Steve Baker, a reporter for The Blaze, has been charged with one count of aggravated assault and two counts of aggravated burglary. The charges stem from an incident that took place on January 6th, 2019 in Tampa, Florida. Glenn and Brennan discuss whether or not it's better to shoot or not to shoot in self-defense situations.
00:04:29.740Brennan Carr is the FCC commissioner who I just am a big fan of because he actually will speak out on behalf of the American people and freedom of speech.
00:04:41.300He issued a warning a couple of days ago.
00:04:44.860The FCC just ordered every broadcaster to start posting a race and gender scorecard that breaks down the demographics of their workforce.
00:04:55.800Activists lobbied for this because they want to see businesses pressured into hiring people based on their race and gender.
00:05:03.060We welcome Brennan Carr to the program now.
00:05:19.100Yeah, this is a pretty wild decision by the FCC, and you're right that it has to do with broadcasters, but it's also part of a more broad effort to sort of compel businesses at large, even outside the broadcaster context, to hire or not hire people based on their race and gender.
00:05:39.580And so the FCC tried to do this many, many years ago, in fact, twice before the FCC has sought to pressure broadcasters into hiring people based on race and gender in violation of the equal protection components of the Constitution.
00:05:54.440And the courts have struck the FCC down twice, but now here the FCC goes again for a third time.
00:05:59.960And as you noted, it's going to require every single broadcaster to publicly disclose a race and gender scorecard that lists every employee across these demographics lines.
00:06:13.220The one reason why activist groups and others wanted the FCC to do this is because they want to launch public pressure campaigns targeting individual stations if they don't have what the activists view as some proper balance or the right number of some unspecified amount of race and ethnicity employees.
00:06:34.000And so it's deeply, deeply concerning.
00:06:36.180So what is terrifying to me is the arrogance of so many people on the left.
00:06:44.200This whole woke thing is completely falling apart.
00:06:48.180It's falling apart, like, in ways I never expected.
00:06:51.720I don't know if anybody saw the opening monologue of Saturday Night Live this last weekend.
00:06:56.900And the answer should be, for most people, no.
00:06:59.600But it was actually funny because it broke rules, the woke rules.
00:07:04.980This is coming apart, and yet they're still going down this direction.
00:07:25.360The government's not the fastest-moving entity.
00:07:27.540And so when, in sort of the real world, you see the tide turning slowly against these sort of radical versions of DEI, that's the precise moment when the FCC decides to jump in and double down on that type of approach.
00:07:42.860There are a number of entities that have appealed this before in one.
00:07:46.020And so I'm hopeful that some groups of broadcasters or otherwise will take this to court.
00:07:51.900But it's also part and parcel of a broader trend we're seeing with free speech in the country where the government is outsourcing censorship to third parties, whether it's Facebook and Google.
00:08:03.120And this is the same type of pattern as well.
00:08:04.760We are trying to sort of co-opt these activist organizations to force people into hiring based on, you know, race and gender.
00:08:13.740And the Constitution and the constitutional law is very clear.
00:08:17.040The government can't do indirectly that which it is prohibited from doing directly.
00:08:21.300So I do hope that somebody takes this up and goes to court because it is part of these, you know, very broadly speaking, concerning trends.
00:08:29.940So last time you were on with me, I think, was back in November.
00:08:32.560And we talked about how the Biden administration wants to control the Internet in the name of equity.
00:08:40.880I've seen the FCC lean one direction or another on trying to silence people.
00:08:52.980You know, they always try to use the FCC to go after Rush Limbaugh, and it's always failed.
00:09:23.120How do you feel about the future of free speech on radio?
00:09:27.260Yeah, I think you're right to notice this broader trend.
00:09:31.040I mean, when I was growing up in high school in the 1990s, you're right, there was sort of a surge of FCC activity there, whether it was, you know, censorship or political censorship.
00:09:41.200In fact, I remember very famously when I was in high school, Eminem, the FCC won't let me be.
00:09:45.780And for a little while there, the FCC sort of turned a corner, as you noted, in sort of the mid-2000s and for a while stayed out of this type of political censorship type of activity.
00:09:56.020And it is concerning as to where things are going now.
00:09:58.240As you pointed out, the Biden administration is engaged in a lot of regulatory actions that are ultimately about increasing government control and then down the road increasing of censorship.
00:10:09.800And what's clear in this country as a cultural matter is we have to return to an embrace of free speech for a lot of reasons.
00:10:17.200But one is the soapbox is directly connected to the ballot box.
00:10:22.440What I mean by that is once people start not trusting Americans with the freedom to speak their minds on the soapbox, they very naturally go into, well, I also don't trust you to make your own decisions at the ballot box.
