Verdict with Ted Cruz - The Rise of the Censorship Czars ft. Sohrab Ahmari

00:00:00.000 This is an iHeart Podcast.

00:00:02.500 Guaranteed human.

00:00:04.500 Conservatives are finally fighting back in a tangible way against big tech censorship.

00:00:10.340 And as it so happens, we happen to have on this show,

00:00:13.980 the man who first put forward the legal theory that is doing it,

00:00:17.600 and the man who was at the center of big tech's biggest censorship play during the 2020 election.

00:00:25.140 This is Verdict with Ted Cruz.

00:00:30.000 Welcome back to Verdict with Ted Cruz, joined as ever by Senator Ted Cruz,

00:00:35.880 and we're very pleased to be joined by Saurabh Amari, op-ed page editor at the New York Post

00:00:40.860 and the author of The Unbroken Thread, which is an excellent book that people should go read.

00:00:45.680 Saurabh, thank you for being here.

00:00:46.940 Thanks for having me, Jens.

00:00:47.880 So, look, I hate to say I told you so.

00:00:50.580 I hate it when we take a victory lap on this show.

00:00:52.640 Let's be honest.

00:00:53.360 There are few things you love more than saying I told you so.

00:00:55.620 That might be true.

00:00:56.900 That is true, in fact.

00:00:57.780 And we can say it on this show because I think you were the first one,

00:01:02.860 and I think it was on this show, that we put forward the idea of how conservatives can,

00:01:08.380 using the law, go after big tech, which is something very near and dear to all of our hearts.

00:01:14.520 So how is it happening?

00:01:16.120 Well, that's right.

00:01:16.640 We talked about in an earlier verdict the theory that I thought big tech could be held accountable for,

00:01:21.960 and it turned out that the theory that we talked about is, in fact, the theory that is embodied in the class action lawsuit

00:01:29.460 that President Trump filed against big tech.

00:01:33.980 And the theory is that they're violating the First Amendment.

00:01:38.280 Now, the challenge with that is the First Amendment doesn't apply to private companies.

00:01:42.940 The First Amendment begins with the words, Congress shall make no law.

00:01:48.020 And so the First Amendment is binding against the federal government.

00:01:52.180 And through a process called incorporation, the First Amendment is binding against state governments.

00:01:59.200 But Facebook is not the federal government.

00:02:01.800 It's not state government.

00:02:02.680 And so when President Trump filed his lawsuit, you had all sorts of know-it-alls in the corporate media say,

00:02:11.140 oh, this has no chance of success because, ha-ha, Facebook's not the government, you lose.

00:02:15.800 Well, what that misses is there's a long line of Supreme Court cases that says that when government uses private industry

00:02:23.980 as a tool to carry out its policies, then that private industry can become state action,

00:02:31.080 that it can become an arm of the state.

00:02:33.940 And the theory that we talked about on the pod earlier is that Facebook and Twitter and social media

00:02:42.720 have become so intertwined and Google have become so intertwined with the federal government

00:02:47.700 between the carrot and stick of Section 230 providing immunization,

00:02:53.160 the stick of government officials threatening retribution

00:02:56.480 if social media doesn't censor to match government's policies.

00:03:02.300 And then on top of that, you've got the Fauci emails back and forth with Mark Zuckerberg,

00:03:08.000 where Fauci is a senior government official, is directing Zuckerberg,

00:03:12.120 here's the speech I want you to censor.

00:03:13.700 Silence them when they say this.

00:03:15.340 Silence them when they say that.

00:03:17.160 And Zuckerberg essentially salutes and says, sir, yes, sir,

00:03:20.620 and goes and becomes the enforcement arm for the federal government.

00:03:25.420 And what we talked about right after the Fauci emails came out is, wow,

00:03:29.180 this really lays out a factual predicate that Facebook is not acting as just a private company on their own,

00:03:35.580 but they're acting as an arm of government.

