Episode 988: Inside the Battle for Free Speech on the Internet

Summary

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Newt’s World – Episode 988: Inside the Battle for Free Speech on the Internet

Host: Newt Gingrich
Guest: Sarah Westall, Host of the "Business Game Changers" podcast
Date: June 13, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode dives into the evolving struggle for free speech in the digital era, centering on Sarah Westall’s experiences with deplatforming, censorship, and legal battles against the US government and Big Tech. Newt Gingrich guides a conversation that explores Section 230, the power of AI and data centers, and the implications of government and corporate overreach on free speech, democracy, and even energy infrastructures. The discussion also touches on issues of fraud and governance, with a look at Minnesota as a case study.

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Main Discussion Points & Insights

1. Sarah Westall's Censorship Experience

[09:14–11:00]

• In 2020, Westall’s YouTube channel with over 130,000 subscribers was deleted overnight just before the US election.
  • "I was deleted overnight two weeks before the 2020 election. Like so many others, it was right when the Hunter Biden laptop story came out." – Sarah Westall [09:22]
• She attributes the censorship to interviews with credentialed experts who challenged the prevailing COVID-19 narrative and alternative treatments.
  • "They just didn’t agree with the narrative. And I think for me in particular, that was why I was shut down." – Sarah Westall [10:02]
• She contends these actions reveal a deliberate, coordinated censorship push against influential dissenting voices.

2. Legal Pushback: The Lawsuits against Big Tech & the Government

[11:10–14:39]

• Westall was part of a group lawsuit alleging anti-free speech actions; she refers to October 2020 as "the Day the Internet Died."
  • "The 15 of us that ended up suing had more views together on the internet than mainstream media had on cable." – Sarah Westall [12:23]
• Central to their legal battle is the interpretation and application of Section 230, which she claims has evolved beyond its original intent.
  • "What happened is they suddenly went from being an open publisher to being a protected editor. And that was never the intent of section 230." – Sarah Westall [13:38]
• Westall’s current federal lawsuit is also an antitrust case, alleging viewpoint discrimination and economic harm from Big Tech censorship.

3. Section 230 – What Is It and Does It Need Reform?

[12:34; 14:39]

• Section 230 initially aimed to foster a free and open internet by shielding platforms from liability over user content; however, Westall says it’s been "weaponized."
  • "They wanted the Internet to be a place for freedom and democracy. ... What happened is that they turned it into something different." – Sarah Westall [13:05]
• She calls for Congress or the Supreme Court to clarify and revert the law to its original purpose, advocating for recourse and accountability.

4. Ongoing Battles with YouTube and Google

[15:38–20:27]

• Despite Google promising Congress it would reinstate channels censored during COVID/election controversies, Westall’s was restored for three days in 2024—then removed again for vague violations.
  • "My channel went from being misinformation at one point and then to bullying and harassment. I have no idea who I bullied and harassed. Never told me." – Sarah Westall [16:27]
• Multiple fake channels using her likeness and content remained live and monetized for a year, while defamatory and inappropriate content appeared in Google search results linked to her name.
• She describes exhaustive, fruitless efforts to get action from YouTube/Google, ultimately fueling her decision to sue.
  • "If they would have just treated me with some dignity and respect, I wouldn’t have been forced to actually go this far." – Sarah Westall [19:33]

5. Case Status: Jurisdictional Fight

[20:27–21:28]

• The lawsuit is filed in DC (including the federal government as a defendant); Google wants a venue change to California, which Westall argues is systemically biased in favor of Big Tech.

6. AI, Data Centers, and the Energy Conundrum

[24:14–30:46]

• Westall, with a background in telecom and IT, sees Big Tech rapidly building data centers, raising concerns about energy usage and potential inefficiency or overbuild—possibly creating an "artificial boom."
• Large data centers are becoming as energy-intensive as small cities. The push may drive innovation, particularly in alternative energy and efficiency, but raises grid stress and locality issues.
• She discusses the dangers of centralized vs. distributed centers, and new health/safety concerns over physical infrastructure (noise/frequency).
• On AI specifically, Westall warns of its capacity to manipulate psychology and threaten "freedom and sovereignty," especially if left unsafeguarded.
  • "We're talking some serious issues here. And it can come from within. It can come from, like you were saying, some random corporation, it can come from some politicians, it can come from another country." – Sarah Westall [30:52]

