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May 24, 2025 01:53-02:28 - CSPAN
34:56
FCC Chair Addresses Republican Lawyers Conference
Participants
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brendan carr
27:38
Appearances
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r
rick steves
00:25
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Speaker Time Text
unidentified
Conversations, even people who disagree.
Shows that you can have a television network that can try to be objective.
Thank C-SPAM for all you do.
It's one of the reasons why this program is so valuable, because it does bring people together where dissenting voices are heard, where hard questions are asked, and where people have to answer to them.
Next, Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr on his views on his agency's role under the Trump administration.
He spoke at the recent Republican National Lawyers Association's policy conference.
Good morning.
I have the great pleasure of introducing our next speaker.
Brendan Carr is the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission.
He previously served as a senior Republican commissioner and as the FCC's general counsel.
Nominated by both President Trump and President Biden, Carr has been confirmed unanimously by the Senate three times.
Chairman Carr brings nearly 20 years of private and public sector experience in communications and tech policy to his position.
Before joining the FCC as a staffer back in 2012, he worked as an attorney at Wiley Ryan in the firm's appellate litigation and telecom practices.
Previously, Chairman Carr clerked on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit for Judge Dennis Shedd.
After attending Georgetown University for his undergrad, Chairman Carr earned his JD magnum cum laude from the Catholic University of America's Columbus School of Law.
So please help me in welcoming Chairman Carter to the stage.
brendan carr ▲ ● ▼
Gosh, thank you so much, Lindsay.
Thanks for that kind introduction.
Great to see you.
Great to see Elliot as well and the whole crew.
What a treat to get to sit in and watch Chairman Comer's speech and remarks.
That guy is phenomenal.
Now, everybody here knows how tough he is up here at the podium, how tough he is on the dais.
What you may not know is he's actually very tough in person as well.
I was with him a little while ago.
We were on a visit out west.
And for reasons that escape me right now, we decided to go mountain biking together.
So me, a regulator, Chairman Comer, a politician, and I know the visual doesn't quite look like a Nike ad in your mind, right?
And it played out that way as well.
So very quickly, Chairman Comer aggressively was mountain biking down this hill and went straight off the trail into bushes, cut open underneath of his eye.
And I was like, man, that was terrible.
Like, nothing like that's ever going to happen to me.
And, okay, about an hour later, I was sort of feeling like I had this under control on the mountain bike.
Again, for reasons that escaped me, I decided to go off of some jumps like I was like a kid.
And I went up in the air, landed, crashed terribly, broke two ribs, ended up in the hospital.
And so, yeah, after making fun of Chairman Comer for cutting his eye, I ended up much, much worse off.
But he's a great guy.
He's a tough guy, and he cried a lot less than I did through that whole experience.
But seriously, though, thank you so much.
Good morning to you all.
It's an honor to be with you at the Republican National Lawyers Association, particularly here at the 40th anniversary celebration.
As someone who is currently enjoying their 40s, as evidenced by my failure on the mountain bike, I'm very much on the back end of the 40s, though, so I can tell you you are entering some of the greatest years.
And when you think back 40 years ago to where we were as a country, RNLA was founded right in the heart of the Reagan revolution.
And the work that you've carried out in the intervening years has been phenomenal.
And I think it's fitting that we're here all these years later and we're participating in another great period of revival for the country.
In my view, we are entering a new golden age for America.
The Trump administration has come in.
They are moving at unprecedented speed.
Normally, a new administration comes in and they think that they can, you know, maybe turn the ship of government one degree here, maybe two degrees.
And President Trump has fundamentally flipped that script.
He's setting an aggressive agenda, and those of us across government, including at the FCC, are trying to move on Trump time.
The administration is moving quickly to end the corrosive and destructive weaponization of government that we saw for the last four years, and Chairman Comer spoke very eloquently about.
We're working to restore free speech so everyday Americans once again have the freedom to express themselves consistent with our First Amendment rights.
