:49:01.000And that category, male rats, I believe, actually lived longer than the controls.
00:49:08.000So there's a lot of anomalies with that report.
00:49:10.000And the authors themselves say you can't extrapolate that to the real world because of the power levels.
00:49:14.000So let me ask the question, though, Brendan.
00:49:17.000Why is it that there are so many articles and there's such a big push behind this in your estimation?
00:49:35.000You saw it with 2G, you saw it with 3G, you saw it with 4G.
00:49:38.000We have social media now, we have the internet now, so it spreads a bit farther.
00:49:42.000But think about it from this way, from the real world experience.
00:49:44.000If you want to dismiss the fact that the dozens and dozens of studies that have been done that show it's safe, okay, fine.
00:49:50.000But look at your real world experience.
00:49:52.0001988, when a lot of sort of cell phones first started getting out there, from 1988 to now, the build out of towers, the use of cell phones has spiked like a hockey stick.
00:50:03.000Over that same period of time, the incidence of brain and other nervous system cancers has declined.
00:50:10.000If there was any correlation, you wouldn't be seeing that.
00:50:41.000The facts and the data are out there for people that want to believe it, but there are some people that are just not going to be persuaded by it.
00:50:47.000Do you think that there might be motives from other countries to try to push an anti-5G message?
00:51:47.000We are left to wonder why do China, Russia, Poland, Italy, and several other European countries allow up to 100 of times less wireless radiation to the environment than does the United States.
00:51:59.000The last EPA report on the topic released in 86, back when a gallon of gasoline costs less than a dollar.
00:52:04.000So she's arguing and postulating we should be more like these countries.
00:52:08.000Yeah, I think there's a lot of misinformation there.
00:52:09.000Again, the FDA recently put out this report that looked at studies from 2008 all the way to 2018.
00:52:17.000It walked through in detail these health and safety studies that they claim don't exist that show that RF emissions are safe.
00:52:28.000Again, I think look at the real world.
00:52:30.000You know, cell phone usage has spiked.
00:52:32.000Incidents of brain and other nervous system cancers have decreased.
00:52:37.000So let's talk about, so I want to talk about the national security implications, but what I don't think we did a good enough job, though, is can you explain what 5G does for the country?
00:53:05.000Interesting, but not that revolutionary.
00:53:08.000The second is actually in-home broadband.
00:53:10.000So right now, a lot of Americans feel like they have one or no choice for high-speed home internet.
00:53:14.000Well, 5G is going to finally give you wirelessly the same speed and quality that up to now you could only get through a fiber or wired connection.
00:53:23.000The third bucket is this new wave of innovations that really we can only scratch at right now, whether it's Internet of Things or connected cars.
00:53:30.000The way I describe that third bucket to people, or at least try to describe it, is tell people to think back on their own life 10 years ago.
00:53:37.00010 years ago is when we were shifting from 3G to 4G.
00:53:40.000Think about how you got across town 10 years ago, right?
00:53:43.000You had to call a taxi, wait for one to show up, pay exorbitant rates.
00:53:47.000Well, 4G ushered in the app economy, Uber Lyft.
00:53:50.000Now you have access to a ride right on your phone.
00:54:13.000But if you were standing 10 years ago, you may not even have identified those things in your life as pain points, but that shift to 4G helps solve them.
00:54:20.000We're going to see that again with 5G.
00:54:26.000I hate grocery shopping, but I have to eat, so I got to go grocery shopping.
00:54:30.000It's particularly troublesome right now with COVID and social distancing.
00:54:33.000And there's some apps right now that you can go online, order food, but it doesn't replicate the experience of going through your own grocery store.
00:54:39.000So imagine with 5G, you put virtual reality goggles on and you're automatically in your own local grocery store.
00:54:46.000Aisles that you know, you can walk through it the way that you like to walk through it.
00:56:56.000Very few people, very few reasons to justify that type of investment from a normal consumer perspective.
00:57:05.000I think we need to treat Huawei and ZTE as nothing less than a threat to our collective security.
00:57:13.000And we've taken concrete action at the FCC.
00:57:15.000We've now stopped subsidized Huawei gear and ZTE gear from going into the U.S. network.
00:57:23.000We are looking now at ripping out Huawei gear that made it into the network.
