Speaker 1: What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to
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smartphone or tablet. And again, thank you so much for
your support. In the last hour I mentioned this limitation.
I guess you could call it that a lot of
leftists have when it comes to discussing political topics. And
I understand this. I have sympathy for them because if
I had to defend these positions, I would not be
able to do so from a like a rational logical
point of view, and so, like, I know, that's got
to be difficult. However, their inability to articulate a cogent, logical,
rational argument for a lot of their positions, they become frustrated.
And when people don't go along with them because they
have not been persuaded to go along with them, that
then frustrates them and a lot of them get angry,
and that then leads. You know, as I was going
over in the last hour, Saul Olinsky's rules for radicals,
this moral relativism that now you are justified in doing
all sorts of things, even if it conflicts with your
conscience or societal norms. You can blow through those guardrails
if the quote greater good is on the line, and
you hear Democrats saying these things. And again, I don't
know if all democrats hashtag not all democrats. I don't
know if all of them are aware that when they
talk about the democracy, you know, and they say everything
is a threat to the democracy. Trump is a threat
to the democracy. We're losing the democracy. That's what they're channeling, like,
that's that's the uh. The Olensky tactics are sort of
the well spring from which they are drawing. And again,
I don't know if all of them understand that. I
suspect a great many of them have simply been essentially
trained into speaking in these talking points, these little bumper
sticker bromides, if you will, and they don't really, they don't.
They don't convince. They may look good on your little
poster board that you carry to the No King's protest,
but you're not actually persuading it about anybody. I have
seen a great many political signs at protests in my life,
and I have never seen one that has prompted me
to change my opinion about anything. Anything. All Right, it's there.
It's like a placard at a panther game. Wait, I
don't think you're allowed to bring those into the stadium,
but if you could, Okay, It's like having a sign
that says, you know, panthers. You've not convinced me to
cheer for the panthers. You've not made a compelling argument.
You've just screened at me about something you know. So this,
this then leads to the censorship. This then leads It's
a direct line because I can't stop or I can't
persuade you that you are wrong. I can't recruit you
to my side. I can't get more critical mass development
around a particular policy or direction or nominee or whatever.
I can't get enough people over here because they're listening
to you. So stop saying what you're saying. And so
now I'm going to, as Alensky says, right, pick the tar,
get isolated, personalize it, and so now I'm gonna attack you.
I'm gonna try to cancel you. I'm gonna make you radioactive.
I'm gonna call you all the isms, all the names.
Nobody's gonna want to associate with you, and then you'll
shut up. But what if you don't shut up? Well,
V had some vase. That's a terrible German impression. But
uh yeah, there are ways that we can shut you up,
particularly now if you're doing your yammering on social media.
So little noticed story. A couple of weeks ago, the
Trump administration officially dismantled the GEK. Do you know what
the GEK was? The GEC. I call it the GEK
because it sounds like some sort of regurgita, involuntary regurgitation movement. Anyway,
it was called the Global Engagement Center. It was housed
in the US State Department, and it became a tool
of censorship against conservative voices. The State Department announced last
month its decision to close the remnants of the GEK,
an office that the Biden administration had rebranded last year
after it came under scrutiny for contributing to the censorship
of conservatives online. Right, they tried to hide this thing,
this unit principal deputy spokesperson, Tommy Pigot. Pigott, Pigott, how
would you pronounce it's Pigott Pigout. I don't know, Tommy Pigot,
he said. The framework, initially launched by the GEK to
counter so called disinformation, devolved into tools for politicals censorship
instead of protecting Americans from foreign adversarial propaganda. Yeah, it
didn't even do that, right, It didn't even do that
if it ever actually was designed for that. That's what
they said that the GEK was supposed to do, but
for some reason, it spent all of its time ferreting out,
you know, Ben Shapiro and Charlie Kirk and the Federalist
and the New York Post. The Biden administration reshuffled the
GEK into another named operation that they called the Frameworks
to Counter Foreign State Information Manipulation or the fc FS
I am or as I call Yeah, I'm actually not
gonna call it fc I'm not actually no, I'm not
going to do that, just to maintain the face license.
So they tried to hide this thing, the GEK. They
tried to give it a different name and oh, now
we're totally going to look at just the foreign people,
the foreign adversaries, because Congressional Republicans defunded the GEK in
twenty twenty four. They shut down the GEK after widespread
backlash among conservatives against the agency over the pressure that
it put on social media companies to censor disfavored points
of view. Because again, this is the natural trajectory, there
is an authoritarian mindset. Do what I tell you to do.