And we're working to unleash the power of America's economy to deliver opportunities for every single person across this country.
So I think congratulations are definitely in order for you all on your 40-year milestone.
You've established yourselves as one of the nation's leading voices on election integrity.
Special thanks, of course, to your president, Michael Thielen, who spearheaded work on election integrity efforts and so much more starting 25 years ago.
You know, your work obviously has been recognized.
My understanding is we have six hours of CLEs, including, I think, this whole remark here is part of the CLE credit, so I feel good about that.
You know, someone believes that they put their imprimatur that this will continue your legal education in some way.
Hopefully there's no takebacks on that.
But I think there's going to be some real impact.
And speaking of impact that RNLA has had, just look at what all of your members have accomplished over the years.
Look at your chair, Lee Goodman, ends up serving as the chairman of the Federal Election Commission and agency.
Not too unlike the FCC, but by structure they are usually split on cross-party lines.
Right now the FCC is split.
We're two Democrats, two Republicans, so I understand what it's like to run an agency like that.
One of your former chairs, Harmeet Dillon, is now our esteemed Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, doing phenomenal work.
One of my mentors, long-term mentors, Dick Wiley, I started out in D.C., who was at the law firm of Wiley Ryan.
He's been a long-term participant in RNLA and held many leadership positions and won various awards and recognitions.
So many of your members have gone on and participated in the highest rungs of government.
I think that's a real testament to you all.
And of course, congratulations to this year's Edwin Meese Award winner, Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan.
Look, no member of Congress has been more steadfast and courageous in their work to hold the powerful accountable than Chairman Jordan.
And in particular, one thing I want to focus on in some of my remarks is something that he's been such a strong leader on, which is free speech and pushing back against big tech censorship.
The work that he did on the weaponization committee really, I think, helped change the direction of free speech in this country.
One of the things that produced was a letter from Mark Zuckerberg from about a year ago where he said, yeah, we censored people.
Yes, we felt pressure by the Biden administration to stop Americans from speaking about topics that were fully protected by the First Amendment.
I referred to that Zuckerberg letter as the Maya Coppa letter, and I cite it a lot.
And so kudos to Jim Jordan and his team for that.
As you all know, the RNLA is dedicated to four core missions.
Advancing professionalism, advancing open, fair, and honest elections, advancing career opportunity, and advancing Republican ideals.
Now, in many ways, my opening remarks here so far have touched on a lot of those first three missions.
I'd like to spend the core of my remarks talking about what the FCC is doing in alignment with that fourth mission: advancing Republican ideals.
The first Republican ideal I want to talk about is freedom, and in particular, freedom of speech.
As a lot of you know from your own personal experience, in this country, we lived through a massive wave of censorship.
It really accelerated at the beginning of COVID-19.
Anytime that you have an increase in government control, you necessarily have a decrease in free speech because free speech is the check on excessive government actions.
And what happened over these years was that a censorship cartel materialized.
It covered lots of different features.
On the one hand, you had social media companies like Facebook, at least prior to the Zuckerberg letter, choosing to censor the speech of Americans.
You couldn't talk about potential origins of COVID-19, one of the most significant public health or other issues that we have confronted in a long time.
Discussions about many core topics about medicine, completely censored.
But they weren't acting alone.
As a lot of the investigative reports have shown, the Biden administration was expressly pressuring social media companies to censor disfavored political speech.
But it didn't stop there.
You had a cohort of advertising and marketing companies, entities with a lot of power, that were diverting ad dollars and otherwise demonetizing both individuals and platforms that dare to allow people to express themselves.
And again, free speech is core to what we are as a country.
It's how we solve our most pressing problems as we think about things from different perspectives.
We toss out different ideas.
We think about new things.
And all of that was immensely stifled during the last few years.
And it wasn't just domestic either.
Look at foreign governments.
All across the globe, this wave of censorship was surging.
You saw it in Brazil.