00:57:27.000And we're taking action against Chinese-owned companies that are connected to the network today.
00:57:34.000China Mobile, one of the largest wireless companies in the world, wanted to connect to the U.S. network, which would give it control potentially over traffic.
00:58:12.000And so whether it's the trade negotiations, where we're cracking down on IP theft that Huawei and others were engaged in, or at the FCC where we're stopping this gear from going into our network, we're taking the right, strong, appropriate steps to make sure that 5G is built out in a secure way.
00:58:28.000So is there fear, though, that we have over 300,000 Chinese nationals that we educated and then work somewhere in our infrastructure system, whether it be at low-level positions all the way up to mid-level positions.
00:58:41.000But is there a fear that since Huawei has signed all these contracts for construction in the Western Hemisphere, not necessarily in America, but most specifically about 30 countries, Iceland, Turkey, UK, do we have to have an intercontinental 5G grid?
00:58:58.000And if so, then aren't we already parlaying our grid to Huawei-dominated?
00:59:03.000Huawei is part of the Belt and Road initiative that the communist regime has been carrying out.
00:59:35.000And as I think you're aware, and as your question indicates, it has been a live debate in Europe.
00:59:39.000How much Huawei gear and others do we let in?
00:59:42.000And the U.S. has been very clear about our position.
00:59:45.000I think some of the cabinet secretaries have even said there is no world in which we are going to be sharing our national security information with other countries that if they have this insecure Huawei gear in their network.
00:59:57.000And I think UK right now, under Boris Johnson, has indicated that they're taking a fresh look at their past decision to let Huawei given.
01:00:34.000Yeah, they had no investment to make it, but go ahead.
01:00:36.000And so people will look at that and say, all right, I could buy Nokia, I could buy Ericsson, or I could buy this less expensive Huawei gear.
01:00:43.000Oftentimes, they bought that less expensive Huawei gear, but the value proposition has to be over the long run.
01:00:49.000How much do you value national security?
01:00:51.000But any sense, wondering if government bureaucrats ever cared about saving money.
01:00:54.000Well, it's interesting because a lot of these governments also set up this weird approach where they would take effectively a Huawei gear out of the box, check it at a laboratory, then say, okay, ship all your Huawei gear to my country now.
01:01:07.000What that doesn't understand is that Huawei sets this up in a very bespoke way.
01:01:11.000They will fly their own communist regime communist China nationals to set up this equipment in a bespoke fashion.
01:01:22.000So you really can't check the security vulnerabilities on the front end.
01:01:27.000One way that we're mitigating the Huawei threat, in addition to the steps that we talked about, is there's this shift in 5G to basically software.
01:01:35.000So 4G was predominantly a hardware-based network, expensive boxes, and you need 10 of them to do each individual task.
01:01:42.000Well, now software can do the task of those 10 different boxes.
01:01:46.000So increasingly, 5G networks are going to be software-based networks.
01:01:49.000And when you compete on software, U.S. companies have an advantage because they're much better at coding and developing software.
01:01:56.000So one way, in addition to the trade steps, the Huawei steps, that we are going to make sure that there is a secure 5G network is by enabling U.S. companies to compete at the software level.
01:02:09.000And that's a free market way of doing it.
01:02:11.000And so currently, do you think there are risks to the United States with the 5G infrastructure in our country?
01:02:19.000We are taking concrete steps to mitigate and address it.
01:02:23.000China Telecom, for instance, is one company that may ultimately be controlled by the communist regime that right now is connected to the U.S. network.
01:02:29.000Department of Justice has asked the FCC to start a proceeding to revoke their authorization, effectively kick them out of the U.S.
01:02:36.000And we are right now engaged in our proceeding to take a look at whether we should do that.
01:03:18.000Again, the type of misinformation we're seeing about 5G and health effects is no different than what we saw with 4G, with 3G, with AM and FM radio before.
01:03:28.000There are dozens and dozens of studies.
01:03:29.000The FDA has listed them all out there that reached the same conclusion about the safety of 5G.
01:03:37.000So the FCC is overseeing this continuation of the building out of the American grid.
01:03:47.000And so if Europe doesn't change, would you support us sharing our information then with them if they continue to be purchased by Huawei?
