Is 5G Dangerous? Social Media Censorship, How To Beat China In Tech Cold War, And MORE with FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr

Summary

Podcast Summary: "Is 5G Dangerous? Social Media Censorship, How To Beat China In Tech Cold War, And MORE with FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr"

The Charlie Kirk Show | June 11, 2020
Guest: FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr

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Episode Overview

In this wide-ranging interview, Charlie Kirk welcomes FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr for an in-depth discussion on the role of the FCC, social media censorship, Section 230, the U.S. tech cold war with China (particularly through 5G infrastructure), the safety myths of 5G, and broader issues related to big tech’s influence on speech, culture, and competition. The conversation weaves together policy, legal frameworks, technology, and cultural criticism from an unapologetic conservative perspective.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. What Does the FCC Do? (01:10–01:39)

• Brendan Carr explains the remit of the FCC, which includes the regulation and rollout of communications infrastructure like 5G.
• The FCC’s job is largely to facilitate the private sector's buildout of internet infrastructure and ensure U.S. leadership in wireless technology.

“A lot of people think that [phones, laptops] just happen with magic or pixie dust. But there’s a lot behind the scenes that we do at the FCC.”
— Brendan Carr (01:18)

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2. Section 230 & Social Media Censorship (02:01–10:41)

• Carr supports President Trump’s executive order targeting Section 230, the law giving social media platforms immunity as long as they act in “good faith.”
• The discussion centers on tech companies' expanding power over online speech and their alleged inconsistent, biased enforcement of their own terms of service.
• Both Democrats and Republicans (including then-candidate Joe Biden) have called for reevaluating or revoking Section 230, albeit from different motivations.

“There are some of the most powerful corporations in the history of the world, social media companies. They have more control over speech today than any entity that history has ever known.”
— Brendan Carr (02:06)

• Carr outlines the FTC’s potential role in treating misrepresented neutrality or deceptive business practices—where companies claim impartiality but act otherwise—as actionable consumer fraud.

“If you are going to hold yourself out as a politically neutral platform, you should be held accountable to that.”
— Brendan Carr (04:21)

• The difference between First Amendment rights and Section 230 is explained. Section 230 is a special legal privilege, not a constitutional right.
• Carr believes that revising Section 230 wouldn’t infringe on First Amendment rights but would add accountability for social media corporations' claims and conduct.

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3. Platform Power, Free Speech, and Market Dynamics (11:47–16:24)

• Discussion of the dilemma: When users invest years building a presence on platforms, is there an intellectual property or rights issue if they are removed arbitrarily?
• Carr and Kirk challenge the “fundamentalist libertarian” approach which, they argue, simply defends the privileged status quo of big tech and ignores market distortions introduced by law and policy.

“They’re not advocating for a free market, [they’re] defending a skewed market.”
— Brendan Carr (12:48)

• Comparison to turn-of-the-century anti-trust laws: It’s difficult to apply antitrust law when “you are the product, not the consumer.” In the tech era, consumer exploitation is through data collection and social engineering rather than price gouging.

“If you can’t find what it costs you to use it, you’re the product, not the consumer. They’re selling you.”
— Charlie Kirk (15:09)

• The analogy between data collection by big tech and historic privacy debates; Carr asserts that the Obama-Biden FCC “ran interference for big tech,” deflecting privacy criticism away from tech platforms and towards ISPs.

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4. Culture Wars & Cancel Culture (19:35–27:14)

• The hosts connect big tech’s speech controls to the rise of cancel culture and ideological groupthink, tracing the lineage from college campuses to social media to mainstream news outlets (e.g., The New York Times op-ed controversy).
• Satirical memes are highlighted as a threat to traditional media power—hence the push by establishment actors to label memes as “disinformation.”

“People have realized… that people are sensitive to this concept of disinformation… What you see are people taking political memes… and call[ing] it disinformation.”
— Brendan Carr (25:11)

• Critique of the use of fact-checking labels by platforms, especially in political contexts.

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5. Solutions: Transparency, Bias Filters, and Regulation (31:18–39:18)

• Carr proposes a model where users can turn off third-party “bias filters” on platforms like Facebook, allowing individuals to consume unfiltered content or choose their own fact-checking provider.
• Discussion of public accommodation laws in limited jurisdictions like D.C., which could potentially prohibit political discrimination by platforms.
• Concerns about anonymous accounts, digital “assassination” (deplatforming), and selective enforcement.

“That’s why I think we need to bring a lot more transparency here. That’s step one and then step two is accountability.”
— Brendan Carr (35:39)

• Criticism of social media company oversight boards, with Carr noting the political leanings of many Facebook oversight board members, suggesting institutional bias ahead of elections.

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6. Tech Breakup, Antitrust, and Utility Models (39:05–40:28)

• Debates about breaking up tech giants (advocated by some progressives) are contrasted with Carr’s preference for targeted reforms and increased scrutiny rather than full utility regulation or breakups.

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7. Net Neutrality, 5G, and Tech Myths (42:38–50:47)

• Arguments against net neutrality as a heavy-handed, misapplied regulatory move; Carr asserts that deregulation (Title II repeal) led to higher internet speeds and spurred U.S. tech leadership.
• On 5G Safety Myths:
  • Carr systematically debunks 5G health concerns, citing comprehensive FDA and other studies.
  • He addresses a frequently cited National Toxicology Program (NTP) rat study, explaining why its results can’t be extrapolated to typical human exposures.

“The NTP program exposed mice and rat to levels of radiation 75 times higher than what humans experience… That’s like taking a lab rat, tossing it off a 75-story building and saying that humans shouldn’t jump rope because of the result.”
— Brendan Carr (46:57)

• The cyclical pattern of health scares with every new wireless generation, fueled in part by foreign state misinformation (notably Russia), is discussed.

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8. National Security, China, Huawei, and the Tech Cold War (55:13–62:43)

• National Security and 5G:
  • 5G’s role in everything from in-home broadband to connected cars and the “Internet of Things;” its security implications are profound.
  • Carr recounts seeing Huawei gear near sensitive military facilities, underscoring national security risks.
• The U.S. has taken steps to stop subsidizing and to rip out Huawei/ZTE gear, part of a broader strategy to decouple from Chinese network technology and insist allies do the same.
• Ongoing battles in Europe over Huawei’s role in national infrastructure are noted, with Carr suggesting cost savings are a false argument compared to national security vulnerabilities.

“If our 5G networks are insecure, everything that we value in life is insecure.”
— Brendan Carr (55:22)

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9. Congressional Surveillance & Call Record Subpoenas (64:11–66:54)

• Carr criticizes Rep. Adam Schiff for issuing secret subpoenas to telecom companies for call records during impeachment, sidestepping judicial review and due process.

“Are we comfortable that one political party can have unchecked, unreviewable authority to pull our call records?”
— Brendan Carr (66:12)

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10. Robocalls & FCC Enforcement (67:04–68:26)

• The FCC considers robocalls a top enforcement priority, with recent record-breaking fines and ongoing collaboration with the FTC, FBI, and DOJ.

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11. Telehealth & Pandemic Tech Shifts (68:41–73:04)

• The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated telehealth adoption; the FCC played a role in supporting remote patient monitoring and virtual healthcare delivery, helping to reduce costs and improve outcomes, especially in rural areas.

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12. Media Ownership, Local News, and “Fairness” (76:01–78:39)

• The FCC’s traditional media rules—supposedly aimed at fostering diversity and localism—often have the opposite effect by limiting investment in local outlets.
• Fairness Doctrine: The original law enforcing equal time for opposing views on the airwaves was “weaponized” to suppress conservative voices; its repeal paved the way for conservative talk radio.

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13. Guidance for Young Professionals (80:16–82:57)

• Carr’s personal journey from FCC intern to commissioner; the best career advice: do good work, seek new opportunities, and be prepared to move when opportunities knock.

“Opportunity knocks for everyone. Most people don’t have their bags packed… Always bet on yourself.”
— Brendan Carr (82:18)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Tech Power vs. Government:
  “What if the tech companies are more powerful than government? Does that warrant using instruments of government power… to then go after these tech companies?”
  — Charlie Kirk (05:36)

• On Cancel Culture Migrating from Campuses:
  “This idea of groupthink is making a very quick and dangerous spread across this country. And I think this organization sees it more than anyone else. You know, this sort of started… on college campuses… That culture moved from college campuses to a lot of social media companies that then replicated that same type of culture.”
  — Brendan Carr (20:11)

• 5G Health Paranoia:
  “Congratulations to people that have fallen for Russian disinformation on that [5G safety].”
  — Brendan Carr (50:54)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• FCC’s Mission and Scope: 01:10–01:39
• Section 230, Free Speech, & Social Media: 02:01–10:41
• Big Tech Market Power, Antitrust, and Data Collection: 11:47–16:24
• Culture Wars & Cancel Culture: 19:35–27:14
• Transparency, Filters, and Platform Accountability: 31:18–39:18
• Net Neutrality, 5G, and Safety Myths: 42:38–50:47
• China, Huawei, and National Security: 55:13–62:43
• Congressional Surveillance (Schiff Call Records): 64:11–66:54
• Robocalls Enforcement: 67:04–68:26
• Telehealth & Post-COVID Policy: 68:41–73:04
• Media Rules, Local News & Fairness Doctrine: 76:01–78:39
• Career Advice from Brendan Carr: 80:16–82:57

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Final Thoughts

This episode offers a comprehensive, conservative-leaning approach to contemporary debates about free speech, tech regulation, data privacy, and American primacy in technology. Brendan Carr presents a case for targeted, pragmatic reforms rather than radical dissolution or socialization of tech firms, and he situates the often-academic policy debates in the heated context of current political culture and the U.S.-China rivalry.

