The Plan To Reprogram Us With Approved Content & Search Results | Free Speech Expert Ron Coleman
In this riveting episode of the One American Podcast, host Chase Geiser sits down with special guest Ron Coleman, an esteemed freedom of speech expert and attorney. Together, they dive deep into the concerning trends threatening our fundamental right to free speech.
🔍 Topics Covered:
What is the "Deep State" and its real influence on media?
The chilling effects of censorship on the modern public discourse.
The legal battles and nuances defending our First Amendment rights.
The slippery slope from content approval to mind control.
How to recognize and combat information manipulation in your daily life.
Ron Coleman shares his vast expertise and provides eye-opening insights into the underpinnings of our freedom of speech, making this episode a must-listen for anyone concerned about the direction our society is heading.
🔔 Don't forget to LIKE, SHARE, and SUBSCRIBE for more enlightening discussions and in-depth interviews on One American Podcast.
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And he said, well, I think I really do think it will, because ultimately, you know, people do, if you graduate from law school and you don't have the ability to truly understand the other side's point of view, at least for purposes of knowing how to respond to it, you're not going to succeed.
What happened during the, when the internet era began, because I've been at this for over 30 years now.
So before Al Gore really rolled out the internet for everybody, it was much less of a thing.
But once it became a thing, people started to realize that they had a lot less control over their intellectual property, their trademarks on the internet than they had previously had in the brick and mortar world.
And trademarks, first, what happened was that trademarks became a way, became an excuse for shutting down so-called unauthorized distributors.
And I say so-called because once you buy something, you actually have a right to sell it to anyone you want.
That's it's yours.
But if you give people the impression that you're an authorized distributor or that perhaps you're the brand owner itself, which is usually not the case and usually wasn't the case, but trademarks became increasingly.
That's not an English sentence, so I'm going to go try that in English.
It became more and more common for trademarks to be used as a way of shutting down competition, especially competition with your distributors, who were usually charging people too much.
Anyway, more and more, that kind of work began to creep into free speech work.
And I've always been interested in free speech going back to when I was in high school and I was a publisher of a, and let's call it an unauthorized high school newspaper.
I was a bit of a, I've always been a bit of a subversive.
I come from a long line of subversives, but in any event, I did begin to get more involved in free speech work.
And eventually my interest in trademark and free speech intersected in a case called INRE TAM, which later became known as Mattel versus TAM, and which ended up being the Supreme Court,
United States Supreme Court opinion that ruled that the section of the Lanham Act, which is the trademark statute, the trademark registration statute, which prohibited the registration of any trademark that was disparaging.
The answer, not the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
The government can't pick winners and losers in messaging, cannot withhold the benefit of trademark registration based on the content or point of view of the, well, not of the content, because if you're not entitled to a trademark based on the content, then you're not entitled.
But the point of view cannot be a basis for withdrawing your withholding a trademark registration.
So the slants, which was and once again is a group of Asian Americans who wanted to, as they call it, reappropriate a century-old slander of calling Asians slants.
They wanted to call, and they do call their band the slants.
They wanted a registration for their trademark.
And now they have one.
So we won that case in the Supreme Court.
And my life since then has been basically just pure bliss.
I've just, you know, I hardly even feel the ground when I take steps now.
Well, the money part is even, I don't even think about money anymore because We literally have plumbing that when you open it up, gold, liquid gold comes out of it.
It's amazing.
Well, no, actually, we didn't even get paid for that case, unsurprisingly.
Yeah, well, and that's why people tend to give me the call.
But anyway, I've bounced around a lot.
I've been in a lot of different law firms of many different sizes.
I am a little bit of a tough fit.
I ended up with Harmeet Dylan.
I'm still a little bit of a tough fit for her, but I am.
We don't fight a lot and we don't fight that much.
But I'm not necessarily easy to absorb into a standard organization.
And this is not a standard organization.
So it's gone very well here.
And in fact, we do get along great.