01:03:55.000This ultimately would be a call for the State Department or for DOD, but I do think that they have indicated that if they continue to go down this path, even Canada, I think there's been some issues with, that there would be a serious reconsideration of information sharing.
01:04:11.000So you've also been very vocal against Adam Schiff.
01:04:27.000If you look at the impeachment report, the impeachment report indicates that Chairman Schiff issued a subpoena for call records to a number of people in government and outside of government.
01:04:40.000And this has to do with a provision of law that we implement at the FCC.
01:04:44.000There is a law that protects call records.
01:04:47.000So call records are the numbers you dial from your phone, how long those calls last, the date of those calls.
01:04:53.000We've described that information at the FCC as highly sensitive information.
01:04:59.000Congress can have an avenue to getting at some of that information, but Chairman Schiff issued a subpoena for call records and obtained 4,000 pages worth of call records.
01:05:11.000What's interesting is that he did it in a way that completely avoided any chance for judicial review.
01:05:19.000Historically, when Chairman Schiff himself and others in Congress have tried to get call records on everyday Americans, they provided some public notice that they were doing it.
01:05:29.000That public notice then gave people the right to exercise their legal right to go to court to say, you can't get my call record.
01:05:36.000We've seen that play out with the Trump administration.
01:05:39.000Schiff said, I'm going to get Trump's tax returns, so I'm issuing a subpoena to Trump's accounting firm and to his bank.
01:05:49.000The fact that Schiff said that publicly enabled the Trump administration to go to court, and they've now successfully blocked the release of those call records.
01:05:56.000In the case that I've been working on, Chairman Schiff secretly issued a subpoena to one telecom carrier without notice to notice to the underlying consumer.
01:06:09.000Those call records were turned over to Schiff.
01:06:12.000So I think the question ultimately for the American people is: are we comfortable that one political party can have unchecked, unreviewable authority to pull our call records?
01:06:24.000So I think whether it's Congress needing to engage in some reforms itself or courts needing to take a look at that, I think it's an important question that has yet to be answered.
01:06:33.000I wrote a letter to Chairman Schiff, but I never heard back.
01:06:36.000Wouldn't it be a violation of the Fourth Amendment?
01:06:39.000So that's another interesting question is who owns those records and how do you get them?
01:06:46.000The subpoena that was issued could potentially have been a lawful way of getting them, but there's a lot that's still unknown about the subpoena that was issued.
01:06:54.000The FCC also issued a $225 million fine on a robocall issue.
01:07:22.000Robocalls is something that we do have jurisdiction over the FCC.
01:07:25.000And robocalls are something that I get.
01:07:27.000It's the one issue that when I walk down the street in my neighborhood, my neighbors literally throw their window up and yell at me about why I'm not doing more to stop robocalls.
01:08:02.000This particular case, I believe, was one where they were not only placing the robocalls illegally, but were pitching fake health insurance sort of proposals.
01:08:10.000So they're not just annoying, but oftentimes they're used to defraud Americans.
01:08:14.000And did you do that in conjunction with the FTC?
01:08:18.000We sometimes work with the FTC, and then in some cases, we work with whether it's the FBI or Department of Justice from an enforcement perspective.
01:08:26.000So, I mean, I think that if you could solve the robocall issue, again, you could be elected pope.
01:08:31.000So what else are you working on at the FCC that you think it's critical for our audience to be aware of?
01:08:36.000What other issues are you involved in and things that you're concerned about in the direction of our country?
01:08:41.000Well, you know, I think 5G is a big one, and I think we've helped secure U.S. leadership from that perspective.
01:09:37.000You have Bluetooth connected blood glucose monitors for people with diabetes.
01:09:40.000So we're seeing this big shift in healthcare from brick and mortar facilities to distributed that we've been playing a supporting role at the FCC.
01:09:48.000HHS has been doing a great job cutting red tape, reorienting reimbursement, licensing issues.
01:09:54.000So I think that's one thing that when we come out of this COVID-19 pandemic is a set of regulatory reforms that I hope as a country we keep because it drives down healthcare costs dramatically and improved results for patients.
01:10:05.000So what you're saying is that the telehealth revolution could potentially lower the cost of health care.
01:10:21.000Now you have devices, and I've seen them myself.
01:10:24.000This goes back to Ruleville, Mississippi.