00:03:37.600 Well, it almost seems like the Biden administration saw that and decided to up the ante

00:03:44.120 because this week, between Jen Psaki and Joe Biden, they're leaning in.

00:03:51.120 Jen Psaki from the White House, from the podium, is directing social media,

00:03:55.860 you must take down any speech we deem to be misinformation,

00:04:00.780 which is whatever is contrary to the government line at that moment,

00:04:05.020 and demanding from the White House podium not just one social media site.

00:04:08.500 We want every social media site to become our censorship arms.

00:04:14.180 I got to say, I think the Trump class action lawsuit became much, much stronger this week

00:04:21.060 because of the blatant exercise of power by the Biden administration.

00:04:26.760 You know, I will admit I was one of the people who was skeptical of the First Amendment argument against Facebook,

00:04:32.720 and you did begin to persuade me otherwise.

00:04:36.040 But it does seem as though the Biden administration wants to give some credibility here.

00:04:42.280 And by the way, when it's the Biden team defining misinformation,

00:04:46.740 I think we have it on good authority that that misinformation often turns out to be exactly the truth,

00:04:53.020 as we found out in 2020.

00:04:53.720 It turns out to be information.

00:04:55.160 Right.

00:04:56.140 Look, you know full well because one of the targets of censorship right in the heat of the 2020 election

00:05:04.240 was the New York Post where big tech for two weeks banned you from their platforms.

00:05:11.660 What was your reaction when the big tech overlords, just with a flip of a switch, said you're de-platformed?

00:05:19.280 I actually hadn't seen this story.

00:05:20.700 I'd gone to bed early.

00:05:22.140 I could look up our pages the night before, but I hadn't.

00:05:24.880 So I just went to sleep, woke up, saw the story.

00:05:27.100 I was like, whoa, that's a big cover.

00:05:28.340 That's interesting.

00:05:29.620 Ten o'clock, Facebook employee says we're reducing circulation on this.

00:05:35.860 And in his bio, it says before joining Facebook, this fellow was a staffer for Senator Boxer,

00:05:42.440 a staffer for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

00:05:45.060 But so shameless, so blatant about this.

00:05:47.500 And then the Twitter thing happened where you couldn't share it publicly.

00:05:51.040 And then people were asking me, so what's the story?

00:05:53.920 Can you send it to me in direct messages?

00:05:55.840 And you couldn't send it in direct messages.

00:05:58.180 It was the most surreal, sinister.

00:06:01.900 I mean, look, I mean, ultimately we prevailed.

00:06:05.000 The New York Post's story got unbanned.

00:06:08.980 We got our account back without doing the absurd thing that Twitter asked us to do,

00:06:13.760 which is to admit that this was hacked material.

00:06:17.100 Which it was not as far as I know.

00:06:18.680 It absolutely was.

00:06:19.640 And by the way, you say you prevailed.

00:06:22.940 There was this thing that happened in November.

00:06:26.560 Yes.

00:06:27.660 And I don't know if you saw that.

00:06:28.940 There was a few polls suggesting that a marginal share of Americans would have voted differently

00:06:34.860 had they heard of the Hunter Biden files.

00:06:37.660 So it's worth, for folks listening and watching,

00:06:40.420 let's assume some of them are distracted by the summertime joys of life

00:06:47.240 and don't perhaps remember the story.

00:06:49.420 So what was the story in the Post that big tech banned?

00:06:53.060 The initial story that they banned was a story that suggested that Hunter Biden had arranged

00:06:59.800 meetings between executives from a Ukrainian energy firm called Burisma,

00:07:05.120 which was paying him $50,000 a month.

00:07:07.940 Nice work if you can get it.

00:07:09.060 Despite his utter lack of expertise in, you know, Eastern European energy affairs or whatever.

00:07:15.060 So yeah, that he had arranged meetings between executives from this firm and his father,

00:07:21.480 who was then the Obama administration's point man on Ukraine and the second most powerful man in the world.

00:07:28.560 That was the story.

