March 22, 2025 • 44 mins
America is familiar with the vast censorship that took place under the Joe Biden presidency. This didn't just happen by accident. There's a vast, coordinated system working to ensure censorship continues. Jesse Kelly investigates alongside Ben Weingarten and Jeffrey A. Tucker.
I'm Right with Jesse Kelly | 3-21-25
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
Let's talk about censorship just really quickly. We have such
a huge show for you. Ben Winingarden's going to join
us here in a couple minutes. But censorship control is
really what it is. Censorship isn't really the right word
to use. Its control controlling what you are allowed to see, hear,
what you are allowed to say. And just understand why
the communist loves it now and why the communist has
(00:31):
always loved it. He is selling misery. He understands that
he cannot possibly exist without lies, without putting on a mask,
without hiding what he wants to do to you in
your country.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
So he must control everything.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
A big shout out to Hillary Clinton for once again
putting something on tape that proves my point perfectly.
Speaker 3 (00:55):
There's no way to sugarcoat it, there's no way to
explain it away. Autocracy is on the march, and we
now have a government in the United States that has
thrown in its slot with the autocrats, which has made
(01:16):
a choice to support those who wage war not peace,
who has given enormous power to the men who control
the information flow in our world, who have all pledged
allegiance to the continuation of algorithms that not only addict us,
(01:42):
but poison us with hatred and fear.
Speaker 1 (01:48):
You know what she's saying, This free speech stuff is
dangerous to all the control we used to have. They
believe in control because what they're selling is horrific and
they know it. That's why abortion becomes women's reproductive rights.
That's why you could go down the list of every
single issue and you will find out they have somehow
(02:10):
come up with some language that lies about what it
really is. And don't think this is just something that
exists over in Europe or China or North Korea. It's
right here in the good old US of A. We've
been living in it for years now. During COVID we
saw it turned into overdrive, and so many of these
people Trump or No Trump are still in their positions
(02:33):
of power. We're going to talk about the censorship industrial complex.
We're going to talk about control. Ben Winingarden has so
many thoughts on this, and he joins us next.
Speaker 4 (02:58):
I believe the dismissing people, dismissing their concerns, or worse yet,
shutting down media, shutting down elections, or shutting people out
of the political process protects nothing. In fact, it is
the most surefire way to destroy democracy and speaking up
(03:18):
and expressing opinions isn't election interference, even when people express
views outside your own country, and even when those people
are very influential, and trust me, I say this with
all humor. If American democracy can survive ten years of
Thunberg scolding, you guys can survive a few months of
(03:39):
Elon Musk. But what German democracy, What no democracy, American,
German or European will survive, is telling millions of voters
that their thoughts and concerns, their aspirations they're pleased for relief,
are invalid or unworthy of even being.
Speaker 2 (04:01):
I love that.
Speaker 1 (04:02):
I love that America is starting to lead when it
comes to freedom again, and it saddens me a great
deal what's happening in Europe and what happened in this country.
Let's not just point fingers across the pond under the
Biden administration, joining me now to discuss the censorship, the
communists love of it, and so many other things. It's
been wide garden editor at large of real clear investigations.
(04:24):
Ben communists are selling something evil and horrible. They always
have been, and so they've always believed in controlling what
people can see and hear. It's just that simple, because
you can't sell a demonic religion of destruction if you're
being honest about it.
Speaker 5 (04:40):
Absolutely right, and to your point, that's why the communists
generally go after religions first, because as an anti religion,
they don't want to have to compete against a religion
that actually puts in place a system where man isn't
God and.
Speaker 6 (04:57):
Lording over slaves.
Speaker 5 (04:59):
But people are actually endowed with inalienable rights. They can
think for themselves, they can pursue their interests, their passions,
their ambitions as they see fit, and they can be sovereign.
They can be kings in their own home. And to
your point, at core, the censorship, what I would call
(05:20):
the censorship industrial complex that has lorded over Americans speech
and really global speech for the last decade or so.
At the end, to your point, is all about power
and control. If you can control the narrative, you can
control populations, you can control and maintain a political monopoly
(05:45):
and therefore monopolize power. Pure and simple, that's what censorship
is about. And they will drum up all kinds of
other justifications for it. We don't want dangerous speech, so
called to proliferate, because that can lead people to go
down bad pads, and it can threaten national security, it
(06:05):
can threaten public health, etc. But these are all pretexts
that in reality are used to silence dissenters from regime orthodoxy,
whoever that regime is and whatever their orthodoxy is.
Speaker 6 (06:18):
And Vice President of.
Speaker 5 (06:19):
Vance there, even though it may have fallen on deaf
years and I love that you have the Europeans not
laughing at the joke about Gretit Tunberg. But he's raising
a very serious and basic and fundamental point, which is
that governments are responsible to their people, and if not,
they're basically acting as masters and we are the slaves
as opposed to them actually governing with our consent and
(06:44):
being responsive to our concerns. And if you're going to
silence the other half of a country, if you're going
to not permit dissent, you're not being responsive to your people,
and you're not a government, you're a tyranny. And thank god,
what a change in administry from one that not only
supported a censorship industrial complex here but supported its growth
(07:06):
abroad as well, and now we have an administration that
defends that liberty, that natural right at home and is
also going to defend our liberty as abroad as well.
And we're going to work together with allies and partners
who actually share those values and principles as opposed to
privileging those who talk about democracy while they impose policies
(07:27):
that are anything but including when it comes to speech.
Speaker 1 (07:31):
Yeah, it's funny brought up about the safety thing. I remember,
like it was yesterday, Jensaki and all of them talking
about how they had to go to Facebook.
Speaker 2 (07:39):
Well here she was about COVID.
Speaker 7 (07:41):
In terms of actions Alex that we have taken, or
we're working to take, I should say, from the federal government,
We've increased disinformation research and tracking within the Surgeon General's Office.
We're flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation.
Speaker 2 (07:58):
It blew me away. I remember watching things like that.
Speaker 8 (08:02):
Ben.
Speaker 1 (08:02):
I'm sure I have the same effect on me that
it did on you, and my jaw would just drop.
Speaker 2 (08:07):
It's not just that they.
Speaker 1 (08:08):
Were doing it, they were bragging that they were doing
And of course, it's always for your safety, always, always, always.
Speaker 2 (08:14):
Stalin said the exact same stuff. Mau said. The stands up.
Speaker 1 (08:17):
It's always for your safety, of course, but here in
the United States of America, the land.
Speaker 2 (08:21):
Of the Free.
Speaker 1 (08:22):
They felt totally comfortable standing up in front of the
American people and let them know that the White House
was flagging problematic posts.
Speaker 2 (08:30):
I'm fluorid at what's happened to this country.
Speaker 5 (08:33):
A tyranny for your own good, of course, And you're right,
they say it, and it's like so matter of fact
the approach. Oh yeah, we're going to surveil social media
en mass for ideas and opinions and even facts that
we don't like, and then we're going to tell the
big tech companies that we have the power to destroy
with regulations and even by a statement from a president
(08:57):
who says, by the way, you're killing people by what
you allow to traffic on your platform, and we're going
to tell them you better take down this speech. We
don't like, but it's for it's all for public health,
and fully in accordance with public health authorities. Of course,
didn't abuse those authorities and run rough shot over our
(09:17):
rights and invent out of thin air things like six
feet social distancing and made us wear three masks that
didn't do a thing, and on and on, of course,
But even if that weren't the justification for it. The
fact that they could build that apparatus is the thing
that's really terrifying.
Speaker 6 (09:34):
And I dove pretty deep in.
Speaker 5 (09:36):
Investigative reporting and testified a couple of times before Congress
on what they actually did. But it is staggering what
that administration built in the way of a censorship apparatus,
and through that pretext of first public health and pandemic
emergency measures, and then expanding it way beyond that, and
(09:57):
really starting with the pretext of the Russians are interfer
in our system and so there's a real problem on
social media and we need to clamp down on foreign
information operations and interference. Then we're going to take those
powers and graph them onto Americans because actually, it doesn't
really matter where the wrong think is coming from. What
(10:17):
matters is the content of the wrong thing. So we're
not going to care that much about attribution. And basically,
you had a number of agencies within the federal government,
including a subagency in Department of All Land Security that
no one ever heard of, SISA, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure
Security Agency, and they created essentially an outsourced censorship regime.
(10:40):
Everyone has heard by this point about the Disinformation Governance
Board that the Biden administration had to scrap because people
called it out for the Orwellian tyrannical engine that it
would have been. But already a DGB, a Disinformation Governance
Board really existed, but they outsourced it to try and
flout law and the Constitution, and of course the First Amendment.
