Emily (48:17)
Just go back and google Barack Obama, Silicon Valley. Look at Those articles from when he was leaving office about how he brought Silicon Valley to Washington. This man oversaw so many mergers that consolidated power in the hands of Mark Zuckerberg and others that for him to speak so passively about the effects of social media when these were happening. Monoculture was crumbling before our very eyes during his presidency. And you can argue that some of it may have been inevitable, sure. But his public policy pushed it through at an accelerated rate. A lot of these mergers probably should have been challenged, and the power of Silicon Valley should have been challenged, instead of treating these companies with nothing but reverence and optimism and boosting them to the hilt, basically for his entire presidency and actually even before he was president. So that's another amusing, but actually pretty typical Obama comment about just things that he had something to do with passively observing them, like, 10 years later or five years later, actually, even in real time. That's something that he was known to do, of course. So, I mean, and what Bacha was really getting at is these companies that did have this concentrated power in the hands of so few people, they weren't necessarily. I mean, her point about the Supreme Court case on Biden and Meta was a really interesting one, because they didn't necessarily need to have their arms twisted. Facebook didn't need to have its arm twisted by the government to add that you could, you know, choose from 52 genders or whatever it was when that happened. Of course, the government did that to schools with Title 9. But these corporations didn't necessarily need that because there was this intense synergy between the corporations and the faculty lounges and the Obama administration, millennial staffers and all of that. It was a perfect storm for what started to feel like a complete ostracization from the. From. Josh Hawley campaigned on this. I remember because I covered his. Came his campaign. He said back in 2018, when he was first running for the Senate, he would, in his stump speech, talk about Hollywood, Washington and Wall Street. That's what conservatives felt like for at least 10 years, that these institutions had entirely closed ranks and had entirely been usurped or dominated by the left in a way that was being. The power was being leveraged to shut down conservatives. And there's evidence of that in every single one of these. Every single one of these industries and institutions. Like, think about DEI and ESG from Wall Street. Think about Operation Choke Point, which is a little joint effort. Think about Silicon Valley. Think about all the. I mean, basically, maybe the only place that the left could still make the argument was dominated by The Republican Party, I mean, you could have maybe said that about the Pentagon, but the Pentagon was going full DEI and the like as well as conservatives were separating themselves from those old, quote, Republican foreign policies anyway. And so for the right, there will be no tears spilled because Jimmy Kimmel says something awful is suspended for a couple of days. And it looks like in the process a couple of corporations are trying to get a merger out of it or favorable treatment from the government. Nobody's going to cry. It doesn't mean that it's the ideal circumstance. But in this case, ABC actually a does have to act in the public interest. Brendan Carr is not wrong about that. And I look forward to Brendan Carr hopefully applying that standard evenly across the board. If someone, one of these networks, I don't know conceivably what this would look like, does something that is egregiously biased in the direction of Donald Trump, I look forward to Brendan Carr calling ABC News up and saying you have a responsibility to act in the public interest. As I said when we were talking to Batya, I would have no problem with the Democratic FCC commissioner when, you know, let's say there was another build up to the Iraq war. We saw something like that happen in 2026. Well, let's say 2029. I would have no problem with a Democratic FCC commissioner calling up ABC and saying you just lied about the intelligence information and this is not in the public interest and you know it. Great. All for it. I think actually these licenses are a scarcity. They are licenses that are given by the government and they should be treated as such. It's different if you're talking about cable. It's different if you're talking about podcasts. Completely. That is a completely separate story. I have no problem with Republicans flexing a little muscle. Even though I do think Bach is correct that it wasn't Brendan Carr that forced ABC into this situation. It was the fact that Jimmy Kimmel said something insane and local affiliates were dropping the program. Now, were those local affiliates dropping the program because their parent company wants to get a merger deal through? I bet that's partially an issue, but I bet the bigger part of it is that people around the country don't want to see Jimmy Kimmel get away with what he said about the shooter of a conservative activist within days of the event happening. So just some follow up thoughts on what Baccio was saying tonight. I also want to get into. Man, do