For listeners seeking an “inside scoop” on the interplay between technology, law, and power—and skeptical of both big government and big tech—this episode delivers both detail and conviction.

Transcript

[A]

Thank you for listening to this Podcast 1 production now available on Apple Podcasts, Podcast 1, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcasts.

[B]

Charlie, what you've done is incredible here. Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.

[A]

I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.

[B]

Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks. I want to thank Charlie. He's an incredible guy. His spirit, his love of this country. He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point usa. We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives. And we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country. That's why we are here. Hey, everybody. We're honored to be here with Brendan Carr from the fcc, board member of the fcc. We're going to get into all sorts of really fun and interesting issues today. You guys can email us your questions freedomarliekirk.com and make sure you type in Charlie Kirk show right now to your podcast provider. Hit subscribe. Do you guys want to beat the 1619 Project on new York Times? I do. On the podcast charts. Type it in. Type Charlie Kirk Show. Brendan, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.

[C]

Great to be with you. Thanks for having me.

[B]

So tell us, what does the FCC do?

[A]

Well, it's a really exciting time to

[C]

be at the FCC. So there's five of us that are commissioners of the FCC and we regulate everything from the rollout of 5G, trying to make sure that the US can establish leadership in wireless so everyone that turns on their phone or fires up their laptop. A lot of people think that that just happens with magic or pixie dust. But there's a lot behind the scenes that we do at the FCC to help the private sector build out that Internet infrastructure that we all rely on today.

[B]

So you were outspoken recently in favor of the President's executive order on social media, and you, you spoke out and some people thought it was meaningless or superfluous. Tell us why you supported the President's executive order on the tech companies and the importance of free speech online and in digital communication.

[C]

Yeah, I really welcomed the President's Executive order on social media. Look, free speech is under threat right now. There are some of the most powerful corporations in the history of the world, social media companies. They have more control over speech today than any entity that history has ever known. What the President's Executive Order would do would calls for the FCC to take a look at a law called Section 230. And Section 230 is a law passed in the 1990s, that singled out one set of actors, social media companies today, for special treatment. And it takes that group and it gives them legal immunity that other political actors don't enjoy. And look, Twitter, Jack Dorsey, all these other companies, they have every right under the First Amendment to speak their own minds. What we're seeing, though, what appears to be happening is they're running roughshod over their own terms of service. In taking action against the President of the United States with his own tweets, they were putting up this fact check about glorification of violence that when you look at the President's tweet, it just didn't seem to even line up on its own. So they have every right to express their political views. What they don't have the right to do, what no business in this country has the right to do, is run roughshod over its legally accountable terms of service. So the executive order would look at the Federal Trade Commission to take a look and see whether some of this conduct falls under the traditional unfair deceptive business practices conduct and at the fcc, whether there's a need to take a look at section 230 as well.

[B]

So let's talk about the deceptive business practices. That's very interesting because 230 has kind of now gotten into the zeitgeist. And I wrote an op ed for the Washington Post saying that 230 should be repealed.

[C]

Platform versus publisher.

[B]

Can you talk about deceptive business practice? What you're saying is the misapplication of the terms of service by these tech giants, the way that they actually pretend to be fair and impartial, they could be classified as a fraudulent enterprise.

[C]

Right. I think just recently one of the commissioners at the Federal Trade Commission raised this very point about analyzing some of this conduct through unfair deceptive trade. Trade practices perspective. So look, any business in this country that holds itself out is accountable. These platforms have made very public representations that they don't engage in systemic political bias. They represent this to Congress, they make it the statements everywhere else. People rely on those statements to use their platforms. Well, if it in fact turns out that they are engaged in sort of systemic political bias, then that is something that could be looked at through the lens of an unfair deceptive business practice. Again, this has nothing to do with Twitter or Jack Dorsey's own First Amendment rights, but if you are going to hold yourself out as a politically neutral platform, you should be held accountable to that.

[B]

Correct? And if you, if you aren't politically neutral, then you must state that you're not politically neutral.

[C]

You really can't have it both ways. What we're seeing is people say look, these are private entities. If they want to be politically biased, they can. Well, they can't have it both ways. You can't be out there representing to users. We don't engage in political bias. And then behind the scenes engage in political bias. You don't get to have it both ways. And if they were to come forward and say yeah, we're in the tank for a Republican or we're in the tank for a Democrat, then all of us can make our decisions against that sort of background principle, whether it's regulatory decisions or decisions as individual users. Yeah.

[B]

So the equivalent would be misleading business practices of any sort of where you tell the consumer something you are not. It would be an airline that says

[C]

that they are going to be on

[B]

time and they know they won't. It would be deceiving the consumer or misapplication of standards of labeling or anything. The FTC does all sorts of different front facing consumer advocacy. I think they go too far, quite honestly too many times as a limited government free market guy. But I also believe one of the reasons I believe in limited government as a philosophically is I believe in limited power because government, as the founders theorized was the ultimate form of power. Now what if the tech companies are more powerful than government? Does that warrant using instruments of government power or courts to then go after these tech companies?

[C]

Look, I'm with you. I think I start from the position of limited government and I don't support regulatory action. That's going to make problems at the end of the day worse. What we have to realize is the immense enormity of the power that these social media companies have developed I think do merit the screening they're now getting. And frankly this is a bipartisan issue. It doesn't seem like it. But earlier this year vice president, now presidential candidate Biden said that we should repeal or revoke section 230 immediately. Got very little coverage. Now when President Trump says that we should look at revising section 230 gets a lot of coverage.

[B]

So Biden says we should repeal 230.

[C]

Biden's positions we should repeal 230 now

[A]

for many people right now, did he

[B]

misspeak or what was his.

[C]

He's doubled down on this recently as well. Many people right now their North Star when it comes to political or legal issues is Orange man bad. And so when President Trump says it, there's a lot of people that push back. But There is a bipartisan call for taking a look at section 230. Biden says it should be revoked immediately.

[B]

Why would Biden say that, do you think? Because a lot of his biggest contributors are the tech companies.

[C]

Yeah. You know, look, if you look back at the 2016 election, the far left has been hopping from hoax to hoax to hoax to try to justify their loss at the ballot box. One place that they've been looking is social media companies for the crime in their view of staying too neutral in the 2016 election. So what has been happening since then is a working of the refs from the left to try to persuade social media companies to not stay on the sideline in 2020. And so some of what I think you're seeing Biden and others pushing back on is concerns from the left about some of the activities and that they're not going far enough in pursuing the agenda that they want them to engage in.

[B]

2020 has been a year that none of us will forget impeachment, the Chinese coronavirus, race riots. Who knows what's next? What better time to try to get to the source? Sen. Ted Cruz and Michael Knowles got back together in D.C. this week for the first time in months. Their podcast Verdict with Ted Cruz topped the podcast charts earlier this year with their inside look into impeachment hearings. And now they're back at it again as 2020 gets even crazier. This is your chance to go behind the scenes in Washington to, to see what's really happening. You can't get much closer to the action than this. Go check out the podcast Verdict with Ted Cruz and be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Again, that's Verdict with Ted Cruz. Check it out and subscribe today. So you wrote in this press release in favor of the executive order. You said the federal government has provided virtually no guidance on the good faith limitation Congress included in section 230. And so you say you welcome the executive order. So when I understand this guidance that Congress passed is so open ended, is that correct? Basically it's open to regulatory interpretation.

[C]

Yeah. So flashback to the 1990s. This is when people had Prodigy messaging boards of the day. That is when Congress passed section 230, they had Prodigy messaging board in mind and it said good faith.

[B]

What is piety?

[C]

That's a whole separate podcast. The law says if these platforms are engaged in good faith, conduct good faith in the statute, then it gets these special treatments, these special legal immunities that other political actors don't get by Implication,

[A]

that means there is a category of

[C]

conduct that Congress identified called bad faith conduct. Well, again, flash forward 20 plus years. The Prodigy messaging board is now, you know, the most powerful social media companies in the world.

[A]

And there's been virtually no guidance about

[C]

that line that Congress drew.

[A]

And this goes to the First Amendment.

[C]

A lot of people, when Trump put his executive order out there, when I put my statement out there, have been collapsing the First Amendment analysis under the statutory analysis. And that's a mistake. There's three things going on here.

[A]

The First Amendment, everybody has a First Amendment right.

[C]

Private entities have a First Amendment right. Section 230 is a set of legal privileges and immunities above and beyond the First Amendment that only some political actors get.

[A]

There is no First Amendment right to Section 230.

[C]

So you can revise, you can revoke Section 230 without infringing First Amendment rights. And then the third bucket, as we've been talking about, are these terms of service.

[A]

So that's how you analyze it from a legal perspective. Everyone has First Amendment rights.

[C]

Only some political actors get 230 rights.

[A]

And then they also have this bucket

[C]

of legal terms and conditions that the Federal Trade Commission could take a look at.

