00:08:50.220And it's worth pointing out, look, something you said is really significant, which is when it broke, neither Hunter Biden nor Joe Biden denied that it was his laptop.
00:09:00.080Or that the emails were not authentic.
00:09:02.260If it wasn't his laptop or if the emails were fake, you would expect within the first hour for Hunter and Joe to both be on TV saying, this is a lie.
00:09:34.840Well, didn't 50 intelligence, senior intelligence voices say this is Russian and have any of those 50 apologized, admitted that they were completely full of crap, that they were aiding in covering up true information about one of the two presidential candidates?
00:10:07.480Well, I would point out here that, as you mentioned, Saurabh, there were a lot of people who just hadn't heard of this story.
00:10:13.680A good number of them would have changed their votes, according to surveys later.
00:10:17.120And so you've just got this arbitrary wielding of power.
00:10:21.360You know, even beyond the First Amendment arguments for speech control, you've got three companies run by billionaire oligarchs in Silicon Valley who control the flow of information around the public square.
00:10:32.700They are working, to use a phrase from Mitch McConnell, as a sort of woke parallel government that is policing speech.
00:10:40.040And I think it actually ties in, Saurabh, with your book, which is we're seeing the free speech tradition, so much of the political tradition in America being completely upended by a handful of very progressive actors.
00:10:53.040This is a point that I often made, is that there's this element of these upstarts with their, you know, they wear Birkenstocks and shorts, you know, but they happen to be billionaires.
00:11:24.300Like, I say this all the time, but it's Saturday Night Live skits have come to life.
00:11:28.720Like, you have these billionaire oligarchs in Silicon Valley that are like – and you guys are what, the fourth, fifth largest circulation in the country?
00:12:33.240I will not discuss the topics you will not allow me to discuss.
00:12:36.420So just to tie those two elements together because the entire blue check media, save for a few honorable exceptions, the entire blue check media lined up behind the censorship ban, cheered it.
00:12:49.200And that one reporter, Gabe Sherman, had to do his kind of Maoist self-criticism.
00:12:55.140I should have looked into the story, blah, blah, blah.
00:12:57.600And then you bring in the 50 intelligence officials.
00:13:00.320And as I remember, journalists and intelligence officials were supposed to have an adversarial relationship with this country because those intelligence officials wield the unaccountable power to, you know, like nuke people or – not nuke people, but drone people or spy on people.
00:13:17.480And journalists were supposed to kind of have a questioning relationship with them.
00:13:21.880I'm not – but General Hayden comes out and says, well, I don't have any evidence for this, but it has all the harm, all the indicia of Russian disinformation.
00:13:30.560And every blue check reporter says, oh, yes, sir.
00:13:37.840But so, Reb, you know the media world.
00:13:41.780Do you think there was a single one of them who actually believed what they were saying?
00:13:46.400Well, at that point – I mean one of the things that has happened to media today is they are pure partisan.
00:13:53.280The New York Times understood that their overriding mission in life was to defeat Donald Trump, that they were political operatives, and anything that helped Trump must be silenced.
00:14:05.680Anything that benefited Joe Biden must be amplified.
00:14:08.340Anything that hurt Biden must be covered up, and they're not – you know, there was a time when there was a norm in journalism of actually cover facts.
00:14:17.400As far as I'm concerned, the New York Times and CNN and MSNBC and ABC and CBS and NBC, the corrupt corporate media behaves exactly how they would behave if they were in fact the communication directors for the Biden campaign.
00:14:37.940But, you know, what people will often say here is, yes, the Times, CNN, yes, they're partisan.
00:14:47.800The American journalistic and free speech tradition, it's always been the same sort of thing.
00:14:52.420And, you know, I suppose this ties in a little bit with, you know, maintaining the tradition broadly and this unbroken thread.
00:14:59.240But are we actually living through a break with the American political tradition, whether it's in journalism or the wielding of power?
00:15:07.940Or is this – you know, look, it's just more of the same conservatives and don't get so wrapped up about it.
00:15:13.680So I happen to be reading Richard Hofstadter's book, The American Political Tradition, right now.
00:15:18.120And, you know, he's – you know, in the 50s and 60s, I think it was published in 48, but this book had a long life.
00:15:25.060And his argument was that the American political tradition is broadly speaking the – is a consensus tradition that despite what seemed like it's very furious oppositions at any given point,
00:15:37.700the bottom line is that it is a tradition aimed at maintaining kind of bourgeois liberal power, right, of the owners of capital and then later the managerial capital that emerges to service industrial capital
00:15:54.560because after a while you couldn't just be a, you know, small.
00:15:57.640And if that's the case, which is a kind of cynical view, I mean, and he's admiring of the figures he's writing about, including the founders or Jackson or others.
00:16:08.380If that's the case, then what we're seeing is a kind of acceleration where it's this blob of government, corporate power, media power, academe, enforcing the consensus
00:16:23.280because the consensus has stopped serving a lot of people in the heartland of the country
00:16:27.820and a lot of people are angry about what the consensus has produced for them over the past generation.
00:16:33.440But they've become aware of themselves much more so than perhaps before as a united, uniparty elite
00:16:38.900and are prepared to – are now prepared to go to steps that go beyond what was the norm maybe a generation or two ago
00:16:48.340in terms of how, you know, how do you deal with this kind of opposition.
00:16:51.260I don't know. That's my – that's my theory.
00:16:54.060You do see a strange issue when it comes to consensus.
00:16:57.120There are certain issues where the majority of the American people are on one side and the entire ruling class is on another.