Oh you're not going to do what I tell you
to do, all right, shut up. Oh you're not going
to shut up. I'm gonna make you shut up. I'm
gonna censor you. That's the trajectory. The Daily Wire sued
the State Department in December of twenty twenty three, alongside
the Federalist and the State of Texas because of the
gek's support for the quote Global Disinformation Index or the GDI,
that is a British organization that attempted to pressure advertisers
into defunding right wing news sites. This was something the
Biden administration really took advantage of. They used foreign allies
to go after their domestic opponents, so they would use
the British GDI in order to try to silence conservatives
in America. The lawsuit argued the State Department violated the
First Amendment by supporting third party organizations that were engaging
in censorship and targeting media outlets. The GEK collaborated with
the Election Integrity Partnership that's a group of organizations that
work together on censoring election related speech. Beginning in twenty twenty,
the EIP targeted conservative voices, and the GEK worked with
it on numerous occasions to flag speech for social media
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so I mentioned the GEK and the dismantling finally of
this censorship apparatus by the Trump administration. Good job on
the Trump administration for that much appreciated. Then there was
this story a few days later, thanks to the oversight
of Chairman Jim Jordan. This is, by the way, a
press release from the House Judiciary Committee. Google promises to
offer all creators who had previously been kicked off of
YouTube due to political speech violations on topics like COVID
nineteen and elections, they will have an opportunity to return. Now.
I have heard that this isn't exactly like an amnesty,
so not everybody is being allowed to return, But this
is what Google told the Judiciary Committee. They were like, okay, fine,
I know we censored a bunch of people at the
behest of the Biden administration vi them off of our platform.
And you know, some people who were these YouTube content creators,
that was where they were making their money. They made
a living off of the YouTube platform. And then they started,
you know, questioning some of the COVID stuff. And I
don't know every single person that got booted. I don't
know what every person was saying. Okay, So I don't
know if there were violations of policy or whatever. I
do know that the Biden administration was in constant contact
with the with these tech companies and flagging content and
telling them take it down. And some of the content
that they were flagging what's true they were censoring, like
the Great Barrington Declaration. They put out, you know, a
fatois against those doctors that signed the Great Barrington Declaration
that was against the lockdownes. So stuff that actually was
true that doctors were saying was stuff like that was
also getting demonetized and censored. So Google says, okay, fine,
we'll let some of these people back on. They also
acknowledged the following. Number One, the Biden administration pressured Google
to censor Americans and remove content that did not actually
violate YouTube policies. That's a problem, right If YouTube's got
a platform policy that says you can't talk about xyz
and then they kick you off even though you did
not talk about xyz, well you're not in violation of
their policies. But when the Biden administration comes calling you,
bend the knee. See, I don't believe that Google will
not bend the knee once again in the future. Okay.
Number two, they acknowledge the Biden administration censorship pre pressure
was quote unacceptable and wrong. Number three, public debates should
never come at the expense of relying on quote unquote authorities.
Number four the company will never use third party fact
checkers like the GEK or the GDI or the FCF
whatever whatever whatever, right, which were basically like shadow governments.
These were people that were connected to all the Democrat
and geos and think tanks and former administration officials that
you know, migrate over to like you know how it
works over in like England, they've got they call like
the shadow government, so like they have all of so
like I don't know, all of the different offices they
call them weird things like the Home Office is one
of them, and so the government that's in power, they've
got their you know, home secretary. Okay, well there's the
political coalition or parties that are not in power, and
they will have a shadow home secretary because of the
volatile nature of their politics. Like you can have like
a no confidence vote or something and then the coalition
falls apart. Now you're out of power, and so you
call for a new election and all of a sudden
everything gets shifted around, and now you've got all new
people in there. And so the idea is that you've
got a home secretary ready to step into the role. Right,
So they are shadow government, and like that's what these
fact checking organizations were operating as. And this revolving door.