And she is, besides being an outstanding lawyer, a very good friend and a very loyal person and, you know, a reasonable boss.
But boy, she takes the professionalism and standards of this organization, the Dylan Law Group, every bit as seriously as the, you know, the managing partner of a thousand lawyer firm.
And she's great at what she does.
She's got great clients, and I've got some great clients myself.
I mean, there is a I might have done very well as a criminal defense lawyer if I were a little bit harder, but I'm not.
I'm a little, I'm, I'm not quite that hard.
But they do get to do things a little bit more by the seat of their pants than in most cases, you know, civil litigators.
On the other hand, I really like to, I take a lot of pride in my written work, and most criminal defense lawyers don't do as much written work as civil guys.
I think I'm doing the right thing for myself and, you know, for my clients.
And I think I do have the, I do think I ultimately chose the right profession.
But, you know, when you have ADHD and you're a little bit perhaps too smart for your own good, you need to have people around you, and I do, who will make sure that you hit the mark as well as being, you know, brilliant and flamboyant and loud.
You need to also make sure that the word count is correct and that you had the right color on your brief and stuff like that.
And that's the Princeton before the soup, you know, before the woke era, back when you had to really, you had to take a standardized test and you had to, you had to really be smart.
My thoughts are that we are entering an era of radical abuse of power on the part of government and institutions that have allied themselves with governments, such as social media platforms and media companies and finance companies.
But of all the abuses, perhaps the most egregious and the most the greatest threat to liberty is the abuse of the justice system and in particular the prosecutorial like the weaponization of it.
The weaponization of prosecutors, both at the federal and now the state level, for the most egregious political and anti-liberty purposes.
The idea that journalists are now being arrested, tried, convicted for doing their jobs or being on the scene as if they were, because they may have been sympathetic to people who were doing something which we'll call criminal.
Let's say that everyone else was criminal on January 6th, which is also preposterous.
And that entire prosecutorial enterprise has been an absolute government racket, of which I hope historians will be able to write in the future.
But there has always been this potential.
There has always been, and it has been abused before.
During World War I, dissenters and opponents of the war, people like Eugene V. Debs, who is no hero, by any stretch of the imagination, but people were imprisoned for expressing opposition to the United States' involvement in World War I, opposition to the draft.
It's not something unprecedented in American history, but it should be something that should not have happened in the 21st century because of how far we have come since the early days of the 20th century.
It is always been true, it has always been true, that when you give power and privileges to the government to enforce the law, and you make law enforcement officials and prosecutors in particular exempt from any personal and to all practical purposes,
professional consequences for their actions, that you are giving them the power to abuse those privileges.
What we have always depended on was a sense of civic duty, a sense of decency, so that that would be widespread enough that even if an individual prosecutor or an individual prosecutor's office would be delinquent, that those around him, or ultimately the judiciary, would call it out and stop it.
I do think that a lot of the gross political prosecutions that we're seeing now are going to end up being reversed in the courts.
We have two problems now, though.
One is that because the United States Supreme Court has historically, but never more than it is now, been extremely selective in the cases that it hears and also extremely conservative with a small C in the breadth of its rulings.
Right.
So that, right, so that a case will frequently not be heard that might otherwise have been heard in other times because Every single thing doesn't align procedurally, or the issue that everyone's really interested in is not down the middle.
And there's something to be said for judicial restraint.
There's a lot to be said for judicial restraint.
But because the Supreme Court has been so very careful, what we have now is a world in which a lot of things that should have been clearly prohibited, including cheating and elections.
No, I was trying to, I was trying to get a good look at the cheating, and we were not allowed.
We and the other observers from the Trump team and from the GOP were prohibited, even though we had a court order for a period of time that allowed us to get in.
We were prohibited from doing so to watch the counting of mail-in ballots.
Of course, it was, of course, Trump won.
But aside issue for now, we can go back to it if you want to.
But all these issues, all this, all the conservative.
So that reason number one.
