The Charlie Kirk Show - Is 5G Dangerous? Social Media Censorship, How To Beat China In Tech Cold War, And MORE with FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr

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00:00:08.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.

00:00:10.000 Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campuses.

00:00:12.000 I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.

00:00:15.000 Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.

00:00:19.000 I want to thank Charlie.

00:00:20.000 He's an incredible guy.

00:00:21.000 His 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.

00:00:29.000 We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.

00:00:38.000 That's why we are here.

00:00:41.000 Hey, everybody.

00:00:42.000 We're honored to be here with Brendan Carr from the FCC, board member of the FCC.

00:00:47.000 We're going to get into all sorts of really fun and interesting issues today.

00:00:51.000 You 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.

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00:01:06.000 Type it in, type Charlie Kirk Show.

00:01:07.000 Brendan, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.

00:01:08.000 Great to be with you.

00:01:09.000 Thanks for having me.

00:01:10.000 So tell us, what does the FCC do?

00:01:13.000 Well, it's a really exciting time to be at the FCC.

00:01:15.000 So 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.

00:01:24.000 So 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.

00:01:39.000 So you were outspoken recently in favor of the president's executive order on social media.

00:01:46.000 And you spoke out and some people thought it was meaningless or superfluous.

00:01:51.000 Tell us why you supported the president's executive order on the tech companies and the importance of free speech online and in digital communication.

00:02:01.000 Yeah, I really welcome the president's executive order on social media.

00:02:04.000 Look, free speech is under threat right now.

00:02:08.000 There are some of the most powerful corporations in the history of the world, social media companies.

00:02:15.000 They have more control over speech today than any entity that history has ever known.

00:02:22.000 And what the president's executive order would do would call for the FCC to take a look at a law called Section 230.

00:02:29.000 And Section 230 is a law passed in the 1990s that singled out one set of actors, social media companies today, for special treatment.

00:02:39.000 And it takes that group and it gives them legal immunity that other political actors don't enjoy.

00:02:44.000 And look, Twitter, Jack Dorsey, all these other companies, they have every right under the First Amendment to speak their own minds.

00:02:53.000 What 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.

00:03:03.000 They 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.

00:03:13.000 So they have every right to express their political views.

00:03:15.000 What 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.

00:03:22.000 So 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.

00:03:31.000 And at the FCC, whether there's a need to take a look at Section 230 as well.

00:03:36.000 So let's talk about the deceptive business practices.

00:03:38.000 That's very interesting because 230 has kind of now gotten into the zeitgeist.

00:03:42.000 And I wrote an op-ed to the Washington Post saying that 230 should be repealed, platform versus publisher.

00:03:47.000 When 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.

00:03:58.000 They could be classified as a fraudulent enterprise.

00:04:01.000 Right.

00:04:01.000 I 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.

00:04:11.000 So, look, any business in this country that holds itself out is accountable.

00:04:15.000 These platforms have made very public representations that they don't engage in systemic political bias.

00:04:22.000 They represent this to Congress, they make the statements everywhere else.

00:04:25.000 People rely on those statements to use their platforms.

00:04:28.000 Well, 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.

00:04:36.000 Again, this has nothing to do with Twitter or Jack Dorsey's own First Amendment rights.

00:04:41.000 But if you are going to hold yourself out as a politically neutral platform, you should be held accountable to that.

00:04:47.000 Correct.

00:04:48.000 And if you aren't politically neutral, then you must state that you're not politically neutral.

00:04:54.000 Yeah, you really can't have it both ways.

00:04:56.000 What we're seeing is people say, look, these are private entities.

00:05:00.000 If they want to be politically biased, they can.

00:05:02.000 Well, they can't have it both ways.

00:05:03.000 You 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.

00:05:12.000 You don't get to have it both ways.

00:05:13.000 And 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.

00:05:25.000 Yeah, so the equivalent would be misleading business practices of any sort where you tell the consumer something you are not.

00:05:33.000 It would be an airline that says that they are going to be on time and they know they won't.

00:05:37.000 It would be deceiving the consumer or misapplication of standards of labeling or anything.

00:05:42.000 The FTC does all sorts of different front-facing consumer advocacy.

00:05:47.000 I think they go too far, quite honestly, too many times as a limited government, you know, free market guy.

00:05:52.000 But I also believe believe one of the reasons I believe in limited government as a philosophically is I believe in limited power.

00:06:01.000 Because government, as the founders theorized, was the ultimate form of power.

00:06:07.000 Now, what if the tech companies are more powerful than government?

00:06:10.000 Does that warrant using instruments of government power or courts to then go after these tech companies?

00:06:19.000 Look, I'm with you.

00:06:20.000 I think I start from the position of limited government.

00:06:25.000 And I don't support regulatory action that's going to make problems at the end of the day worse.

00:06:30.000 What 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.

00:06:39.000 And frankly, this is a bipartisan issue.

00:06:41.000 It doesn't seem like it.

00:06:42.000 But earlier this year, vice president, now presidential candidate Biden said that we should repeal or revoke Section 230 immediately.

00:06:51.000 Got very little coverage.

00:06:52.000 Now, when President Trump says that we should look at revising Section 230, it gets a lot of coverage.

00:06:56.000 So Biden says we should repeal 230.

00:06:58.000 Biden's position is we should repeal 230.

00:07:00.000 Now, for many people right now.

00:07:01.000 Did he misspeak?

00:07:03.000 He's doubled down on this recently as well.

00:07:05.000 Many people right now, their North Star when it comes to political or legal issues is Orange Man Bad.

00:07:11.000 And 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.

00:07:19.000 Biden says it should be revoked immediately.

00:07:21.000 Why would Biden say that, do you think?

00:07:23.000 Because a lot of his biggest contributors are the tech companies.

00:07:27.000 You 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.

00:07:27.000 Yeah.

00:07:40.000 One place that they've been looking is social media companies for the crime, in their view, of staying too neutral in the 2016 election.

00:07:48.000 So 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.

00:07:58.000 And 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.

00:08:11.000 2020 has been a year that none of us will forget.

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00:08:59.000 So you wrote in this press release in favor of the executive order.

00:09:03.000 You said the federal government has provided virtually no guidance on the good faith limitation Congress included in Section 230.

00:09:10.000 And so you say you welcome the executive order.

00:09:13.000 So when I understand this guidance that Congress passed is so open-ended, is that correct?

00:09:18.000 Basically, it's open to regulatory interpretation.

00:09:21.000 Yeah, so flash back to the 1990s.

00:09:23.000 This is when people had Prodigy messaging boards of the day.

00:09:27.000 That is when Congress passed Section 230.

00:09:29.000 They had Prodigy Messaging Board in mind.

00:09:31.000 And it said, good faith, what is that's a whole separate podcast?

00:09:38.000 The 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.

00:09:49.000 By implication, that means there is a category of conduct that Congress identified called bad faith conduct.

00:09:54.000 Well, again, flash forward 20 plus years.

00:09:57.000 The Prodigy Messaging Board is now the most powerful social media companies in the world.

00:10:03.000 And there's been virtually no guidance about that line that Congress drew.

00:10:06.000 And this goes to the First Amendment.

00:10:07.000 A 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.

00:10:15.000 And that's a mistake.

00:10:16.000 There's three things going on here.

00:10:17.000 The First Amendment, everybody has a First Amendment right.

00:10:20.000 Private entities have a First Amendment right.

00:10:22.000 Section 230 is a set of legal privileges and immunities above and beyond the First Amendment that only some political actors get.

00:10:29.000 There is no First Amendment right to Section 230.

00:10:33.000 So you can revise, you can revoke Section 230 without infringing First Amendment rights.

00:10:38.000 And then the third bucket, as we've been talking about, are these terms of service.

00:10:41.000 So that's how you analyze it from a legal perspective.

00:10:44.000 Everyone has First Amendment rights.

00:10:46.000 Only some political actors get 230 rights.

00:10:49.000 And then they also have this bucket of legal terms and conditions that the Federal Trade Commission could take a look at.

00:10:54.000 So I've been on Twitter since 2011.

00:10:56.000 I've tweeted 42,600 times.

00:10:59.000 1.7 million Twitter followers about to be 1.8.

00:11:02.000 We lost 42,600 tweets.

00:11:06.000 If Twitter deleted my profile completely, what happens to all the intellectual property?