00:07:29.680 And we were very transparent about how we had gotten hold of the Hunter Biden laptop.

00:07:36.300 Our sourcing was more transparent and more open that, yes, it was a partisan source.

00:07:40.480 We had gotten it through Rudy Giuliani.

00:07:43.220 But there had been so many stories over the past four years, anti-Trump stories,

00:07:48.240 that were sourced based on an official who knew an official whose aunt might know someone else, you know,

00:07:55.020 and they collapsed under factual scrutiny.

00:07:58.140 None of those stories got banned.

00:08:00.020 This one, we said, yes, we got this from a partisan source.

00:08:02.660 You, the reader, have the right to know that.

00:08:04.640 Make your own judgment about it.

00:08:05.780 But here's also the raw facts, which aren't, you know, debunked for the mere fact that it's a partisan source.

00:08:13.200 Go ahead.

00:08:13.700 Well, the pushback was they said it wasn't Hunter Biden's laptop.

00:08:17.840 We now know it was.

00:08:19.120 Of course.

00:08:19.960 He wouldn't deny it on air in an interview with, I think, CBS.

00:08:22.960 So the story was true.

00:08:25.380 True misinformation.

00:08:27.120 It was true, but it was deemed misinformation by the people who control 90% of the flow of information around the Internet.

00:08:33.180 Yeah, when I would go on Fox to defend the story, I often would say, you know,

00:08:36.280 none of the thrust of the story or the essence of the story is absolutely true.

00:08:41.460 And that actually, I now regret that wording because even the details were true.

00:08:44.980 It wasn't as if the, you know, the gist of it was true.

00:08:48.240 The whole thing was true. 0.67

00:08:49.120 Not one bit has been debunked.

00:08:50.220 And 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.

00:08:59.740 Nope.

00:09:00.080 Or that the emails were not authentic.

00:09:02.260 If 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.

00:09:11.440 This is not my laptop.

00:09:12.580 These are not my emails.

00:09:13.660 I mean that.

00:09:14.700 Yeah.

00:09:14.920 But that's the natural.

00:09:16.940 If they don't say that, you know, we are reminded of Sherlock Holmes and the dog that doesn't bark.

00:09:25.820 When they're not saying that, that communicates an awful lot.

00:09:29.240 Yeah.

00:09:29.620 What they relied on was claims of Russian disinformation.

00:09:33.800 Absolutely not true. 0.90

00:09:34.840 Well, 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? 0.76

00:09:56.880 Senator, you work in Washington. 0.93

00:09:58.320 Have you ever heard a swamp creature apologize for anything?

00:10:02.160 Well, no.

00:10:03.140 And I'm not holding my breath.

00:10:07.480 Well, I would point out here that, as you mentioned, Saurabh, there were a lot of people who just hadn't heard of this story.

00:10:13.680 A good number of them would have changed their votes, according to surveys later.

00:10:17.120 And so you've just got this arbitrary wielding of power.

00:10:21.360 You 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.

00:10:32.700 They are working, to use a phrase from Mitch McConnell, as a sort of woke parallel government that is policing speech.

00:10:40.040 And 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.

00:10:53.040 This 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.

00:11:06.180 Yeah.

00:11:06.340 They're censoring the newspaper founded by one of the founding fathers.

00:11:11.780 I mean, there's the gall of that, the cultural gall.

00:11:14.440 Let's pause for a second.

00:11:15.780 They have a lot more money, to be honest.

00:11:16.540 You guys were founded by Alexander Friggett Hamilton.

00:11:19.900 Yeah.

00:11:20.340 Like, there's a musical about that guy.

00:11:22.580 You know, he's a very important guy.

00:11:24.300 Like, I say this all the time, but it's Saturday Night Live skits have come to life.

00:11:28.720 Like, you have these billionaire oligarchs in Silicon Valley that are like – and you guys are what, the fourth, fifth largest circulation in the country?

00:11:37.240 Something like that, yes.

00:11:38.560 And yet, Zuckerberg and Dorsey, who, my God, tell me he is not a troll who came from under a bridge.