They have a Justice Des Moray on their version of the Supreme Court who effectively shut down Twitter and took punitive actions against other social media companies if those companies didn't censor political speech.
If you read through one of the 60-page decisions from Justice Day Moray, and I think you probably get some CLI credit if you can do that, what he said in there is he needed to censor speech to stop what he called incitement of anti-democratic acts.
Now, it's interesting because this concept of incitement has a home in our own constitutional law, incitement of unprotected by the Constitution Acts.
We sort of have that concept.
But they completely distorted it.
What they said was incitement of anti-democratic acts.
And then they defined what anti-democratic acts were.
And in essence, what they said, an anti-democratic act is going into the voting booth with ideas in your mind that are different from those approved from the government in power.
That is an anti-democratic act in their view.
We've seen it spreading.
Just look at Europe.
Europe has this new regulation, the DSA, the Digital Services Act, that not only is bad in the sense that it authorizes European regulators and European countries to dictate what can be said on platforms, to effectively go into businesses in the social media space and monitor and track what's being said and direct censorship.
That's bad on its own, right?
But the biggest thing is it potentially has extraterritorial effects where we could have European regulators putting pressure on America tech platforms that have made commitments to us to embrace free speech and effectively forcing them to take their censorship regime and apply it in the U.S. and apply it abroad.
And to me, that's fundamentally unacceptable.
So I wrote letters to U.S. technology platforms saying that you should not be taking actions, particularly outside of Europe, that are inconsistent with your free speech commitments here in America.
I also, my first trip abroad, as FCC chairman, went to Europe and spoke at a conference there and made clear that it's unacceptable to America to have European regulators discriminatorily singling out U.S. technology platforms for censorship of what we view as core political speech and trying to export that abroad.
And so one of the things that I am very committed to in this job is working to smash this censorship cartel.
And thankfully I'm not alone.
This is something that President Trump has been leading on, and it's something that we have officials across the government that are working on.
Just recently, I held an event over at the Department of Justice with Gail Slater, the head of antitrust, with my counterpart of the Federal Trade Commission, Chairman Andrew Ferguson.
And we had an event where we stood together and made clear that this era of the government putting a thumb on the scale to censor the speech of everyday Americans is over, and that we expect U.S. technology platforms to stand up to those free speech rights.
Now this brings me to another topic.
One of the big issues that we're running at the FCC is obviously an economic agenda.
But I don't think that these two things are entirely disconnected.
Because when you censor words, you're censoring ideas.
And when you censor ideas, you are stifling innovations.
You're stifling growth.
You're stifling economic opportunity.
And that's why I think when we saw such a rise in censorship in this country, this wet blanket on ideas, it also held us back economically.
So we're working to unleash that economic opportunity across the communications sector.
One way we're doing that is on wireless.
Most of you probably don't really think about this at all, but if you want your smartphone to work, if you want all these great mobile connectivities to happen, you have to have use of a scarce public resource called the airwaves.
And the reality is, during the Biden administration, we fell way behind our global counterparts when it comes to the availability of spectrum.
And that means slower speeds.
It means less competition.
Because when we free up spectrum, that's a new capacity to bring families across the digital divide.
It's the ability to go into a market where maybe you just had one cable provider before, but wirelessly, you can offer cable-like, fiber-like speeds.
In fact, when we free up spectrum and get new competition into a market, we see significant reductions in the price that consumer pays.
So we need to get going on that, and we already have.
We've started work at the FCC to free up more spectrum.
Now, one thing that we need to do to really complete that effort is for Congress to act to restore the FCC Spectrum Auction Authority, which is how we actually move spectrum into the commercial marketplace.
That authority lapsed during the Biden years, and we are hoping, particularly through reconciliation, that that auction authority will be restored.
The good news, too, is it's a revenue generator.
Even CBO, which tends to vastly underestimate some of these things, says that restoring our auction authority could free up $80 billion for the U.S. Treasury.