00:11:13.000 In law, you could have a precedent almost of squatters' rights.

00:11:17.000 What happened to all that work I put into that platform?

00:11:21.000 Do 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.

00:11:37.000 That's your property.

00:11:38.000 I 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?

00:11:47.000 Well, I think some of this goes to the bait and switch.

00:11:49.000 When 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.

00:12:00.000 And 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.

00:12:07.000 That's why I think at this point in time, doing nothing is just not an option.

00:12:13.000 I think that's why it was welcome news for the president's issue, Section 230.

00:12:17.000 Look, 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.

00:12:33.000 We shouldn't do anything about the powerful corporations and their control over speech because they say these are private platforms.

00:12:40.000 I get it.

00:12:41.000 I sort of came to politics and policy late in life and was really attracted to some of these libertarian ideas.

00:12:47.000 I've read all their books.

00:12:48.000 And at this point, though, what's odd, though, is they're not advocating for a free market, defending a skewed market.

00:12:55.000 And not only just 230, think back to competition law.

00:12:58.000 So 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.

00:13:13.000 And we had antitrust policy and competition policy that I don't think was fit for what we were seeing.

00:13:19.000 And here's part of what I mean.

00:13:21.000 A lot of competition policy sort of has a status quo bias.

00:13:26.000 They tend to see things the way they are now and they don't understand where technology is going.

00:13:30.000 I'll give you two examples.

00:13:32.000 One, we saw at the FCC.

00:13:33.000 We had this Sprint-T-Mobile merger that we reviewed.

00:13:36.000 A lot of people saw Sprint and they said it's a fourth competitor.

00:13:39.000 We don't want to lose a fourth competitor.

00:13:42.000 But 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.

00:13:48.000 We have two big competitors in Wireless, ATT and Verizon, and T-Mobile was sort of an upstart competitor.

00:13:54.000 But Sprint was kind of barely hanging on.

00:13:56.000 So 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.

00:14:04.000 But a lot of the antitrust theory would assume and take the snapshot in time that Sprint stays alive.

00:14:08.000 Flashback to when Facebook buys Instagram.

00:14:13.000 A lot of people look at that and they say, well, Instagram is an interesting photo sharing app.

00:14:17.000 Little did they know that given three or four years' time or less than that, it would have been an immense competitor to Facebook.

00:14:25.000 So in fact, I think the Federal Trade Commission right now is doing a look back to take a look at some of that.

00:14:29.000 All that goes to show is when you're defending the status quo, you're defending it against an already tilted regulatory regime.

00:14:37.000 So 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.

00:14:45.000 Well, 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.

00:15:03.000 And I've read a lot of these books and they're quite compelling.

00:15:05.000 I 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.

00:15:13.000 That's a different point.

00:15:14.000 However, that's what the legislation was built around was trust busting.

00:15:17.000 Now, the issue is it's very hard to apply the Sherman Antitrust Act if a company is not exploiting its consumers based on price.

00:15:26.000 They're not price gouging.

00:15:27.000 They're not.

00:15:28.000 Now, the problem is that people say, well, there's no price, there's no cost.

00:15:33.000 I say, well, if you can't find what it costs you to use it, you're the product, not the consumer.

00:15:41.000 They're selling you.

00:15:42.000 They're actually selling you to a company.

00:15:45.000 So, 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.

00:16:05.000 And 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.

00:16:16.000 Yeah, 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.

00:16:24.000 To your point, the amount of data that is now collected by these companies, even today, people really don't even know.

00:16:30.000 So, 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.

00:16:38.000 If 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.

00:16:47.000 It is tracking data on you.

00:16:49.000 Even today, when people have some sort of awareness of big data, they don't know the true scope of the collection practices.

00:16:55.000 And this wasn't an accident.

00:16:56.000 Again, go back to sort of the Obama-Biden administration.

00:16:59.000 Back then at the FCC, where I work, there's this big debate about privacy.

00:17:04.000 What is the biggest privacy threat to consumers?

00:17:07.000 Is it internet service providers or is it social media companies?

00:17:11.000 Who collects more data?

00:17:12.000 And 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.

00:17:20.000 It's only a glimpse.

00:17:21.000 What we need to be concerned about is the internet service providers.

00:17:24.000 And 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.

00:17:34.000 The revolving door between the Obama administration and Silicon Valley simply never stopped swinging.

00:17:42.000 And some of those very same people are now backing Vice President Biden's run.

00:17:46.000 And 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.

00:18:05.000 Are you guys being crushed by the cartel of the colleges?

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00:19:29.000 So let me ask you a question.

00:19:31.000 Who do you think is more powerful, the United States government or Google?

00:19:35.000 When it comes to free speech, you certainly see big tech exercising a lot more influence over what people can say.

00:19:42.000 And I speak about this a lot from a free speech perspective to, in some ways, to differentiate it from the First Amendment, right?

00:19:48.000 So we have private platforms to which the First Amendment doesn't apply.

00:19:54.000 But we've never seen an entity, government or otherwise, in this country that has more control over speech.

00:20:00.000 And I think this ties into another point that we're seeing right now.

00:20:03.000 Whether 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.

00:20:16.000 And I think this organization sees it more than anyone else.

00:20:19.000 You 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.

00:20:28.000 I mean, how did universities go from places where you should be exposed to diverse views to pushing back on diverse views?

00:20:35.000 Well, that culture moved from college campuses to a lot of social media companies that then replicated that same type of culture.

00:20:43.000 And 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.

00:20:58.000 You 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.

00:21:10.000 And he was fired.

00:21:12.000 20 years.

00:21:13.000 And 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.

00:21:27.000 There 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.

00:21:39.000 And he said, we need to push back on that.

00:21:42.000 And he said that diversity of opinion is the lifeblood of democracy.

00:21:48.000 The minute we insist that everybody think the same way that we think, our democratic way of life is in jeopardy.

00:21:56.000 This was an editorial board member of the New York Times.

00:21:59.000 He was the one that launched the modern day op-ed in 1970, September of 1970.

00:22:06.000 They want to invite diversity of opinions, and they expressly said this stuff is not going to always represent views that we agree with.

00:22:15.000 Flash forward 50 years, 1970 to 2020, rest in peace for that type of embrace of diversity of views.

00:22:24.000 New York Times invented the op-ed and then it kills the op-ed.

00:22:27.000 Right.

00:22:28.000 That is the stormy the bastille of the radical left that starts on campuses.

00:22:32.000 The other interesting wrinkle of that story is the page that was opposite of the editorials back then were obituaries.

00:22:38.000 And that was a big revenue generator for these papers.

00:22:41.000 So it's kind of ironic that what started as an obituary page is now going to be home to sort of dead ideas and a lack of diversity.

00:22:50.000 A bit of a full circle in some ways.

00:22:54.000 So 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.

00:23:06.000 They use it as sensationalist shields to protect their corporate incumbency, basically.

00:23:13.000 I 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?

00:23:25.000 Like that's it's laughable.

00:23:28.000 It'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.

00:23:44.000 But do they actually believe in Locke and natural rights?

00:23:49.000 Now, of course not.

00:23:50.000 Nothing in their entire ideological worldview does it, or their philosophical worldview, I should say, does it reflect that?

00:23:56.000 And 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.

00:24:23.000 That same philosophy is now running Google.

00:24:26.000 So explain me to this.

00:24:27.000 Explain this to me.

00:24:29.000 We're supposed to act now that the Google employees are going to never act impartially, whereas this same mob acts impartially everywhere.

00:24:39.000 Look, I think diversity of thought has rarely been under as much assault as it is right now.

00:24:47.000 And there are all sorts of ways in which ideas are being shut down.

00:24:51.000 Let's look at political memes to start.

00:24:55.000 I have this saying that is disinformation is the new disinformation.

00:25:00.000 And 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.

00:25:11.000 And what you see are people taking political memes.

00:25:14.000 One of the first ones that I saw do this, I think you guys may have been involved.

00:25:17.000 This was a viral video of Nancy Pelosi tearing up the State of the Union speech.

00:25:24.000 You had political actors step in and call it disinformation misinformation. 0.52

00:25:29.000 The House responded to our video.

00:25:31.000 Yeah.

00:25:33.000 This is political meme.

00:25:35.000 Political meme, political satire goes back to the very foundations of government.

00:25:39.000 It goes back to Ben Franklin, even before that.

00:25:42.000 Why is it effective?