00:11:47.880 What is it with that beard and at least one of those Senate testimonies?

00:11:52.120 I was pretty sure he hadn't showered, hadn't gotten out of bed yet.

00:11:55.280 I mean, it was bizarre.

00:11:55.960 Why does he need to?

00:11:57.120 Who does he answer?

00:11:57.860 Doesn't he go on these meditation trips where he only dines on bananas and whatever?

00:12:02.760 I refer to him as hipster Rasputin. 0.86

00:12:04.660 There are many theories about that one.

00:12:05.940 That's a very good one.

00:12:06.380 I like that one.

00:12:07.380 But the absolute arrogance of we will silence – and it was not only you.

00:12:13.780 There was an aftermath to that and that there was a Politico reporter who sent a tweet referencing what your article was about.

00:12:23.260 And the Politico reporter got banned and the Politico reporter crawled back on his hands and knees and said, oh, my overlord masters.

00:12:31.120 I apologize for having offended you.

00:12:33.240 I will not discuss the topics you will not allow me to discuss.

00:12:36.420 So 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.

00:12:49.200 And that one reporter, Gabe Sherman, had to do his kind of Maoist self-criticism.

00:12:54.000 I'm so sorry.

00:12:55.140 I should have looked into the story, blah, blah, blah.

00:12:57.600 And then you bring in the 50 intelligence officials.

00:13:00.320 And 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.

00:13:17.480 And journalists were supposed to kind of have a questioning relationship with them.

00:13:21.880 I'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.

00:13:30.560 And every blue check reporter says, oh, yes, sir. 0.70

00:13:33.880 Yes, sir.

00:13:34.320 That's right.

00:13:34.860 Yes, it is – you're not going to question that?

00:13:37.440 I mean –

00:13:37.840 But so, Reb, you know the media world.

00:13:41.780 Do you think there was a single one of them who actually believed what they were saying?

00:13:46.400 Well, at that point – I mean one of the things that has happened to media today is they are pure partisan.

00:13:53.280 The 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.

00:14:05.680 Anything that benefited Joe Biden must be amplified.

00:14:08.340 Anything 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.

00:14:17.400 As 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.

00:14:37.940 But, you know, what people will often say here is, yes, the Times, CNN, yes, they're partisan.

00:14:44.020 But it was sort of ever thus.

00:14:45.780 It was always this way.

00:14:46.700 There's nothing really new here.

00:14:47.800 The American journalistic and free speech tradition, it's always been the same sort of thing.

00:14:52.420 And, you know, I suppose this ties in a little bit with, you know, maintaining the tradition broadly and this unbroken thread.

00:14:59.240 But are we actually living through a break with the American political tradition, whether it's in journalism or the wielding of power?

00:15:07.940 Or is this – you know, look, it's just more of the same conservatives and don't get so wrapped up about it.

00:15:13.680 So I happen to be reading Richard Hofstadter's book, The American Political Tradition, right now.

00:15:18.120 And, 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.

00:15:25.060 And 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,

00:15:37.700 the 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

00:15:54.560 because after a while you couldn't just be a, you know, small.

00:15:57.640 And 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.

00:16:08.380 If 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

00:16:23.280 because the consensus has stopped serving a lot of people in the heartland of the country

00:16:27.820 and a lot of people are angry about what the consensus has produced for them over the past generation.

00:16:33.440 But they've become aware of themselves much more so than perhaps before as a united, uniparty elite

00:16:38.900 and are prepared to – are now prepared to go to steps that go beyond what was the norm maybe a generation or two ago

00:16:48.340 in terms of how, you know, how do you deal with this kind of opposition.

00:16:51.260 I don't know. That's my – that's my theory.

00:16:54.060 You do see a strange issue when it comes to consensus.

00:16:57.120 There are certain issues where the majority of the American people are on one side and the entire ruling class is on another.