7. Minnesota Fraud Scandals: A Case Study in Censorship & Governance

[34:19–41:07]

• Westall details how Minnesota became a laboratory for "extreme legislation," fueled by a substantial budget surplus and the political dominance ("trifecta") of Democratic leadership.
• She notes extensive social program fraud, especially in immigrant communities (with examples from Somali communities), and describes attempts to discuss or expose fraud as being stifled by accusations of racism and political correctness.
  • "It's lunacy not to point out when there is fraud going on in a community or any community." – Sarah Westall [37:55]
• The result, she says, is taxpayer money flowing to fraudsters and overseas actors, with most politicians and media reluctant to confront the systemic crisis.

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Notable Quotes

• On Free Speech and Censorship:

  • "We were shut down because we were a narrative they did not want people to hear." – Sarah Westall [10:41]

• On Section 230:

  • "It's not an immunity against everything. They're not sovereigns. You don't get to do what they did to me...You have to have some sort of recourse for their behavior." – Sarah Westall [14:45]

• On AI's Threat:

  • "That's real. That kind of stuff is very scary because in the wrong hands...it's extremely dangerous and it puts freedom and sovereignty on the line." – Sarah Westall [29:09]

• On Cultural and Governmental Challenges:

  • "It's a culture issue because it's a clash of ideals. It's a clash of what you respect, and that needs to be discussed. And it's why there is this crazy fraud going on." – Sarah Westall [39:50]

• Memorable Moment:

  • "The Chinese had a saying that said, I understand you've had the misfortune to be born in interesting times." – Newt Gingrich [42:53]

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Key Segment Timestamps

• Introduction & Context: [02:16–06:17]
• Sarah Westall’s Censorship Story: [09:14–10:47]
• Section 230 and Free Speech Law: [12:34–14:39]
• Fake Channels, Monetization & Legal Battles: [16:27–20:27]
• AI and Data Center Discussion: [24:14–30:46]
• Minnesota Fraud and Governance: [34:19–41:07]
• Concluding Thoughts: [42:23–43:27]

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Conclusion

This episode offers a pointed look at how government and Big Tech actions are reshaping the boundaries of free speech, economic opportunity, and civic engagement on the internet. Sarah Westall’s narrative illustrates the personal and societal stakes as platforms, regulators, and the judiciary wrestle over who decides what can be said, who profits, and how power will be distributed in the increasingly digitized future. As Gingrich notes, we truly live in interesting times—and vigilant conversation is more necessary than ever.

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Transcript

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Welcome to Newt's World podcast on the iHeart podcast network. The California governor's primary is weird, as you might expect because California has a very long, very slow count and somehow liberals do better and better the longer the count goes on. However, at the present time, because they have this very strange top two get to be in the general election. Doesn't matter if they're Democrat or Republican. The leading Democrat, Xavier becerra, is at 27.7% and Steve Hilton, a Republican, is at 25.1. So there's now guaranteed to be a race this fall between a Democrat and a Republican, which is very important for the growth of the Republican party in California. Now, before the primary occurred, the Cook Political Report said the California governor's race is solidly Democratic. That's in part because the registration nowadays is so heavily Democratic, the amount of money will be heavily Democratic. But interestingly, since California became a state in 1850, it's had 18 Republican governors and 22 Democratic governors. So it's been much more split than you might have thought. The last Republican governor was Arnold Schwarzenegger, who served from 2003 to 2011. Before that, P. Wilson served eight years, 91 to 99, George Duke Magian served from 83 to 91 and Ronald Reagan served from 67 to 75. So you can see a fair amount of Republicanism in the past. However, you'd have to say that Hilton is an underdog. On the other hand, Californians are increasingly unhappy with everything from the Palisades fire to the tax rates to the homeless to the crime rates. So it'll be interesting to see how this campaign unvolves the most recent event in the Persian Gulf, the Navy deployed an unmanned surface drone to help rescue the crew of a downed army helicopter. This is a real breakthrough. It's cutting edge technology, much like that which the Ukrainians have been using. It's a drone boat that has no people on it, so you're not risking somebody and went out and rescued the pilots who'd crashed near the Strait of Hormuz. There's some argument, by the way, whether they crashed because they were hit by Iranian fire or they had some other mechanical problem. This is the first time a high tech US Navy drone has been deployed in the Middle east for a rescue mission. The unmanned vessel, a Saronic Corsair, is 24ft long, looks like a small speedboat powered by artificial intelligence. It located the crew that had been stuck in the water off the coast of Oman for two hours and brought them ashore. First example and by the way, I just recently got a long two day briefing by the US army in Europe on what's happening in both Ukraine and Iran. And the rate of use of drones and of basically ground robots is astonishing. And the US Military is going to have to really go through a wrenching adjustment to be able to get into the modern world that's evolving. Trump, responding to the loss of the helicopter, said, quote on Truth Social I have just been informed by our great military that last night the Iranians shot down one of our highly sophisticated Apache helicopters while patrolling over the Strait of Hormuz. The Iranians themselves have not said that they deliberately went out to shoot down anything. So there does seem to be some confusion about exactly what's going on. Coming up, I'm joined by Sarah Westall, host of the Business Game changers podcast