This has been the case in Democrat circles for my
entire adult life. They just I saw it first with
John Edwards, right, he got a scholarship. Basically, they create
in the UNC Chapel Hill campus, they create a little
was it the Center for Poverty and Work or something
like that, and they give them some one hundred and
fifty thousand dollars annual salary and it's just like a
it's like a no show job. And they so you're
basically just giving him money so he can make his
bills while he runs around doing speeches and gets ready
to launch his next presidential campaign. And it's the same idea,
except with all the different people that actually work in
the bureaucracy and would get these appointments and would fill
these roles in a Democrat administration. They just go off
to a think tank and then they generate I don't
even know, a white paper here or there, they give
some speeches, right, and so this was operating as this
shadow government, these fact checking groups, and finally they acknowledge
Google acknowledged Europe's censorship laws target American companies and threaten
American speech, including the removal of lawful content. As I mentioned,
the Biden administration was relying on the EU and Britain.
They were relying on those nations to target American companies
tech companies to censor Americans because the Biden administration couldn't
directly do it. So they would go after these tech
companies and their advertisers and they would say, if you
want to do business and you want your platforms to
be available in the EU, you have to agree to
our rules. Well, they don't have the First Amendment over there,
and so they will censor you. You make a joke
about the prophet Mohammed over there, you're going to jail
in the UK, So you're inciting violence or something. If
you like, fly your Union Jack flag from your house.
So these admissions come after the Judiciary Committee subpoena at
Google and they launched a year's long investigation into the company.
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make memories that'll last a lifetime. Sometimes censorship doesn't require
you to make the phone calls to Google and YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter.
Sometimes you just have to call your CIA if you're
the White House. And that is apparently what occurred during
the Biden administration in late twenty fifteen early twenty sixteen
see at the specific request of the Vice President, Joe Biden.
Twenty fifteen, he was still vice president, so Trump hadn't
won yet his first election. So think let's go back
and think about that timeframe. What was in the news
in twenty sixteen, because Biden wasn't running, right, he was
not running for office. Hillary Clinton was the anointed one,
as the Party of Democracy cleared the field for Hillary
the most qualified candidate ever until Kamala Harris came along.
Do you hear her say the other day at some interview,
she's hawking her book and it's like one hundred and
seven days is the name of it. How I lost
in one hundred and seven days something like that. Anyway,
she was and she said, some people have told me
that I'm the most qualified presidential candidate in history. And
the interviewer like laughed, thinking she was joking, and she wasn't.
Who would say that Thomas Jefferson could write like in
Latin in his right hand and Greek with his left
hand at the same time. Not that that's a qualification
for president, but still, I don't think you're the most
qualified person to ever run for president. That seems like
a bit of a stretch, you know. Anyway, at the time,
Joe Biden is the vice president, and they requested, actually
he requested specifically him the CIA Berry, an embarrassing intelligence
report that detailed the poor view that the Ukrainian government
had of his diplomatic efforts, as well as the business
dealings of his family in that country. Huh interesting. So
the business dealings that then Trump started asking about with
Hunter Biden Ukrainian energy company Barisma, and your visit over
there where you're like, you need to fire this prosecutor
or we're going to withhold all the money, like all
of that stuff. Biden had traveled to Kiev in December
of twenty fifteen ostensibly to meet with leaders of the
fledgling democracy and to deliver a warning against quote the
cancer of corruption aka the Biden crime family. And I'm
just kidding it. I threw that last part it and
during an address to the Ukrainian Parliament, he condemned the
pervasive poison of cronyism, corruption and kleptocracy. That's Joe Biden
saying that, yes. But behind the scenes, Ukrainian officials expressed
quote bewilderment and disappointment that the Vice president had crossed
the Atlantic almost exclusively to deliver a generic speech. Officials
close to then President Petro Poroshenko had hoped for guidance
in support of or against specific officials within the Ukrainian government.
They discovered instead that Biden had no intention of discussing
substantive matters. Those were all direct quotes from the CIA
brief after Biden comes home members of the poor. Sheenko
administration quote privately mused at how American media treated the
alleged ties of his family to corrupt business practices in
the Ukraine. It was in their minds over in Ukraine,
the Poorshenko administration, it was evidence of a double standard
within the US government towards matters of corruption and political power.
Because of course it was. That's why it looked like
that is because that's what it was, right, and the
Ukrainian government is like, here's this guy coming over here
lecturing us about corruption, and look at the media coverage
of his own kid with barisma. So all of that
was the determination of a twenty sixteen report that was
prepared by the CIA and has now been reviewed by
Real Clear Politics. Philip Wegman, the reporter on the story.