00:25:43.000 It is effective because it sidelines traditional gatekeepers and speaks directly to the people.

00:25:51.000 And 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.

00:26:03.000 You don't need that middleman to translate for you what's going on because the political meme draws you into the conversation.

00:26:10.000 So we now have the Washington Post fact checker that's giving four Pinocchios to different memes.

00:26:16.000 I spoke out even on the Bloomberg campaign.

00:26:19.000 He 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.

00:26:33.000 And people fact check that.

00:26:35.000 Well, there weren't actually crickets on the stage.

00:26:36.000 Of course, crickets didn't take to the stage and start chirping.

00:26:40.000 What's happening here is people are not concerned that this is disinformation.

00:26:43.000 They're not concerned that people are going to be fooled by Pelosi ripping up this speech, which actually happens.

00:26:49.000 They're not going to think people.

00:26:50.000 It wasn't edited.

00:26:51.000 Right.

00:26:51.000 They're not going to think that people actually crickets came to the stage.

00:26:55.000 What they're concerned about is that it's going to be effective.

00:26:58.000 They're concerned that their jobs, their place in terms of determining the political narrative is getting minimized.

00:27:05.000 And 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.

00:27:15.000 That's a very different point that I've heard recently, and it's a very important one.

00:27:19.000 Because 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.

00:27:28.000 Instead, they're worried that their opinion isn't more predominant in the zeitgeist.

00:27:34.000 I think that's right.

00:27:34.000 You know, fact-checking many times is simply opinion editorializing.

00:27:42.000 I think we saw that with some of the fact-check labels that were placed on some of the president's tweets.

00:27:48.000 I think Twitter put a label on that said one of his tweets was glorification of violence.

00:27:52.000 It just didn't seem to line up with the tweet that the president said. 0.78

00:27:56.000 Well, and also, they allow Hamas to have a Twitter account. 0.57

00:27:59.000 They allow the Chinese Communist Party to have a Twitter account.

00:28:02.000 And we know the Chinese Communist Party advertises with six figures in Twitter, amongst other media companies.

00:28:09.000 Twitter allows Antifa videos to stay up, smashing of people's buildings and homes.

00:28:16.000 I don't understand how that's not glorification of violence.

00:28:19.000 But the president says something that is really not anything more than just calling what is happening in the country.

00:28:28.000 And meanwhile, Twitter employs Antifa members.

00:28:30.000 It's important to remember that.

00:28:33.000 And so there's people that are wondering what legislatively or what realistically is going to happen with this issue.

00:28:42.000 Because the cynic side of me is that these companies are more powerful than our government.

00:28:47.000 They spend $30, $40 million a year on lobbying, of which is political contributions indirectly through lobbyists.

00:28:54.000 They control public opinion immensely.

00:28:58.000 What's going to prevent them from shutting us all down?

00:29:01.000 Look, there's no question that they're tremendously powerful.

00:29:03.000 And 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.

00:29:14.000 Republicans must be thoroughly defeated.

00:29:16.000 Democrats must win.

00:29:18.000 This is the same person who says, if you have an issue with content moderation at Twitter, I am ultimately the one responsible.

00:29:23.000 And 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?

00:29:33.000 Or look at Facebook.

00:29:35.000 In a lot of ways, I give sort of Zuckerberg some credit.

00:29:37.000 I think his instincts have been right on a lot of issues.

00:29:40.000 And so I say Zuckerberg is right.

00:29:42.000 Facebook is wrong.

00:29:43.000 Because despite Zuckerberg's instinct, we still see some missteps from Facebook.

00:29:47.000 And his instinct was right.

00:29:48.000 I 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.

00:29:57.000 Subsequently, I think Facebook made him sort of turn heel and take a different approach on that.

00:30:02.000 And you see it on free speech.

00:30:03.000 He's taken a different approach than Twitter.

00:30:05.000 He'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.

00:30:16.000 Because here's the thing: there is no oracle of truth.

00:30:20.000 When you talk about content moderation on social media, these are people in power that are making these decisions.

00:30:26.000 And they're people that are either fallible or they're biased.

00:30:30.000 That's why I embrace this concept of more speech, more ideas, empowering users.

00:30:35.000 So one idea that I've talked about is this idea of turning off the bias filters.

00:30:39.000 So 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.

00:30:48.000 If you want MSNBC to check everything before you see it in Facebook, fine, go into your settings, you know, flip that button.

00:30:54.000 But if you don't, if you want to be able to decide for yourselves, let's empower people to make that decision for themselves.

00:30:59.000 That's one reform that I've put out there.

00:31:01.000 I think this Section 230 executive order is going to be very important.

00:31:05.000 I think the Federal Trade Commission signaling through Commissioner Wilson that they can take a look at this and it's important.

00:31:11.000 The FCC, where I work, is going to get a petition on this issue that we are going to take up.

00:31:17.000 But it's troubling.

00:31:18.000 I 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,

00:31:44.000 which 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.

00:31:52.000 And then, of course, you have an issue of international actors that are also on the platform and all that.

00:31:55.000 I recognize that.

00:31:57.000 But the question is: should platform access be a civil right?

00:32:01.000 And so people say, well, it's a private company.

00:32:03.000 You can't do it.

00:32:03.000 I say, okay, let's heard that argument.

00:32:06.000 I got it.

00:32:07.000 But can you realistically petition your government if you don't have access to Twitter, Facebook, or Google?

00:32:12.000 Can you realistically do that?

00:32:13.000 Okay, you could do a protest outside of Capitol Hill.

00:32:16.000 No one's going to see that.

00:32:17.000 Got it.

00:32:18.000 But doesn't the Constitution say that you have a right given to you by God to petition your grievances and redress your government?

00:32:25.000 And so, how could you possibly, in this world, communicate with your lawmakers without having access to these platforms?

00:32:38.000 You know, there's an interesting area of law that I think you've talked about, which is sort of public accommodation law.

00:32:46.000 And 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.

00:32:56.000 And it's an interesting question that I've not fully grappled with or explored myself.

00:32:59.000 But do those types of public accommodation laws apply to social media platforms?

00:33:05.000 And if so, if you are accessing it through DC, does the DC public accommodation law, which prohibits political discrimination, does that apply?

00:33:13.000 Is that something that can be looked at through Section 230 when the FCC takes that petition up?

00:33:18.000 I think those are interesting avenues.

00:33:19.000 Well, 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.

00:33:31.000 I'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?

00:33:39.000 Because you can only create law for the sovereign of our country.

00:33:43.000 However, I think there is something to be said, though, that the worst parts of social media are anonymous accounts.

00:33:48.000 Like that's the worst experience of it.

00:33:50.000 I think it's fair to say.

00:33:52.000 Secondly, every human being should have the right to be able to speak where the conversation is happening.

00:34:02.000 So 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.

00:34:13.000 Okay.

00:34:13.000 But 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.

00:34:22.000 Whereas 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.

00:34:33.000 And so the precedent of case law probably does not exist for that constitutionally.

00:34:38.000 But 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.

00:34:49.000 Yeah, I mean, look, there's some challenges, obviously.

00:34:52.000 So anonymous speech actually has protections from sort of a First Amendment perspective.

00:34:57.000 So there's some challenges there.

00:34:58.000 But I don't think doing nothing isn't an option at this point.

00:35:01.000 I think more transparency gets to a lot of what you're talking about.

00:35:03.000 It's so much of a black hole.

00:35:05.000 So you have people on social media who are gaining followers.

00:35:09.000 They are seeing a lot of interaction on their tweets, and then all of a sudden it just sort of stops.

00:35:14.000 ALX.

00:35:15.000 How does that happen?

00:35:16.000 Alex LaRusso, right?

00:35:17.000 At ALX on Twitter, 100,000 followers, retweeted by the president.

00:35:20.000 He's a real person with his picture, and Twitter decides to digitally assassinate him.

00:35:27.000 Why is that tolerated? 0.51

00:35:29.000 I mean, if he was a Black Lives Matter activist and they just decided to digitally assassinate him, do you think that would be okay? 0.72

00:35:29.000 Who's standing? 0.72

00:35:35.000 Of course not.

00:35:36.000 Right.

00:35:39.000 That's why I think we need to bring a lot more transparency here.

00:35:42.000 That's step one.

00:35:43.000 And then step two is accountability.