So that can help pay for either deficit reduction or other federal priorities.
It's a national security issue as well.
You know, right now, China has something like four times the amount of sort of high-power mid-band spectrum that's key for 5G and 6G.
And being fourfold behind China in any matter of sort of economic security and national security, in my view, is unacceptable.
So we need to close that gap.
Another area where we're trying to accelerate our work at the FCC is America's space economy.
And that's why we are running what we call a final frontiers agenda at the FCC.
If you step back over the past decade, we have seen a 14-fold increase in the number of satellites that are put up in orbit.
Most of you probably know of SpaceX, of Starlink, but there's lots of other smaller players in this area as well.
And it's a real economic opportunity for the country.
It's an opportunity for connectivity as well.
When we get these new generation of low-earth orbit satellites up there, it eliminates effectively dead zones across the country.
And so we're really excited about the opportunity that this new space economy is going to bring for jobs, for our economy, for closing those dead zones, which has public safety implications.
And so we're working very hard at the FCC.
One, we've worked quickly to clear backlogs.
For too long, it actually was faster for a company, whether it's Amazon Kuiper or Starlink and SpaceX, to build their rockets and their satellites than it would take for a regulatory agency to move a authorization of the application from one desk to the other.
So we've come in right away and we have streamlined and accelerated the FCC's work in clearing the backlog.
We're also putting up more spectrum so that those new systems can continue to operate.
Another area that we're pushing hard on ties into this, which is national security.
Because China is not only trying to dominate this new space race, but more generally.
We know that the CCP, the Communist Party of China, will stop at nothing to infiltrate many, many vectors of our technology and our economy, and obviously our communications infrastructure is a core target for them.
We've taken consistent action.
At the FCC during the first Trump administration, we took action on Huawei and ZTE and removing that gear from the network.
We've taken action on companies like China Mobile and China Telecom, entities that we believe are national security threats and prohibited them from interconnecting with the network.
And I wanted to extend that work under my leadership as chair at the FCC.
One thing we did there is we stood up a new Council on National Security within the FCC.
They've gotten underway to sort of pull all the resources at the agency to make sure that we're vigilant with respect to the threats that come from communist China.
One thing we did as well is we've launched a massive new enforcement effort.
So we have a lot of entities that are on what we call the FCC our covered list.
It's a version of an entity list that identifies companies that are too much of a national security risk like Huawei and ZTE to be allowed to do business in this country.
And what we've seen is that a lot of these companies have nonetheless continued to do business in the country claiming that it's not prohibited, claiming that it's unregulated.
And so we've issued a subpoena and letters of inquiry to get to the bottom of it.
And if there's any loopholes, we're going to work to close those.
One other big point, and then I'll stop, try to leave a couple questions.
I'll suppose leave more time for questions, but we'll try to leave a little bit of time for questions, is limited government.
One of the things that we've seen over time, and again, I started the FCC as a staffer back in 2012, is that regulations just tend to grow and grow and grow.
There's very little effort to do a top-to-bottom review to clean house of regulations that have long since outlived their usefulness.
But we're doing that at the FCC.
It's consistent with President Trump's commitment to efficiency.
It's consistent with the efforts of Doge, the efficiency department that Elon Musk had been part of.
We have our own sort of internal Doge group as well.
One thing we did is we stood up an entire proceeding titled Inray, Delete, Delete, Delete.
It's sort of a play on this idea that the best part is no part at all.
And so we've undertaken literally a review of every single regulation.
The FCC has this code of federal regulations.
If you stack the books together, it's like this.
It's probably like this.
The goal, I don't want to set an exact margin, okay?
But the goal is to get somewhere down to decrease those regulations.
And thankfully, with President Trump, there's a 10-to-1 rule in place where you've got to eliminate 10 regulations of every one that you pass.
And so we're trying to bank some deregulations because there are some pro-consumer regulations that we want to do, cracking down on robocalls and public safety issues.