[B]

So I've been on Twitter since 2011. I've tweeted 42,600 times, 1.7 million Twitter followers, about to be 1.8 with those 42,600 tweets. If Twitter deleted my profile completely, what happens to all the intellectual property in law? You could have a precedent almost of squatters rights. That if what happened to all that work I put into that platform? Do you think that there's any possible legal. That's what's right word. I'm looking for just potential legal analysis to go after legislative reform, I should say, towards being able to say that you as a human being have poured into these companies intellectually, that's your property. It's not. I know that you might sign or check some box, but is it really? Did they really participate in the creation of my 42,600 tweets?

[A]

Well, I think some of this goes

[C]

to the bait and switch.

[A]

When these platforms are out there, whether it's YouTube or others that say, come

[C]

here to your point, pour your heart

[A]

into this, pour your money into this, create this conduct, build this business that can support your family and the idea

[C]

that it can be pulled away from

[A]

you even if you do basically nothing

[C]

wrong, I think that's troublesome to a lot of people.

[A]

That's why I think at this Point in time, doing nothing is just not an option. I think that's why it was welcome news for the President's issue section 230. Look, in D.C. there are a lot of sort of trade associations, sort of think tanks that fall into what I would call, I think I've heard you talk about it, sort of this fundamentalist libertarian view that say we shouldn't touch 230.

[C]

We shouldn't do anything about the powerful

[A]

corporations and their control over speech because

[C]

they say these are private platforms. I get it.

[A]

I sort of came to politics and policy late in life and and was really attracted to some of these libertarian ideas.

[B]

I've read all their books.

[A]

And at this point though, what's odd though is they're not advocating for a free market, defending a skewed market. And not only just 230, think back to competition law. So if you look back from, for instance, if you look back to the obama Biden administration 2008-2016, that was one of the greatest run ups in terms of accumulation of power and size of big tech social media companies. And we had antitrust policy and competition policy that I don't think was fit for what we were seeing. And here's part of what I mean, a lot of competition policy sort of has a status quo bias. They tend to see things the way they are now and they don't understand where technology is going. To give you two examples, one we saw at the fcc, we had this Sprint T Mobile merger that we reviewed. A lot of people saw Sprint and they said it's a fourth competitor. We don't want to lose a fourth competitor. But if you actually look and see where Sprint was headed as a company, it was not going to be a strong fourth competitor for very long. We have two big competitors in wireless, AT&T and Verizon. And T Mobile was sort of an upstart competitor, but Sprint was kind of barely hanging on. So if you look at the future, you could see that combining Sprint and T Mobile, creating a stronger third competitor at, AT and T and Verizon is a good thing. But a lot of the antitrust theory would assume and take the snapshot in time that Sprint stays alive. Flashback to when Facebook buys Instagram. A lot of people look at that and they say, well, Instagram is an interesting photo sharing app. Little did they know that given three or four years time or less than that, it would have been a immense competitor to Facebook. So in fact, I think the Federal Trade Commission right now is doing a look back to take a Look at some of that. All that goes to show is when you're defending the status quo, you're defending it against an already tilted regulatory regime. So I think whether it's 230, whether it's antitrust law, when you are saying there is no action the government should take, I don't think that's the path forward.

[B]

Well, and the Sherman Antitrust act and antitrust monopoly laws were written for a very specific purpose of consumer exploitation. When there is vertical monopolizations created in the early 20th century, Rockefeller, Carnegie, and there's even some fundamentalist free markets, free marketeers. I've read a lot of these books and they're quite compelling. I don't know if I fully agree with them that think that Rockefeller and Carnegie actually weren't exploiting people. And they were. They've gotten a bad rap in history. That's, that's a different point. However, that's what the legislation was built around, was trust busting. Now the issue is it's very hard to apply the Sherman Antitrust act. If a company is not exploiting its consumers based on price. They're not price gouging. They're not. Now the problem is that people say, well, there's no price, there's no cost. I say, well, if you can't find what it costs you to use it, you're the product, not the consumer. They're selling you. They're actually selling you to a company. So when you flip through that Facebook feed or flip through Twitter feed based on what you like, based on your behavior, based on what you might dictate actually into your phone, all of a sudden they use that, you know, potpourri of data and sell it back to XYZ Co. Or you know, benefactor cause. And so the issue is that the laws are literally 100 years old and don't necessarily apply to a company that doesn't charge basically anything to the consumer.

[A]

Yeah, I think that's part of some of the fresh look that has to be taken into account from a competition perspective when it comes to big tech.

[C]

To your point, the amount of data

[A]

that is now collected by these companies, even today, people really don't even know. So if you have a Google or an Android device, even if you're not connected to a network, it is constantly taking data on where you are. If you get into a car, your phone can know that because that's barometric pressure sensors in it that can know when a car door closes.

[B]

Really.

[A]

It knows when you're going up an elevator. It is tracking data on you. And even today when people have some sort of awareness of big data, they don't know the true scope of the collection practices. And this wasn't an accident. Again, go back to the Obama Biden administration. Back then at the FCC where I work, there was this big debate about privacy. What is the biggest privacy threat to consumers? Is it Internet service providers or is it social media companies who collects more data? And the FCC back then was actively running interference. Who effectively for big tech and saying big tech doesn't actually get to see that much data on you, it's only a glimpse. What we need to be concerned about is the Internet service providers. And so at this time that they were ramping up, that they were growing, they were collecting massive amounts of data, you had Democrats in power who were telling people to look the other way. The revolving door between the Obama administration and Silicon Valley simply never stopped swinging. And some of those very same people are now backing Vice President Biden is run. And I don't have an opinion in terms of who should win the presidency and I'm legally prohibited from expressing such an opinion. But I do think it's worthy for people to take a look and see. These are the same people that were running the government during this run up to big tech growing.

[B]

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[A]

it comes to free speech? You certainly see big tech exercising a lot more influence over what people can say. And I speak about this a lot from a free speech perspective in some ways to differentiate it from the First Amendment. Right. So we have private platforms to which the First Amendment doesn't apply. But we've never seen an entity, government or otherwise, in this country that has more control over speech. And I think this ties into another point that we're seeing right now. Whether we call it cancel culture or other types of terms, this idea of groupthink is making a very quick and dangerous spread across this country. And I think this organization sees it more than anyone else. You know, this sort of started, I think, on college campuses, this idea of safe spaces, this idea that a diversity of thought and information is something to be avoided. I mean, how did universities go from places where you should be exposed to diverse views to pushing back on diverse views? Well, that culture moved from college campuses to a lot of social media companies that then replicated that same type of culture. And then you now see it in sort of institutional, established media organizations, the New York Times being one of them, their editor stepping down, resigning, whatever the conduct was, for the crime of exposing people to a different view. An op ed by Senator Cotton. You have the progressive editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer who put out a piece that I think said buildings matter too, which is a reaction to some of the looting and vandalism that was taking place. And he was fired 20 years. And what's actually really ironic, and I learned this recently, the modern day op ed was developed by no institution other than the New York Times. There was a editorial board member by the name of John Oakes, and he was looking in the 1950s and the 1960s to this sort of group think that pervaded then, this sort of Maoist thinking that pervaded then. And he said we need to push back on that. And he said that diversity of opinion is the lifeblood of democracy. The minute we insist that everybody think the same way that we think our democratic way of life is in jeopardy. This was an editorial board member of the New York Times. He was the one that launched the modern day op ed in 1970. September of 1970. They want to invite diversity of opinions and they expressly said this stuff is not going to always represent views that we agree with. Flash forward 50 years, 1970 to 2020. Rest in peace. For that type of embrace of diversity of views.

[B]

New York Times invented the op ed and then it kills the op ed.

[C]

Right?

[B]

That is the stormy the Bastille of the radical left that starts on campuses.

[A]

The other interesting wrinkle of that story is the page that was opposite of the editorials back then were obituaries and that was a big revenue generator for these papers. So it's kind of ironic that what started as an obituary page is now going to be home to sort of dead ideas and a lack of diversity. A bit of a full circle in some ways.

[B]

Full circle irony. So what amazes me is that some of the fundamentalists, and by the way, a lot of these companies will fund and will hide behind libertarian dogma, but they don't actually even believe it. They use it as sensationalist shields to protect their corporate incumbency, basically. I mean, not for a second are we supposed to believe when Google or Twitter funds some of these fundamentalist libertarian think tanks. Does Sergey Brin actually believe in libertarian philosophy? Like that's, it's laughable. It's fun, foolish if you think that these CEOs that are, they're funding it because they are striking an intellectual and philosophical consistency nerve of the prior base of the conservative movement that allows it to be a shield for their corporate incumbency. But do they actually believe in Lockean natural rights? No, of course not. They have nothing in their entire ideological worldview, does it? Or their philosophical worldview, I should say, does it reflect that? And what's amazing to me is the very same people that have just gone with the wind off of HBO Max, the very same people have taken cops off of television. The very same people that have fired that Serbian soccer player for the Los Angeles Galaxy for something his wife wrote. The very same people that just fired the Sacramento Kings announcer. The very same people that have just fired the CrossFit CEO or made him resign. That same philosophy is now running Google. So explain me this. Explain this to me. We're supposed to act now that the Google employees are going to never act impartially, whereas they are this same mob acts impartially everywhere.

[A]

Look, I think diversity of thought has rarely been under as much assault as it is right now. And there are all sorts of ways in which ideas are being shut down? Let's look at political memes to start. I have this saying that is disinformation is the new disinformation. And what I mean by that is people have realized, Whether it's after 2016 election or otherwise, that people are sensitive to this concept of disinformation and shutting down disinformation. And what you see are people taking political memes. One of the first ones that I saw do this, I think you guys may have been involved. This was a viral video of Nancy Pelosi tearing up the State of the Union speech. You had political actors step in and call it disinformation. Misinformation.