00:35:45.000 Again, you know, there's some tricky issue here having to do with speech.

00:35:48.000 There's tricky issues here having to do with private platforms.

00:35:51.000 But 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.

00:36:00.000 You know, they should be accountable like any other business in this country for their conduct.

00:36:04.000 I 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.

00:36:12.000 Supreme Court or something, right?

00:36:14.000 It's interesting.

00:36:15.000 If 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.

00:36:23.000 So you think, okay, maybe there's progressive people on there, but they're probably pretty neutral.

00:36:30.000 Not at all.

00:36:31.000 If you look at who's on this board, one person is Pam Carlin. 0.87

00:36:34.000 So she testified in favor of impeaching President Trump.

00:36:38.000 She was the one that made the barren, Baron Trump joke. 0.96

00:36:42.000 She's been described by the New York Times as a full-throated liberal torchbearer. 0.92

00:36:47.000 She's the person, among others, that Facebook is tossing the keys to content moderation to ahead of the 2020 election.

00:36:54.000 Columbia law professor Jamal Green, who has fantasized about President Trump being shot, who has called his election unacceptable.

00:36:54.000 Who else?

00:37:05.000 You 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.

00:37:19.000 There's people on there that are connected to the sort of George Soros network of left-wing groups.

00:37:24.000 Safiya, Antiwa, Asare, Kaiwia.

00:37:27.000 I don't mean any offense, by the way, if I mispronounce it, but that's a tough one.

00:37:31.000 So, 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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00:38:50.000 There's a lot of momentum growing, though, on the conservative side to break these companies up.

00:38:55.000 From the FCC or from your position, do you support if it could be done, let's pretend it could be done, breaking up these companies?

00:39:05.000 You know, so Elizabeth Warren and others have called for sort of a full breakup of big tech.

00:39:09.000 They want to turn it into a public utility, which I think, I don't mean to interrupt you, it's just I feel so Marxist.

00:39:18.000 Yeah.

00:39:19.000 So I'm not there.

00:39:20.000 But I do think that there is a level of accountability that has been missing.

00:39:25.000 And there are so many people in Washington who say, again, this sort of fundamentalist, libertarian view of do nothing.

00:39:32.000 And I think the time for that has passed.

00:39:35.000 That's why I've tossed out this idea of turning off the bias filters.

00:39:38.000 That's why the executive order that Trump has put out there can lead to some concrete steps.

00:39:43.000 I'm focused more on sort of that type of reform and additional scrutiny.

00:39:49.000 So I don't see this changing anytime soon, to be honest with you.

00:39:53.000 I don't see Congress acting on it.

00:39:54.000 The tech companies have purchased Congress.

00:39:57.000 And it's just the worst company right now is Twitter.

00:40:01.000 And we're streaming live on Twitter.

00:40:03.000 Thank you all for watching on Twitter, by the way.

00:40:04.000 Hopefully still.

00:40:05.000 They're probably going to take it down.

00:40:07.000 You guys can email us, freedom at charliekirk.com, and make sure you subscribe to that link right now.

00:40:12.000 Subscribe to that podcast link.

00:40:14.000 Do me a favor.

00:40:15.000 Make the country a freer place.

00:40:18.000 I don't see this changing.

00:40:19.000 In fact, I think we need to be more aggressive against these companies.

00:40:23.000 We really do.

00:40:24.000 And Twitter and Google have been the worst by far.

00:40:28.000 Look, I think these aren't isolated incidences.

00:40:31.000 When 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.

00:40:46.000 This is just in the last 48 hours.

00:40:48.000 Yeah, there is a strong movement to shut down opposing ideas.

00:40:51.000 In fact, it's spilled over to the FCC.

00:40:53.000 So 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.

00:41:07.000 You remember when this was an issue a few weeks ago, maybe a month ago at this point?

00:41:10.000 You mean when the country wasn't burning?

00:41:11.000 Exactly.

00:41:13.000 There was a movement to pressure these television stations to stop letting the president of the United States speak directly to the people.

00:41:20.000 And that's a private sector debate that can take place.

00:41:22.000 But 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.

00:41:35.000 And of course, we turn the petition away.

00:41:37.000 But what I think this is, is this particular group, Free Press, is sending a signal.

00:41:41.000 And 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.

00:41:55.000 And so is it philosophically okay for conservatives to now use the levers of government to protect speech?

00:41:55.000 Right.

00:42:04.000 Well, this is an interesting debate.

00:42:05.000 So this is what gets back to the 230.

00:42:08.000 And I think my position is we want more speech.

00:42:11.000 And 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.

00:42:25.000 If Jack Dorsey has a political perspective, fine, speak your mind, donate your money.

00:42:30.000 But should he be weaponizing his company to go after whether it's the president or another political candidate that he doesn't like?

00:42:38.000 So one other fight you guys at the FCC picked really early was net neutrality.

00:42:43.000 Yeah.

00:42:44.000 The world was supposed to end, Brendan.

00:42:47.000 I remember.

00:42:48.000 I got the death threats to prove it.

00:42:50.000 Tell us about that.

00:42:50.000 Yeah.

00:42:52.000 So net neutrality is a spectacularly misnamed sort of left-wing political agenda.

00:43:00.000 Net neutrality, in of itself, is a concept, is actually not that disagreeable.

00:43:05.000 So, 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.

00:43:11.000 Basic rules of the road.

00:43:13.000 What happened at the end of the Obama administration is they did this massive internet power grab.

00:43:17.000 The internet has long been lightly regulated, and that has been a tremendous success story.

00:43:22.000 And for the first time ever, the Obama administration classified the internet as what we call a Title II utility service.

00:43:29.000 And as you saw, the predictions were unbelievable.

00:43:32.000 It was going to be the end of the internet.

00:43:35.000 Speeds were going to slow down.

00:43:37.000 Tweets were going to come one word at a time.

00:43:40.000 Obviously, none of that happened.

00:43:41.000 In fact, the story of the internet infrastructure in this country is one of the great, I think, undertold success stories of the administration.

00:43:50.000 Since the end of 2016, internet speeds in this country are up 85%.

00:43:55.000 Since 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%.

00:44:02.000 In 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.

00:44:17.000 President Trump, Congress, the FCC, where I work, we flipped the script.

00:44:21.000 And now the U.S. has secured the strongest 5G platform in the world.

00:44:25.000 And it's a great private sector success story.

00:44:27.000 So let's talk about 5G.

00:44:30.000 Is it safe?

00:44:32.000 Yes.

00:44:33.000 There is a tremendous amount of misinformation out there about 5G.

00:44:37.000 And I think people fall into three buckets.

00:44:40.000 People that see some of this conspiracy theories and they sort of readily dismiss it.

00:44:45.000 There's people in the middle who say, I don't know a lot about this.

00:44:48.000 I'm seeing some troubling news stories and headlines.

00:44:51.000 I'd like to learn more.

00:44:53.000 And 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.

00:45:00.000 So one of the things you hear is people say there's been no studies on the health and safety of RF emissions.

00:45:07.000 It's just not true.

00:45:08.000 There have been dozens upon dozens of studies regarding the safety of RF emissions.

00:45:13.000 In 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.

00:45:35.000 So there's an article here.

00:45:37.000 We 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.

00:45:46.000 And the guy who wrote it is pretty respectable.

00:45:49.000 And he says this: he says, 5G will employ millimeter waves the first time.

00:45:54.000 Given limited reach, 5G will require cell antennas every 100, 200 meters, exposing many people to millimeter wave radiation.

00:46:01.000 He continues by saying millimeter waves are mostly absorbed within a few millimeters of human skin.

00:46:08.000 And 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.

00:46:18.000 Yeah, it's just not the case.

00:46:19.000 So a couple things to unpack there.

00:46:22.000 People suggest that the use of what's called millimeter wave spectrum.

00:46:25.000 So to back up, there's low-band spectrum, mid-band spectrum, high-band spectrum.

00:46:29.000 High-band spectrum is millimeter wave.

00:46:30.000 High-band spectrum has been used for a long time.

00:46:32.000 It is newly being used in new ways for 5G.

00:46:35.000 But the suggestion there, when you unpack it, is that there are no health and safety standards for millimeter wave spectrum.

00:46:41.000 That's not the case.

00:46:42.000 We 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.

00:46:50.000 A lot of people also talk about this study from the National Toxicology Program.

00:46:56.000 I was going to ask about that.