00:10:34.240And I think in some ways we're starting to see that. And again, sort of switching back to this FCC order on race and gender scorecards, the FCC claimed it wasn't doing it to pressure people.
00:10:43.540In fact, one of the lead justifications they gave for publicly disclosing this is that it said they wanted the public to be able to have the data so that they could verify the accuracy of these disclosures by broadcasters, which doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
00:10:57.480What exactly does the federal government want the public to do to verify the race and gender of employees?
00:11:04.000How exactly are they going to verify that, particularly when the FCC is adding newly a category of gender non-binary?
00:11:10.280But whatever that mechanism is that the FCC wants the public to verify the race and gender of broadcasters, I'm not sure we should be encouraging that type of conduct.
00:11:18.200So I think this is a continuing trend of the story that came out today where the president directed all agencies to work on a plan to register more voters, which is not the job of the State Department or the FCC or anybody else.
00:11:39.600And there was a lawsuit by the Government Accountability Office to be able to see those plans.
00:11:50.700The DOJ has just rejected offering those plans and turning those plans over in this court case because they say it will be confusing for the American public.
00:12:05.680Who do they think they are and who do they think we are that we'd be confused by evidence of of whatever it is you're doing, good or bad?
00:12:16.280Yeah, you know, it's concerning this sort of paternalistic approach of not trusting the American people.
00:12:23.860That's the fundamental component of democracy is that we have to trust people.
00:12:29.140And, you know, the other sort of interesting development of the last couple of days or so, you know, I'm sure you've been tracking was this Google AI that has been sort of widely criticized for being biased.
00:12:40.240And I think there's actually something that we should give Google credit for with this in terms of a contribution to public discourse.
00:12:47.340And that is that it has laid bare for the American people to see in the clearest terms yet the bias and sort of partisan ideology that has been embedded in so much of the products coming out of Silicon Valley.
00:13:00.720And for years, people said, well, there's no conservative bias in Silicon Valley and these Google AI chatbots really make that clear.
00:13:10.320In fact, last weekend I went on it and I asked it to write an op ed against President Biden's signature effort to control the Internet known as net neutrality.
00:13:20.240And it said it couldn't do that. And I asked it to write one in support of that exact same policy, net neutrality.
00:13:26.500And it wrote a very long, flourishing one about it.
00:13:29.120So as things move more into this space of artificial intelligence and AI, it's deeply concerning the really serious partisan bias that clearly has been embedded in these algorithms.
00:13:42.180And Google came out and said, well, mea culpa, it was a mistake. It actually was not a mistake.
00:13:47.020In fact, again, hats off to them. They have an ideology and they found a way to code it deeply into these algorithms in an effective way.
00:13:54.240But we need to sort of step back and make sure that we don't have these biases embedded as these technologies start moving forward.
00:14:00.580Yeah, I tell you, the only mistake they made was that they were discovered. It wasn't subtle enough.
00:14:06.700You know, they're very into changing people's minds without their fingerprints on anything.
00:14:12.440Brendan, thank you so much. I appreciate everything that that you do and you're warning us about.
00:14:18.760I'm extraordinarily concerned about my job and the jobs of those people who do disagree with the government for the first time in my life.
00:14:32.100I think I'm I may lose my job at one point or lose my ability to speak out.
00:14:39.680That's never happened to me before. And I appreciate the warning signs.
00:14:45.160Yeah, well, thanks so much for having me on. I think these are really important issues to track.
00:14:49.080Again, each one individually looks like it could be a one off, whether it's these digital equity rules for the Internet or the government working with Silicon Valley to censor Americans political speech or these race and gender scorecards.
00:15:00.140But you have to put them all together because they're not pinpricks. It's a mosaic.
00:15:03.860At the end of the day, it's about more and more government control.
00:15:07.620And, you know, the government is colluding with these large technology companies to to carry out an effort to put more controls on more speech than we've ever seen in our history.
00:15:16.880And I think the good news is things are turning slightly.
00:15:19.580I think, you know, the the the maximum effort of censorship happened during covid whenever there's government control that covid was sort of by by definition.
00:15:26.560You increase in censorship. I think it's receding.
00:15:30.580But it's also it's kind of downstream from this extreme version of identity politics, because once you divide the world into oppressors and oppressed, then it's very easy to take all the rights away, including free speech rights of the oppressor group.
00:15:43.840And there's no sort of free exchange of information and free debate.
00:15:47.380But but we've got to get back to that as a cultural matter.
00:15:49.640I will tell you. Thank you very much. I will tell you tomorrow I'm going to be talking about what's happening in Canada.