[B]

Speak for the House responded to our video.

[A]

Yeah, this is political meme. Political meme. Political satire goes back to the very foundations of government, goes back to Ben

[B]

Franklin even before them.

[A]

Why is it effective? It is effective because it sidelines traditional gatekeepers and speaks directly to the people. And so what you're seeing now are these established media gatekeepers who've been sidelined by political memes, because political means, whether they're funny or otherwise, they draw people into the political discussion. You don't need that middleman to translate for you what's going on, because the political meme is. Draws you into the conversation. So we now have the Washington Post fact checker that's giving four Pinocchios to different memes. I spoke out even on the Bloomberg campaign. He issued an advertisement where he had a one liner that he liked at one of the Democratic debates, and he inserted in there the sound of crickets to indicate that his Democratic candidates had no response to what it was that he said. And people fact checked that. Well, there weren't actually crickets on the stage. Of course. Of course. Crickets didn't take to the stage and start chirping. What's happening here is people are not concerned that this is disinformation. They're not concerned that people are gonna be fooled by Pelosi ripping up this speech, which actually happened. They're not gonna think people.

[B]

It wasn't edited.

[A]

Right. They're not gonna think that people actually crickets came to the stage. What they're concerned about is that it's gonna be effective. They're concerned that their jobs, their place in terms of determining the political narrative is getting minimized. And so I do think that we see whether you call this war on memes or otherwise, it is merely an attempt to control the political narrative.

[B]

That's a very different point than I've heard Recently, and it's a very important one. Because what you're saying is that the fact checkers aren't actually worried that this might be swaying public opinion one way or the other. Instead, they're worried that their opinion isn't more predominant in the zeitgeist.

[A]

I think that's right. You know, fact checking many times is simply opinion editorializing. I think we saw that with some of the fact check labels that were placed on some of the president's tweets. I think Twitter put a label on that said one of his tweets was glorification of violence. It just didn't seem to line up with the tweet that the president said.

[B]

Well, and also they allow Hamas to have a Twitter account. They allow the Chinese Communist Party to have a Twitter account. And we know the Chinese Communist Party advertises with six figures in Twitter. Amongst other media companies. Twitter allows antifa videos to stay up. Smashing of people's buildings and homes. I don't understand how that's not glorification of violence. But the president says something that is really not anything more than, you know, just calling what is happening in the country. Meanwhile, Twitter employs antifa members. It's important to remember that. And so there's people that are wondering what legislatively or what realistically is going to happen with this issue. Because the cynic side of me is that these companies are more powerful than our government. They spend 30, 40 million dollars a year on lobbying of which is political contributions. Indirectly through lobbyists. They control public opinion immensely. What's going to prevent them from shutting us all down?

[A]

Look, there's no question that they're tremendously powerful. And if you look at Jack Dorsey in particular, he sent out an article some time ago, favorably retweeted an article that said it is the end of bipartisanship. Republicans must be thoroughly defeated. Democrats must win. This is the same person who says, if you have an issue with content moderation at Twitter, I am ultimately the one responsible. And how much confidence does that give people that these are decisions that are being made impartially based on the plain application of terms of service? Or look at Facebook. In a lot of ways, I give sort of Zuckerberg some credit. I think his instincts have been right on a lot of issues. And so I say Zuckerberg is right. Facebook is wrong. Because despite Zuckerberg's instinct, we still see some missteps from Facebook. And his instinct was right. I think after the 2016 election, when people said that a handful of advertisements on Facebook swayed the election. I think you saw Zuckerberg immediately express some skepticism about that. Subsequently, I think Facebook made him sort of turn heel and take a different approach on that. And you see it on free speech. He's taken a different approach than Twitter. He's embraced this idea that candidates should get to speak directly to people through their ads and people should get to decide for themselves, whether they want to believe it or not, that Facebook's not the arbiter of truth. Because here's the thing, there is no oracle of truth when you talk about content moderation on social media. These are people in power that are making these decisions, and they're people that are either fallible or they're biased. That's why I embrace this concept of more speech, more ideas, empowering users. So one idea that I've talked about is this idea of turning off the bias filters. So rather than having Facebook immediately fact check your feed and either have MSNBC do it or Fox News do it, you should have the ability to turn that off. If you want MSNBC to check everything before you see it in Facebook, fine, go into your settings, you know, flip that button. But if you don't, if you want to be able to decide for yourselves, let's empower people to make that decision for themselves. That's one reform that I've put out there. I think this Section 230 executive order is going to be very important. I think the Federal Trade Commission signaling through Commissioner Wilson that they can take a look at this. It's important the fcc, where I work, is going to get a petition on this issue that we are going to take up. But it's troubling.

[B]

I mean, there's problems with this solution I'm about to probe, let's propose, I should say, or talk about. But it's not perfect in any sense. But it's better than what's now, which is what if every citizen, every person of the country had a correlated Social Security number or whatever it is, a social ID number, and it would actually get rid of a lot of the anonymous accounts, which I think would be refreshing because I think there's a lot of the issues with social chatter and a lot of the, let's just say, problem. And of course, you have an issue of international actors that are also on the platform and all that. I recognize that. But the question is, should platform access be a civil right? And so people say, well, it's a private company, you can't do it. I say, okay, let's heard that argument. I got it. But can you realistically petition your government? If you don't have access to Twitter, Facebook or Google, can you realistically do that? Okay, you could do a protest outside of Capitol Hill. No one's going to see that. Got it. But doesn't the Constitution say that you have a right, given to you by God, to petition your grand grievances and redress your government? And so how could you possibly in this world communicate with your lawmakers without having access to these platforms?

[A]

You know, there's an interesting area of law that I think you've talked about, which is sort of public accommodation law. And there's not many states that have this, but in D.C. their public accommodation law says that you can't discriminate based on political viewpoints. And it's an interesting question that I've not fully grappled with or explored myself. But do those types of public accommodation laws apply to social media platforms? And if so, if you are accessing it through DC does the DC Public accommodation law, which prohibits political discrimination, does that apply? Is that something that can be looked at through Section 230 when the FCC takes that petition up? I think those are interesting avenues.

[B]

I think if every American citizen got a social media ID that is correlated with their Social Security number, and you can't be kicked off the platform, but you're not allowed to create anonymous, and it's not a perfect solution. I've said there's plenty of downfalls with this, the least of which being how do you regulate people that are not citizens of the country and all that, because you can only create law for, you know, the sovereign of our country. However, I think there is something to be said, though, that the worst parts of social media are anonymous accounts. Like, that's the worst experience of it, I think it's fair to say. Secondly, every human being should have the.

[A]

Have.

[B]

Should have the right to be able to speak where the conversation is happening. So when the founders wrote the Declaration, their idea was that you should have equal access to be able to. To voice your concerns that your religion or whatever it is. Okay, but if you're only able to voice your concerns now in the physical world, not the digital world, you're only touching 1% of the population, if that. Whereas in the. In the world of the 1780s, the comprehension of a digital space was just. It wasn't even in the. It was 150 years removed. And so the precedent of case law probably does not exist for that constitutionally. But for me, it makes a. It's a very clear argument because if you are kicked off a social media platform, you're basically useless to protest your government. Basically, yeah.

[A]

I mean, look, there's some challenges, obviously. So anonymous speech actually has, you know, protections from sort of a First Amendment perspective. So there's some challenges there. But I don't think, you know, doing nothing isn't an option at this point. I think more transparency gets to a lot of what you're talking about. It's so much of a black hole. So, you know, you have people on social media who are gaining followers. They are seeing a lot of interaction on their tweets and then all of a sudden it just sort of stops. ALX how does that happen?

[B]

Alex LaRusso.

[C]

Right.

[B]

ALX On Twitter, 100,000 followers retweeted by the President. He's a real person with his picture. And Twitter decides to digitally assassinate him. Why is that tolerated? Who's standing? I mean, if he was a Black Lives Matter activist and they just decided to digitally assassinate him, do you think that would be okay? Of course not.

[C]

Right.

[A]

That's why I think we need to bring a lot more transparency here. That's step one and then step two is accountability. Again, you know, there's some tricky issue here having to do with speech. There's tricky issues here having to do with private platforms. But that's part of why I think this step that the President took in the executive order made so much sense, which was bringing the Federal Trade Commission in because put their speech rights to the side. You know, they should be accountable like any other business in this country for their conduct. I think another thing that I wanted to touch on is if you look at Facebook, they've recently stood up this what they call an oversight board, Supreme Court or something.

[B]

Right.

[A]

It's interesting if you look at who is on this. So this is a group that they've stood up in the run up to the 2020 election to make what they call the toughest content moderation decision. So you think, okay, maybe there's progressive people on there, but they're probably pretty neutral. Not at all. If you look at who's on this board, one person is Pam Karlan. So she testified in favor of impeaching President Trump. She was the one that made the Baron Barron Trump joke. She's been described by the New York Times as a full throated liberal torchbearer. She's the person among others that Facebook is tossing the keys to content moderation to ahead of the 2020 election. Who else? Columbia law professor Jamal Green, who has fantasized about President Trump being shot, who has called his election unacceptable. You have this activist, Manny Cai, I believe his name is, who has said that President Trump is the crown jewel in the sort of fascism, xenophobic white nationalist movement. There's people on there that are connected to the sort of George Soros network of left wing groups.