00:17:52.080A decade ago, there was a consensus in journalism that there was a journalistic norm, that they had an obligation to report news even if they didn't like it,
00:18:03.640that they had an obligation to report both sides of a story.
00:18:39.400There was a norm that people should be allowed to live according to their faith.
00:18:43.960You look at something like the Religious Freedom Restoration Act that was passed through both houses of Congress overwhelmingly bipartisan.
00:19:08.000Well, even – frankly, we're talking about Section 230.
00:19:10.720Everyone forgets Section 230 is part of the Communications Decency Act, which was passed by Republicans and Democrats, signed by Bill Clinton,
00:19:18.420that sought to have some standards on the internet, although ultimately the anti-indecency provisions got booted out of there.
00:19:24.660But as recently as the 90s, people came together and said, no, there were some norms, there were some standards that we're going to respect, and that seems to have been upended.
00:19:32.420Isn't it interesting that you can find incredibly obscene material on Twitter and Facebook, completely unmolested by the companies, but conservative speech is censored?
00:19:42.600That's completely reversing the purpose of Section 230.
00:19:46.120It was so they would – the bulletins at the time, there wasn't kind of social media as such.
00:19:51.220Bulletins could restrain and censor violent material, threats, prurient stuff.
00:20:08.760Well, and I think two things happened to shift us away from those norms because those norms – and by the way, those norms had withstood over two centuries of our country's history.
00:20:18.260I said go back 10 years ago, but they didn't originate 10 years ago.
00:20:22.240They were present at the dawn of the republic, and we went over two centuries holding on to those norms, and it's been the last few years that they've been obliterated.
00:20:32.880I think it's a combination of a couple of things.
00:20:34.800One, it is what happened in the university starting 20 years ago.
00:20:39.840And 20 years ago, we've talked a lot on this podcast about critical race theory and critical theory, and the Marxists took over many of our universities.
00:20:49.540And critical theory is all about destroying norms.
00:20:55.680It's literally whatever the norm is, it's a tool of oppression, so therefore let's tear down the norm.
00:21:02.600And an awful lot of folks said, oh, that's kind of cute.
00:21:08.100Our children are being trained in this stuff, but it's harmless.
00:21:10.980When they go get a job and get a mortgage, they will put aside childish things and move on to life.
00:21:16.900Well, we had for a decade young leftists come into the media, come into entertainment, come into Hollywood, come into big corporations, come into government who were trained that none of these norms matter and that everything is politicized.
00:21:38.320But then number two, the accelerant was Donald J. Trump.
00:21:43.420And I think Donald Trump, who did an enormous amount of good for the country over the last four years, simultaneously enraged the left and it made their heads explode.
00:21:57.420And it accelerated that process because much like if you're leading a rebellion, the rise to power of Adolf Hitler convinces you this rebellion is worth doing because we must stop the evil one.
00:22:15.680Trump for the left became the evil one, which meant any norm that stood in the way.
00:22:21.520If you're a journalist, if you're a Jake Tapper, you know, good example of someone who used to be a journalist.
00:22:29.980He actually knows what these norms were.
00:22:57.580I think that if you poll the average newsroom now, you have lots of recent Ivy grads whose minds are full of kind of the critical theory that you're talking about.
00:23:08.800What's interesting to me, and if I may introduce a wrinkle to that, is that we say Marxism or we say critical theory, and we use the word left even.
00:23:19.540But it's not the traditional economic left, because notice it gets so easily accommodated by large corporations.
00:23:28.780It's not as if – so if critical theory and this kind of neo-Marxism were a threat to the material interests of Apple Corp.
00:25:33.560No, but I do hope people will look at the book because I think a lot of these problems will be seen in a new light in the light of the great tradition.
00:25:44.580And chiefly speaking, the Christian and classical tradition, which had an account of the common good, ultimately, of what it means to create conditions in which ordinary people can live decent lives of virtue and lives of faith.
00:25:59.000A republic itself refers to, like, res publica, right?
00:26:33.880And I became an atheist while I was still living under the Ayatollahs.
00:26:36.800In fact, I became an interest atheist in part because of the Ayatollahs in Iran.
00:26:40.600Then 20 years later, through a long process of reading Pope Benedict's books, of life experience, and a couple of providential encounters with the Mass, I was received into the Catholic Church in 2016 in London.
00:27:06.360So I've spent most of my career, it's the second mention, I've spent most of my career with Rupert Murdoch's wonderful family of media companies.
00:27:14.500And how did you come to be editor at the Post?
00:27:19.140So I had done five years at the Wall Street Journal doing, you know, editing book reviews and then helping run the European editorial opinion pages in London.
00:27:29.900Then I spent a year at a magazine called Commentary.
00:27:33.760And then this job opened up at the New York Post and I seized it by the horns, as it were.
00:27:41.980And there are a handful of people demonstrating courage in the media world, and you've got a target on you as a result of that.
00:27:53.800What you're doing is important, and I think it's important for the rest of us to encourage you, to support you, and I hope that you will get lots more allies.
00:28:05.140Not who will be – I don't want to see partisans on my side of the aisle.
00:28:09.700I just want to see forums where you're allowed to actually speak the truth and have dialogue to see institutions that are not pure tools of political propaganda as so much of the corporate media is today.
00:28:26.600So the line you're trying to hold is incredibly important, and thank you for that.
00:28:31.100I just really hope that people are permitted to DM and privately message this episode.
00:28:36.720So Rob might have completely blown it for us.
00:28:39.040You know, we're going to be totally censored now.
00:28:41.200But that's fine because conservatives are finally fighting back against this.
00:28:44.360And thank you, Senator, for that fight.