[B]

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[B]

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[D]

I am really pleased to welcome my guest, Sarah Westall, host of the Business Game Changers podcast, which reaches over 3 million organic viewers per month and is ranked in the top 1% of podcasts globally. Sarah, first of all, congratulations. That's quite an achievement.

[A]

Thank you, Newt. I really appreciate that.

[D]

Sarah, for people who haven't followed the story, can you take us back to 2020 and what happened to your YouTube channel?

[A]

Well, my YouTube channel, I had about 130,000 subscribers back then, and it was doing very well. And I was deleted overnight two weeks before the 2020 election. Like so many others, it was right when the Hunter Biden laptop story came out. And there's pretty clear that there was a hit done on people who had too much influence on what was happening in the politics of the day. I think we scared them.

[D]

What do you think actually triggered the censors to decide that they couldn't take the risk of letting you reach the country?

[A]

Well, I was interviewing many doctors and PhDs. They were all credentialed or had PhDs, and they didn't agree with how we were moving with COVID and there was alternative treatments. There were all these things that were being banned and censored, and we were having these discussions about masks, and they just didn't agree with the narrative. And I think for me in particular, that was why I was shut down. And it turned out that all these people were right. All the people I were talking to were right. You know, some of them maybe exaggerated a little bit from their perspective, but they certainly didn't exaggerate rate more than these predictions that were coming out of London. We were shut down because we were a narrative they did not want people to hear.

[D]

Now, I'm curious. You've spent years investigating powerful institutions and asking tough questions. And in March, you found yourself at the center of a major story when you filed a federal lawsuit against the US government. Google, YouTube, and Alphabet. That's quite an achievement. What led you to take that step?

[A]

I don't know how much of an achievement it is, but maybe it is. You know, it's been accumulating for years, and I thank you for terming it that way. Back in 2020, when there was a massive purging of the Internet, I was one of those that was purged. I call it the Day the Internet Died. It was a different Internet after that point. And, you know, some ways good, some ways bad. But there was a group of us that ended up suing YouTube because the day that we were taken down at the exact same moment YouTube switched out their contract that made it legit. But we never really got anywhere because of section 230. They just dismissed us, dismissed us. Everybody's dismissed. We went to the 9th Circuit and fought it there. There are some interesting points about that case. The 15 of us that sued, we were working with Zach Voorhees, who was the Google whistleblower at the time. He still is the Google whistleblow. He called me and we worked to get people together for this case, people who had large followings. And I guess I was more idealistic in understanding free speech and you know, spend many years and thinking through this over the time period. But the 15 of us that ended up suing had more views together on the Internet than mainstream media had on

[D]

cable for our listeners. Walk them through section 230.

[A]

Yeah, that's an important thing. Section 230 is a piece of legislation that was made in the 90s to protect the platforms, to protect these big tech companies so that they're not going to be sued into oblivion for people putting up stuff that they have no responsibility for. So if somebody's going to be putting up something, you know, disparaging you or disparaging somebody, they can't be responsible for every piece of content that everybody in the world puts up. It makes sense. It was very common sense legislation. And the reason they did that is they wanted to make a free and open Internet. They wanted the Internet to be a place for freedom and democracy. You know, they wanted that freedom expression. And if the platforms are being sued on a non stop basis for everything, then it would overnight kill that whole idea. What happened is that they turned it into something different than it was. They could obviously take down pornography or dangerous content. That was always part of their prerogative. But the intent was to have a free and fair open discussion and to clear the pathway for these platforms to be able to do that. What it turned into is it was weaponized and it turned into we need to protect these platforms at all costs. My lawyer's way better at articulating this than I am, but we will protect them at all costs. And that you're just going to be dismissed. You can't debate anything. You can't look and question any reason why they take down content at all. And what happened is they suddenly went from being an open publisher to being a protected editor. And that was never the intent of section 230. And we are arguing that the courts are actually misunderstanding and misrepresenting section 230. That's one of our tenets of our arguments. My lawsuit's actual antitrust case, which we can dive into more too.