00:17:02.840 Immigration is a good example. 1.00

00:17:04.480 The majority – poll after poll shows the majority of Americans want to reduce immigration, legal and illegal, Republicans and Democrats.

00:17:11.120 And yet, as you know very well, Senator, the ruling class, the establishment of both parties doesn't want to.

00:17:16.600 So some of what is most troubling is that there were norms and constraints that held back the ability of the ruling class to rule.

00:17:28.620 You go back to our constitution as it was written.

00:17:31.060 One of my favorite quotes from Thomas Jefferson is that the constitution was designed to be chains to bind the mischief of government.

00:17:42.620 And when it comes to consensus, even a decade ago – let's not go 30, 40, 50 years ago.

00:17:50.260 Let's go a decade ago.

00:17:52.080 A 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,

00:18:03.640 that they had an obligation to report both sides of a story.

00:18:07.980 Now, they were terrible at it.

00:18:10.700 They were horribly biased.

00:18:12.920 But they would tell you when you sat down, I am reporting news.

00:18:17.060 I am doing this.

00:18:17.960 They were lying.

00:18:18.720 They were self-justifying.

00:18:20.280 But that norm –

00:18:22.180 Hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue.

00:18:24.640 Exactly.

00:18:25.960 When it came to the First Amendment, there was a consensus, an overwhelming consensus, that free speech was a good thing,

00:18:32.540 that people should be allowed to speak even if you didn't like what they were saying, that our constitution protected it.

00:18:38.320 Religious liberty.

00:18:39.400 There was a norm that people should be allowed to live according to their faith.

00:18:43.960 You look at something like the Religious Freedom Restoration Act that was passed through both houses of Congress overwhelmingly bipartisan.

00:18:51.160 Hillary Clinton voted for it.

00:18:52.400 Chuck Schumer voted for it.

00:18:53.540 Ted Kennedy voted for it.

00:18:54.840 Bill Clinton signed it into law.

00:18:58.180 All of these norms, everyone agreed.

00:19:00.960 The American flag. 1.00

00:19:02.780 Everyone understood you stand up for the damn American flag. 1.00

00:19:05.680 Nobody disagreed. 0.99

00:19:08.000 Well, even – frankly, we're talking about Section 230.

00:19:10.720 Everyone forgets Section 230 is part of the Communications Decency Act, which was passed by Republicans and Democrats, signed by Bill Clinton,

00:19:18.420 that sought to have some standards on the internet, although ultimately the anti-indecency provisions got booted out of there.

00:19:24.660 But 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.

00:19:32.420 Isn't it interesting that you can find incredibly obscene material on Twitter and Facebook, completely unmolested by the companies, but conservative speech is censored?

00:19:42.600 That's completely reversing the purpose of Section 230.

00:19:46.120 It was so they would – the bulletins at the time, there wasn't kind of social media as such.

00:19:51.220 Bulletins could restrain and censor violent material, threats, prurient stuff.

00:19:57.220 All that stuff continues now.

00:19:58.800 But that measure is used to –

00:20:01.940 The political speech now.

00:20:03.120 To insulate these guys when they censor political speech.

00:20:07.740 It's so perverse.

00:20:08.760 Well, 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.

00:20:18.260 I said go back 10 years ago, but they didn't originate 10 years ago.

00:20:22.240 They 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.

00:20:31.280 So why were they obliterated?

00:20:32.880 I think it's a combination of a couple of things.

00:20:34.800 One, it is what happened in the university starting 20 years ago.

00:20:39.840 And 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.

00:20:49.540 And critical theory is all about destroying norms.

00:20:53.520 It's saying –

00:20:54.240 Criticizing.

00:20:54.940 It's criticizing.

00:20:55.680 It's literally whatever the norm is, it's a tool of oppression, so therefore let's tear down the norm.

00:21:02.600 And an awful lot of folks said, oh, that's kind of cute.

00:21:08.100 Our children are being trained in this stuff, but it's harmless.

00:21:10.980 When they go get a job and get a mortgage, they will put aside childish things and move on to life.