(11:04):
You had SISA working with third party quote unquote NGOs, researchers,
academic institutions, and they created a non governmental so called
vehicle at least in name, that would look to social
media en mass all of our tweets, all of our
Facebook posts, four narratives that threatened election infrastructure. That is,
(11:29):
if you had questions about the integrity of mass mail
in balloting, of all the other pandemic era quote unquote
emergency measures that were imposed to eviscerate and erod the
integrity of the twenty twenty elections, they said that poses
a threat to our critical election infrastructure.
Speaker 6 (11:48):
So your tweets basically.
Speaker 5 (11:50):
Questioning mail in balloting and those ballot boxes all over
the country, those were like potential mini terror attacks. And
SISA worked with third parties to lobby the social media
companies to change their content moderation policies so called really
their censorship strategies to make sure that anything challenging election
(12:13):
integrity from their perspective would be potentially flagged and categorized
as wrongthink and liable to be censored, violating their terms
of service. And these outsourced entities, and I'm thinking primarily
of the Election Integrity partnership here when about flagging tweets,
Facebook posts, and other content, violating the very social media
(12:38):
content moderation policies they lobby the social media companies to create,
and God Americans censored some of that content was flagged
by the government. And of course this vehicle was created
by the government to avoid the First Amendment issues by
creating another entity to do it. And you had multiple
federal courts agree this was censorship by proxy. This was
(13:02):
maybe the greatest attack on the First Amendment in American
history at the scale of social media, and sadly and
in some ways this brings us to today where we
see this kind of crisis playing out in other realms.
The Supreme Court refused to rule on the merits of
that case. They said the plaintiffs lacked standing, and they
kicked it back to the Lower courts, So we didn't
(13:23):
get the Supreme Court to step in and say what
happened here was censorship by proxy. You had government pushing
all these social media companies to censor. It created vehicles
on the outside to push them to censor. Things that
the government wanted flagged got censored. They abridged our speech,
They tried to abridge our speech. There was a conspiracy
to do it by proxy from these third parties. If
(13:44):
not directly by what the government was saying in direct
emails and phone conversations and publicly to the social media companies,
Supreme Court would not step in and do its duty
to rule on the merit and.
Speaker 6 (13:56):
To curtail and prohibit that behavior.
Speaker 5 (13:58):
So now it's incumbent on a president and a Congress
to do it. The executive branch has started that work.
It started it within hours of the president's inauguration with
an executive order, and now it's time for Congress to
do its job. Beyond the oversight it did, which was
important over the last four years to expose the size,
scope and nature of this complex of government agencies and
(14:21):
NGOs and academic entities, and beyond that worked to silence
us directly and by proxy.
Speaker 1 (14:29):
Ben these people obviously they're a bunch of nutballs, and
I don't like to We don't man worship here anybody
on the show but Elon Musk purchasing Twitter, which of
course he renamed X, which is kind of weird, but anyway,
he renamed it X. It sounds small if you're not
somebody aware of how powerful social media has become. But
(14:51):
he really is the mortal enemy of all these evil monsters.
Is the fact that he took one of the biggest
companies and freed it up.
Speaker 2 (15:00):
For lack of a better way to put it, they.
Speaker 1 (15:02):
Had everything, and the fact that he took one thing
it really hurt them, didn't it.
Speaker 6 (15:08):
It really hurt them.
Speaker 5 (15:09):
And it also has now caused the other social media
companies to, at least in their rhetoric, if not in
their policies, have to change and go back towards something
more closely resembling free speech, even though they're still by
no means there for no other reason than the competitive
pressure that X brought to it. But I think to
your point, we ought to have thought of social media
(15:33):
companies pre the second Trump administration as essentially controlled assets
of the national security and intelligence apparatus. We would have
liked to think of them as this is the digital
public square, this is the printing press, this is newspapers,
This is the public square in twenty first century America.
(15:53):
But in reality, while they may have started out that way, governments,
including our own, realized that if you could harness this power.
First of all, these are tools of mass surveillance and intelligence,
because you can develop a massive profile on people if
you know what they're saying and who they're communicating with,
at what times and where, and what the impact is.
(16:15):
But also that you can manipulate public opinion if you
can control what is allowed to be propagated on the
social media platforms and what isn't seen, what's banned, and
what shadow band what doesn't get the circulation that it
otherwise would. So in the hands of good and benevolent people,
these platforms can be great tools, and in the hands
(16:36):
of those who want to exploit them, sometimes maybe in
pursuit of beneficial things, but other times eviscerating our rights
here at home. You can see the danger in it,
and he took essentially what I would argue is a
national security or intelligence asset out of the hands of
those services, because it was the national security and intelligence
apparatus that was pressuring and colluding with the likes of
(16:59):
X and the executives at the other companies to ensure
that the narrative they wanted was out there, and things
they didn't want, like the Hunter Biden laptop story, weren't
out there. And he took it, and he put up
forty plus billion dollars to say I'm going to free
the bird.
Speaker 6 (17:14):
As he put it, that was.
Speaker 5 (17:17):
A courageous move in terms of the principle of let's
defend free speech. It's courageous because he might have lit
billions of dollars on fire. And maybe it was most
courageous of all because, as a consequence of it, all
of these other governments that wanted to have control over
the social media companies now feared that there was an
asset that was not in their hands. He disarmed them,
(17:38):
he took it out of their hands.
Speaker 6 (17:40):
And of course there was a massive.
Speaker 5 (17:41):
Onslaught against Musk as a consequence of it, and that
onslaught continues, and it only intensified, of course, when he
backed Trump. But you had the Biden administration any number
of agencies investigating him after you had the European governments
who hate his guts, they have their own regulatory regime
that threatens to impose crippling, crippling finds on the likes
(18:04):
of X and other social media companies if they don't
censor content the way that those European governments want. And
of course most of the European nations have nothing remotely
resembling the First Amendment.
Speaker 6 (18:15):
That governs their regulatory regime.
Speaker 5 (18:18):
So this was a courageous move, a costly move in
defense of free speech, and thank god he did it.
It's still not a perfect social media platform by any means,
but when we look back in history, and really if
you look at the ability to have anything resembling a republic,
of course, it depends first on the ability to be
(18:41):
able to debate, to share information, ideas, to argue and
made the best argument win.
Speaker 6 (18:48):
And you can make the case.
Speaker 5 (18:49):
That if he didn't buy X, and if he didn't
take all these swings and arrows, and by the way,
if he weren't so important to the US government as well,
because of all the technologies he develops that have sort
of made him a protect man in some way. Is
despite all the swings and arrows against him. This could
be the difference between freedom and tyranny in this country
when we look back on it over the long run.
Speaker 1 (19:11):
Then something I was thinking about, actually, I was thinking
about it this morning. I was thinking about COVID and
all the evil, horrible lockdown crap all the demons in
this country did. And then I thought about where all
those people are now, and this could expand way beyond COVID.
We're obviously talking about censorship here. All the evil things
(19:31):
that were done to the American people over the last
four or five, six years, ten years, pick your number,
doesn't matter. The people who did it are not in prison.
Most of them are not resigning, retired, fired in disgrace,
had to change their name and move into the rocky
mountains somewhere.
Speaker 2 (19:48):
These people were.
Speaker 1 (19:49):
Still among us, and many of them still have a
bunch of power and the desire to do what they
did again.
Speaker 2 (19:56):
How do we stop that?
Speaker 5 (20:00):
Yeah, And to your point, they even took preemptive steps
like Partning the likes of Anthony Fauci and others to
try and protect themselves. What we have right now is
the beginnings of it, which is, first of all, you
have all of these people who were targeted by the
censorship apparatus, by the public Health establishment and others, and
(20:21):
they have actually assumed the very seats with the very
authorities that were used to try and destroy them before.
So I'm thinking of of course RFK Junior, of course
Donald Trump himself, J. Bodicharia, and Nih and others.
Speaker 6 (20:36):
Well.
Speaker 5 (20:37):
Bodicharia, by the way, was one of the plaintiffs in
that case that went to the Supreme Court I mentioned before,
and one of the leaders of the Great Barrington Declaration
which called for essentially liberty in response to the COVID response.
But he was one of the plaintiffs in that case
Missouri v.
Speaker 6 (20:52):
Biden.
Speaker 5 (20:53):
So you have people who were targeted by the regime
and by the system who are now in places of power.
That's a start. There's some level of justice in that.
The Trump administration goes further in the way of policy.
And a big part of how these people have accrued
their powers is first of all, obviously when they're in government,
but second of all on the outside, when they're in
(21:16):
this gulag archipelago of NGOs.
Speaker 6 (21:19):
And think tanks, etc. And academic institutions.
Speaker 5 (21:23):
And the Trump administration put forth that first day executive order,
which essentially says no federal personnel can engage in this
sort of censorship directly or by proxy behavior, and also
no federal resources can go towards it, and that of
course means money and money.
Speaker 6 (21:40):
Government money is part.