[B]

Afia, Antigua, Asare, Kaire. I don't mean any offense, by the way, if I mispronounce it, but that's a tough one.

[A]

So look, if you were to create a board specifically for the purpose of tilting an election against an incumbent president, I don't think it would look much different than the board that Facebook has put together.

[B]

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[A]

So Elizabeth Warren and others have called for sort of a full breakup of Big Tech.

[B]

They want to turn into a public utility, which I think I don't mean interrupt you. It's just I feel so Marxist.

[A]

Yeah, so I'm not there. But I do think that there is a level of accountability that has been missing. And there are so many people in Washington who say again, this sort of fundamentalist libertarian view of do nothing. And I think the time for that has passed. That's why I've tossed out this idea of turning off the bias filters. That's why the executive order that Trump has put out there can lead to some concrete steps. I'm focused more on sort of that type of reform and additional scrutiny.

[B]

So I don't see this changing anytime soon, to be honest with you. I don't see Congress acting on it. The tech companies have purchased Congress and it's just the worst company right now is Twitter. And we're streaming live on Twitter. Thank you all for watching on Twitter, by the way.

[A]

Hopefully still, they're probably gonna take it down.

[B]

You guys can email us freedom charliekirk.com and make sure you subscribe to that link right now. Subscribe to that podcast link. Do me a favor, make the country a freer place. I don't see this changing. In fact, I think we need to be more aggressive against these, these companies. We really do. And Twitter and Google have been the worst by far.

[A]

Look, I think these aren't isolated incidences. When you look at the New York Times and their editor getting taken off his job for putting a diversity of views out there. Philadelphia inquire. Drew Brees.

[B]

This is part of Scott with the wind, L.A. soccer player, CrossFit CEO. This is just in the last 48 hours.

[A]

He yeah, there is a strong movement to shut down opposing ideas. In fact, it's spilled over to the fcc. So there was a group, ironically enough, named Free Press that filed a petition at the FCC asking us to take regulatory action against television broadcasters that carried the President's daily coronavirus briefings. You remember when this was an issue? A few weeks ago, maybe a month ago at this point?

[B]

You mean when the country wasn't burning?

[A]

Exactly. There was a movement to pressure these television stations to stop letting the President of the United States speak directly to the people. And that's a private sector debate that can take place. But one group decided to file a petition at the FCC and asking us to take a look at this rule having to do with broadcast hoaxes and tell us to investigate and take action against broadcasters that carry the president. And of course, we turn the petition away. But what I think this is, is this particular group, Free Press, is sending a signal and it says, look, if they get control of the fcc, if they get the votes there, whether it's Republican or not, they are going to look to take the levers of government and shut down speech they disagree with. Right.

[B]

And so is it philosophically okay for conservatives to now use the levers of government to protect speech?

[A]

Well, this is an interesting debate. So this is what gets back to the 230. And I think my position is we want more speech and the reforms that I've seen Talked about with 230 are about more speech, which is to say, get out of the content moderation business, or at least should you be getting out of the content moderation business when it comes to sort of your own political views? If Jack Dorsey has a political perspective, fine, speak your mind, donate your money. But should he be weaponizing his company to go after, whether it's the president or another political candidate that he doesn't like?

[B]

So one other fight you guys at the FCC picked really early was net neutrality. Yeah, the world was supposed to end, Brendan.

[A]

I remember I got the death threats to prove it.

[B]

Yeah, tell us about that.

[A]

So net neutrality is a spectacularly misnamed sort of left wing political agenda. Net neutrality in of itself as a concept is actually not that disagreeable. So it's basically, you know, you should go on the Internet where you want to go, you know, not get throttled if that's not being disclosed. Basic rules of the road. What happened at the end of the Obama administration is they did this massive Internet power grab. The Internet has long been lightly regulated and that has been a tremendous success story. For the first time ever, the Obama administration classified the Internet as a, what we call a title to utility service. And as you saw, the predictions were unbelievable. It was going to be the end of the Internet. Speeds were going to slow down, tweets were going to come one word at a time. Obviously none of that happened. In fact, the story of the Internet infrastructure in this country is one of the great, I think, undertold success stories of the administration since the end of 2016. Internet speeds in this country are up 85% since the repeal of net neutrality. When we were told netrat was going to, the repeal was going to end, the Internet speeds are up 70% in 2015 and 2016. The US was at really serious risk of ceding global leadership in 5G and the billions of investment, millions of jobs it can create to our global counterparts, including China, President Trump, Congress, the fcc, where I work, we flipped the script and now the US has secured the strongest 5G platform in the world. And it's a great private sector success story.

[B]

So let's talk about 5G. Is it safe?

[A]

Yes. There is a tremendous amount of misinformation out there about 5G. And I think people fall into three buckets. People that see some of this conspiracy theories and they sort of readily dismiss it. There's people in the middle who say, I don't know a lot about this. I'm seeing some troubling news stories and headlines. I'd like to learn more. And there's a group of people who are going to believe these conspiracy theories about 5G regardless of the facts that are presented to them. So one of the things you hear is people say there's been no studies on the health and safety of RF emissions. It's just not true. There have been dozens upon dozens of studies regarding the safety of RF emissions. In fact, the fda, which runs point on this, they're scientists, epidemiologists recently put out a 113 page report that went through 10 years of these epidemiological and other scientific studies into RF emissions with the bottom line that these emissions are safe.

[B]

So there's an article here, we get a lot of emails about this@freedom charliekirk.com on 5G that says we have no reason to believe 5G is safe from the Scientific American blog network. And the guy who wrote it is pretty respectable. And he says this. He says 5G will employ millimeter waves the first time. Given limited reach, 5G will require cell antennas every 100, 200 meters, exposing many people to millimeter wave radiation. He continues by saying millimeter waves are mostly absorbed within a few millimeters of human skin. And he says research suggests that long term exposure may pose health risks to the skin, the eyes and tests and so on and so forth.

[A]

Yeah, it's just not the case. So a couple things to unpack there. People suggest that the use of what's called millimeter wave spectrum. So to back up, there's low band spectrum, mid band spectrum, high band spectrum. High band spectrum is millimeter wave. High band spectrum has been used for a long time and it's newly being used in new ways for 5G. But the suggestion there, when you unpack it, is that there are no health and safety standards for millimeter wave spectrum. That's not the case. We have rules at the FCC designed to protect health and safety that go up to 100 GHz, which is above the millimeter wave spectrum that's being talked there. A lot of people also talk about this study from the National Toxicology Program.

[B]

I was going to ask about that.

[A]

That's sort of a key piece of data that a lot of these sort of conspiracy theorists go to. A couple things there. The NTP program exposed mice and rat to levels of radiation 75 times higher than what humans experience in the real world. That's like taking a lab rat, tossing it off a 75 story building and saying that humans shouldn't jump rope because of the result. In fact, the authors of that NTP study said that exactly themselves, you cannot extrapolate what they saw with the real world.

[B]

So let me read from that. Is that okay?

[A]

Sure.

[B]

So it's Dr. Devra Davis, March 14, 2020, and there were some people that believe there's a connection between 5G and the spread of the coronavirus. That is a growing belief. So here's what it says in the article. In 2018, the US Gold Standard National Toxicology Program NTB confirmed clear evidence that cell phone radiation caused heart tumors in rats as well as DNA damage. Within days of the report's release, well placed articles appear debunking the findings. Bizarrely, this $30 million government study, as well as others linking phone radiation to tumor promotion, memory and behavioral changes do not appear. So basically what she's saying, and it continues on, that there is the study and then there was a counter study right after it, and she's calling it bizarre. This is Dr. Deborah Davis from IB Times.

[A]

Yeah, so if you look just at the NTP study, not whatever came after, just at the authors of that study themselves, they say exactly what I'm saying. They exposed lab rats to RF at 75 times the level at humans get from our interactions to attempt to see if at those power levels there could be some sort of link. They said themselves, it cannot be extended to humans based on the fact that it was 75 times level. There's also a number of anomalies from that NTP report. So there's four categories of animals that were used there. Male rats, female rats, male mice, female mice. Only one of those categories actually showed a negative finding. And that category, male rats, I believe, actually lived longer than the controls. So there's a lot of anomalies with that report. And the authors themselves say you can't extrapolate that to the real world because of the power levels.

[B]

So let me ask a question though, Brendan. Why is it that there are so many articles and there's such a big push behind this, in your estimation?

[A]

Well, it's nothing new. So if you look back at every generation of technology, these same conspiracy theories were there. I've gone back to the 1920s and 1930s when AM&FM radio was first getting built out. You saw this same stuff. You saw it with 2G, you saw it with 3G, saw with 4G. We have social media now, with the Internet now, so it spreads a bit farther. But think about it from this way, from the real world experience. If you want to dismiss the fact that the Dozens and dozens of studies that have been done that show it's safe. Okay, fine. But look at your real world experience. 1988, when a lot of sort of cell phones first started getting out there. From 1988 to now, the build out of towers, the use of cell phones has spiked like a hockey stick. Okay. Over that same period of time, the incidence of brain and other nervous system cancers has declined. If there was any correlation, you wouldn't be seeing that. And the same with COVID Covid is spreading around the globe. Obviously it's spread by respiratory droplets, not RF emissions. But again, put that to the side.