00:21:16.900 Well, 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.

00:21:37.280 So that's number one.

00:21:38.320 But then number two, the accelerant was Donald J. Trump.

00:21:43.420 And 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.

00:21:57.420 And 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. 0.85

00:22:15.680 Trump for the left became the evil one, which meant any norm that stood in the way.

00:22:21.520 If you're a journalist, if you're a Jake Tapper, you know, good example of someone who used to be a journalist.

00:22:29.980 He actually knows what these norms were.

00:22:31.780 There was a time when he tried.

00:22:33.520 He didn't effectively follow them, but he tried to follow them.

00:22:36.480 But then the angry 20-somethings say, well, if you report news, it helps the evil one.

00:22:45.340 So therefore, don't be part of the oppressive system.

00:22:48.720 I mean, all right, so that's kind of a theoretical.

00:22:50.820 But give me your perspective.

00:22:52.140 Well, no, I mean.

00:22:53.260 In a newspaper, how real is that?

00:22:55.380 Well, it's certainly true.

00:22:57.580 I 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.

00:23:08.800 What'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.

00:23:19.540 But it's not the traditional economic left, because notice it gets so easily accommodated by large corporations.

00:23:28.780 It's not as if – so if critical theory and this kind of neo-Marxism were a threat to the material interests of Apple Corp.

00:23:39.380 Of Nike.

00:23:39.920 Of Nike, of the trustees of the Ivy universities and so forth, I would promise you they would repel it within a second.

00:23:48.540 But somehow it's a kind of cultural leftism that blends very well with kind of neoliberal corporate rule.

00:23:59.020 Let me ask you something.

00:24:01.040 Is Chinese communism a threat to Apple or Amazon or big tech? 0.93

00:24:08.320 It's a friend.

00:24:10.520 It's the employer, I believe.

00:24:12.560 I think that's exactly right.

00:24:14.980 But I actually think communists are quite fine with massive accumulations of economic power as long as they can control it.

00:24:23.580 Communism has always been built on a lie, a lie of equality.

00:24:26.780 And in every communist country on the face of the earth, there's massive inequality.

00:24:30.540 Fidel Castro was a billionaire.

00:24:32.540 Right.

00:24:32.820 And he lived like a billionaire.

00:24:35.040 Putin is a billionaire and he lives like a billionaire.

00:24:37.820 Putin wants to be Mark Zuckerberg.

00:24:40.360 I'm waiting to see Vladimir on one of those weird hydrofoil things.

00:24:44.080 Surfing on the lake.

00:24:45.660 Like it is.

00:24:47.380 These are all tools to use force to oppress and take from everyone else.

00:24:54.680 And so big business, I think, has always been willing to get in bed with big government.

00:25:01.220 And today, the Fortune 100 does not oppose communism.

00:25:05.160 And in fact, they view communist countries as cash cows.

00:25:09.880 And, you know, obviously, when we're talking even about the Western tradition, Marxism plays a role in the Western tradition.

00:25:17.320 So it becomes difficult to parse these sorts of things.

00:25:20.020 You know, the book is called The Unbroken Thread.

00:25:21.820 We are going to have to break the thread because we're out of time.

00:25:23.720 But so, Rob, in our remaining 30 seconds, can you lead us out of this cultural madness and, you know, save the West?

00:25:31.520 Yes, I can save the West in 30 seconds.

00:25:33.480 Thank you.

00:25:33.560 No, 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.

00:25:44.580 And 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.

00:25:59.000 A republic itself refers to, like, res publica, right?

00:26:02.780 Yes.

00:26:03.040 Things that we hold in common.

00:26:03.740 Yes, the common we hold.

00:26:04.340 Right, right.

00:26:05.100 And actually, Sarah, before we wrap, can you take 60 seconds and just tell verdict listeners your story?

00:26:13.640 Because you have a remarkable story, and I think we would be doing a disservice if we didn't get a chance for people to learn it.