And reason number two is, even under the best of circumstances, the speed at which these cases move and the expense that is incurred in defending against them makes it possible to ruin someone,
even a very wealthy man or a woman or person or institution, merely by prosecuting them across multiple jurisdictions, like they're doing to Donald Trump, multiple jurisdictions on the most specious of claims, some of them actually literally being claims for saying things.
And in other cases, utilizing statutes that are never utilized in ways that they could never have been conceived of as being utilized.
And in particular, I'm thinking of the financial reporting claims by the state of New York against the Trump.
I tweeted a week or two ago that budging information about valuation, about collateral, on credit applications, commercial credit applications, and what are called collateral reports or loan disposition, proceeds with disposition reports.
There are all kinds of different things you have to, when you borrow a lot of money, or if you have a line of credit, banks frequently will require you to regularly tell them what's the status of our collateral and what have you done with the money?
Are you using the money for what we lent it to you for?
Banks really don't care what are in those reports unless there's a gigantic smoking gun in them.
They just care that you keep paying.
But what those reports do is set up a tripwire so that if you do default, the banks then sue you and their lawyers pick up the phone and try to get the interest of the Southern District of New York U.S. Attorney's Office or the Eastern District, who are basically private bank police.
And suddenly they will charge you with all kinds of financial crimes because the bank was, which the bank was fine with until they stopped getting paid.
It's one of the many, many problems with the massive number of statutes and overregulation of just about everything in this country.
And it all depended on trust.
It all depended on civic virtue.
You cannot have government without giving power to people to govern and to enforce laws.
And I'm not a libertarian, much less an anarchist.
But it always depended, as the founding fathers recognized, and until fairly recently, everyone recognized, regardless of whether they were liberal or conservative, that to have such a system, you required not only an educated electorate on some level,
but certainly Those in power had to meet certain qualifications, standards of both education and character.
That's simply no longer the case.
In fact, many people consider it offensive merely to suggest that it should be the case.
This all kind of reminds me with this selective prosecution and what we've seen since we last spoke on my podcast with the Twitter files.
You said something really brilliant, and I'm going to have to paraphrase, obviously, because I don't have everything you've ever said memorized, unfortunately, not yet.
But we were talking about the censorship on YouTube around the COVID misinformation.
And as I recall, you basically said that it was very odd that they would take the position, YouTube would take the position to determine the accuracy of certain claims around the pandemic in the middle of it.
From like a legal standpoint, you're basically, it's just weird that the lawyers would choose to censor based off of claims or opinions about vaccines or the pandemic.
And that was before we explicitly knew that the intelligence community is heavily integrated into these platforms.
And that was the implication, though, I don't think you explicitly said it, was that someone else must, there must be some other motivating factor for these terms of service and policies that we see from these big tech platforms.
How have your thoughts developed on that, given what we've learned over the last couple of years?
Well, one thing that continues to be true, as it was when I said that, is that the expansive judicial reading of Section 230 has essentially created a world in which there is and can be essentially no liability for any social media or
content platform for anything it does or anything it doesn't do.
So that has been more true than ever.
We learned that the Ninth Circuit considers it that way.
In the O'Hanley case, in the DC Draino case, which is now, we're hoping the Supreme Court will take a look at, where the Ninth Circuit said, yeah, it's fine that the state of California told Twitter what accounts to ban because Twitter didn't really have to do it.
Oh, Twitter did it even 98% of the time they were asked to do it.
That wasn't actually a Section 230 ruling, but that's the attitude that apparently a very large part of the judiciary, not including the Fifth Circuit, Biden versus Missouri, thank God, seems to have.
So, you know, the legal piece of it is not that if in any other world with respect to any other enterprise, the idea that you would allow either algorithms or mid-level staffers to pick and choose among medical-related or healthcare-related information that is acceptable on your platform because you have no exposure whatsoever to the circumstances
and of those choices, but the understanding that you can do it because the choices you're making align with the official government narrative, not because they've been proved to be correct,
but that there is an official government narrative that is adopted by the corporate media and by all the important institutions that run this country, but not by doctors and not in any, well, not only doctors, because doctors actually were part of this.