[D]

From your perspective, do you think Congress needs to come back and clarify 230?

[A]

Yes, I think Congress or the courts, I mean section 230 is pretty good. The way it was written right now, the Supreme Court could rule on it and say, hey, this was not the intent of it. The California court system, it's not an immunity against everything. They're not sovereigns. You don't get to do what they did to me and I can walk through what they did to me with immunity. You have to be able to have citizens and people have to have some sort of recourse for their behavior. They can't just willy nilly take you down. You can't spend years developing. This is where the antitrust comes in. They get to decide who makes money and who doesn't on the Internet based on whatever they want. And I think it's based on your beliefs and your political beliefs should not be determinant on whether you can make money or not.

[D]

Google told Congress that they were going to reinstate the creators, but when you set out to do that, they were quite sincere.

[A]

No, I think, well, there's this metadata, right, that these NGOs and these other organizations are using to attach to certain people. And the ones that were canceled before still have all this metadata on it and a lot of other people. Viewpoint discrimination is a word that I'm looking for. And it's really across a lot of people. And it's to maintain whatever political agenda that they want. And that goes against the very core of what our society has been about.

[D]

Has YouTube taken your channel off again or what's your relationship?

[A]

So what happened was you were talking about the letter that they sent to Congress on admitting that they were coerced by the US Government and they were going to reinstate channels based on the taking it down for Covid and for election integrity. And of course, I was one of those. I fit clearly into that case and they put me back up for three days in 2024 and then took me down three days later. My channel went from being misinformation to at one point and then to bullying and harassment. I have no idea who I bullied and harassed. Never told me. Right. There was never any video where I bullied and harassed people. But I was taken down. And then after I was taken down again, there were multiple channels. There's been a channel that's been up since 2001, but there were multiple fake channels of me that were up with my pictures, my likeness. They were posting all of my content. They were monetized. Two of them were monetized, posting all of my content, plus other things. And that was up for almost a year. And meanwhile, when you did searches on Google, my own stuff, my website, my information, none of that was coming up, but all the fake stuff came up. I had multiple defamatory videos coming up on the first page of Google Search, all my fake channels. I reached out to YouTube and said, hey, there's these fake channels. Can you please take them down? And initially I had somebody respond to me on X. And then once I told them what it was, they never talked to me again. They ghosted me. And then I went through their formal DMCA process, which is supposedly how you get this stuff down. I sent five certified letters. I sent emails to every department, both Google and YouTube, and I got one response from one department saying, they don't take down channels, they only take down videos. And then I had to hire an attorney, and I hired my attorney to get these channels down. They sent a letter and no response. We sent another letter, no response. And then all of a sudden, I had all this porn material coming up with my name associated with it on the front page of Google Search. And it was an obscure channel that was on Rumble. It was gay porn stars talking about the profession. And the video would come up and then my name would be associated with it. And then there was other things that were even worse that I can't repeat. That was up, that should have been stripped out by Google Safe Search. And it was not very hardcore pornographic words with my name on it, implying I'm the one that was doing it. And it was all up on the front page of Google Search. The ironic part of all that is this was a Rumble channel that was coming up, and Rumble is their own lawsuit against YouTube and Google because they won't put up any of their videos. So that's already stripped and filtered out. So somehow it was not filtered out when it came to me. And it came to that kind of content. And we just said, okay, we're suing. I mean, if they would have just treated me with some kind of dignity and respect, I wouldn't have been forced to actually go this far. But now we're like, this is just totally unacceptable. Not only have they kicked me off for viewpoint discrimination, destroyed my ability. Ability to. Not destroyed, but really hamper my ability to make a living. Although I'm doing okay. I mean, imagine how much better I would do. And then they disparage me on the front page of Google Search and they ignore us and they monetize my other content for almost a year, claiming that my own content is not acceptable to be on the Internet or on their platform while they're monetizing people that are putting all my content up there. It's come on.