It would have been a humiliating assessment for Biden, whom
President Obama had entrusted with all things Ukraine. Remember he
told Biden, like, you take care of all the stuff
in Ukraine because your son is the expert on Ukraine,
you know, I mean, obviously because he landed the gig
at Barisma. So the Vice President and his team killed
this report. They spiked it. In an email sent to
the CIA on February tenth, twenty sixteen, an individual in
the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said, quote,
I just spoke with the Vice President slash nssay national
Security advisor, and he would strongly prefer the report not
be disseminated. The national Security advisor was Colin Kahl Kahl.
These are the latest tranch of documents that were declassified
by the CIA's director John Ratcliffe, as the Trump administration
continues its review of how intel is collected and reported.
Later on, Phil Wegman writes in his piece, what is
striking is that a member of the intel community sought
to clear a report with Biden and his team before
presenting the information to the president. That's weird. That's kind
of weird. Why would the VP get to veto a
CIA report to the president? Weird? H I'm just I'm
not even asking questions. I'm just saying it's weird. Why
wouldn't it go to Obama first? Why would the Vice
president get to spike anything? It's the Obama administration. He
gets to see all of this intel generated weird. All right,
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media landscape more transparent two stories to close out the
hour here. Do you remember, I mean, I'm old enough
to remember, but you may be too. Remember after what
was the Hurricane Milton? Hurricane Milton, it's gone back aways.
It was in Florida, And then there was another hurricane
that hit North Carolina called Helene. Do you remember that, right? So?
Do you remember the stories after the hurricanes about FEMA
people not going to properties that had Trump signs in
the yard or something, right, or flags Trump flags, that
kind of thing. Matt Tayebe independent journalist writing at Racket
News last November eighth, On the Saturday after the election,
one of the more bizarre postscripts to Donald Trump's reelection
emerged in the form of a FEMA decision to sideline
one of its officials accused of telling FEMA workers to
avoid Holmes advertising Trump while these workers were supposed to
be canvassing for victims of Hurricane Milton in Florida. The
Daily Wire spoke to multiple FEMA officials who produced screenshots
of messages that said things like Trump sign no contact
per leadership, which seems pretty clear to me, right, Trump
sign no contact per leadership. Then FEMA administrator Diane Criswell
testified after the election that this episode was simply an
isolated incident, and she said it was unacceptable, it was heartbreaking,
and said it was basically just one person, one eventually
terminated disaster survivor assistant's crew leader named Marnie Washington. Remember this,
I covered this story. Yeah. Well, she didn't like this much.
She did not take the Cya maneuver lying down. According
to Tayibe, she made a series of aggressive media appearances,
saying repeatedly, my orders come from my superior, okay, and
the instructions to the subordinates was to avoid homes that
made FEMA workers uncomfortable because they had a Trump sign.
That was That was her story. The Democrats generally maintained
that decisions to skip over houses featuring Trump signs or
signs about guns were legitimate and safety base. See Republicans
blasted FEMA workers for comparing Trump voters to vicious dogs
and suggested instructions like per leadership, no stop Trump flag
or another one that said Trump signed no contact, per leadership,
that this was indicative of a larger problem. It was
n't till one off, It wasn't just Marnie Washington. Well
A year later, the Privacy Office of the Department of
Homeland Security is releasing a review of the episode. The
new administration has found more than just the one isolated incident.
It's described violations of the Privacy Act of nineteen seventy four, which,
with a few exceptions, bars the collection of information about
First Amendment protected speech like political science, DHS investigators found,
in a near exact parallel to trends in pro censorship
programs that a lot of the political controversy surrounding FEMA
AID grew out of the vague way in which the
agency's Disastro Survivor Assistance Field Operations Guide was written. In
other words, the guidebook tells FEMA workers to rem move
yourself from the situation if you feel threatened, if you're
dealing with hostile individuals, right, something like that. But it's nebulous,
and so FEMA employees they had wide birth to skip
a house if a sign or a flag made them
simply feel uncomfortable. The DHS report does not describe a
huge number of instances, but does list examples from various
efforts of FEMA people taking down political information. So like,
that's not cool either, You shouldn't be getting like their
voter cards and stuff. For that they collected prohibited information
dating back to Hurricane Ida in twenty twenty one. And
the problem is, how do you then change this, change
the guide book right, because people are always going to
then try to find a way around it to say
I feel like this is a hostile environment. It's just
a mess, all right. That'll do it for this episode.
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