Speaker 5 (21:43):
Of the lifeblood of all of these outside organizations, imperative
to them. It helped birth this whole burgeoning censorship ecosystem
on the outside. So depriving it of government employees, depriving
it of government policies, and depriving it of federal government
money is hugely significant and shouldn't be understated, as is
(22:04):
the oversight work, because no one wants to be named
and shammed and exposed. And if you could put a
face and a resume and a record with the kind
of tyrannical activity that we saw, no one wants that.
So all of those things matter. The executive action and
the oversight work matters. The next thing has to be
codifying this in the law, and there's evidence that this
(22:26):
Congress is going to try to do it.
Speaker 6 (22:29):
Let's see what happens.
Speaker 5 (22:30):
You know, it's obviously we've been burned before expecting there
to be a robust legislative action and there's some who
would you would think be on our side who aren't.
Speaker 6 (22:40):
On this issue, you.
Speaker 5 (22:41):
Have to have legislative action to codify it so that
you can turn the president's executive action into law that's
on the books and that can outlast any one president.
Now I would step back and say it's absurd on
its face that you need laws to codify what the
First Amendment already says. But these people have so perverted
(23:02):
our system and have such a warped perspective on what
their powers ought to be, and they think they know
best for the American people.
Speaker 6 (23:12):
And so consequently, I think you need laws, and.
Speaker 5 (23:14):
Not only laws that codify what the administration is doing.
And the administration is also, by the way, going to
go back and do a review of everything the Biden
administration did, and maybe there will be some law enforcement
action at the end of all that. But beyond that,
I think there needs to be real teeth to the laws,
and that means you have to have criminal penalties. It
can't just be you get fired, maybe you lose your pension,
(23:37):
if you engage in this sort of conduct conduct, there
have to be criminal penalties, and then the law has
to be enforced because if not, there is no to
turn action. And to your point, few have paid any
real price except maybe being out of power. And so far,
maybe their budgets have been cut, their prestige has been lost,
they've been exposed publicly, and half the country may find
(23:59):
them to be contemptible. Until and unless there is real teeth,
there's going to be nothing to deter that sort of action.
And basically you're gonna have tyrants in waiting ready to
spring when there's a new administration, in new Congress, et cetera.
So it has to be done by law, executive action,
and then ultimately you got to change.
Speaker 6 (24:19):
The culture, and that's the really hard part.
Speaker 5 (24:21):
You have to have a country that produces people who
don't view the world the way these people view the
world and think they're smarter than everyone else, they're morally
superior to everyone else, and so they not only have
a right, but an obligation to lord over us. And
that's a generational project, and that's a project that we
all have to engage in our own lives, starting with
(24:42):
our families, our friends, and in our communities.
Speaker 1 (24:45):
Yeah, that's the long term I totally agree, that's the
ultimate solution, and I'm glad you brought up people going
to prison, because everyone just thinks I'm an unhinged barbarian
when I say we can't save the gover we can't
save the country without government people going to prison. And yes,
I hate the government and I can't stand these people,
but that's not.
Speaker 2 (25:02):
Why I say it.
Speaker 1 (25:03):
Unless government people go to prison, they're just gonna do
all the same stuff against they know they can. There's
no consequences. Kevin Klinsmith getting twelve months probation for using
his job at the FBI to lie on a freaking
warrant application. He should be buried under the federal jail somewhere.
A guy should never breathe free year again. But these
people were never held to account.
Speaker 5 (25:24):
And to your point, who was the presiding judge in
the clin Smith case.
Speaker 6 (25:29):
I believe it was Judge James Boseburg.
Speaker 2 (25:31):
It was.
Speaker 1 (25:33):
It was same freaking guy, Ben my brother, Thank you,
come back soon.
Speaker 2 (25:37):
I appreciate you. All right, We're not done, We'll be back.
Speaker 1 (25:56):
It's amazing how long censorship has been around. You know,
it didn't start with Joe Biden by any stretch the imagination.
It didn't even start with communism, tyrants, evil people who
can't sell their ideas to the masses simply try to
control them.
Speaker 2 (26:12):
That's what they do.
Speaker 1 (26:13):
Evil people abound in evil people who want to do
evil things will always try to control what you can
see here and say, joining me now to talk about
this and many things, my friend Jeffrey Tucker, founder and
president of the wonderful Brownstone Institute, Jeffrey. Censorship may have
been pushed into overdrive in this country under President Joe Biden,
(26:35):
if we're still pretending he was president.
Speaker 2 (26:37):
But it didn't begin with him.
Speaker 1 (26:39):
Communists in particular have loved it forever they need it.
Speaker 9 (26:44):
We don't know how long we've lived in a censored world.
I suspect it's been for most of our lives. Actually,
it's true that we didn't have the technology in the
past to know everything in real time and to get
a diverse range of views.
Speaker 8 (26:57):
I mean, I grew up in a world with.
Speaker 9 (27:00):
Three television stations that all had the same thing, and
nobody really had much hunger for news beyond that. On
the other hand, we kind of trusted the system. We
figured that everything worked just fine, and nobody really questioned it.
But now then that with technology came along to make
everybody a reporter. You have citizen journalism, as Elon says,
(27:24):
and it's like the ruling class just panicked and said, Okay, no,
we're going to make the Internet work exactly the way
television worked in the nineteen seventies. And the Biden administration
even put out a document to that effect called Declaration
on the Future of the Internet, in which they imagined
a world of stakeholders working with governments.
Speaker 8 (27:48):
So that's what they were going to do.
Speaker 9 (27:50):
And then they would have gotten away with it too,
But for Elon Musk and the purchase of Twitter and
turning it into x has just blown up in the
entire world and done much more besides. So now we're
facing this kind of astonishing information flood on an increasing level,
(28:12):
and we can't even believe what we're what we're seeing.
It's every day is kind of mind blowing. And adolescence
is always the same that we've been lied to, we've
been robbed, we've been pillaged, and that there's an overclass
out there that has long lived at our expense. So
that seems like, you know, the upshot of what we're learning,
(28:34):
and every day and every minute has just been an
unfolding of that truth.
Speaker 1 (28:41):
Jeffrey, this may sound off topic. Maybe it is off topic,
but hearing you describe it in that way, you know
what you know what bugs me is I love history.
I'm a history freak. I geek out on ancient history.
But you to World War two, you name it. I'm
just I'm a history geek. I guess that's part of
getting old and gray. I just love history, and the
(29:01):
older the history gets, the fewer and fewer sources you
get for any one story. You know, world War two,
you're gonna have a bunch of sources, But the Battle
of Troy you have one?
Speaker 2 (29:12):
It did it even happen?
Speaker 8 (29:13):
Right?
Speaker 1 (29:13):
How much of the history that I know and love
that maybe you know and love that people watching know
and love. How much of the history of the world
is just a flat out lie.
Speaker 9 (29:23):
You know, it's amazing that you say that, you put
it that way, and that you say it that way.
That is exactly what I've been thinking. And we have
to rethink kind of everything you know, from the follow
from through through everything. And I can't get enough of
this now. And probably you're in the situation I am
where I'm just in a constant state of incredulity, you know.
(29:48):
You know, oh that's what you say happened, What really happened?
Speaker 8 (29:51):
You know.
Speaker 9 (29:53):
And from from the Brownstond point of view, we're mainly
dedicated to figuring out the history of the last five years.
And it is not easy, I can tell you. It's
just it's kind of a NonStop investigative effort, and it's
it's truly overwhelming, and it would have been impossible without
(30:17):
all these new tools that we have. But even with them,
we're still trying to piece it together, to say nothing
of you know, the Cold War, you know, the the
Latin American wars of the nineteen eighties, Vietnam, you know, Korea.
You just go back in time, and who knows what
(30:38):
it is.
Speaker 8 (30:39):
We don't know.
Speaker 9 (30:40):
And then we had this document dump for the CIA,
because there's in Washington. If you've hung around Washington enough,
you figure this out that there's two information streams. I mean,
one is what the public knows and the other is
the classified information stream. And there's a firm barrier between
those two things. And and Trump was advocating for the
(31:03):
release of the JFK files and uh and and he
pushed for it last time, he pushed for it. This
time he put out an executive order demanding it, and
it still wasn't coming. It still wasn't company. So finally
he went to the JFK Performing Arts into the Kennedy
Performing Arts Center and announced that they would becoming sending
the entirety of the Washington establishment into overdrive panic. And
(31:28):
they jumped all these documents withholding some but and they
weren't even entirely sure, according to New York Times anyway,
New York Times is panicked about this. They were not
even sure entirely what it is that they dumped. And
we're getting our first look at it now. And of
course it turns out the CIA, you know, the operations
the CIA are are are revealed within this, within this,
(31:52):
within these documents, confirming confirming your worst fears, you know.
And but that's the way we're getting the information. So
I guess to some extent, I feel like there's no
chance we're ever gonna put this genie back in the bottle.
And I'm quite frankly glad about that.