00:46:57.000 That's sort of a key piece of data that a lot of these sort of conspiracy theorists go to.

00:47:04.000 A couple things there.

00:47:06.000 The NTP program exposed mice and rat to levels of radiation 75 times higher than what humans experience in the real world.

00:47:18.000 That's like taking a lab rat, tossing it off a 75-story building, and saying that humans shouldn't jump rope because of the result.

00:47:26.000 In fact, the authors of that NTP study said that exactly themselves.

00:47:30.000 You cannot extrapolate what they saw with the real world.

00:47:34.000 So let me read from that.

00:47:35.000 Is that okay?

00:47:35.000 Sure.

00:47:36.000 So it's Dr. Deborah Davis, March 14th, 2020.

00:47:39.000 And there were some people that believe there's a connection between 5G and the spread of the coronavirus.

00:47:44.000 That is a growing belief.

00:47:46.000 So here's what it says in the article.

00:47:48.000 In 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.

00:47:58.000 Within days of the report's release, well-placed articles appear debunking the findings.

00:48:02.000 Bizarrely, this $30 million government study, as well as others linking phone radiation to tumor promotion, memory, and behavioral changes do not appear.

00:48:10.000 So basically what she's saying, and it continues on, that there was the study and then there was a counter study right after it.

00:48:17.000 And she's calling it bizarre.

00:48:18.000 This is Dr. Deborah Davis from IB Times.

00:48:21.000 Yeah, 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.

00:48:27.000 They 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.

00:48:41.000 They said themselves it cannot be extended to humans based on the fact that it was 75 times level.

00:48:47.000 There's also a number of anomalies from that NTP report.

00:48:50.000 So there's four categories of animals that were used there.

00:48:53.000 Male rats, female rats, male mice, female mice.

00:48:57.000 Only one of those categories actually showed a negative finding.

00:49:01.000 And that category, male rats, I believe, actually lived longer than the controls.

00:49:08.000 So there's a lot of anomalies with that report.

00:49:10.000 And the authors themselves say you can't extrapolate that to the real world because of the power levels.

00:49:14.000 So let me ask the question, though, Brendan.

00:49:17.000 Why is it that there are so many articles and there's such a big push behind this in your estimation?

00:49:22.000 Well, it's nothing new.

00:49:23.000 So if you look back at every generation of technology, these same conspiracy theories were there.

00:49:28.000 I've gone back to the 1920s and 1930s when AM and FM radio was first getting built out.

00:49:34.000 You saw this same stuff.

00:49:35.000 You saw it with 2G, you saw it with 3G, you saw it with 4G.

00:49:38.000 We have social media now, we have the internet now, so it spreads a bit farther.

00:49:42.000 But think about it from this way, from the real world experience.

00:49:44.000 If you want to dismiss the fact that the dozens and dozens of studies that have been done that show it's safe, okay, fine.

00:49:50.000 But look at your real world experience.

00:49:52.000 1988, 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.

00:50:03.000 Over that same period of time, the incidence of brain and other nervous system cancers has declined.

00:50:10.000 If there was any correlation, you wouldn't be seeing that.

00:50:13.000 And the same with COVID.

00:50:14.000 COVID is spreading around the globe.

00:50:15.000 Obviously, it's spread by respiratory droplets, not RF emissions.

00:50:19.000 But again, put that to the side.

00:50:21.000 That is a belief that people do have.

00:50:22.000 And it's there.

00:50:25.000 That the incidences of COVID globally are not showing a correlation at all with where 5G has been built out.

00:50:32.000 So again, this type of conspiracy theory has been with us for generations.

00:50:39.000 It will stay with us for generations.

00:50:41.000 The 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.

00:50:47.000 Do you think that there might be motives from other countries to try to push an anti-5G message?

00:50:54.000 Absolutely.

00:50:55.000 There's been reports that state actors are behind this misinformation about 5G, in particular, Russia.

00:51:02.000 Russia has fallen behind the U.S. in its build out of 5G internet infrastructure.

00:51:07.000 So it is trying to sow doubts about health and safety in the U.S. to slow down the U.S. build.

00:51:12.000 So congratulations to people that have fallen for Russian disinformation on that.

00:51:17.000 Well, it's interesting.

00:51:18.000 The woman that I cited served in the Clinton administration and awarded Nobel Peace Prize.

00:51:24.000 That doesn't necessarily mean that she's right or wrong.

00:51:26.000 I mean, she believed in gravity.

00:51:27.000 That would mean she's right.

00:51:28.000 But she doesn't believe in gravity.

00:51:29.000 She was wrong.

00:51:30.000 It's not invalidated.

00:51:31.000 I bring this up, though.

00:51:32.000 She says this in the article where the article was dangers of 5G.

00:51:36.000 This is from IB Times.

00:51:37.000 This is not some, this is relatively mainstream published.

00:51:42.000 It says dangers of 5G, new technology draws concerns for the environment, public safety.

00:51:46.000 She says this.

00:51:47.000 We 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.

00:51:59.000 The last EPA report on the topic released in 86, back when a gallon of gasoline costs less than a dollar.

00:52:04.000 So she's arguing and postulating we should be more like these countries.

00:52:08.000 Yeah, I think there's a lot of misinformation there.

00:52:09.000 Again, the FDA recently put out this report that looked at studies from 2008 all the way to 2018.

00:52:17.000 It walked through in detail these health and safety studies that they claim don't exist that show that RF emissions are safe.

00:52:28.000 Again, I think look at the real world.

00:52:30.000 You know, cell phone usage has spiked.

00:52:32.000 Incidents of brain and other nervous system cancers have decreased.

00:52:37.000 So 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?

00:52:45.000 Let's put the health issues aside.

00:52:48.000 Since we have this infrastructure, what does it do to benefit the country?

00:52:52.000 Because I don't think we did a good enough job of setting that foundation.

00:52:54.000 I would think about 5G in three buckets.

00:52:55.000 And the first is actually the least interesting.

00:52:57.000 It's everything you do on your cell phone today is going to be better and faster.

00:53:00.000 You can download a movie in three minutes.

00:53:02.000 You can download a movie in seconds.

00:53:05.000 Interesting, but not that revolutionary.

00:53:08.000 The second is actually in-home broadband.

00:53:10.000 So right now, a lot of Americans feel like they have one or no choice for high-speed home internet.

00:53:14.000 Well, 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.

00:53:23.000 The 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.

00:53:30.000 The 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.

00:53:37.000 10 years ago is when we were shifting from 3G to 4G.

00:53:40.000 Think about how you got across town 10 years ago, right?

00:53:43.000 You had to call a taxi, wait for one to show up, pay exorbitant rates.

00:53:47.000 Well, 4G ushered in the app economy, Uber Lyft.

00:53:50.000 Now you have access to a ride right on your phone.

00:53:54.000 Or think about banking, right?

00:53:56.000 Oftentimes you had to go to a physical brick and mortar bank.

00:53:58.000 You had to stand in one of those rope lines.

00:54:01.000 You had to take that pen that was always lashed to the table and out of ink.

00:54:05.000 Well, now with 4G, we have Square and all kinds of money transfer apps, Venmo right on the phone.

00:54:11.000 It was a transformative experience.

00:54:13.000 But 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.

00:54:20.000 We're going to see that again with 5G.

00:54:23.000 What's a glimpse of that?

00:54:24.000 Take grocery shopping.

00:54:26.000 I hate grocery shopping, but I have to eat, so I got to go grocery shopping.

00:54:30.000 It's particularly troublesome right now with COVID and social distancing.

00:54:33.000 And 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.

00:54:39.000 So imagine with 5G, you put virtual reality goggles on and you're automatically in your own local grocery store.

00:54:46.000 Aisles that you know, you can walk through it the way that you like to walk through it.

00:54:49.000 You can pick stuff off the shelf.

00:54:51.000 That type of innovative technologies, things are going to solve pain points.

00:54:56.000 5G is the upgrade to our wireless network that we need to get there.

00:55:02.000 That was well said.

00:55:03.000 And people that are proponents of 5G talk about advanced robotics, they talk about autonomous vehicles.

00:55:10.000 But there's also a national security implication to 5G.

00:55:13.000 Yeah.

00:55:14.000 So as we shift to 5G, a couple interesting things happen.

00:55:20.000 We aren't in a world anymore where it's just email and cat videos that are going on these networks.