Not all doctors, but the majority of doctors in this country very, very comfortably bought into that as well.
But they weren't even using doctors to make these decisions.
Rather, it was and remains essentially a checklist.
And by the way, you know, there's a little bit more freedom now on YouTube to talk about COVID alternative perspectives.
And it is, in my non-professional opinion, my opinion as a 60-year-old man who's at least a click or two below Einstein that it is not sustainable.
Ultimately, the truth, you can't fool all the people all the time, as a legitimate genius said many years ago.
And they're not.
And the fewer, you know, the more people who open themselves up to truth, the more they will have influence on others who will consider truth.
It is, however, a very complex game that we're playing now because we know that there are all these operatives who work not only to silence dissent, but to infiltrate groups of dissenters,
either to induce them to commit crimes, which is basically the FBI's main business now, it seems, or to report on them,
which is the kind of thing that was considered to be distasteful at best and perhaps unconstitutional when it was done against leftists in the 50s and 60s and 70s.
But when it is being done against rightists, all of a sudden it's protecting the Constitution.
It's, you know, this is any one of your guests can spout this stuff.
You don't need me for that.
But I do think we have to appreciate how complex it is.
I mean, I can't for sure say that you're not one of them.
I don't, you know, but the thing about you is that one of them.
And that was a massive miscarriage of justice as well, notwithstanding how silly, how really wrong Alex was.
That's not defamation.
I mean, I do a lot of defamation work, and that's not defamation.
And again, there you've got a judge doing whatever the hell she wants, because by the time there's review by a respectable court, and there are still some respectable courts in this country, the damage will have been done.
Alex Jones will be radioactive forever.
Gavin McGinnis will be radioactive forever, regardless of whether the claims against them are ultimately shown.
And, you know, there are people in the conservative movement who will bite every single time.
Yeah.
Every single time.
And I remember during the Trump presidency, every time some stupid, obviously, obviously invented narrative came out of sources that refused to be identified.
You know, Trump was trying to grab the wheel in the Secret Service limousine.
You know, Trump had a, you know, a secret radio in the basement of the White House that he was using to communicate with Putin.
I mean, whatever it was, breathlessly reported.
And how many conservatives names you would know?
Well, this, you know, this, this, he's crossed the line here.
It may as well be, you know, it's like the old joke that, you know, they used to have these ladies' luncheons club, and they would, some distinguished professor from the university would come and speak to them.
And the professor says, you know, he's talking about how the sun will eventually be extinguished.
And the lady, one of the ladies in the audience, she gets very excited and she faints.
And they run over to her and they revive her.
And the professor says, Madame, what is it that I said concerned you so much?
She said, you said that the sun is going to be extinguished in 2.4 billion years.
I said, no, no, no.
2.4 million years.
He said, no, no, no.
I said 2.4 billion years.
She said, oh, my goodness.
I feel so much better now.
These are all meaningless numbers.
These are completely meaningless numbers, billions of dollars.
Look, right off the bat, there's a gigantic constitutional problem with punitive damages of that magnitude.
But why, how this could possibly have gone to trial, I've asked many times.
I never sat down and really looked at the procedural history of that case, but it should have been dismissed well before the jury got to it.
But I did a video actually when I was sitting in for Jenna Ellis a couple weeks ago.
Maybe it was last week.
I've lost all track about the decline in the quality of the judiciary and why that has happened.
And, you know, it's a sectoral problem.
It's not entirely related to affirmative action, but you would be naive to think that it has nothing to do with affirmative action.
It's always been said that the A students become judges and the B students become, well, the A students become law professors, and the B students become judges, and the C students become, you know, wealthy.
Yeah, that's a little bit of an exaggeration.
I mean, the fact is there are many, many very, very good judges.
Sometimes when I read some of these opinions, I'm really impressed by the quality of them.
But some of you.
Well, there is stuff that does look like it was.