Speaker 1 (32:11):
How does the normal person, how do they how do
they navigate this new world? Because you brought up Elon
Musk and X and social media and Trump, the JFK
files and right.
Speaker 2 (32:22):
So, okay, now we went from having.
Speaker 1 (32:25):
A few very tightly controlled sources by evil people to
now and it's endless now at this point in time,
if you want to drink water, you have to drink
from a fire hydrant that's just been opened up. And
anyone with any experience and that knows that can be
extremely dangerous and has it is to your health. So
if I'm a normal person and I wake up in
(32:45):
the morning and I pick up my phone, how do
I even.
Speaker 2 (32:47):
Start to walk through this world? What do I do?
Speaker 8 (32:51):
Yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 9 (32:52):
It's a completely different world with a kind of a
constant dopamine rush, which, as you say, is not actually
very helpful about this, you know, it's not helpful for
us spiritually and mentally and otherwise. But we've got decades
of disinformation to unravel, and those are just the times
(33:14):
we live in. We're going to find out worse and
worse things every day. I've been quite frankly shocked beyond
anything that I ever expected about the revelations from DOGE,
and I don't think that people have fully processed the
implications of what they've said over and what they've discovered
(33:38):
over the last couple of months, and I mean, like
even a conservative estimate is that ten percent of the
US budget is essentially unaccounted for. I mean, that's that's
an unbelievable figure. I mean, we were talking about since
since the end of World War two, something like what
(33:58):
a twenty trillion dollars has come and gone that's not
been accounted for and that But what do you do
with that kind of information?
Speaker 8 (34:07):
How do you run that down? I don't know.
Speaker 9 (34:09):
And then you've got the other problem that the Trump
administration and the people within the Trump administration that one
transparency that want to get the information out are facing,
you know, attacks from every angle, unrelenting, like every single
minute of every day is and not to mention threats
(34:33):
on the threats on their lives, right and now Elon's
faced with having you know, Tesla Dealership's burning and Tesla's
burning on the street and people selling the.
Speaker 8 (34:43):
Stock and everything. It's it's what a time to be alive, astounding.
Speaker 1 (34:49):
Speaking of the last five years in Brownstone and the
work you've been doing. I can I'll never be able
to let it go. Every Maybe that's the Irish in me.
Maybe it's it's just a Kelly thing, but I'm never
going to let it go. What I watched happen to
this country when we got a new virus from China.
Honestly the other day I brought it up online, and
(35:10):
I've talked about this on the show before. The fact
that every single institution in the United States of America,
from the medical institutions to the freaking Central Intelligence Agency,
demanded that everybody say it didn't come from a lab
when it came from a lab. And again, it's not
the lie. That's amazing. Why Why is it every institution
(35:32):
in the country decided to together join forces and lockshields
against the truth. And that's just one of a million
ways they tried to censor out all the honesty, all
the true things during COVID.
Speaker 9 (35:44):
And the silliness, right, I mean the six feet of distance,
you know, that censorship, the claims that the vaccine was
the magic cure when it clearly was not, and anybody
could have known that even without reading the EA, extended
closures that ruined kids' lives, the destructions of small business,
(36:08):
and the silence on the part of elite sectors. You know,
in in academia and in media and so on. It's
it's incredible. It's an event that discredits an entire generation
of legacy institutions, from think tanks to universities, to professors
to media outlets. And they're terrified for people to talk
(36:33):
about it. Really, and and yet we have to talk
about it, and we should not get over it. We
need a truth on what happened over the last five years,
why all this stuff happened, you know, who was behind it,
why they engaged in it. Just some some truth and honesty.
I think we're going to get there, but it's going
to take new institutions like brown Sion and and and
(36:59):
you too to make it happen, because the legacy just doesn't.
They want it all, you know gone. The New York
Times has only recently started saying basically, mistakes were made.
You know, now shut up. That's essentially it. But there's
a lot more to it. There's a lot more going on.
And and forget justice. We just need truth.
Speaker 2 (37:22):
Yeah, talk to me about Murphy versus Missouri.
Speaker 8 (37:26):
Yeah, the censorship issue. So here's the problem. It's not
a problem.
Speaker 9 (37:33):
Trump has put in a an executive order that forbids
the federal agencies from from from from being involved, and
it was a very good executive order in any kind
of third party censorship efforts, and that presumably makes that
litigation kind of puts it on the back burner. Uh
(37:56):
And and meanwhile, you know that the litigators had worked
for years on Discovery to get little bits and pieces
actually got about ten thousand pages. But then Zuckerberg comes
out and just confesses the whole thing. Right, they're just
being perfectly honesty how they censored at the behase of governments.
The problem with the executive order is that it's not
(38:18):
it's not in law yet and and that litigation is
going to be ongoing, but I doubt that we're going
to get anything from the Supreme Court out of it.
What we really need is some strict legislation from the
Center and that would that would help. At the same
time the censorship goes on. You know, this is this
(38:41):
is part of the problem with all of these platforms,
from from LinkedIn to to Facebook to YouTube have deep
algorithmic structures that were trained to censor, so they no
longer needed the pressure from the federal government to do it.
And just to give you an example, when Elon took
(39:01):
over Twitter. Twitter, they tried to rip out all the
gots of the censorship. But even now there's certain links
and certain things that you find that uh, you know,
will trigger X to say, oh, you can't post that,
but the note goes to the legacy url Twitter dot com,
(39:22):
not to X, so you can tell that this is
just legacy code still in there. So they've been working
for a year to get rid of all the machinery
of censorship within the algorithms and have been unable to
do a complete job. And that process at YouTube and
then Google and LinkedIn so on hasn't even begun. So
(39:47):
in a fact, we don't we don't have sort of
intensifying censorship, but we have the legacy censorship is still
you know, a continuing reality at all those platforms. Then
you have the problem of the mainstream media, which has
a deep culture of political bias and aspirational professionals who
(40:10):
know better than to say anything that would expose expose
the racket. So those institutions are kind of done. I mean,
what's interesting to me. You have Jeff Bezos over at
the Washington Post made a big announcement We're not going
to be biased anymore. We're going to have the op
ed page is going to be filled with it's going
(40:31):
to have content that's in favor of, for example, freedom.
Well you know that caused resignations all around. Well, we
can't do that. That's a terrible idea. And that announcement
I think was made maybe a month or six six
weeks ago. Nothing has changed on the op ed page.
So what do you do. I think at some point
you just can't fire everybody.
Speaker 8 (40:51):
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (40:55):
All right, Finally, this all this brings me actually to
the thing that that to be honest, it frightens me
a little bit. And part of it is just because
I don't understand it. I'm not a technological person. AI
artificial intelligence. I know what it is. I mean, I
know at least the basics of it. I certainly could
not explain the code or anything like that behind it,
but I get it.
Speaker 2 (41:14):
What it is.
Speaker 1 (41:15):
But I'm very, very concerned about the worst people in
the world coming up with the new technology that's going
to only favor them. I just it's something that concerns
me greatly.
Speaker 9 (41:27):
When AI was first came out, and you probably remember this,
it was chat GPT just kind of Go dropped on
the world and I said, oh, this is wonderful. And
then Google got its own AI and oh this is wonderful.
Except people quickly discovered it was wildly biased. You remember
that you tried to get you know, these chat GPT
or one of the other AI engines to draw a
(41:48):
picture of Founding Fathers and it looked, you know, didn't
look anything like the Founding Fathers, so to speak, and
the questions were skewed, and it seemed like we were
living in an Orwellian world. Well, Grock came along, which
is you know, once again Elon Musk and and became
an uncensored, unbiased, trainable, non woke AI engine, and so
(42:15):
everybody else just immediately shaped up right, So it was
only that competitive pressure.
Speaker 8 (42:20):
Uh, you know that that fixed that.
Speaker 9 (42:22):
So it's like we keep dodging these bullets one by one,
but ultimately the censorship will be baked into AI, and
it probably already is at Google and Facebook and elsewhere.
And at that point, the machines run us and it
doesn't require any kind of decision making by on the
(42:42):
part of any actual human person. So you know, AI
is going to lead to a world where we're fed,
you know, NonStop propaganda, and like I say that, the
only thing that separates us from that is you know, Grock,
one guy in one platform. So it's it's tremendously scary
just how close we came.
Speaker 1 (43:03):
No doubt, Jeffrey as always, Thank you, sir. I appreciate
you very much. I don't even understand AI, but I
understand it enough that it makes me nervous.
Speaker 2 (43:16):
Anyway, We're not.
Speaker 1 (43:17):
Done yet, we'll be back. I believe you should be
able to say what you want to say. I think
if you have ideas that are different than mine, that
(43:38):
you should be able to voice those ideas just as
loudly as I do. I don't need or have any
desire to control you. That's because I'm not a filthy communist.