00:55:27.000 It is banking information.

00:55:29.000 It is healthcare information.

00:55:30.000 It is energy grid information.

00:55:33.000 If our 5G networks are insecure, everything that we value in life is insecure.

00:55:40.000 Let me give you an example.

00:55:42.000 In this job, I've tried to spend as much time as possible outside of DC.

00:55:46.000 I think there's no better way to serve in government than to get out of the beltway and hear directly from the people.

00:55:52.000 My first two years on this job, I did events in 27 states, from halfway out the Aleutian islands of Alaska to all across rural America.

00:56:01.000 On one of those trips, I went to a town, Great Falls, Montana, a couple hundred miles from the Canadian border.

00:56:08.000 It's a beautiful place.

00:56:08.000 I've been there.

00:56:10.000 It is very sparsely populated, and there's a military base there called Maelstrom Air Force Base.

00:56:16.000 That's where I met Colonel Jennifer Reeves.

00:56:18.000 In her command are 150 intercontinental ballistic missiles, and they are spread out in silos all across northern Montana.

00:56:31.000 In spending time with them, you really get a sense of the emotional gravity of their jobs.

00:56:37.000 So these missile silos spread out across nothing but big sky country and wheat fields.

00:56:43.000 Except one thing.

00:56:45.000 Dotted throughout that missile field are cell towers running Huawei gear.

00:56:51.000 High-end, high-tech, Huawei gear.

00:56:56.000 Very few people, very few reasons to justify that type of investment from a normal consumer perspective.

00:57:05.000 I think we need to treat Huawei and ZTE as nothing less than a threat to our collective security.

00:57:13.000 And we've taken concrete action at the FCC.

00:57:15.000 We've now stopped subsidized Huawei gear and ZTE gear from going into the U.S. network.

00:57:23.000 We are looking now at ripping out Huawei gear that made it into the network.

00:57:27.000 And we're taking action against Chinese-owned companies that are connected to the network today.

00:57:34.000 China 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.

00:57:41.000 And we've taken steps there.

00:57:43.000 And I think this is part of a stronger approach to China, appropriately so, that you see from this administration.

00:57:49.000 From day one in 2017, when Trump got into the White House, it was a departure from the sort of weak Biden-Obama approach to China.

00:58:01.000 And I don't mean that in a partisan sense because it was bipartisan.

00:58:04.000 Many, many administrations, Republican and Democrat, took a weak approach to China for decades.

00:58:10.000 Trump has turned the corner on that.

00:58:12.000 And 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.

00:58:28.000 So 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.

00:58:41.000 But 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?

00:58:58.000 And if so, then aren't we already parlaying our grid to Huawei-dominated? 0.73

00:59:03.000 Huawei is part of the Belt and Road initiative that the communist regime has been carrying out. 0.65

00:59:09.000 World domination.

00:59:10.000 I spent time in Nairobi, Kenya.

00:59:15.000 Actually, I went a couple hours outside of Nairobi, Kenya, this dusty small town called Nanuki.

00:59:23.000 And in the middle of this dusty small town in Nanuki, you see all these Huawei billboards.

00:59:28.000 Huawei gear is all through the African continent.

00:59:32.000 It is in many parts of South America.

00:59:35.000 And as I think you're aware, and as your question indicates, it has been a live debate in Europe.

00:59:39.000 How much Huawei gear and others do we let in?

00:59:42.000 And the U.S. has been very clear about our position.

00:59:45.000 I 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.

00:59:57.000 And 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.

01:00:04.000 Why are they hesitating, Brendan?

01:00:05.000 Why would you even allow China? 1.00

01:00:08.000 What's the advantage? 1.00

01:00:10.000 Unless you're purchased by the Chinese.

01:00:12.000 There is some concern about some influence from that perspective. 0.76

01:00:15.000 The other neutral principle you could articulate is some concern about the influence is not taking an appropriate look at the cost.

01:00:24.000 They see up front, some of the Huawei gear can be less expensive.

01:00:27.000 Because they're subsidized by the state.

01:00:29.000 Because they're subsidized, because there's slave labor, because there is IP theft.

01:00:33.000 Put that to the side for a second.

01:00:34.000 Yeah, they had no investment to make it, but go ahead.

01:00:36.000 And 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.

01:00:43.000 Oftentimes, they bought that less expensive Huawei gear, but the value proposition has to be over the long run.

01:00:49.000 How much do you value national security?

01:00:51.000 But any sense, wondering if government bureaucrats ever cared about saving money.

01:00:54.000 Well, 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.

01:01:07.000 What that doesn't understand is that Huawei sets this up in a very bespoke way.

01:01:11.000 They will fly their own communist regime communist China nationals to set up this equipment in a bespoke fashion. 0.64

01:01:22.000 So you really can't check the security vulnerabilities on the front end. 0.92

01:01:27.000 One 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.

01:01:35.000 So 4G was predominantly a hardware-based network, expensive boxes, and you need 10 of them to do each individual task.

01:01:42.000 Well, now software can do the task of those 10 different boxes.

01:01:46.000 So increasingly, 5G networks are going to be software-based networks.

01:01:49.000 And when you compete on software, U.S. companies have an advantage because they're much better at coding and developing software.

01:01:56.000 So 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.

01:02:09.000 And that's a free market way of doing it.

01:02:11.000 Sure.

01:02:11.000 And so currently, do you think there are risks to the United States with the 5G infrastructure in our country?

01:02:19.000 We are taking concrete steps to mitigate and address it.

01:02:23.000 China 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.

01:02:29.000 Department of Justice has asked the FCC to start a proceeding to revoke their authorization, effectively kick them out of the U.S.

01:02:36.000 And we are right now engaged in our proceeding to take a look at whether we should do that.

01:02:40.000 So we've taken some steps.

01:02:42.000 I think there's more that we should take.

01:02:45.000 In Europe, this is the EU, which you take it forever you want.

01:02:52.000 They're struggling with the 5G issue in far anyways.

01:02:55.000 They say they have more than 180 scientists and doctors that warn about the danger of 5G.

01:03:00.000 Germans petition parliament to stop 5G auction on health grounds.

01:03:04.000 Resolution opposing 5G by the municipality of Rome.

01:03:07.000 Netherlands Parliament asks independent investigation of 5G.

01:03:11.000 When you look at this, what do you chalk up this to chalk this to?

01:03:16.000 I think it's a variety of things.

01:03:18.000 Again, 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.

01:03:28.000 There are dozens and dozens of studies.

01:03:29.000 The FDA has listed them all out there that reached the same conclusion about the safety of 5G.

01:03:37.000 So the FCC is overseeing this continuation of the building out of the American grid.

01:03:47.000 And so if Europe doesn't change, would you support us sharing our information then with them if they continue to be purchased by Huawei?

01:03:55.000 This 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.

01:04:11.000 So you've also been very vocal against Adam Schiff.

01:04:14.000 Tell us about that.

01:04:15.000 Yeah, so it's interesting.

01:04:17.000 So Chairman Schiff has been running a secret in partisan surveillance state.

01:04:26.000 And how do we know this?

01:04:27.000 If 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.

01:04:40.000 And this has to do with a provision of law that we implement at the FCC.

01:04:44.000 There is a law that protects call records.

01:04:47.000 So call records are the numbers you dial from your phone, how long those calls last, the date of those calls.

01:04:53.000 We've described that information at the FCC as highly sensitive information.

01:04:59.000 Congress 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.

01:05:11.000 What's interesting is that he did it in a way that completely avoided any chance for judicial review.

01:05:18.000 What I mean by that is this.

01:05:19.000 Historically, 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.

01:05:29.000 That 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.

01:05:36.000 We've seen that play out with the Trump administration.

01:05:39.000 Schiff 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.

01:05:47.000 And he said that publicly.

01:05:49.000 The 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.

01:05:56.000 In 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.

01:06:09.000 Those call records were turned over to Schiff.

01:06:12.000 So 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?

01:06:24.000 So 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.

01:06:33.000 I wrote a letter to Chairman Schiff, but I never heard back.

01:06:36.000 Wouldn't it be a violation of the Fourth Amendment?

01:06:39.000 So that's another interesting question is who owns those records and how do you get them?

01:06:46.000 The 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.

01:06:54.000 The FCC also issued a $225 million fine on a robocall issue.

01:07:00.000 I don't like robocalls.