I mean, my wife, Jane Coleman, who writes for legal insurrection, reads a lot of opinions, and we spend a lot of time talking, doing reality checks with each other.
Is this actually something in a judicial opinion?
Did the judge really say this?
And again, because of the massive.
So, one of the issues in the federal judiciary in particular that people should understand is that you can't appeal virtually anything in a federal case.
There are some exceptions, such as preliminary injunctions, but as a general rule, you can't appeal until the case is completely over.
In states such as New York, you can take what are called interlocutory appeals, which means you can appeal a ruling in the case while the case continues on.
That can be a very big deal.
It has the disadvantage of enabling a lot of extra wasted motion and money, but it can eliminate a lot of wasted motion and money because if the judge made an outcome-determinative ruling early in the case, you appeal it and you went to the next case is dismissed or whatever.
So, in the federal system, the policy choice was made not to have interlocutory appeals.
And I think, generally speaking, that's a good idea.
But once you have this world in which judges are no longer acting as gatekeepers to dispose of obviously meritless cases, both civil and criminal, then the lack of meaningful review potentially for years is once again going to the beginning of our conversation,
has the potential to really wreak havoc on people's lives, careers, and wealth.
And it's a problem, but it's not, again, we're talking about the systemic lack of trust and the systemic lack of standards that has affected just about every institution in this country.
Well, I think that major reform is possible if the will is there.
And if, you know, a lot of things have to go right.
One of the things that a Republican majority and a Republican president could do is to make some reforms that don't look very big with respect to the legal system, but which could really make a big difference.
One thing I would do is eliminate the District of Columbia circuit.
But there's no reason a city, even if it's the capital city, should have its own district and its own circuit.
Those should be integrated into the Maryland and Virginia systems, federal courts, for those districts and those circuits, so that there's at least some spreading out of the outrageous.
I mean, you have a judicial district in which no Republican can ever get a fair trial and no Democrat can ever be convicted.
And I remember this going back, there was, I don't remember if you, I don't know if you're old enough to remember Scooter Libby.
He was in the Bush White House, and this was, you know, a National Security Advisor.
And that's, which would be why you wouldn't remember it.
And he was tried on some, you know, one of these political process crimes or something.
And he hired a former boss of mine, a guy named Ted Wells, who is now basically the head of litigation at Paul Weiss, which is one of the elite handful of law firms in the world.
Super duperstar, black Democrat, incredibly, I mean, gosh, I wish I could have one day just understanding how his mind works to put together a prepared case, just so I could feed off that for the rest of my career.
He could not get Scooter Libby acquitted in the district in the DC, District of D.C., and this was 20 years ago.
it's only gotten immensely worse and and and you know we use so that's you know i would i would split the ninth circuit in half It's in an immensely large circuit.
It's not going to make things more liberal or conservative, but it's an unwieldy circuit.
And the quality problem there is well known.
But if there were two smaller circuits, there might be a certain level of accountability in terms of what's going on over there.
But going, you know, the bigger question, you know, will all the bad rulings be appealed and will they all be reversed?
No, they won't be reversed.
The appellate courts lack the quality and the integrity to do what's right across the board.
But I do think we can make things tolerable until we regain our sanity.
I do think it's possible for our national culture to regain its sanity as it did, you know, not so long after the Debs conviction.
And there are lots of cases that did not shock people when they were made, but which history has shown to be a consensus has developed.
Now, what is true, though, you're right that there's, you know, it's not just a matter of corruption.
I've repeatedly mentioned how many institutions are degraded now.
So where is that consensus, that reborn consensus going to come from?
Not from academia.
You know, you have people like Richard, like Lawrence Tribe, you know, still tweeting the most preposterous things about free speech.
This was a guy who was, you know, I mean, Alan Dershowitz is the only one who kept his head and he's basically retired now.
And plus, they threw him out.
He's no longer a member of the club.
And I have this discussion with David Latt, who is a distinguished writer and a conservative who founded the Above the Law blog, which is now run by a lunatic.