Remember when the communists tell you who they are, believe them,
and they always, always, always will sell their censorship desires
as keeping you safe.
Speaker 2 (44:00):
Don't ever listen. All right, all right, we'll do it
again
Let's talk about censorship just really quickly. We have such
a huge show for you. Ben Winingarden's going to join
us here in a couple minutes. But censorship control is
really what it is. Censorship isn't really the right word
to use. Its control controlling what you are allowed to see, hear,
what you are allowed to say. And just understand why
the communist loves it now and why the communist has
(00:31):
always loved it. He is selling misery. He understands that
he cannot possibly exist without lies, without putting on a mask,
without hiding what he wants to do to you in
your country.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
So he must control everything.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
A big shout out to Hillary Clinton for once again
putting something on tape that proves my point perfectly.
Speaker 3 (00:55):
There's no way to sugarcoat it, there's no way to
explain it away. Autocracy is on the march, and we
now have a government in the United States that has
thrown in its slot with the autocrats, which has made
(01:16):
a choice to support those who wage war not peace,
who has given enormous power to the men who control
the information flow in our world, who have all pledged
allegiance to the continuation of algorithms that not only addict us,
(01:42):
but poison us with hatred and fear.
Speaker 1 (01:48):
You know what she's saying, This free speech stuff is
dangerous to all the control we used to have. They
believe in control because what they're selling is horrific and
they know it. That's why abortion becomes women's reproductive rights.
That's why you could go down the list of every
single issue and you will find out they have somehow
(02:10):
come up with some language that lies about what it
really is. And don't think this is just something that
exists over in Europe or China or North Korea. It's
right here in the good old US of A. We've
been living in it for years now. During COVID we
saw it turned into overdrive, and so many of these
people Trump or No Trump are still in their positions
(02:33):
of power. We're going to talk about the censorship industrial complex.
We're going to talk about control. Ben Winingarden has so
many thoughts on this, and he joins us next.
Speaker 4 (02:58):
I believe the dismissing people, dismissing their concerns, or worse yet,
shutting down media, shutting down elections, or shutting people out
of the political process protects nothing. In fact, it is
the most surefire way to destroy democracy and speaking up
(03:18):
and expressing opinions isn't election interference, even when people express
views outside your own country, and even when those people
are very influential, and trust me, I say this with
all humor. If American democracy can survive ten years of
Thunberg scolding, you guys can survive a few months of
(03:39):
Elon Musk. But what German democracy, What no democracy, American,
German or European will survive, is telling millions of voters
that their thoughts and concerns, their aspirations they're pleased for relief,
are invalid or unworthy of even being.
Speaker 2 (04:01):
I love that.
Speaker 1 (04:02):
I love that America is starting to lead when it
comes to freedom again, and it saddens me a great
deal what's happening in Europe and what happened in this country.
Let's not just point fingers across the pond under the
Biden administration, joining me now to discuss the censorship, the
communists love of it, and so many other things. It's
been wide garden editor at large of real clear investigations.
(04:24):
Ben communists are selling something evil and horrible. They always
have been, and so they've always believed in controlling what
people can see and hear. It's just that simple, because
you can't sell a demonic religion of destruction if you're
being honest about it.
Speaker 5 (04:40):
Absolutely right, and to your point, that's why the communists
generally go after religions first, because as an anti religion,
they don't want to have to compete against a religion
that actually puts in place a system where man isn't
God and.
Speaker 6 (04:57):
Lording over slaves.
Speaker 5 (04:59):
But people are actually endowed with inalienable rights. They can
think for themselves, they can pursue their interests, their passions,
their ambitions as they see fit, and they can be sovereign.
They can be kings in their own home. And to
your point, at core, the censorship, what I would call
(05:20):
the censorship industrial complex that has lorded over Americans speech
and really global speech for the last decade or so.
At the end, to your point, is all about power
and control. If you can control the narrative, you can
control populations, you can control and maintain a political monopoly
(05:45):
and therefore monopolize power. Pure and simple, that's what censorship
is about. And they will drum up all kinds of
other justifications for it. We don't want dangerous speech, so
called to proliferate, because that can lead people to go
down bad pads, and it can threaten national security, it
(06:05):
can threaten public health, etc. But these are all pretexts
that in reality are used to silence dissenters from regime orthodoxy,
whoever that regime is and whatever their orthodoxy is.
Speaker 6 (06:18):
And Vice President of.
Speaker 5 (06:19):
Vance there, even though it may have fallen on deaf
years and I love that you have the Europeans not
laughing at the joke about Gretit Tunberg. But he's raising
a very serious and basic and fundamental point, which is
that governments are responsible to their people, and if not,
they're basically acting as masters and we are the slaves
as opposed to them actually governing with our consent and
(06:44):
being responsive to our concerns. And if you're going to
silence the other half of a country, if you're going
to not permit dissent, you're not being responsive to your people,
and you're not a government, you're a tyranny. And thank god,
what a change in administry from one that not only
supported a censorship industrial complex here but supported its growth
(07:06):
abroad as well, and now we have an administration that
defends that liberty, that natural right at home and is
also going to defend our liberty as abroad as well.
And we're going to work together with allies and partners
who actually share those values and principles as opposed to
privileging those who talk about democracy while they impose policies
(07:27):
that are anything but including when it comes to speech.
Speaker 1 (07:31):
Yeah, it's funny brought up about the safety thing. I remember,
like it was yesterday, Jensaki and all of them talking
about how they had to go to Facebook.
Speaker 2 (07:39):
Well here she was about COVID.
Speaker 7 (07:41):
In terms of actions Alex that we have taken, or
we're working to take, I should say, from the federal government,
We've increased disinformation research and tracking within the Surgeon General's Office.
We're flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation.
Speaker 2 (07:58):
It blew me away. I remember watching things like that.
Speaker 8 (08:02):
Ben.
Speaker 1 (08:02):
I'm sure I have the same effect on me that
it did on you, and my jaw would just drop.
Speaker 2 (08:07):
It's not just that they.
Speaker 1 (08:08):
Were doing it, they were bragging that they were doing
And of course, it's always for your safety, always, always, always.
Speaker 2 (08:14):
Stalin said the exact same stuff. Mau said. The stands up.
Speaker 1 (08:17):
It's always for your safety, of course, but here in
the United States of America, the land.
Speaker 2 (08:21):
Of the Free.
Speaker 1 (08:22):
They felt totally comfortable standing up in front of the
American people and let them know that the White House
was flagging problematic posts.
Speaker 2 (08:30):
I'm fluorid at what's happened to this country.
Speaker 5 (08:33):
A tyranny for your own good, of course, And you're right,
they say it, and it's like so matter of fact
the approach. Oh yeah, we're going to surveil social media
en mass for ideas and opinions and even facts that
we don't like, and then we're going to tell the
big tech companies that we have the power to destroy
with regulations and even by a statement from a president
(08:57):
who says, by the way, you're killing people by what
you allow to traffic on your platform, and we're going
to tell them you better take down this speech. We
don't like, but it's for it's all for public health,
and fully in accordance with public health authorities. Of course,
didn't abuse those authorities and run rough shot over our
(09:17):
rights and invent out of thin air things like six
feet social distancing and made us wear three masks that
didn't do a thing, and on and on, of course,
But even if that weren't the justification for it. The
fact that they could build that apparatus is the thing
that's really terrifying.
Speaker 6 (09:34):
And I dove pretty deep in.
Speaker 5 (09:36):
Investigative reporting and testified a couple of times before Congress
on what they actually did. But it is staggering what
that administration built in the way of a censorship apparatus,
and through that pretext of first public health and pandemic
emergency measures, and then expanding it way beyond that, and
(09:57):
really starting with the pretext of the Russians are interfer
in our system and so there's a real problem on
social media and we need to clamp down on foreign
information operations and interference. Then we're going to take those
powers and graph them onto Americans because actually, it doesn't
really matter where the wrong think is coming from. What
(10:17):
matters is the content of the wrong thing. So we're
not going to care that much about attribution. And basically,
you had a number of agencies within the federal government,
including a subagency in Department of All Land Security that
no one ever heard of, SISA, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure
Security Agency, and they created essentially an outsourced censorship regime.
(10:40):
Everyone has heard by this point about the Disinformation Governance
Board that the Biden administration had to scrap because people
called it out for the Orwellian tyrannical engine that it
would have been. But already a DGB, a Disinformation Governance
Board really existed, but they outsourced it to try and
flout law and the Constitution, and of course the First Amendment.
(11:04):
You had SISA working with third party quote unquote NGOs, researchers,
academic institutions, and they created a non governmental so called
vehicle at least in name, that would look to social
media en mass all of our tweets, all of our
Facebook posts, four narratives that threatened election infrastructure. That is,
(11:29):
if you had questions about the integrity of mass mail
in balloting, of all the other pandemic era quote unquote
emergency measures that were imposed to eviscerate and erod the
integrity of the twenty twenty elections, they said that poses
a threat to our critical election infrastructure.