00:15:54.700Trudeau has just introduced a bill that is going through parliament now that will make hate speech.
00:16:34.780That's including something as basic as and lifesaving as amoxicillin.
00:16:39.800Medication shortages are going to happen.
00:16:43.620You can't introduce 10 million people into your country and give them access to the health care system.
00:16:50.340When the health care was built for a country that was 10 million smaller in population.
00:16:57.940When you have the things of unrest all around the world and we get all of our medicine from someplace else in the world, it's going to happen.
00:17:06.840Take this problem head on and into your own hands with the Jace case by Jace Medical.
00:17:14.040It's a pack of different antibiotics that you can use to treat a host of bacterial illnesses in an emergency.
00:17:21.060And you can have all of the medicine that you have to take for your family.
00:19:04.460And actually, the founding can't really work for you.
00:19:07.440And I think that they're actually being honest as well.
00:19:10.120I mean, I do think they believe rights come from the state and that this way they can get rid of rights they don't like, add new ones whenever they feel like it.
00:19:39.980I'm not really spiritual, but I'm definitely religious because I think religion offers incredibly important ideas about the world that were, you know, even if you believe in God, you also probably believe that they evolved into religion because they're the right things.
00:19:58.660So for me, it is clear that man has innate rights.
00:20:03.940I'm not sure why or where they come from, but in my heart, I know it and rationally, I know it.
00:20:09.420So the right to speak your mind, the right to practice your faith, the right to own property, all the things that are basically enshrined in the Constitution, those basic rights, which are negative rights, meaning like I'm not asking someone to do anything for me.
00:20:23.440These are just things I'm born with, I think, are vital to living a free and prosperous life.
00:20:30.700And the Constitution's not perfect or anything like that, but it's as close as I think humans have gotten.
00:20:35.620So if you don't believe in God, you should act like you do when you talk about the law.
00:20:42.140The idea that you're born with rights given to you by your family's position or the state, they can take those rights away at any time.
00:20:58.760And we all know, wait, I'm an individual.
00:21:01.820This is why this always happens in times of collectivism, because it's the group over the individual, where America was always about the individual, help the individual live a great life, allow them to be able to celebrate God in their own way,
00:21:24.200which would be their governor, their regulator, if you will, on their passions, and let everybody just do their thing.
00:21:59.760Individualism doesn't mean that you can't become part of a community and do things communally, but it does mean that you're not treated individually.
00:22:07.520I mean, for instance, democracy, everyone keeps talking about it and they never really define it.
00:22:11.520But I don't really care about democracy when it comes to rights, because I don't care that three people can tell me what to do.
00:23:57.860The whole thing is that that Donald Trump's biggest strength or one of his biggest strengths is that his enemies are just the worst people.
00:24:16.620I mean, from the start, you know, and I'm not I'm not a huge fan of the guy, truthfully, but but the people who hate him are worse than he is.
00:24:24.900So to save democracy, they're worse than he is to, you know, to take him off ballots.
00:24:30.540The people who are supposedly upholding Constitution and democracy and all that, you know, are worse than he is.
00:24:37.980As the things I don't like about him, let's say how he talks about government or maybe that he's a little bit not conservative enough for me.
00:24:45.920Frankly, you know, I think one of the big secrets about Donald Trump is he's actually quite moderate on a lot of issues where I would say normal, you know, when it comes to gender or borders or things like that, is that his his enemies are the worst people.
00:25:01.600And a lot of people under because of the hysteria about Donald Trump, a lot of bad people, a lot of people want to make their names have gotten in in with the mob going after him.
00:25:11.880And because of the hatred for him, a lot of people on the left just let, you know, praise all these people before actually maybe vetting them a bit.
00:25:21.360So, yeah, I think it's a good it was a good week for Donald Trump.
00:25:25.540What do you think is going to happen with Fannie?
00:25:27.480What do you think is going to happen with the Fannie Willis case?
00:25:32.700I don't know. I don't know how you can move forward knowing all we know right now.
00:26:14.420I mean, I don't think she I mean, how does the governor not call for if the judge doesn't turn on her and say these are clear lies?
00:26:27.480If you perjured yourself, she should lose her license.
00:26:31.620She should pay a big fine and possibly because they did it with such zeal go to jail.
00:26:39.360I mean, I don't think I've ever seen a more clear cut case on perjury because she did it with zeal where I've seen people perjure themselves.
00:26:50.600Anthony Fauci, but he's not necessarily going, well, actually, he did, too.
00:30:10.100Back two and a half years ago when they initially threatened me and said that I would be arrested within the week in November of 21,
00:30:17.120they actually told my attorney at the time what the charges were going to be then.