[D]

What is the status of your case now?

[A]

The case is filed in the court and we filed in D.C. because that's where the federal government is and Google has made a motion to switch it to California. We preemptively submitted 400 pages on why we believe that the California court systems are structurally biased over decades of case law that we looked at and showed the evidence of how they're misinterpreting section 230 and they're not giving. They're just dismissing everybody outright, not looking at the merits of these cases and that we don't believe that we can get a fair trial in Google's backyard. And we think it's a more important case for the country and that we need to stay in D.C. where it rightfully should be, based on how important this is for the people of the country. And also the federal government is one of the defendants and we should be there. So that's where it's at right now.

[D]

When we come back, we'll discuss AI data centers and the growing concerns over privacy and surveillance.

[B]

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[D]

What's your view about the rise of artificial intelligence and whether or not we need to find a way to build enough data centers to sustain that?

[A]

Well, I come out of telecom big tech. I'm an engineer by training. I was responsible for by the time I left us West Enterprise, which we had almost 90% of the infrastructure of the Internet at that time. We were building it out fast. I was responsible for all the data systems designed for that organization when I left. And before that I was responsible for doing the data modeling of that organization, which is essentially modeling out the early Internet. So I learned a lot about data and metadata and how it's structured and how powerful it is. I can tie back that in when we get into the AI discussion. But it also gave me a good understanding of what's needed for infrastructure. And when I look at what they're doing, I think there's a couple things that come to mind. I think that there's a little bit of a manufacturing boom, an artificial boom going on, a manufactured boom. I think there's a lot of money plowing into it that I'm questioning whether this much is necessary for what is really going on. If this is more of sort of a manufactured boom to build out this area. I also think that for the future, I think that we used to have what one little hard Drive can do used to take up a whole room. So I wonder if we're building for old tech already. But my biggest concern is energy. I think it's quickly turning into an energy conversation. The grid is being overused and people can't handle the energy consumption. So what's really happening is these big tech companies are turning into energy companies. They're investing and plowing a lot of money into to alternative energy, whether it's fusion, plasma, nuclear energy that actually is more efficient than the grid that we currently have. Now that part of it I actually think could be a very massive positive for society if we can move into a much more efficient, less expensive energy consumption. But that's what the conversation is quickly diving into. And I think it becomes a much more broader conversation because then it ties into, and I think you can appreciate some of this, the petrodollar on the whole economic system at large. I think these are pretty big power dynamics that are going on worldwide and energy is quickly becoming the center of it.

[D]

You actually have as much concern about the energy that will be absorbed by these data centers as by the centers themselves.

[A]

They're realizing that these data centers are like a massive city themselves. I mean, when you're talking about a data center that takes up thousands of acres and uses massive energy, you know, the people talk about the water. If it's engineered properly, it's a closed looped water system, right? So water really shouldn't be a problem. There is a problem with the humming and the frequency. And if you're within two miles, you can have some health issues, right? Those are real. It gives people vertigo and things. And so that's why they're trying to build in rural areas. Almost every large corporation has their own data center and universities and hospitals and everything. But they're smaller. And so the frequency and the hums aren't as dangerous, although people can be pretty sensitive to those as well. But it's smaller. And so that's why people are pushing maybe for more of these smaller distributed data centers instead of these massive ones. But the ways around it is the smaller, more distributed or being rural areas. So those are issues too. But engineering can solve a lot of those problems. We don't have the bottlenecks that energy brings us. Those bottlenecks with energy are real. And that's why these companies, the Chevron too, these energy companies, these big tech companies, Google, Microsoft, they're sovereign funds. They're plowing money into alternative energy. That gives you an indication of what's really going on here behind the scenes.

[D]

Are you at all concerned about artificial intelligence itself?

[A]

Yes, I am. That's a big concern. But it's a different conversation than infrastructure.

[D]

When you have that many big companies prepared to invest that much money, they'll figure out a solution at some point because there's just too much mass involved. From an engineering background, what concerns you about artificial intelligence and do you see it as fundamentally different from simply high speed computing?

[A]

I think a lot of the artificial intelligence that they claim is artificial intelligence is just computing. Right. That is a fact. When you're looking at the more advanced stuff, when you're looking at the deep brain and the advanced really well designed, not just the language models that search the whole Internet and make concise things, but really do deep analysis and more intense things, can read every piece of data on your psychology, understands psychology, can then converse with you in a way that can manipulate you. That's real. That kind of stuff is very scary because in the wrong hands, your enemy or anybody that wants to control you, it's extremely dangerous and it puts freedom and sovereignty on the line. There's some red lines here that the adults in the room need to start really having some serious conversations about.