Speaker 6 (11:48):
So your tweets basically.
Speaker 5 (11:50):
Questioning mail in balloting and those ballot boxes all over
the country, those were like potential mini terror attacks. And
SISA worked with third parties to lobby the social media
companies to change their content moderation policies so called really
their censorship strategies to make sure that anything challenging election
(12:13):
integrity from their perspective would be potentially flagged and categorized
as wrongthink and liable to be censored, violating their terms
of service. And these outsourced entities, and I'm thinking primarily
of the Election Integrity partnership here when about flagging tweets,
Facebook posts, and other content, violating the very social media
(12:38):
content moderation policies they lobby the social media companies to create,
and God Americans censored some of that content was flagged
by the government. And of course this vehicle was created
by the government to avoid the First Amendment issues by
creating another entity to do it. And you had multiple
federal courts agree this was censorship by proxy. This was
(13:02):
maybe the greatest attack on the First Amendment in American
history at the scale of social media, and sadly and
in some ways this brings us to today where we
see this kind of crisis playing out in other realms.
The Supreme Court refused to rule on the merits of
that case. They said the plaintiffs lacked standing, and they
kicked it back to the Lower courts, So we didn't
(13:23):
get the Supreme Court to step in and say what
happened here was censorship by proxy. You had government pushing
all these social media companies to censor. It created vehicles
on the outside to push them to censor. Things that
the government wanted flagged got censored. They abridged our speech,
They tried to abridge our speech. There was a conspiracy
to do it by proxy from these third parties. If
(13:44):
not directly by what the government was saying in direct
emails and phone conversations and publicly to the social media companies,
Supreme Court would not step in and do its duty
to rule on the merit and.
Speaker 6 (13:56):
To curtail and prohibit that behavior.
Speaker 5 (13:58):
So now it's incumbent on a president and a Congress
to do it. The executive branch has started that work.
It started it within hours of the president's inauguration with
an executive order, and now it's time for Congress to
do its job. Beyond the oversight it did, which was
important over the last four years to expose the size,
scope and nature of this complex of government agencies and
(14:21):
NGOs and academic entities, and beyond that worked to silence
us directly and by proxy.
Speaker 1 (14:29):
Ben these people obviously they're a bunch of nutballs, and
I don't like to We don't man worship here anybody
on the show but Elon Musk purchasing Twitter, which of
course he renamed X, which is kind of weird, but anyway,
he renamed it X. It sounds small if you're not
somebody aware of how powerful social media has become. But
(14:51):
he really is the mortal enemy of all these evil monsters.
Is the fact that he took one of the biggest
companies and freed it up.
Speaker 2 (15:00):
For lack of a better way to put it, they.
Speaker 1 (15:02):
Had everything, and the fact that he took one thing
it really hurt them, didn't it.
Speaker 6 (15:08):
It really hurt them.
Speaker 5 (15:09):
And it also has now caused the other social media
companies to, at least in their rhetoric, if not in
their policies, have to change and go back towards something
more closely resembling free speech, even though they're still by
no means there for no other reason than the competitive
pressure that X brought to it. But I think to
your point, we ought to have thought of social media
(15:33):
companies pre the second Trump administration as essentially controlled assets
of the national security and intelligence apparatus. We would have
liked to think of them as this is the digital
public square, this is the printing press, this is newspapers,
This is the public square in twenty first century America.
(15:53):
But in reality, while they may have started out that way, governments,
including our own, realized that if you could harness this power.
First of all, these are tools of mass surveillance and intelligence,
because you can develop a massive profile on people if
you know what they're saying and who they're communicating with,
at what times and where, and what the impact is.
(16:15):
But also that you can manipulate public opinion if you
can control what is allowed to be propagated on the
social media platforms and what isn't seen, what's banned, and
what shadow band what doesn't get the circulation that it
otherwise would. So in the hands of good and benevolent people,
these platforms can be great tools, and in the hands
(16:36):
of those who want to exploit them, sometimes maybe in
pursuit of beneficial things, but other times eviscerating our rights
here at home. You can see the danger in it,
and he took essentially what I would argue is a
national security or intelligence asset out of the hands of
those services, because it was the national security and intelligence
apparatus that was pressuring and colluding with the likes of
(16:59):
X and the executives at the other companies to ensure
that the narrative they wanted was out there, and things
they didn't want, like the Hunter Biden laptop story, weren't
out there. And he took it, and he put up
forty plus billion dollars to say I'm going to free
the bird.
Speaker 6 (17:14):
As he put it, that was.
Speaker 5 (17:17):
A courageous move in terms of the principle of let's
defend free speech. It's courageous because he might have lit
billions of dollars on fire. And maybe it was most
courageous of all because, as a consequence of it, all
of these other governments that wanted to have control over
the social media companies now feared that there was an
asset that was not in their hands. He disarmed them,
(17:38):
he took it out of their hands.
Speaker 6 (17:40):
And of course there was a massive.
Speaker 5 (17:41):
Onslaught against Musk as a consequence of it, and that
onslaught continues, and it only intensified, of course, when he
backed Trump. But you had the Biden administration any number
of agencies investigating him after you had the European governments
who hate his guts, they have their own regulatory regime
that threatens to impose crippling, crippling finds on the likes
(18:04):
of X and other social media companies if they don't
censor content the way that those European governments want. And
of course most of the European nations have nothing remotely
resembling the First Amendment.
Speaker 6 (18:15):
That governs their regulatory regime.
Speaker 5 (18:18):
So this was a courageous move, a costly move in
defense of free speech, and thank god he did it.
It's still not a perfect social media platform by any means,
but when we look back in history, and really if
you look at the ability to have anything resembling a republic,
of course, it depends first on the ability to be
(18:41):
able to debate, to share information, ideas, to argue and
made the best argument win.
Speaker 6 (18:48):
And you can make the case.
Speaker 5 (18:49):
That if he didn't buy X, and if he didn't
take all these swings and arrows, and by the way,
if he weren't so important to the US government as well,
because of all the technologies he develops that have sort
of made him a protect man in some way. Is
despite all the swings and arrows against him. This could
be the difference between freedom and tyranny in this country
when we look back on it over the long run.
Speaker 1 (19:11):
Then something I was thinking about, actually, I was thinking
about it this morning. I was thinking about COVID and
all the evil, horrible lockdown crap all the demons in
this country did. And then I thought about where all
those people are now, and this could expand way beyond COVID.
We're obviously talking about censorship here. All the evil things
(19:31):
that were done to the American people over the last
four or five, six years, ten years, pick your number,
doesn't matter. The people who did it are not in prison.
Most of them are not resigning, retired, fired in disgrace,
had to change their name and move into the rocky
mountains somewhere.
Speaker 2 (19:48):
These people were.
Speaker 1 (19:49):
Still among us, and many of them still have a
bunch of power and the desire to do what they
did again.
Speaker 2 (19:56):
How do we stop that?
Speaker 5 (20:00):
Yeah, And to your point, they even took preemptive steps
like Partning the likes of Anthony Fauci and others to
try and protect themselves. What we have right now is
the beginnings of it, which is, first of all, you
have all of these people who were targeted by the
censorship apparatus, by the public Health establishment and others, and
(20:21):
they have actually assumed the very seats with the very
authorities that were used to try and destroy them before.
So I'm thinking of of course RFK Junior, of course
Donald Trump himself, J. Bodicharia, and Nih and others.
Speaker 6 (20:36):
Well.
Speaker 5 (20:37):
Bodicharia, by the way, was one of the plaintiffs in
that case that went to the Supreme Court I mentioned before,
and one of the leaders of the Great Barrington Declaration
which called for essentially liberty in response to the COVID response.
But he was one of the plaintiffs in that case
Missouri v.
Speaker 6 (20:52):
Biden.
Speaker 5 (20:53):
So you have people who were targeted by the regime
and by the system who are now in places of power.
That's a start. There's some level of justice in that.
The Trump administration goes further in the way of policy.
And a big part of how these people have accrued
their powers is first of all, obviously when they're in government,
but second of all on the outside, when they're in
(21:16):
this gulag archipelago of NGOs.
Speaker 6 (21:19):
And think tanks, etc. And academic institutions.
Speaker 5 (21:23):
And the Trump administration put forth that first day executive order,
which essentially says no federal personnel can engage in this
sort of censorship directly or by proxy behavior, and also
no federal resources can go towards it, and that of
course means money and money.
Speaker 6 (21:40):
Government money is part.
Speaker 5 (21:43):
Of the lifeblood of all of these outside organizations, imperative
to them. It helped birth this whole burgeoning censorship ecosystem
on the outside. So depriving it of government employees, depriving
it of government policies, and depriving it of federal government
money is hugely significant and shouldn't be understated, as is
(22:04):
the oversight work, because no one wants to be named
and shammed and exposed. And if you could put a
face and a resume and a record with the kind
of tyrannical activity that we saw, no one wants that.