But I said, David, do you think it ever gets better?
And he said, well, I really do think it will, because ultimately, people do, if you graduate from a law school and you don't have the ability to truly understand the other side's point of view, at least for purposes of knowing how to respond to it, you're not going to succeed.
Well, and that's actually what I'm really concerned about.
I did a thread the other day on Twitter, and I very subtly touched on this.
I think that us far-right extremists are going to win at some point in this country.
I don't know if it's going to be in four years or if it's going to be in 100 years.
I think things are going to get bad and we're going to win or we're going to be able to prevent the worst from happening when people sort of universally realize that it's inevitable that it will happen unless something different happens fast.
And my concern is that we have not developed the hollow leg, for lack of a better expression, of the kind of universal power that we could potentially have.
Because things get really bad and we drain the swamp quickly and there's this sort of cultural reawakening and everybody, if it flips suddenly, that's the political dynamic, then whoever's in power is going to have the opportunity to do some terrible things, I think, similar to like what happened with the Third Reich.
And my concern is actually more that once we win, we'll lose our heads than that we won't win.
I'm thinking like the Musks and the Joneses and the Rogans, not necessarily Republican guys, but just people that are committed to at least trying to be reasonable, even if they fall short.
I think they're going to win.
And I think there's a lot of American people who aren't famous that are like that.
And I wonder how long they'll stay reasonable in the context of an increasingly unreasonable political environment.
Well, the thing is that the system right now is structured in a way to roll up anyone who strays from the bounds of what the system regards as reasonable.
And I will say that that does concern me more than an overreaction.
And I say that someone who obviously would have plenty to be concerned about in the event of an overreaction.
I mean, I really believe that it helps for people to appreciate.
And this is, again, I mentioned Kurt Schlichter.
I think he's one of the great guys to go to on this kind of endgame stuff.
Whenever you see a comparison to the Third Reich of any kind, you have to ask yourself, all right, so when the Supreme Court of Nazi Germany heard First Amendment objections to the Nuremberg laws, what was their ruling?
What are you talking about?
They didn't really have a Supreme Court.
There was no First Amendment.
Like the comparisons, the framework doesn't even make any sense.
All the, not just the Nuremberg laws, but all the special legislation and the decrees that were made.
I will say that what happened during COVID could actually end up being sort of a gift to us because we did see during COVID the extent to which the system, including the judiciary, is far too comfortable using emergencies like the Reichstag fire or like Rome, Dictator for Life.
Or like, right, like Eric Rome and friends as rationales for throwing basically absolutely everything out the window.
You say to me, Ron, well, that proves that you're wrong.
But I say, no, that proves that we have successfully identified and potentially isolated a real problem.
And I think that there, I think there are going to be reforms that are not going to be seen as radical.
They're not going to involve looting or rioting, but are going to be in the normal course.
And they're going to make a big difference about our ability to retain the constitutional rules that we rely on to keep us from ever becoming like one of these, you know.
Ron Coleman, at Ron Coleman, spelled with an E-R-O-N-C-O-L-E-M-A-N.
Then you click there.
You can go to RonColeman.com and learn all about the wonderful world of Ron Coleman.
It's really mostly about my law practice.
I do have a podcast, Culmination.
It's one word because the joke is culmination, not Coleman Nation.
But there is a hyphen because I couldn't get the domain name.
Get off my back.
Just search on the internet for Ron Coleman lawyer.
You must put in the word lawyer.
You will get a couple of false results because there are some other Ron Coleman lawyers.
And if you don't put in lawyer, you're going to get a very, very large African-American who was Mr. Universe many, many times, whose name is Ron Coleman.
But easy to find me.
Easy to find me.
I'm at Ron Coleman.
And usually you and I are in the same threads, you know, if even if we're not on.
As much as I admire and recognize all that Elon Musk has done, which is a lot, he still has not fixed and he has not really acknowledged the extent of the shadow banning.
I mean, my account, I should have easily half a million followers.