[B]

That is a belief that people do

[A]

have and it's there that the incidences of COVID globally are not showing a correlation at all with where 5G has been built out. So again, this type of conspiracy theory has been with us for generations. It will stay with us for generations. The facts and the data are out there for people that want to believe it. But there's some people that are just not going to be persuaded by it.

[B]

Do you think that there might be motives from other countries to try to push an anti 5G message?

[A]

Absolutely. There's been reports that state actors are behind this misinformation about 5G. In particular Russia. Russia has fallen behind the US and its build out of 5G Internet infrastructure. So it is trying to sow doubts about health and safety in the US to slow down the US build. So congratulations to people that have fallen for Russian disinformation on that.

[B]

Well, it's interesting, the woman that I cited served in the Clinton administration and awarded Nobel Peace Prize. That doesn't necessarily mean that she's right or wrong. I mean she believed in gravity. That would mean she's right. But she doesn't believe in gravity. She was wrong. It's not invalidates it. I bring this up though. She says this in the article where the article was dangers of 5G. This is from IB Times. This is not some. This is relatively mainstream published. It's just dangers of 5G. New technology draws concerns for the environment, public safety. She says this, we are left to wonder why do China, Russia, Poland, Italy and several other European countries allow up to hundred of times less wireless radiation to the environment than does the United states. The last EPA report on the topic released in 86 back when a gallon of gasoline cost less than a dollar. So she's arguing and postulating we should be more like these countries.

[A]

Yeah, I think there's a lot of misinformation there. Again, the FDA recently put out this report that looked at studies from 2008 all the way to 2018, it walked through in detail these health and safety studies that they claim don't exist that show that RF emissions are safe. Again, I think look at the real world. You know, cell phone usage has spiked. Incidence of brain and other nervous system cancers have decreased.

[B]

So let's talk about, so I want to talk about the national security implications, but what I don't think we did a good enough job though is can you explain what 5G does for the country? Let's put the health issues aside. Since we have this infrastructure, what does it do to benefit the country? I don't think we did a good enough job of building that foundation.

[A]

Yeah, I would think about 5G in three buckets. And the first is actually the least interesting. It's everything you do on your cell phone today is going to be better and faster. You can download a movie in three minutes, you can download a movie in seconds. Interesting, but not that revolutionary. The second is actually in home broadband. So right now a lot of Americans feel like they have one or no choice for high speed home Internet. Well, 5G is going to finally give you wirelessly the same speed and quality that up to now you could only get through a fiber or wired connection. The third bucket is this new wave of innovations that really we can only scratch at right now, whether it's Internet of things or connected cars. The way I describe that third bucket to people, or at least try to describe it, is tell people to think back on their own life 10 years ago. 10 years ago is when we were shifting from 3G to 4G. Think about how you got across town 10 years ago, right? You had to call a taxi, wait for one to show up, pay exorbitant rates. Well, 4G ushered in the app economy, Uber, Lyft. Now you have a access to a ride right on your phone. Or think about banking. Right. Oftentimes you had to go to a physical brick and mortar bank. You had to stand in one of those rope lines. You had to take that pen that was always lashed to the table and out of ink. Well, now with 4G, we have square and all kinds of money transfer apps. Venmo, right on the phone. It was a transformative experience. But if you were standing 10 years ago, you may not even have identified those things in your life as pain points. But that shift to 4G helps solve them. We're going to see that again with 5G. What's a glimpse of that? Take grocery shopping. I hate grocery shopping. But I have to eat, so I got to go grocery shopping. It's particularly troublesome right now with COVID and social distancing. And there's some apps right now that you can go online, order food, but it doesn't replicate the experience of going through your own grocery stores. So imagine with 5G, you put virtual reality goggles on and you're automatically in your own local grocery store aisles that you know you can walk through it the way that you like to walk through it. You can pick stuff off the shelf. That type of innovative technologies things are going to solve pain points. 5G is the upgrade to our wireless network that we need to get there.

[B]

That was well said, and it could. People that are proponents of 5G talk about advanced robotics. They talk about autonomous vehicles. But there's also a national security implication to 5G.

[A]

Yeah. So as we shift to 5G, a couple interesting things happen. We aren't in a world anymore where it's just email and cat videos that are going on these networks. It is banking information, it is healthcare information, it is energy grid information. If our 5G networks are insecure, everything that we value in life is insecure. Let me give you an example. In this job, I've tried to spend as much time as possible outside of D.C. i think there's no better way to serve in government than to get out of the Beltway and hear directly from the people. My first two years on this job, I did events in 27 states from halfway out the Aleutian Islands of Alaska to all across rural America. On one of those trips, I went to a town, Great Falls, Montana, a couple hundred miles from the Canadian border.

[B]

It's a beautiful place. I've been there.

[A]

It is very sparsely populated. And there's a military base there called Malmstrom Air Force Base. That's where I met Colonel Jennifer Reeves. In her command are 150 intercontinental ballistic missiles. And they are spread out in silos all across northern Montana. In spending time with them, you really get a sense of the emotional gravity of their jobs. So these missile silos spread out across nothing but big sky country and wheat fields, except one thing. Dotted throughout that missile field are cell towers running Huawei gear. High end, high tech Huawei gear. Very few people, very few reasons to justify that type of investment From a normal consumer perspective. I think we need to treat Huawei and ZTE as nothing less than a threat to our collective security. And we've taken concrete action at the fcc. We've now stopped subsidized Huawei gear. And ZTE gear from going into the US Network. We are looking now at ripping out Huawei gear that made it into the network. And we're taking action against Chinese owned companies that are connected to the network. Today, China Mobile, one of the largest wireless companies in the world, wanted to connect to the US Network, which would give it control potentially over traffic. And we've taken steps there. And I think this is part of a stronger approach to China, appropriately so that you see from this administration from day one in 2017, when Trump got into the White House, it was a departure from the sort of weak Biden Obama approach to China. And I don't mean that in a partisan sense, because it was bipartisan. Many, many administrations, Republican and Democrat, took a weak approach to China for decades. Trump has turned the corner on that. And so whether it's the trade negotiations or cracking down an IP theft that Huawei and others were engaged in, or at the FCC where we're stopping this gear from going into our network, we're taking the right, strong, appropriate steps to make sure that 5G is built out in a secure way.

[B]

So is there fear though, that we have over 300,000 Chinese nationals that we educated and then work somewhere in our infrastructure system, whether it be at low level positions, all the way up to mid level position. But is there a fear that since Huawei has signed all these contracts for construction in the Western Hemisphere, not necessarily in America, but most specifically about 30 countries, Iceland, Turkey, UK. Do we have to have an intercontinental 5G grid? And if so, then aren't we already parlaying our grid to Huawei dominated?

[A]

Huawei is part of the Belt and Road initiative that the communist regime has

[B]

been carrying out world domination.

[A]

I spent time in Nairobi, Kenya. Actually, I went a couple hours outside of Nairobi, Kenya, this dusty small town called Nanuki. And in the middle of this dusty small town in Nanuki, you see all these Huawei billboards. Huawei gear is all through the African continent. It is in many parts of South America. And as I think you're aware, and as your question indicates, it has been a live debate in Europe, how much Huawei gear and others do we let in? And the US has been very clear about our position. I think some of the cabinet secretaries have even said there is no world in which we are going to be sharing our national security information with other countries that if they have this insecure Huawei gear in their network, I think UK right now under Boris Johnson has indicated that they're taking a fresh look at their past decision to Let Huawei.

[B]

Why are they even hesitating, Brendan? Why would you even allow China? What's the advantage unless you're purchased by the Chinese?

[A]

There is some concern about some influence from that perspective. The other neutral principle you could articulate is some concern about the influence is not taking a appropriate look at the cost they see upfront. Some of the Huawei gear can be

[B]

less expensive because they're subsidized by the

[A]

state, because they're subsidized, because there's slave labor, because there is IP theft. Put that to the side for a second.

[B]

Yeah, they had no investment to make it go ahead.

[A]

And so people will look at that and say, all right, I could buy Nokia, I could buy Ericsson, or I could buy this less expensive Huawei gear. Oftentimes they bought that less expensive Huawei gear. But the value proposition has to be over the long run, how much do you value national security, but in a

[B]

sense one of government bureaucrats ever cared about saving money.

[A]

Well, it's interesting because a lot of these governments also set up this weird approach where they would take effectively a Huawei gear out of the box, check it at a laboratory, then say, okay, ship all your Huawei gear to my country. Now, what that doesn't understand is that Huawei sets this up in a very bespoke way. They will fly their own communist regime, communist China nationals, to set up this equipment in a bespoke fashion. So you really can't check the security vulnerabilities on the front end. One way that we're mitigating the Huawei threat, in addition to the steps that we talked about, is there's this shift in 5G to basically software. So 4G was predominantly a hardware based network, expensive boxes, and you need 10 of them to do each individual task. Well, now software can do the task of those 10 different boxes.

[B]

Boxes.

[A]

So increasingly, 5G networks are going to be software based networks. And when you compete on software, US Companies have an advantage because they're much better at coding and developing software. So one way, in addition to the trade steps, the Huawei steps, that we are going to make sure that there is a secure 5G network is by enabling US companies to compete at the software level. And that's a free market way of doing it.

[B]

Sure. And so currently, do you think there are risks to the United states with the 5G infrastructure in our country?