01:07:02.000 So tell me about this.

01:07:03.000 If you can solve the robocall problem in this country, your path to the presidency is just tailor-made.

01:07:11.000 There's like four issues like that.

01:07:12.000 No more traffic.

01:07:13.000 Right.

01:07:14.000 You know, make the first day of Huntington, Pennsylvania, say a white holiday.

01:07:19.000 Right.

01:07:20.000 There's like five issues.

01:07:22.000 Robocalls is something that we do have jurisdiction over the FCC.

01:07:25.000 And robocalls are something that I get.

01:07:27.000 It'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.

01:07:36.000 What I can tell you is this.

01:07:37.000 A, it's difficult, obviously, for a variety of technical reasons.

01:07:40.000 But at the FCC, we have now elevated fighting robocalls to our top enforcement priority.

01:07:45.000 And we've engaged in a number of regulatory steps aimed at breaking the back of these illegal and annoying robocalls.

01:07:53.000 And so this particular fine that you put forth is $225 million.

01:07:58.000 How many robocalls do they have to send to warrant that?

01:08:01.000 It can be a lot.

01:08:02.000 This particular case, I believe, was one where they were not only placing the robocalls illegally, but were pitching fake health insurance sort of proposals.

01:08:10.000 So they're not just annoying, but oftentimes they're used to defraud Americans.

01:08:14.000 And did you do that in conjunction with the FTC?

01:08:18.000 We 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.

01:08:26.000 So, I mean, I think that if you could solve the robocall issue, again, you could be elected pope.

01:08:31.000 So what else are you working on at the FCC that you think it's critical for our audience to be aware of?

01:08:36.000 What other issues are you involved in and things that you're concerned about in the direction of our country?

01:08:41.000 Well, you know, I think 5G is a big one, and I think we've helped secure U.S. leadership from that perspective.

01:08:46.000 I think that's a great win.

01:08:48.000 Another thing that's come up with the COVID-19 pandemic actually is telehealth.

01:08:52.000 You know, so much spending in this country has to do, obviously, with healthcare.

01:08:57.000 It's a big part of our economy in a good and a bad way.

01:09:02.000 And I think what we saw with COVID-19 was a reorienting around how we deal with telehealth.

01:09:08.000 I think about it from this perspective.

01:09:09.000 At the FCC, we were active for years subsidizing internet connections to physical brick and mortar healthcare facilities.

01:09:17.000 That's great.

01:09:17.000 We're going to continue to do that.

01:09:19.000 One of the trends that I saw, actually, I saw it when I was in a small town, Ruleville, Mississippi, getting out of DC.

01:09:25.000 And it was basically the healthcare equivalent of shifting from blockbuster video to Netflix.

01:09:30.000 What I mean by that is this: you don't have to go to a physical brick and mortar facility anymore to get care.

01:09:35.000 You have apps right on your phone.

01:09:37.000 You have Bluetooth connected blood glucose monitors for people with diabetes.

01:09:40.000 So 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.

01:09:48.000 HHS has been doing a great job cutting red tape, reorienting reimbursement, licensing issues.

01:09:54.000 So 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.

01:10:05.000 So what you're saying is that the telehealth revolution could potentially lower the cost of health care.

01:10:11.000 Absolutely.

01:10:12.000 You look at chronic disease management, something like 85% of direct healthcare spending is on chronic diseases.

01:10:17.000 So diabetes, COPD.

01:10:21.000 Now you have devices, and I've seen them myself.

01:10:24.000 This goes back to Ruleville, Mississippi.

01:10:26.000 I met a woman there named Miss Annie, and she noticed her first signs of diabetes when she woke up one morning with blurred vision.

01:10:32.000 She tried traditional care regimes, and it wasn't working.

01:10:35.000 And they sent her home with an iPad and a Bluetooth-enabled blood glucose monitor.

01:10:39.000 Every 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.

01:10:48.000 And her A1C level came down, and she said she never felt better.

01:10:51.000 So I think replicating that model is what we were trying to do with the FCC.

01:10:56.000 What would she have done prior to that technology? 0.99

01:10:59.000 Prior, you would have to get a very different type of treatment. 0.60

01:11:03.000 So adherence is the healthcare term.

01:11:07.000 Making sure that people actually do their regimen is one area where a lot of us just aren't that good.

01:11:12.000 And I'll give you another example.

01:11:14.000 I was in a small town in southwestern Virginia, Laurel Fork.

01:11:18.000 Met an older woman named Kathy.

01:11:20.000 Her A1C level was through the roof.

01:11:22.000 And 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.

01:11:31.000 Her A1C level got even worse.

01:11:33.000 I mean, to the point where most people would die at that stages.

01:11:36.000 But she also got enrolled in one of these remote patient monitoring programs.

01:11:39.000 So she stayed with it, adherence, right?

01:11:41.000 She would check her A1C levels every day and she saw progress and now she feels a lot better.

01:11:47.000 And so the communication through medicine, there were some regulatory changes by Congress or was it just more through the agencies?

01:11:58.000 A lot of it was through the agencies.

01:12:00.000 So HHS, CMS did a lot of work from a licensing and a reimbursement perspective, right?

01:12:05.000 We 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.

01:12:17.000 And we started to chop away finally at some of those regulatory structures that made it more difficult for people to access healthcare remotely.

01:12:25.000 Think about mental health care in this country.

01:12:26.000 I was on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.

01:12:28.000 It 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.

01:12:35.000 Mental health care is a challenge in every community, including there.

01:12:39.000 Well, 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.

01:12:47.000 You can address opioid dependency through mental health and behavioral health counseling, through pain management specialists.

01:12:54.000 So 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.

01:13:03.000 So 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.

01:13:17.000 Can you speak about that?

01:13:18.000 I think you guys issued a license the other day to ATT.

01:13:22.000 We've been taking a lot of steps.

01:13:23.000 So if you look at the COVID-19 pandemic, so many Americans shifted their life online, right?

01:13:29.000 So we are working from home, we're educating our kids from home, we're accessing telehealth.

01:13:34.000 And COVID-19 actually was a significant stress test of the internet ecosystem.

01:13:39.000 The U.S., we did.

01:13:41.000 The U.S. network held up far better than many other countries.

01:13:45.000 So what countries didn't do well?

01:13:47.000 There'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.

01:13:55.000 And what happened there is that decreases investment.

01:13:57.000 U.S. providers have a tendency to invest twice as much in their network per person than their counterparts in Europe.

01:14:05.000 That investment paid off during this stress test.

01:14:08.000 We saw anywhere from a 20 to 30% spike in traffic levels with people shifting to working from home with almost no degradation in quality.

01:14:18.000 So 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.

01:14:27.000 So 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.

01:14:38.000 It was the greatest stress test imaginable on the internet, right?

01:14:40.000 Yeah, 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.

01:14:49.000 This would be the final nail in the coffin.

01:14:52.000 This 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.

01:15:06.000 The 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%.

01:15:14.000 Last year alone, more miles of high-speed fiber, some 400,000, were built out into the ground.

01:15:20.000 That's enough to wrap around the earth 18 times.

01:15:22.000 So 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.

01:15:36.000 So 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.

01:15:47.000 Corporations are capitulating. 0.51

01:15:49.000 But now there's some demands on the FCC to enforce diversity and affirmative action in media.

01:15:54.000 I'm not even sure if you've seen some of these demands.

01:15:56.000 You guys get more petitions.

01:15:58.000 Any take on the demands to enforce affirmative action in media?

01:16:02.000 Well, I'm not sure I've seen this particular one.

01:16:04.000 You know, we do have.

01:16:05.000 It's okay.

01:16:05.000 There's so many of us.

01:16:06.000 Yeah, we do have sort of broadcast media rules.

01:16:08.000 And here's what they are at the core.

01:16:10.000 At the core of it is more diversity, more news, more information, more localism.

01:16:16.000 And so we've been trying to do that.

01:16:17.000 Perversely, some of our rules are having the opposite effect.

01:16:20.000 So 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.

01:16:29.000 It's like 28% or something of a specific type market or something, right?

01:16:33.000 Is that correct?

01:16:34.000 And what's interesting is you look at local news gathering, and it has been suffering because of the rise of these internet companies.

01:16:41.000 Because the funding for local news comes from advertising revenue.

01:16:45.000 And advertisement revenue has swung dramatically.