So all of those things matter. The executive action and
the oversight work matters. The next thing has to be
codifying this in the law, and there's evidence that this
(22:26):
Congress is going to try to do it.
Speaker 6 (22:29):
Let's see what happens.
Speaker 5 (22:30):
You know, it's obviously we've been burned before expecting there
to be a robust legislative action and there's some who
would you would think be on our side who aren't.
Speaker 6 (22:40):
On this issue, you.
Speaker 5 (22:41):
Have to have legislative action to codify it so that
you can turn the president's executive action into law that's
on the books and that can outlast any one president.
Now I would step back and say it's absurd on
its face that you need laws to codify what the
First Amendment already says. But these people have so perverted
(23:02):
our system and have such a warped perspective on what
their powers ought to be, and they think they know
best for the American people.
Speaker 6 (23:12):
And so consequently, I think you need laws, and.
Speaker 5 (23:14):
Not only laws that codify what the administration is doing.
And the administration is also, by the way, going to
go back and do a review of everything the Biden
administration did, and maybe there will be some law enforcement
action at the end of all that. But beyond that,
I think there needs to be real teeth to the laws,
and that means you have to have criminal penalties. It
can't just be you get fired, maybe you lose your pension,
(23:37):
if you engage in this sort of conduct conduct, there
have to be criminal penalties, and then the law has
to be enforced because if not, there is no to
turn action. And to your point, few have paid any
real price except maybe being out of power. And so far,
maybe their budgets have been cut, their prestige has been lost,
they've been exposed publicly, and half the country may find
(23:59):
them to be contemptible. Until and unless there is real teeth,
there's going to be nothing to deter that sort of action.
And basically you're gonna have tyrants in waiting ready to
spring when there's a new administration, in new Congress, et cetera.
So it has to be done by law, executive action,
and then ultimately you got to change.
Speaker 6 (24:19):
The culture, and that's the really hard part.
Speaker 5 (24:21):
You have to have a country that produces people who
don't view the world the way these people view the
world and think they're smarter than everyone else, they're morally
superior to everyone else, and so they not only have
a right, but an obligation to lord over us. And
that's a generational project, and that's a project that we
all have to engage in our own lives, starting with
(24:42):
our families, our friends, and in our communities.
Speaker 1 (24:45):
Yeah, that's the long term I totally agree, that's the
ultimate solution, and I'm glad you brought up people going
to prison, because everyone just thinks I'm an unhinged barbarian
when I say we can't save the gover we can't
save the country without government people going to prison. And yes,
I hate the government and I can't stand these people,
but that's not.
Speaker 2 (25:02):
Why I say it.
Speaker 1 (25:03):
Unless government people go to prison, they're just gonna do
all the same stuff against they know they can. There's
no consequences. Kevin Klinsmith getting twelve months probation for using
his job at the FBI to lie on a freaking
warrant application. He should be buried under the federal jail somewhere.
A guy should never breathe free year again. But these
people were never held to account.
Speaker 5 (25:24):
And to your point, who was the presiding judge in
the clin Smith case.
Speaker 6 (25:29):
I believe it was Judge James Boseburg.
Speaker 2 (25:31):
It was.
Speaker 1 (25:33):
It was same freaking guy, Ben my brother, Thank you,
come back soon.
Speaker 2 (25:37):
I appreciate you. All right, We're not done, We'll be back.
Speaker 1 (25:56):
It's amazing how long censorship has been around. You know,
it didn't start with Joe Biden by any stretch the imagination.
It didn't even start with communism, tyrants, evil people who
can't sell their ideas to the masses simply try to
control them.
Speaker 2 (26:12):
That's what they do.
Speaker 1 (26:13):
Evil people abound in evil people who want to do
evil things will always try to control what you can
see here and say, joining me now to talk about
this and many things, my friend Jeffrey Tucker, founder and
president of the wonderful Brownstone Institute, Jeffrey. Censorship may have
been pushed into overdrive in this country under President Joe Biden,
(26:35):
if we're still pretending he was president.
Speaker 2 (26:37):
But it didn't begin with him.
Speaker 1 (26:39):
Communists in particular have loved it forever they need it.
Speaker 9 (26:44):
We don't know how long we've lived in a censored world.
I suspect it's been for most of our lives. Actually,
it's true that we didn't have the technology in the
past to know everything in real time and to get
a diverse range of views.
Speaker 8 (26:57):
I mean, I grew up in a world with.
Speaker 9 (27:00):
Three television stations that all had the same thing, and
nobody really had much hunger for news beyond that. On
the other hand, we kind of trusted the system. We
figured that everything worked just fine, and nobody really questioned it.
But now then that with technology came along to make
everybody a reporter. You have citizen journalism, as Elon says,
(27:24):
and it's like the ruling class just panicked and said, Okay, no,
we're going to make the Internet work exactly the way
television worked in the nineteen seventies. And the Biden administration
even put out a document to that effect called Declaration
on the Future of the Internet, in which they imagined
a world of stakeholders working with governments.
Speaker 8 (27:48):
So that's what they were going to do.
Speaker 9 (27:50):
And then they would have gotten away with it too,
But for Elon Musk and the purchase of Twitter and
turning it into x has just blown up in the
entire world and done much more besides. So now we're
facing this kind of astonishing information flood on an increasing level,
(28:12):
and we can't even believe what we're what we're seeing.
It's every day is kind of mind blowing. And adolescence
is always the same that we've been lied to, we've
been robbed, we've been pillaged, and that there's an overclass
out there that has long lived at our expense. So
that seems like, you know, the upshot of what we're learning,
(28:34):
and every day and every minute has just been an
unfolding of that truth.
Speaker 1 (28:41):
Jeffrey, this may sound off topic. Maybe it is off topic,
but hearing you describe it in that way, you know
what you know what bugs me is I love history.
I'm a history freak. I geek out on ancient history.
But you to World War two, you name it. I'm
just I'm a history geek. I guess that's part of
getting old and gray. I just love history, and the
(29:01):
older the history gets, the fewer and fewer sources you
get for any one story. You know, world War two,
you're gonna have a bunch of sources, But the Battle
of Troy you have one?
Speaker 2 (29:12):
It did it even happen?
Speaker 8 (29:13):
Right?
Speaker 1 (29:13):
How much of the history that I know and love
that maybe you know and love that people watching know
and love. How much of the history of the world
is just a flat out lie.
Speaker 9 (29:23):
You know, it's amazing that you say that, you put
it that way, and that you say it that way.
That is exactly what I've been thinking. And we have
to rethink kind of everything you know, from the follow
from through through everything. And I can't get enough of
this now. And probably you're in the situation I am
where I'm just in a constant state of incredulity, you know.
(29:48):
You know, oh that's what you say happened, What really happened?
Speaker 8 (29:51):
You know.
Speaker 9 (29:53):
And from from the Brownstond point of view, we're mainly
dedicated to figuring out the history of the last five years.
And it is not easy, I can tell you. It's
just it's kind of a NonStop investigative effort, and it's
it's truly overwhelming, and it would have been impossible without
(30:17):
all these new tools that we have. But even with them,
we're still trying to piece it together, to say nothing
of you know, the Cold War, you know, the the
Latin American wars of the nineteen eighties, Vietnam, you know, Korea.
You just go back in time, and who knows what
(30:38):
it is.
Speaker 8 (30:39):
We don't know.
Speaker 9 (30:40):
And then we had this document dump for the CIA,
because there's in Washington. If you've hung around Washington enough,
you figure this out that there's two information streams. I mean,
one is what the public knows and the other is
the classified information stream. And there's a firm barrier between
those two things. And and Trump was advocating for the
(31:03):
release of the JFK files and uh and and he
pushed for it last time, he pushed for it. This
time he put out an executive order demanding it, and
it still wasn't coming. It still wasn't company. So finally
he went to the JFK Performing Arts into the Kennedy
Performing Arts Center and announced that they would becoming sending
the entirety of the Washington establishment into overdrive panic. And
(31:28):
they jumped all these documents withholding some but and they
weren't even entirely sure, according to New York Times anyway,
New York Times is panicked about this. They were not
even sure entirely what it is that they dumped. And
we're getting our first look at it now. And of
course it turns out the CIA, you know, the operations
the CIA are are are revealed within this, within this,
(31:52):
within these documents, confirming confirming your worst fears, you know.
And but that's the way we're getting the information. So
I guess to some extent, I feel like there's no
chance we're ever gonna put this genie back in the bottle.
And I'm quite frankly glad about that.
Speaker 1 (32:11):
How does the normal person, how do they how do
they navigate this new world? Because you brought up Elon
Musk and X and social media and Trump, the JFK
files and right.