[A]

We are taking concrete steps to mitigate and address it. China Telecom, for instance, is one company that may ultimately be controlled by the communist regime that right now is connected to the US Network. Department of justice has asked the FCC to start a proceeding to revoke their authorization, effectively kick them out of the US and we are right now engaged in, are proceeding to take a look at whether we should do that. So we've taken some steps. I think there's more that we should

[B]

take in the, in Europe. This is the EU, which you take it for every one. They're struggling with the 5G issue in a variety ways. They say they have more than 180 scientists and doctors that warn about the danger of 5G. Germans petition parliament to stop 5G auction on health grounds resolution opposing 5G by the municipality of Rome, Netherlands Parliament ask independent investigation of 5G. When you look at this, what do you chalk up this to chalk this to?

[A]

I think it's a variety of things. Again, the type of misinformation we're seeing about 5G and health effects is no different than what we saw with 4G, with 3G, with AM and FM radio before. There are dozens and dozens of studies, the FDA has listed them all out there that reached the same conclusion about the safety of 5G.

[B]

So the FCC is, is overseeing this continuation of the building out of the American grid. And so if Europe doesn't change, would you support us sharing our information then with them? If they continue to be purchased by

[A]

Huawei, this ultimately would be a call for the State Department or for dod. But I do think that they have indicated that if they continue to go down this path, even Canada, I think there's been some issues with that. There would be a serious reconsideration of information sharing.

[B]

So you've also been very vocal against Adam Schiff. Tell us about that.

[A]

Yeah, so it's interesting. So Chairman Schiff has been running a secret in partisan surveillance state. And how do we know this? If you look at the impeachment report, the impeachment report indicates that Chairman Schiff issued a subpoena for call records to a number of people in government and outside of government. And this has to do with a provision of law that we implement at the fcc. There is a law that protects call records. So call records are the numbers you dial from your phone, how long those calls last, the date of those calls. We've described that information at the FCC as highly sensitive information. Congress can't have an avenue to getting at some of that information. But Chairman Schiff issued a subpoena for call records and obtained 4,000 pages worth of call records. What's interesting is that he did it in a way that completely avoided any chance for judicial review. What I mean by that is this. Historically, when Chairman Schiff himself and others in Congress have tried to get call records on everyday Americans, they provided some public notice that they were doing it. That public notice then gave people the right to exercise their legal right to go to court to say, you can't get my call record. We've seen that play out with the Trump administration. Schiff said, I'm going to get Trump's tax returns, so I'm issuing a subpoena to Trump's accounting firm firm and to his bank. And he said that publicly. The fact that Schiff said that publicly enabled the Trump administration to go to court, and they've now successfully blocked the release of those call records. In the case that I've been working on, Chairman Schiff secretly issued a subpoena to one telecom carrier without notice to.

[B]

Is this legal?

[A]

That's the big question. Without notice to the underlying consumer, those call records were turned over to Schiff. So I think the question ultimately for the American people is are we comfortable that one political in party can have unchecked, unreviewable authority to pull our call records? So I think whether it's Congress needing to engage in some reforms itself or courts need to take a look at that, I think it's an important question that has yet to be answered. I wrote a letter to Chairman Schiff, but I never heard back.

[B]

Wouldn't it be a violation of the four Amendment?

[A]

So that's another interesting question is who owns those records and how do you get them? The subpoena that was issued could potentially have been a lawful way of getting them, but there's a lot that's still unknown about the subpoena that was issued.

[B]

The FCC also issued a $225 million fine on a robocall issue. I don't like robocalls. So tell me about this.

[A]

If you can solve the robocall problem in this country, your path to the presidency is just tailor made.

[B]

There's like four issues like that. No more traffic, right? You know, make first day of hunting in Pennsylvania, statewide holiday, right? There's like five issues.

[A]

Robocalls is something that we do have jurisdiction over, the fcc. And robocalls are something that I get. It's the one issue that when I walk down the street in my neighborhood, my neighbors literally throw their window up and yell at me about why I'm not doing more to stop robocalls. What I can tell you is this a is difficult, obviously for a variety of technical reasons, but at the fcc, we have now elevated fighting robocalls to our top enforcement priority. And we've engaged in a number of regulatory steps aimed at breaking the back of these illegal and annoying robocalls.

[B]

And so this particular fine that you put forward is $225 million. How many robocalls do they have to send to warrant that?

[A]

It can be a lot. This particular case, I believe, was one where they were not only placing the robocalls illegally, but were pitching fake health insurance sort of proposals. So they're not just annoying, but oftentimes they're used to defraud Americans.

[B]

And did you do that in conjunction with the FTC or.

[A]

We sometimes work with the ftc and then in some cases we work with, whether it's the FBI or Department of justice from an enforcement perspective.

[B]

So, I mean, I think that if you could solve the robocall issue, again, you could be elected Pope. So what else are you working on at the FCC that you think it's critical for our audience to be aware of? What other issues are you involved in and things that you're concerned about in the direction of our country?

[A]

Well, you know, I think 5G is a big one, and I think we've helped secure US Leadership from that perspective. I think that's a great win. Nothing that's come up with the COVID 19 pandemic actually is telehealth. You know, so much spending in this country has to do obviously with healthcare. It's a big part of our economy in a good, in a bad way. And I think what we saw with COVID 19 was a reorienting around how we deal with telehealth. I think about it from this perspective. At the fcc, we were active for years subsidizing Internet connections to physical brick and mortar healthcare facilities. That's great. We're going to continue to do that. One of the trends that I saw, actually, I saw it when I was in a small town, Ruleville, Mississippi, getting out of D.C. and it was basically the healthcare equivalent of shifting from Blockbuster Video to Netflix. What I mean by that is this. You don't have to go to a physical brick and mortar facility anymore to get care. You have apps right on your phone. You have Bluetooth connected blood glucose monitors for people with diabetes source. Big shift in healthcare from brick and mortar facilities to distributed that. We've been playing a supporting role at the fcc. HHS has been doing a great job cutting red tape, reorienting reimbursement, licensing issues. So I think that's one thing that when we come out of this COVID 19 pandemic is a set of regulatory reforms that I hope as a country we keep because it drives down healthcare costs dramatically and improve results for patients.

[B]

So what you're saying is that the telehealth revolution could potentially lower the cost of healthcare?

[C]

Absolutely.

[A]

You look at chronic disease management, something like 85% of direct healthcare spending is on chronic diseases. So diabetes, copd. Now you have devices, and I've seen them myself. This goes back to Ruleville, Mississippi. I met a woman there named Ms. Annie, and she noticed her first signs of diabetes when she woke up one morning with blurred vision. She tried traditional care regimes and it wasn't working. And they sent her home with a iPad and a Bluetooth enabled blood glucose monitor. Every morning she'd prick her finger and her iPad would register her A1C number and give her instant feedback. Eat this, don't eat this. Exercise, don't exercise. And her A1C level came down. She said she never felt better. So I think replicating that model is what we were trying to do with the fcc.

[B]

What would she have done prior to that technology?

[A]

Prior, you would have to get a very different type of treatment. So adherence is the healthcare term. Making sure that people actually do their regimen is one area where a lot of us just aren't that good. I'll give you another example. I was in a small town in southwestern Virginia, Laurel Fork, met an older woman named Kathy. Her A1C level was through the roof. And she would drive to the hospital and they would check her number, but she stopped going because it was a pain to drive there, a pain to get the appointment. Her A1C level got even worse, I mean, to the point where most people would die at that stages. But she also got enrolled in one of these remote patient monitoring programs. So she stayed with it. Adherence. Right. She would check her A1C levels every day, and she saw progress and now she feels a lot better.

[B]

And so the communication through medicine, there were some regulatory changes by Congress or was it just more through the agencies?

[A]

A lot of it was through the agencies. So HHS CMS did a lot of work from a licensing and reimbursement perspective. Right. We had these old school rules that said, you know, if you're working in Georgia, you know, you can't see a patient remotely in South Carolina because all kinds of incumbency reasons, all kinds of licensing reasons. And we started to chop away finally at some of those regulatory structures that made it more difficult for people to access Health care remotely. Think about mental health care in this country. I was on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. It sits right along the border of South Dakota and Nebraska, hundreds and hundreds of miles from the big city in that area of Sioux Falls. Mental health care is a challenge in every community, including there. Well, now you can have this video visit where you can remotely connect with a mental health care professional across state lines and receive high quality care. You can address opioid dependency through mental health and behavioral health counseling through pain management specialists. So I think telehealth, remote patient monitoring is the future of healthcare. And we're starting to support that at the FCC and in other agencies.

[B]

So the FCC is also involved at times, if I'm ready, if I'm not mistaken, about certain issues. AT&T and some of these big telecom companies. Can you speak about that with. I think you guys issued a license the other day to AT&T.

[A]

We've been taking a lot of steps. So if you look at the COVID 19 pandemic, so many Americans shifted their life online. Right. So we are working from home, we're educating our kids from home, we're accessing telehealth. And COVID 19 actually was a significant stress test of the Internet ecosystem. The US we did. The US network held up far better than many other countries.

[B]

So what countries didn't do well?

[A]

There's some in Europe for instance, that have go back to net neutrality. That the sort of title to utility style regulation approach in Europe. And what happened there is that decreases investment. U.S. providers have a tendency to invest twice as much in their network per person than their counterparts in Europe. That investment paid off. During the stress test. We saw anywhere from a 20 to 30% spike in traffic levels with people shifting to working from home with almost no degradation in quality. So it was a surprise stress test to the system that the regulatory regime that we've all been putting in place the last couple of years really paid off.