00:30:21.460But because I'm a little outspoken and vocal about what's happening with me,
00:30:26.620we were told at the time by an assistant U.S. attorney that a judge would not be happy with me going out to the press in the manner that I've done.
00:30:36.380So I just intensified that and accelerated that and lit that candle brighter.
00:30:46.220What right is it for them to say, we're coming after you, and then when you say, hey, by the way, everybody, they're saying they're coming after me.
00:30:54.820They haven't said why they're coming after me.
00:31:36.420Now, fast forward two years under the current threat, and they won't tell me the charges this time, literally, quote, unquote, from the U.S. attorney, because he'll tweet it out.
00:32:29.900It's easier to change into the orange jumpsuit and leg chains.
00:32:38.720And is that something that everybody does?
00:32:44.080When they bust down somebody's door, do they say, hey, change into a T-shirt and some flip-flops?
00:32:49.960I don't think that when they bust in your door, you get that opportunity or that choice.
00:32:54.940When they invite people to turn themselves in.
00:32:57.700I've never seen people turn themselves in.
00:33:01.140This is exactly what they did to the independent journalist Stephen Horn from Raleigh, North Carolina, coincidentally, where I live.
00:33:07.100And when they arrested him and they brought him in, they did exactly the same thing.
00:33:12.060They put him in an orange jumpsuit, put leg chains on him, and made him march before the magistrate in the leg chains on misdemeanor offenses.
00:33:23.960That's one of the interesting parts here because you don't know, as you point out, what you're being charged with.
00:33:29.720But you do know that they are misdemeanors, right?
00:33:31.860That is what they have told my attorney.
00:33:33.560So why on earth would you need to be in leg chains?
00:33:38.160We have prosecutors all over the country that won't charge people who have sexually assaulted individuals with crimes.
00:33:45.880And they won't hold them and they release the next day.
00:33:49.240And they're going to put you in leg chains for misdemeanors?
00:33:51.600Let's start with the bigger question and we'll work our way to that specific answer.
00:33:56.660This is the first time in history since January 6th that the FBI is even involving themselves in misdemeanor offenses and with misdemeanor defendants and swatting misdemeanor defendants with sometimes 15, 20, 25 agents swatting misdemeanor.
00:34:16.100No, they, the FBI has never done that in their history until ordered to do so by Merrick Garland's DOJ after January 6th.
00:34:26.060So fast forward to this, why are they doing that?
00:34:30.840My, my attorney told me when he told me that this was what they were going to have me, you know, requesting that I arrive dressed in flip-flops and shorts.
00:34:40.340I said, why are they doing this to me?
00:34:52.140When, when you have a government, I mean, I don't know if you saw the story today from California, but there was a judge in California said, you can't arrest just people on the right.
00:35:01.900When Antifa was there and they were being violent, beating up these people, you arrest the people they were beating up and you don't arrest Antifa.
00:35:14.660When a, when a, when a United States government can come after individuals.
00:35:21.640And, you know, we've been saying this from the beginning, if they'll do this to Trump, you don't think they'll do it to you?
00:35:27.760Well, the selective prosecution is exactly what's happening right here.
00:35:33.700We have over 60, we have documented over 60 journalists that entered through those doors or broken windows that day.
00:35:42.780The fifth person through the broken window that day was a New York Times reporter.
00:35:47.320The New Yorker reporter, Luke Mogelson, went through the broken window and he paralleled another independent photojournalist.
00:35:55.220They, they went through the same window, paralleled the other journalist.
00:35:58.300He had spent a lot of time working on the Latinos for Trump campaign.
00:36:05.380Well, even though he didn't parade, he didn't do any protesting.
00:36:10.720He did no chanting, anything of the sort, and was contracted at the time as a video photojournalist for a TV station in Mobile, Alabama.
00:36:21.080Even though that was the groundwork laid, four misdemeanors swatted by over 20 agents at his home with the red dots on his wife, his children, and of course, obviously himself at 630 in the morning.
00:36:49.880He was convicted on all four misdemeanors.
00:36:51.720And because he went to trial and he wasted the government's time and resources and not taking the plea deal that he was offered, the judge put him in prison for eight months, sentenced him to eight months.
00:37:02.620They put him in a medium security facility in Georgia where, after spending the first two months in solitary confinement and gets out into the general population, he learns from all the other prisoners that they never put misdemeanor defendants in that prison.
00:37:21.960All of the other guys were – actually, they distrusted him.
00:37:23.960They thought he was some sort of plant inside the prison.
00:37:26.220They're like, people don't come here for misdemeanors.