I want to get into Operation Arctic Frost. Operation Arctic Frost. Did you hear about Operation Arctic Frost? The cash Patel hearings in the Senate and the House over the last couple of days were utterly dominated by these dramatic, and I actually would say almost unprecedented. You can never really say unprecedented in the history of the US Congress, but in recent memory, for as fiery as congressional hearings have gotten, the dust ups between Kash Patel and Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell and actually Senator John Kennedy, Republican Senator John Kennedy had a good exchange with Cash Patel and Epstein. These explosions were wild. And in all of the craziness, one thing that got a bit lost is the news of Operation Arctic Frost, as I mentioned. What could that be? What could Operation Arctic Frost be? It's a great code name. Katherine Herridge has some more on this. She got exclusive whistleblower records. And Senator Chuck Grassley talked a bit about what we know ahead of Cash Patel's hearing at the Senate Judiciary on Tuesday. But basically I'm going to read from New York Post coverage here. An FBI investigation launched in the wake of the 2020 election scrutinized nearly 100 Republican and GOP aligned groups or people, including Turning Point usa, co founded by slang conservative activist Charlie Kirk. Unclassified bureau files released Tuesday show Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley published files related to the probe, code named ARC Arctic Frost, during a panel hearing, saying the records revealed Arctic Frost was much broader than just an electoral matter, that the investigation, quote, expanded to Republican organizations. Some examples of the groups that Christopher Wray, former head of the FBI, sought to place under political investigation included the rnc, the Republican Attorneys General association and Trump political groups, according to Grassley. Deeply disturbing, by the way. Think about it like this way Democrats orchestrated. I'm going to quote here from the Time magazine piece that Molly Ball wrote uncritically promoting it. Molly Hemingway, my former boss, my friend, has covered this many, many times. She wrote a whole book called Rigged about it. But this is how Molly Ball described what happened in 2020 in Time magazine, quote, she said, a well funded cabal of powerful people ranging across industries and ideologies working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information. And that's what democrats orchestrated in 2020 to the favor of Biden. Even Mark Zuckerberg has since conceded, yes, it does. It happens as Mark Zuckerberg is trying to cozy up to the Trump administration. There's no question about that. But Mark Zuckerberg has conceded that some of the research, the research does show this money was flooded disproportionately, you guessed it, into Blue America. And that obviously greatly benefited Joe Biden. So think about it that way. I mean, this is just so profoundly disturbing and it's barely a peep about this in the media. It's a very crowded news cycle. But this story is so significant because Democrats openly had that, quote, well funded cabal, bragged about it in Time magazine and then subpoenaed people for questioning the outcome of the election based on a quote, conspiracy investigation. And again, I am saying that as somebody who thinks Trump was like, to say the least, completely reckless. Trump and others were completely reckless with their claims of, quote, fraud back in that election. The directions that various people went in I think were beyond dangerous and disappointing. And all of that is the amount of flack that I took when I was reporting literally live from the Capitol on January 6, expecting to cover what happened at the Ellipse. I walked over with the crowd and everything. All hell broke loose, basically. I mean, it took plenty of flack for reporting on that at the time and for covering it critically at the time. And I think the way that certain people on the left have said it was worse than was. It was Steve Schmidt, I think on MSNBC once said it was like, like worse than 9 11. He said something to that extent. Worse than 9 11. That stuff was insane and ridiculous. And Dems obviously abused their power, congressional power and otherwise in their investigations. And this is clearly a case of that. When you have left openly bragging about having a well funded cabal flooding Democratic districts to basically nudge to tip the scales in the election with money. This is, by the way, what Citizens United, all of the libs with Citizens United stickers on their priuses, this is why they're concerned about Citizens United. When you talk about like the base most basic principle of why people oppose Citizens United, which is that billionaires shouldn't be able to buy elections. Okay, that's basically what the billionaires were bragging about to time magazine in 2020. And then the people who said something about it got subpoenaed in a conspiracy. A conspiracy investigation. A conspiracy investigation. And again, that's not to say there aren't real concerns about what was said in the wake of that and how seriously these pretty thin charges of fraud were, were treated and, and hyped up. But they were bundled into a RICO case by Fanny Willis Fani Willis in Georgia.