00:26:19.560 Sure.

00:26:20.100 So I was born and raised in Iran.

00:26:21.940 I immigrated to the United States at age 13, kind of born into a secular middle-class family there.

00:26:30.960 And what year did you come?

00:26:32.240 1998.

00:26:33.380 Okay.

00:26:33.880 And I became an atheist while I was still living under the Ayatollahs. 0.79

00:26:36.800 In fact, I became an interest atheist in part because of the Ayatollahs in Iran.

00:26:40.600 Then 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.

00:26:58.640 I was working in London at the time.

00:26:59.760 And, yeah, I was at the Wall Street Journal then.

00:27:03.980 I'm now at the New York Post.

00:27:06.360 So 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.

00:27:14.500 And how did you come to be editor at the Post?

00:27:16.540 Well, I'm the op-editor.

00:27:19.140 So 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.

00:27:29.900 Then I spent a year at a magazine called Commentary.

00:27:33.760 And then this job opened up at the New York Post and I seized it by the horns, as it were.

00:27:39.960 Well, thank you for your courage.

00:27:41.580 Oh, thank you.

00:27:41.980 And 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.

00:27:53.800 What 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.

00:28:05.140 Not who will be – I don't want to see partisans on my side of the aisle.

00:28:09.700 I 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.

00:28:26.600 So the line you're trying to hold is incredibly important, and thank you for that.

00:28:31.100 I just really hope that people are permitted to DM and privately message this episode.

00:28:36.720 So Rob might have completely blown it for us.

00:28:39.040 You know, we're going to be totally censored now.

00:28:41.200 But that's fine because conservatives are finally fighting back against this.

00:28:44.360 And thank you, Senator, for that fight.

00:28:45.960 Yes, yes.

00:28:46.680 Take a battering ground.

00:28:47.580 We'll follow the political fight, the journalistic fight, the legal fight, but we'll have to do it on a future episode.

00:28:52.840 I'm Michael Knowles.

00:28:53.440 This is Verdict with Ted Cruz.

00:28:54.780 We are going to be taking Verdict on the road.

00:29:06.320 We are partnering with the Young Americas Foundation.

00:29:08.700 We're going to multiple schools.

00:29:10.620 I think we're going to six schools and universities with YAF.

00:29:15.140 You can go to yaf.org slash verdict right now to request that we come to your school.

00:29:22.240 The deadline is August 18th.

00:29:24.640 Senator, should we go to the really nice, wonderful conservative schools with the Young

00:29:30.160 Americas Foundation, or should we go to the crazy, leftist, insane schools that are going 0.88

00:29:34.640 to run us out of town on the rail?

00:29:36.040 Well, it seems to me that should be up to the listeners of Verdict to decide.

00:29:39.560 And so you tell us, if you're a student right now, you might be at one of the few havens of

00:29:45.800 sanity and you say, hey, come cheer us on and reach out to us.

00:29:52.460 On the other hand, you might be behind enemy lines, surrounded by Bolsheviks and Mensheviks 0.98

00:29:57.180 and looking for a Berlin airlift.

00:30:01.740 You know, my guess is we're open to do it a little of both, but it's really the incredible

00:30:06.580 listeners of Verdict who are going to make that decision.

00:30:10.220 We want to free the students on campus.

00:30:12.140 We want to free all of us here in this country, so make sure you get those names in yaf.org

00:30:16.820 slash verdict.

00:30:18.300 August 18th is the deadline.

00:30:19.640 This episode of Verdict with Ted Cruz is being brought to you by Jobs Freedom and Security

00:30:26.980 Pack, a political action committee dedicated to supporting conservative causes, organizations

00:30:32.140 and candidates across the country.

00:30:34.520 In 2022, Jobs Freedom and Security Pack plans to donate to conservative candidates running

00:30:39.840 for Congress and help the Republican Party across the nation.

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Verdict with Ted Cruz - July 27, 2021

The Rise of the Censorship Czars ft. Sohrab Ahmari

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