01:10:26.000I met a woman there named Miss Annie, and she noticed her first signs of diabetes when she woke up one morning with blurred vision.
01:10:32.000She tried traditional care regimes, and it wasn't working.
01:10:35.000And they sent her home with an iPad and a Bluetooth-enabled blood glucose monitor.
01:10:39.000Every morning she'd prick her finger and her iPad would register her A1C number and give her instant feedback: eat this, don't eat this, exercise, don't exercise.
01:10:48.000And her A1C level came down, and she said she never felt better.
01:10:51.000So I think replicating that model is what we were trying to do with the FCC.
01:10:56.000What would she have done prior to that technology?0.99
01:10:59.000Prior, you would have to get a very different type of treatment.0.60
01:11:22.000And she would drive to the hospital and they would sort of check her numbers, but she stopped going because it was a pain to drive there, a pain to get the appointment.
01:12:00.000So HHS, CMS did a lot of work from a licensing and a reimbursement perspective, right?
01:12:05.000We had these old school rules that said, you know, if you're working in Georgia, you know, you can't see a patient remotely in South Carolina because all kinds of incumbency reasons, all kinds of licensing reasons.
01:12:17.000And we started to chop away finally at some of those regulatory structures that made it more difficult for people to access healthcare remotely.
01:12:25.000Think about mental health care in this country.
01:12:26.000I was on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.
01:12:28.000It sits right along the border of South Dakota and Nebraska, hundreds and hundreds of miles from the big city in that area of Sioux Falls.
01:12:35.000Mental health care is a challenge in every community, including there.
01:12:39.000Well, now you can have this video visit where you can remotely connect with a mental health care professional across state lines and receive high quality care.
01:12:47.000You can address opioid dependency through mental health and behavioral health counseling, through pain management specialists.
01:12:54.000So I think telehealth, remote patient monitoring is the future of healthcare, and we're starting to support that at the FCC and in other agencies.
01:13:03.000So the FCC is also involved at times, if I'm ready, if I'm not mistaken, about certain issues, ATT and some of these big telecom companies.
01:13:47.000There's some in Europe, for instance, that have, go back to net neutrality, that the sort of Title II utility-style regulation approach in Europe.
01:13:55.000And what happened there is that decreases investment.
01:13:57.000U.S. providers have a tendency to invest twice as much in their network per person than their counterparts in Europe.
01:14:05.000That investment paid off during this stress test.
01:14:08.000We saw anywhere from a 20 to 30% spike in traffic levels with people shifting to working from home with almost no degradation in quality.
01:14:18.000So it was a surprise stress test to the system that the regulatory regime that we've all been putting in place the last couple of years really paid off.
01:14:27.000So if we would have done the net neutrality nonsense and made the internet a utility, we might not have been able to have the flow of information we enjoyed during this.
01:14:38.000It was the greatest stress test imaginable on the internet, right?
01:14:40.000Yeah, if you ever wanted to put this whole debate about Title II in the rearview mirror, it won't happen because political activists are engaged in it.
01:14:49.000This would be the final nail in the coffin.
01:14:52.000This COVID-19 pandemic from a network perspective was just a crucible in it should burn away all of these sort of partisan political ideas like Title II and focus on what matters, investing in the network.
01:15:06.000The first two years of this administration, the digital divide, the percentages of Americans that don't have access to high-speed internet narrowed by about 30%.
01:15:14.000Last year alone, more miles of high-speed fiber, some 400,000, were built out into the ground.
01:15:20.000That's enough to wrap around the earth 18 times.
01:15:22.000So the policies that the administration of the FCC put in place in 2017 that got internet providers to let it rip, to build, to invest, is what held us in such good stead during this pandemic.
01:15:36.000So something in the last couple of days that's breaking, there's been a lot of demands from the Black Lives Matter mob and from the far left wing to try to enforce these all sorts of different things.
01:16:17.000Perversely, some of our rules are having the opposite effect.
01:16:20.000So we have these media regulations that have been on the books since the 60s or 70s that limit who can own TV stations or limit how many TV stations you can own.
01:16:29.000It's like 28% or something of a specific type market or something, right?
01:16:55.000But the vast majority has shifted online.