[B]

So if we would have done the net neutrality nonsense sense and made the Internet a utility, we might not have been able to have the flow of information we enjoyed during this. It was the greatest stress test imaginable

[C]

on the Internet, right?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

If you ever wanted to put this whole debate about Title 2 in the rearview mirror, it won't happen because political activists are engaged in it. This would be the final nail in the coffin. This COVID 19 pandemic from a network perspective was just a crazy crucible and it should burn away all of these sort of partisan political ideas like Title 2 and Focus on what matters. Investing in the network. The first two years of this administration, the digital divide, the percentages of Americans that don't have access to high speed Internet narrowed by about 30% last year alone. More miles of high speed fiber, some 400,000 were built out into the ground. That's enough to wrap around the earth 18 times. So the policies that the administration, the FCC put in place in 2017, that got Internet providers to let it rip, to build, to invest, is what held us in such good stead during this pandemic.

[B]

So something in the last couple days that's breaking. There's been a lot of demands from the Black Lives Matter mob and from the far left wing to try to enforce these all sorts of different things. And corporations are capitulating. But now there's some demands on the FCC to enforce diversity and affirmative action in media. I'm not even sure if you've seen some of these demands. You guys get more petitions. Any take on the demands to enforce affirmative action in media?

[A]

Well, I'm not sure I've seen this particular one. You know, we, we do have.

[B]

Okay, there's so many of us.

[A]

Yeah, we do have sort of broadcast media rules. And here's what they are. At the core, at the core of it is more diversity, more news, more information, more localism. And so we've been trying to do that. Perversely, some of our rules are having the opposite effect. So we have these media regulations that have been on the books since the 60s or 70s that limit who can own TV stations or limit how many TV stations you can own.

[B]

It's like 28% or something of a specific type market or something. Right. Is that correct?

[A]

What's interesting is you look at local news gathering and it has been suffering because of the rise of these Internet companies, because the funding for local news comes from advertising revenue and advertising revenue has swung dramatically. If you're the local car dealership, you're not really placing your ad in the local paper anymore or the local TV station.

[B]

Micro targeting. Right.

[A]

To some extent. But the vast majority has shifted online. And so we have these rules at the FCC designed to promote localism that stop the investment in local stations that you need to maintain localism. So it's been a backwards looking approach that we've been trying to reverse at the fcc, but we've been stymied a bit by the courts along the way.

[B]

So do you guys get into the original talk radio provisions that allow talk radio to be what it is, or is that a different department In a sense there has been for years the left has tried to repeal the idea that you can have conservative talk radio that you must have, and you'd know this better than I would, but there's a provision in the law that says if, if you do news broadcasting, it has to be somewhat the equal. The Fairness Doctrine.

[A]

I'm sorry, so the Fairness Doctrine is.

[B]

Can you dive into that, please?

[A]

Yeah, this is an interesting issue and it pops up from time to time. The Fairness Doctrine was first instituted many, many decades ago. And the idea was this sort of similar to this equal time idea. If you cover one issue, cover the other side of the issue. It actually was weaponized by left leaning entities to shut down consciousness, conservative voices. It was the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine that allowed the rise of conservative talk news.

[B]

So does it still stand or not?

[A]

It's been repealed.

[B]

When was it repealed?

[A]

I think it was actually in some ways it was formally taken off the books not that long ago, but in the. Could have been the 80s or the 90s when we had got rid of

[B]

the, that helped the rise of Rush Limbaugh and people like that.

[A]

Exactly, exactly.

[C]

Right.

[B]

Equally, you've had cnn.

[A]

What's interesting, when you look at things like the Fairness Doctrine, net neutrality, those things that sound. Oh, that's. Yeah, I'm for net neutrality, I'm for fairness. But when you look at the application of it, it is very different. So some of the branding is very different than reality. And the Fairness Doctrine was certainly one of those.

[B]

So you at the fcc, you guys are the arbiter of communication, dialogue in a lot of ways of some of these. What could be said on airwaves and what cannot be said. Is that correct? And the seven forbidden words and all that.

[A]

Well, you know, thankfully we've stepped back from all that.

[B]

So tell me about that. So we're. That's where people usually think you guys are, that you're like the referees of the airwaves.

[A]

The FCC does have some long standing rules on obscenity, indecency, forbidden words and all that stuff. Yeah, if you remember, I was actually an intern at the FCC during the famous Janet Jackson super bowl incident, the famous wardrobe malfunction. But we've really moved out of that space and defer much more to sort of the market and let people decide for themselves. And some people sort of say, well, how do you justify stepping back from that with this 230 reform? Isn't that putting the FCC back in charge? And I say no, again, 230 is about. Congress drew a Line in the sand. Good faith conduct gets this special treatment. Bad faith conduct doesn't. But where that line Congress drew is unclear. And so the FCC stepping in to provide clarity is very different than us becoming the speech police, whether it's for social media companies or for broadcasters.

[B]

Well, one thing I would love either the FCC or somewhere else to dive into is to enforce some form of neutrality into National Public Radio or pbs. The amount of money we fund these companies, and they're anything but fair, and they are publicly funded, Trump hating networks. I don't know if that involves you, you guys, or, you know, hopefully not.

[A]

I mean, I certainly defer the funding decisions to Congress, which is.

[B]

I could say, you don't have to say anything. It's disaster.

[A]

I do think us stepping back in the long run is the better approach there.

[B]

It's pretty amazing that you went from intern to commissioner in that short time.

[A]

It's pretty funny.

[B]

Tell us your story. How'd that work?

[A]

Well, so it's interesting. I interned for a commissioner called Commissioner Abernathy, and I would sit in the intern sort of pen in her office, and through, obviously, a whole bunch of twists of fates, I'm now a commissioner, and I have the exact same office that Commissioner Abernathy had. So every day that I go to work, I walk past the intern pen where I started, out into the back room of the commissioner's office.

[B]

That was like early 2000s, right?

[A]

Yeah, 2003, 2004. So it's been amazing. It's been a lot of twists. And so I think in terms of career advice. Right. So it used to be that you go someplace, do really good work, and sort of stay there forever. And that's not the model anymore. The model now is do good work, put yourself in front of interesting people, and then leave and go do something else. And so I worked at a law firm for about six years. I did a clerkship in there, and I left to go work at the fcc. And a lot of people said, no, don't go to the fcc. Stay here at the law firm. Make partner, make money. But I thought that if I got to the FCC that there'd be some running room and I could have interesting opportunities from there. And I didn't envision all of this. I got to work for who's now Chairman Pai. I got to work as a legal advisor for him. He then made me general counsel, the agency when Trump won the election in 2017. And then from there, President Trump nominated me to this position, went to the Senate confirmation process, and you're one of five commissioners. One of five commissioners and three Republican, two Democrat. And it's been a heck of a ride. And the longest I ever sort of aim for my career was getting to work on what they call the eighth floor. That's where the commissioners work as a legal advisor, which I got to do. And then from then being general counsel, being a commissioner itself is sort of far beyond anything that I thought possible. And it's been a really fun opportunity.

[B]

And so the advice to young people is do exciting things, put yourself in front of interesting people. Don't just be monolithically just the same enterprise for a long period of time.

[A]

I think that's right. You know, there's some advice that I got from former Chairman Powell of the fcc, interestingly is the son of Colin Powell. And he provided some advice which is he said opportunity knocks for everyone. Most people don't have their bags packed. And what I took from that is it never feels like the right time to make a career move. Right. We sort of are comfortable, we don't like change. I'm working at a law firm, I'm making pretty good money. Do I want to take a six figure pay cut to go work at the government? But you got to have your backs back. You got to take that leap of faith and always bet on yourself. If you're worth betting on that you can make something of the new opportunity you're fighting for.

[B]

The freedom of expression and free speech every day. Anything else at the FCC or that you want to share with our listeners?

[A]

You know, as we talk about sort of 5G and national security, one thing that I think that does tie back to is the communist regime of China. And the question for 5G is if a company is under the thumb of the communist regime, are there trustworthy to be in our network? And I think if you look at what's happened with COVID 19, any claim that an entity that is fully under the thumb of the communist regime can be trusted has been obliterated. The communist regime put out active disinformation about COVID 19 early on, and I've written about this a little bit, the communist regime has said that they can't be held responsible for for the global spread of COVID for a few reasons. One of the reasons they point to is this vaunted Wuhan lockdown. They said we immediately locked down Wuhan. That's not the case. They locked down Wuhan at the end of January. In those three weeks leading up to the Wuhan lockdown, 7 million people left Wuhan, including infected people, including people on international flights. When 7 million people out of a city of 11 million leave a city, that's not how you stop a global pandemic. That is how you start a global pandemic. And then in the immediate aftermath of that, they continue to use the WHO as their propaganda mouthpiece, putting misinformation out to the world, slowing down the global response. So I think all of us that are in a position in government, and mine comes in part from the role that we play with reviewing entities controlled by the Communist regiment should be speaking out and speaking the truth about what happened with the Communist regime, because part of it ties back to free speech as well. The regime disappeared its own people that tried to warn the world early on, and we.

[B]

We've seen that time and time again. Well, Brendan, thank you for your leadership for our country. We need more people like you, especially in our government. It's awfully refreshing. So God bless you, and thanks so much for joining, really.

[A]

Charlie Kirchhoff. Yeah, I really enjoyed it. Thank you.