01:16:47.000 If you're the local card dealership, you're not really placing your ad in the local paper anymore or the local TV station.

01:16:53.000 Micro-targeting, right?

01:16:54.000 To some extent.

01:16:55.000 But the vast majority has shifted online.

01:16:57.000 And 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.

01:17:06.000 So 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.

01:17:14.000 So do you guys get into the original talk radio provisions that allow talk radio to be what it is?

01:17:18.000 Or is that a different department?

01:17:20.000 In 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.

01:17:37.000 I'm sorry.

01:17:38.000 So the fairness doctrine is...

01:17:39.000 Can you dive into that, please?

01:17:40.000 Yeah, this is an interesting issue, and it pops up from time to time.

01:17:43.000 The fairness doctrine was first instituted many, many decades ago, and the idea was this sort of similar to this equal time idea.

01:17:49.000 If you cover one issue, cover the other side of the issue.

01:17:52.000 It actually was weaponized by left-leaning entities to shut down conservative voices.

01:17:58.000 It was the repeal of the fairness doctrine that allowed the rise of conservative talk news.

01:18:05.000 So does it still stand?

01:18:06.000 It's been repealed.

01:18:07.000 When was it repealed?

01:18:09.000 I 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...

01:18:18.000 That helped the rise of Rush Limbaugh and people like that.

01:18:21.000 Exactly.

01:18:21.000 Exactly right.

01:18:22.000 Equally, you've had CNN and all of them for the void on the other side.

01:18:25.000 Interesting, 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.

01:18:31.000 But when you look at the application of it, it is very different.

01:18:34.000 So, some of the branding is very different than reality, and the fairness doctrine was certainly one of those.

01:18:39.000 So, 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.

01:18:49.000 Is that correct?

01:18:50.000 And the seven forbidden words and all that stuff.

01:18:53.000 Well, you know, thankfully, we've stepped back from all that.

01:18:55.000 So, okay, so tell me about that.

01:18:56.000 So, that's where people usually think you guys are, that you're like the referees of the airwaves.

01:19:00.000 The FCC does have some long-standing rules on obscenity, indecency, forbidden words, and all that stuff.

01:19:07.000 Yeah, if you remember, I was actually an intern at the FCC during the famous Janet Jackson Super Bowl incident.

01:19:12.000 That must be the famous wardrobe malfunction.

01:19:15.000 But we've really moved out of that space and defer much more to sort of the market and let people decide for themselves.

01:19:22.000 And some people sort of say, Well, how do you justify stepping back from that with this 230 reform?

01:19:28.000 Isn't that putting the FCC back in charge?

01:19:30.000 And I say, no.

01:19:31.000 Again, 230 is about Congress drew a line in the sand.

01:19:35.000 Good faith conduct gets a special treatment.

01:19:37.000 Bad faith conduct doesn't.

01:19:38.000 But where that line Congress drew is unclear.

01:19:41.000 And 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.

01:19:50.000 Well, 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.

01:20:02.000 And they are publicly funded, Trump-hating networks.

01:20:05.000 I don't know if that involves you, you guys, or, you know.

01:20:08.000 Hopefully not.

01:20:08.000 I mean, I certainly defer the funding decisions to Congress.

01:20:12.000 Which is, I could say, you know, I'd say anything else.

01:20:13.000 Yeah, but I do.

01:20:14.000 It's a disaster.

01:20:15.000 I do think, you know, I do think us stepping back in the long run is the better approach there.

01:20:20.000 It's pretty amazing that you went from intern to commissioner in that short time.

01:20:23.000 It's pretty funny.

01:20:24.000 Tell us your story.

01:20:24.000 How'd that work?

01:20:25.000 Well, so it's interesting.

01:20:26.000 I interned for a commissioner called Commissioner Abernathy, and I would sit in the intern sort of pen in her office.

01:20:35.000 And 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.

01:20:42.000 So 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.

01:20:49.000 That was like early 2000s, right?

01:20:51.000 Yeah, 2003, 2004.

01:20:54.000 So it's been amazing.

01:20:55.000 It's been a lot of twists.

01:20:56.000 And so I think in terms of career advice, right?

01:21:00.000 So it used to be that you go someplace, do really good work, and sort of stay there forever.

01:21:04.000 And that's not the model anymore.

01:21:05.000 The model now is do good work, put yourself in front of interesting people, and then leave and go do something else.

01:21:11.000 And so I worked at a law firm for about six years.

01:21:13.000 I did a clerkship in there, and I left to go work at the FCC.

01:21:18.000 And a lot of people said, no, don't go to the FCC.

01:21:20.000 Stay here at the law firm, make partner, make money.

01:21:25.000 But I thought that if I got to the FCC, that there'd be some running room and I could have interesting opportunities from there.

01:21:30.000 And I didn't envision all of this.

01:21:32.000 I got to work for who's now Chairman Pai.

01:21:34.000 I got to work as a legal advisor for him.

01:21:36.000 He then made me general counsel of the agency when Trump won the election in 2017.

01:21:41.000 And then from there, President Trump nominated me to this position, went through the Senate confirmation process.

01:21:46.000 And you're one of five commissioners?

01:21:48.000 One of five commissioners, and three Republican, two Democrat.

01:21:50.000 And it's been a heck of a ride.

01:21:52.000 And the longest I ever sort of aimed for my career was getting to work on what they call the eighth floor.

01:21:58.000 That's where the commissioners work as a legal advisor, which I got to do.

01:22:01.000 And then from then being general counsel, being a commissioner itself is sort of far beyond anything that I thought possible.

01:22:06.000 And it's just been a really fun opportunity.

01:22:09.000 And so the advice to young people is do exciting things, put yourself in front of interesting people.

01:22:14.000 Don't just be monolithically just the same enterprise for a long period of time.

01:22:18.000 I think that's right.

01:22:19.000 There's some advice that I got from former chairman Powell of the FCC.

01:22:23.000 Interestingly, it's the son of Colin Powell.

01:22:26.000 And he provided some advice, which is he said, opportunity knocks for everyone.

01:22:31.000 Most people don't have their bags packed.

01:22:34.000 And what I took from that is it never feels like the right time to make a career move, right?

01:22:39.000 We sort of are comfortable.

01:22:40.000 We don't like change.

01:22:41.000 I'm working at a law firm.

01:22:42.000 I'm making pretty good money.

01:22:43.000 Do I want to take a six-figure pay cut to go work at the government?

01:22:47.000 But you got to have your bags back.

01:22:49.000 You 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.

01:22:57.000 You're fighting for the freedom of expression and free speech every day.

01:23:00.000 Anything else at the FCC or that you want to share with our listeners?

01:23:03.000 You 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.

01:23:11.000 And the question for 5G is: if a company is under the thumb of the communist regime, are there trustworthy to be in our network?

01:23:18.000 And 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.

01:23:28.000 The communist regime put out active disinformation about COVID-19 early on.

01:23:33.000 And I've written about this a little bit.

01:23:37.000 You know, the communist regime has said that they can't be held responsible for the global spread of COVID for a few reasons.

01:23:44.000 One of the reasons they point to is this vaunted Wuhan lockdown.

01:23:47.000 They said, we immediately locked down Wuhan.

01:23:49.000 That's not the case.

01:23:50.000 They locked down Wuhan at the end of January.

01:23:53.000 In those three weeks leading up to the Wuhan lockdown, 7 million people left Wuhan, including infected people, including people on international flights.

01:24:03.000 When 7 million people out of a city of 11 million leave a city, that's not how you stop a global pandemic.

01:24:10.000 That is how you start a global pandemic.

01:24:13.000 And 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.

01:24:24.000 So 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.

01:24:41.000 The regime disappeared its own people that tried to warn the world early on.

01:24:47.000 And we've seen that time and time again.

01:24:50.000 Well, Brendan, thank you for your leadership for our country.

01:24:55.000 We need more people like you, especially in our government.

01:24:57.000 It's awfully depressing.

01:24:59.000 So God bless you.

01:25:00.000 And thanks so much for joining.

01:25:02.000 Really?

01:25:02.000 Charlie Christian.

01:25:03.000 Yeah, I really enjoyed it.

01:25:04.000 Thank you.

The Charlie Kirk Show - June 11, 2020

Is 5G Dangerous? Social Media Censorship, How To Beat China In Tech Cold War, And MORE with FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr

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