01:16:57.000And so we have these rules at the FCC designed to promote localism that stop the investment in local stations that you need to maintain localism.
01:17:06.000So it's been a backwards-looking approach that we've been trying to reverse at the FCC, but we've been stymied a bit by the courts along the way.
01:17:14.000So do you guys get into the original talk radio provisions that allow talk radio to be what it is?
01:17:20.000In a sense, there has been for years the left has tried to repeal the idea that you can have conservative talk radio, that you must have, and you'd know this better than I would, but there's a provision in the law that says if you do news broadcasting, it has to be somewhat the equal, the fairness doctrine.
01:18:09.000I think it was actually, in some ways, it was formally taken off the books not that long ago, but it could have been the 80s or the 90s when we had got rid of the...
01:18:18.000That helped the rise of Rush Limbaugh and people like that.
01:18:22.000Equally, you've had CNN and all of them for the void on the other side.
01:18:25.000Interesting, when you look at things like the fairness doctrine, net neutrality, those things that sound, oh, that's yeah, I'm for net neutrality, I'm for fairness.
01:18:31.000But when you look at the application of it, it is very different.
01:18:34.000So, some of the branding is very different than reality, and the fairness doctrine was certainly one of those.
01:18:39.000So, you at the FCC, you guys are the arbiter of communication dialogue in a lot of ways of somebody's of what could be said on the airwaves and what cannot be said.
01:19:38.000But where that line Congress drew is unclear.
01:19:41.000And so the FCC stepping in to provide clarity is very different than us, you know, becoming the speech police, whether it's for social media companies or for broadcasters.
01:19:50.000Well, one thing I would love to do FCC or somewhere else to dive into is to enforce some form of neutrality into national public radio or PBS is the amount of money we fund these companies, and they're anything but fair.
01:20:02.000And they are publicly funded, Trump-hating networks.
01:20:05.000I don't know if that involves you, you guys, or, you know.
01:20:26.000I interned for a commissioner called Commissioner Abernathy, and I would sit in the intern sort of pen in her office.
01:20:35.000And through obviously a whole bunch of twists of fates, I'm now a commissioner and I have the exact same office that Commissioner Abernathy has.
01:20:42.000So every day that I go to work, I walk past the intern pen where I started out into the back room of the commissioner's office.
01:22:49.000You got to take that leap of faith and always bet on yourself, if you're worth betting on, that you can make something of the new opportunity.
01:22:57.000You're fighting for the freedom of expression and free speech every day.
01:23:00.000Anything else at the FCC or that you want to share with our listeners?
01:23:03.000You know, as we talk about sort of 5G and national security, you know, one thing that I think that does tie back to is the communist regime of China.
01:23:11.000And the question for 5G is: if a company is under the thumb of the communist regime, are there trustworthy to be in our network?
01:23:18.000And I think if you look at what's happened with COVID-19, any claim that an entity that is fully under the thumb of the communist regime can be trusted has been obliterated.
01:23:28.000The communist regime put out active disinformation about COVID-19 early on.
01:23:33.000And I've written about this a little bit.
01:23:37.000You know, the communist regime has said that they can't be held responsible for the global spread of COVID for a few reasons.
01:23:44.000One of the reasons they point to is this vaunted Wuhan lockdown.
01:23:47.000They said, we immediately locked down Wuhan.
01:23:50.000They locked down Wuhan at the end of January.
01:23:53.000In those three weeks leading up to the Wuhan lockdown, 7 million people left Wuhan, including infected people, including people on international flights.
01:24:03.000When 7 million people out of a city of 11 million leave a city, that's not how you stop a global pandemic.
01:24:10.000That is how you start a global pandemic.
01:24:13.000And then the immediate aftermath of that, they continue to use the WHO as their propaganda mouthpiece, putting misinformation out to the world, slowing down the global response.
01:24:24.000So I think all of us that are in a position in government, and mine comes in part from the role that we play with reviewing entities controlled by the communist regime, should be speaking out and speaking the truth about what happened with the communist regime, because part of it ties back to free speech as well.
01:24:41.000The regime disappeared its own people that tried to warn the world early on.
01:24:47.000And we've seen that time and time again.
01:24:50.000Well, Brendan, thank you for your leadership for our country.
01:24:55.000We need more people like you, especially in our government.