[D]

In a sense, when you talk about the wrong hands, what if they are the self directed hands of the artificial intelligence?

[A]

I think that if we engineer it where we don't have safeguards, then it can be a problem. I do think that we should be able to engineer it properly to protect ourselves, but I'm not sure if we have the wisdom to do that. That's why I'm saying the adults in the room need to get together and say what is important here. We can't let an AI just run itself and make all these decisions and then we have no way of controlling it. There has to be many more safeguards along the way. Like if you're going to have an AI run a missile system and decide what it's going to bomb and someday based on intelligence and you don't have safeguards, every step of the way, you are in trouble.

[D]

So it strikes me that we're at the edge of a really different world. Potentially we are.

[A]

I think it's a civilization level kind of crisis that we need to look at and we need to take it very seriously. We're not just talking freedom, we're talking free will, we're talking enslavement. We're talking some serious issues here. And it can come from within. It can come from, like you were saying, some random corporation, it can come from some politicians it can come from another country. It can come from any person that has some kind of psychosis that we can't control. I mean, it can be really extreme and we need to be careful about this. And I think that you have to bring smart people together and take it extremely seriously.

[D]

Coming up, we'll talk about the Minnesota fraud cases and what they reveal about government accountability.

[B]

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[D]

I know this is not something you have to look for, but it kind of surrounds you, I think, from your perspective. Talk about this whole experience.

[A]

Well, yeah, because I'm in Minnesota. So I did a conference. I was tracking what was happening. You know, when you're surrounded by it, you're affected by it. You don't have a choice, especially when you're affected by it. So I did a conference presentation to the Scandinavian Council. It was a really interesting conference. And I talked about how Minnesota is the most extreme legislation in the country. This was back in 2022 and that's when there was a trifecta in this state that Democrats had the governorship, the House and the Senate. It was everything in this country that was extreme was coming through Minnesota. It was crazy. We were a sanctuary city for immigration, for transgender, for abortion. I mean, it was nuts. And they were even one of the groups that were talking about extending abortion past delivery. There were five states that were talking about. I don't know if they just put that out there to make it extreme and so that it's so extreme that something that's not as extreme you'll accept, you know, kind of that psychological thing. Because who in the world would be okay with encoding in law abortion past Delivery right up 28 days or whatever it was. We had the most extreme things going through Congress and then we had a great surplus in this state. I don't remember what it was, 9 billion or something. Of course the surplus was completely used up. And then all this fraud came out. And it's not surprising that the fraud came out. And they're estimating it's something like $19 billion. And internal to the way it was working here, Tim Walls, who is notoriously not serious, I just don't see him as a serious person because of so many things he's done that he was warned by hundreds of people that fraud was going on. And the people internal to these organizations were trying to let these people know there is fraud by the millions going on. And they kept being ignored. People were being fired because they were accused of being racist for bringing up fraud. They were literally comparing being anti Somalian, you know, because Somalian community was doing a lot more fraud than a lot of the other communities. And so if you brought up fraud, you were a racist. And it got so toxic that way that you couldn't even protect your state from stealing billions of dollars. And this is an example of where one community had oversized power in the politics at large. And the problem with Somalia having that much power in this community now, there's a lot of good people who are Somalians who came out of the Somalian revolution, right? There was a civil war, if you will, and there was a lot of turmoil. A lot of churches helped them out and a big portion came to Minnesota. But since then, a lot more were coming there because they realize that you can get a lot of free tickets here and immigration and welfare tourism is true. And so a lot of them were coming here. Not the initial people. There was a lot of hardworking entrepreneurs that are here. I don't think it's okay to stereotype a whole group of people and I don't think that's what we're doing. But the same point, it is lunacy not to point out when there is fraud going on in a community or any community or any place. There's also getting into something that's a little bit more sensitive. 98% of girls in the Somalian community are in Somalia have something called genital mutilation. And it's a religious practice. And in this country it's illegal to do that. But they claim to care about females, but they turn a blind eye to this going on in the community. So there's a lot of hypocrisy. There's a lot of fraud and a lot of it's being sent back to different terrorist organizations from what the FBI and the records show. The other scary part is they don't respect the local politics because Somalia is a clan based structure. Kind of like the Scottish. I'm Scottish. You know, back in my days, and it used to be a clan based structure, you had more allegiance to your family than you had to the politic or to the state and to the legalities of the state. And so they take their authority from international. A lot of it's international clan based leaders, not to the local authority of the politics or the rules of the area. That's a serious issue when you're sending money back to people who don't respect the laws of the place that you live. And we're dealing with that. And we shouldn't be shut down and not be able to openly talk and discuss that. Yes, we need to be respectful. Yes, we have to acknowledge that because. And I think we're past color of skin, aren't we? I mean, come on. I think we're past color of skin. I don't think it's a color of skin issue. It may be a culture issue. Problems with the Russian culture. In a lot of areas, there are issues with people who have white skin. And it's a culture issue because it's a clash of ideals. It's a clash of what you respect, and that needs to be discussed. And it's why there is this crazy fraud going on. They're taking down the small players. They took down some. I don't know, it doesn't sound small, but it is to feed my hungry children. They took down one person and indicted her for. They stole 250 million doll. That's great. And they're taking down a lot of people who are stealing millions of dollars, but they're not getting at the systemic rot that's happening. And Minnesota is not the only state that's having these issues, by the way. Right. We know that this is a problem that is parallel in California and many other states. Arizona is having a ton of problems. Although they're trying to clean it up, each one has maybe their own unique spin on it. But this is a nationwide problem. And I think when Elon Musk went after those NGOs and people just did not like him, what he exposed with those NGOs was incredibly important. I think it ties to a lot of what's happening in Minnesota and many other states and how these fraud networks are getting away with stealing and then having undue influence in politics. Minnesota's a great example because it shows you the undue influence in the politics, but it's much broader and deeper than that.