Speaker 2 (32:22):
So, okay, now we went from having.
Speaker 1 (32:25):
A few very tightly controlled sources by evil people to
now and it's endless now at this point in time,
if you want to drink water, you have to drink
from a fire hydrant that's just been opened up. And
anyone with any experience and that knows that can be
extremely dangerous and has it is to your health. So
if I'm a normal person and I wake up in
(32:45):
the morning and I pick up my phone, how do
I even.
Speaker 2 (32:47):
Start to walk through this world? What do I do?
Speaker 8 (32:51):
Yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 9 (32:52):
It's a completely different world with a kind of a
constant dopamine rush, which, as you say, is not actually
very helpful about this, you know, it's not helpful for
us spiritually and mentally and otherwise. But we've got decades
of disinformation to unravel, and those are just the times
(33:14):
we live in. We're going to find out worse and
worse things every day. I've been quite frankly shocked beyond
anything that I ever expected about the revelations from DOGE,
and I don't think that people have fully processed the
implications of what they've said over and what they've discovered
(33:38):
over the last couple of months, and I mean, like
even a conservative estimate is that ten percent of the
US budget is essentially unaccounted for. I mean, that's that's
an unbelievable figure. I mean, we were talking about since
since the end of World War two, something like what
(33:58):
a twenty trillion dollars has come and gone that's not
been accounted for and that But what do you do
with that kind of information?
Speaker 8 (34:07):
How do you run that down? I don't know.
Speaker 9 (34:09):
And then you've got the other problem that the Trump
administration and the people within the Trump administration that one
transparency that want to get the information out are facing,
you know, attacks from every angle, unrelenting, like every single
minute of every day is and not to mention threats
(34:33):
on the threats on their lives, right and now Elon's
faced with having you know, Tesla Dealership's burning and Tesla's
burning on the street and people selling the.
Speaker 8 (34:43):
Stock and everything. It's it's what a time to be alive, astounding.
Speaker 1 (34:49):
Speaking of the last five years in Brownstone and the
work you've been doing. I can I'll never be able
to let it go. Every Maybe that's the Irish in me.
Maybe it's it's just a Kelly thing, but I'm never
going to let it go. What I watched happen to
this country when we got a new virus from China.
Honestly the other day I brought it up online, and
(35:10):
I've talked about this on the show before. The fact
that every single institution in the United States of America,
from the medical institutions to the freaking Central Intelligence Agency,
demanded that everybody say it didn't come from a lab
when it came from a lab. And again, it's not
the lie. That's amazing. Why Why is it every institution
(35:32):
in the country decided to together join forces and lockshields
against the truth. And that's just one of a million
ways they tried to censor out all the honesty, all
the true things during COVID.
Speaker 9 (35:44):
And the silliness, right, I mean the six feet of distance,
you know, that censorship, the claims that the vaccine was
the magic cure when it clearly was not, and anybody
could have known that even without reading the EA, extended
closures that ruined kids' lives, the destructions of small business,
(36:08):
and the silence on the part of elite sectors. You know,
in in academia and in media and so on. It's
it's incredible. It's an event that discredits an entire generation
of legacy institutions, from think tanks to universities, to professors
to media outlets. And they're terrified for people to talk
(36:33):
about it. Really, and and yet we have to talk
about it, and we should not get over it. We
need a truth on what happened over the last five years,
why all this stuff happened, you know, who was behind it,
why they engaged in it. Just some some truth and honesty.
I think we're going to get there, but it's going
to take new institutions like brown Sion and and and
(36:59):
you too to make it happen, because the legacy just doesn't.
They want it all, you know gone. The New York
Times has only recently started saying basically, mistakes were made.
You know, now shut up. That's essentially it. But there's
a lot more to it. There's a lot more going on.
And and forget justice. We just need truth.
Speaker 2 (37:22):
Yeah, talk to me about Murphy versus Missouri.
Speaker 8 (37:26):
Yeah, the censorship issue. So here's the problem. It's not
a problem.
Speaker 9 (37:33):
Trump has put in a an executive order that forbids
the federal agencies from from from from being involved, and
it was a very good executive order in any kind
of third party censorship efforts, and that presumably makes that
litigation kind of puts it on the back burner. Uh
(37:56):
And and meanwhile, you know that the litigators had worked
for years on Discovery to get little bits and pieces
actually got about ten thousand pages. But then Zuckerberg comes
out and just confesses the whole thing. Right, they're just
being perfectly honesty how they censored at the behase of governments.
The problem with the executive order is that it's not
(38:18):
it's not in law yet and and that litigation is
going to be ongoing, but I doubt that we're going
to get anything from the Supreme Court out of it.
What we really need is some strict legislation from the
Center and that would that would help. At the same
time the censorship goes on. You know, this is this
(38:41):
is part of the problem with all of these platforms,
from from LinkedIn to to Facebook to YouTube have deep
algorithmic structures that were trained to censor, so they no
longer needed the pressure from the federal government to do it.
And just to give you an example, when Elon took
(39:01):
over Twitter. Twitter, they tried to rip out all the
gots of the censorship. But even now there's certain links
and certain things that you find that uh, you know,
will trigger X to say, oh, you can't post that,
but the note goes to the legacy url Twitter dot com,
(39:22):
not to X, so you can tell that this is
just legacy code still in there. So they've been working
for a year to get rid of all the machinery
of censorship within the algorithms and have been unable to
do a complete job. And that process at YouTube and
then Google and LinkedIn so on hasn't even begun. So
(39:47):
in a fact, we don't we don't have sort of
intensifying censorship, but we have the legacy censorship is still
you know, a continuing reality at all those platforms. Then
you have the problem of the mainstream media, which has
a deep culture of political bias and aspirational professionals who
(40:10):
know better than to say anything that would expose expose
the racket. So those institutions are kind of done. I mean,
what's interesting to me. You have Jeff Bezos over at
the Washington Post made a big announcement We're not going
to be biased anymore. We're going to have the op
ed page is going to be filled with it's going
(40:31):
to have content that's in favor of, for example, freedom.
Well you know that caused resignations all around. Well, we
can't do that. That's a terrible idea. And that announcement
I think was made maybe a month or six six
weeks ago. Nothing has changed on the op ed page.
So what do you do. I think at some point
you just can't fire everybody.
Speaker 8 (40:51):
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (40:55):
All right, Finally, this all this brings me actually to
the thing that that to be honest, it frightens me
a little bit. And part of it is just because
I don't understand it. I'm not a technological person. AI
artificial intelligence. I know what it is. I mean, I
know at least the basics of it. I certainly could
not explain the code or anything like that behind it,
but I get it.
Speaker 2 (41:14):
What it is.
Speaker 1 (41:15):
But I'm very, very concerned about the worst people in
the world coming up with the new technology that's going
to only favor them. I just it's something that concerns
me greatly.
Speaker 9 (41:27):
When AI was first came out, and you probably remember this,
it was chat GPT just kind of Go dropped on
the world and I said, oh, this is wonderful. And
then Google got its own AI and oh this is wonderful.
Except people quickly discovered it was wildly biased. You remember
that you tried to get you know, these chat GPT
or one of the other AI engines to draw a
(41:48):
picture of Founding Fathers and it looked, you know, didn't
look anything like the Founding Fathers, so to speak, and
the questions were skewed, and it seemed like we were
living in an Orwellian world. Well, Grock came along, which
is you know, once again Elon Musk and and became
an uncensored, unbiased, trainable, non woke AI engine, and so
(42:15):
everybody else just immediately shaped up right, So it was
only that competitive pressure.
Speaker 8 (42:20):
Uh, you know that that fixed that.
Speaker 9 (42:22):
So it's like we keep dodging these bullets one by one,
but ultimately the censorship will be baked into AI, and
it probably already is at Google and Facebook and elsewhere.
And at that point, the machines run us and it
doesn't require any kind of decision making by on the
(42:42):
part of any actual human person. So you know, AI
is going to lead to a world where we're fed,
you know, NonStop propaganda, and like I say that, the
only thing that separates us from that is you know, Grock,
one guy in one platform. So it's it's tremendously scary
just how close we came.
Speaker 1 (43:03):
No doubt, Jeffrey as always, Thank you, sir. I appreciate
you very much. I don't even understand AI, but I
understand it enough that it makes me nervous.
Speaker 2 (43:16):
Anyway, We're not.
Speaker 1 (43:17):
Done yet, we'll be back. I believe you should be
able to say what you want to say. I think
if you have ideas that are different than mine, that
(43:38):
you should be able to voice those ideas just as
loudly as I do. I don't need or have any
desire to control you. That's because I'm not a filthy communist.
Remember when the communists tell you who they are, believe them,
and they always, always, always will sell their censorship desires
as keeping you safe.
Speaker 2 (44:00):
Don't ever listen. All right, all right, we'll do it
again
Host
Jesse Kelly
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