[D]

So is it in your sense, because you have an auction coming up? Have most people in Minnesota taken this seriously? Or is it one of those things where you just shrug and think, well, that's how life is?

[A]

I think it's a combination of both. I like to listen to NPR on occasion because I like to torture myself on things. Although they do have some good programming, about 30% of it is propaganda mixed in with some. Actually some good science programming and some. But I like to listen because I like to see where different sides are coming from. And there's npr, which is a Minnesota version. Every state has their own version. And if you were to listen to them, you would think there was no fraud or the fraud was just very minimal and it was just rogue characters getting away with stuff. Why the COVID up? Who are they protecting? Right. And we know that it's much deeper and wider than this. So why are they protecting it now if you talk to the average person on the ground, nobody is for fraud fraud. Unless you're extreme or you have something to hide. Most people are not okay with this fraud, but they're discouraged when they see the politicians and nothing ever being done. They're really discouraged by it.

[D]

Yeah, I can't blame them. It's fascinating. Just think about the topics we've covered. Just chatting today. It's kind of astounding to be alive in this particular period. Given your background and what you did educationally and now what you've done professionally. You must have some sense of being in the middle of a constant maelstrom of interesting things happening.

[A]

It's pretty amazing, isn't it? It's amazing. Sometimes you just wonder, wow, I was put in the middle of some of this, right?

[D]

Yeah. The Chinese had a saying that said, I understand you've had the misfortune to be born in interesting times.

[A]

That's an understatement.

[D]

Listen, Sarah, I want to thank you for joining me. Your podcast business, Game Changers can be found on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you listen to podcasts. This has been a great conversation and I'm just delighted that you would take the time to share your ideas and your insights.

[A]

Thank you so much and I really, really appreciate it It.

[D]

Thank you to my guests, Sarah Westall. Newts World is produced by Gingrich 360 and iHeartMedia. Our executive producer is Garnesy Sloan. Our researcher is Rachel Peterson. Special thanks to the team at Gingrich360. If you've been enjoying Newts World, I hope you'll go to Apple Podcast and both rate us with five stars and give us a review so others can learn what it's all about. Join me on [e-mail] I'm Newt Gingrich. This is Newt's World.

[B]

This July 4th, come celebrate at America's Block Party. Hosted by America250. America's Block Party is a can't miss 4th of July concert happen happening at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. Experience music, performances from major artists, patriotic tributes and the kickoff to giving 4th. Helping to make July 4th the largest day of giving in American history. It's more than just fireworks. Learn more about this landmark [e-mail]

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