So we've got to bank some of those.
So in Ray, delete, delete is how we'll do it.
We've also teed up over 2,000 open dockets at the FCC for potentially quick closure.
Again, government is good at starting things, not that great at ending them.
And some of those things are just unbelievable.
When you look at the rules on the books, we have still stuff on there that regulates Morse code, right?
Stuff that just sits on the books for years, stuff that has been wiped away by the courts, but we never take it off the books.
That just makes it harder.
If you want to get into this business and you've got to go through this stack of regulations on penalty of getting something wrong, we want to try to make that a lot better.
One finally practical thing that we're doing on this front as well is, I'll give you an example.
Obviously, we have all of these sort of old copper line networks strewed throughout the country where you originally got some slow DSL service.
We actually have rules on the books at the FCC, believe it or not, that effectively compels broadband providers to keep pouring billions of dollars into an unwinnable battle of maintaining these old copper line networks.
I mean, like, literally, we don't have the workforce anymore that understands how these copper lines work, but we require them to continue to maintain it when these providers want to build new fiber infrastructure or other high-speed connections to these communities.
So this is a broad proceeding called copper retirement.
We are giving permission to providers to quickly shut down those old copper networks.
We're taking care of consumers in a lot of ways so they're protected through this transition, but we can free up billions of dollars for new investment back into these communities.
We're also looking at other issues.
You know, one of the things I said when I first started the FCC was that we were going to end the FCC's promotion of invidious forms of DEI discrimination.
I mean, you would be shocked if you knew how many millions of taxpayer dollars the FCC, the Federal Communications Commission, was spending promoting DEI.
So we've ended the FCC's promotion of DEI.
We've made clear to the businesses that we regulate, we have equal opportunity rules on our books at the FCC, that we expect them to comply with that and to end any invidious forms of discrimination that are inconsistent.
Just this morning, Verizon, for instance, filed a letter with the FCC saying that effective, immediately they are ending their promotion of DEI consistent with a filing they made at the FCC.
And we're seeing a number of businesses do that.
I think that's great.
I think it's good for non-discrimination and it's great for the public interest.
Finally, I'll sort of close where I started.
You know, we look back to that Reagan revolution.
Unlike some people here, I can't claim that I worked in the Reagan administration.
After all, I was only 10 when the Reagan administration ended.
But like many of you, I do have fond memories of that time.
And there was a sense of patriotism.
There was a sense of optimism.
There was a shared pride in this country, a collective confidence, mourning in America again.
And that same feeling and vibe I feel the echoes of today.
There's a confidence, there's an energy coming out of the Trump administration to deregulate, to unleash the private sector.
And I really do believe that we're at the beginning of a new golden age for America.
With that, thank you so much for letting me be here.
I think we have some time left for a couple questions.
But like any good politician, I think I filibustered a little bit long there, but we'll see how it goes.
unidentified
Top of the day, personnel is policy.
And having been around this town since the Reagan administration, the Federal Communications Commission is embedded with many, many deep staters.
How are you surveying that?
How are you getting into helping you reach this new goal of the President's Management Agenda?
And what are you doing with the recalcitrants?
brendan carr ▲ ● ▼
Well, I think historically, and I've been at the FCC since 2012, I think the FCC is a little bit distinct as compared to other agencies where I think this has been a core part of the culture.
The FCC historically does a pretty good job at the staff level of moving left under Democrat leadership, moving right under Republicans, and staff's been fantastic these first hundred days.
But we are taking steps at the FCC.
One, we've brought in our own political leadership, obviously working with the Trump administration.
Two, we are looking very closely at workforce issues.
When I started, the FCC was roughly 1,500 people.
We have that down.
The numbers are in flux a little bit, but somewhere in 1,300.
And we're effectively targeting to be in a position where we have the lowest FTE count at the agency when you project out here a little bit that we've ever had, at least going back to the early 1990s when we've had data.
So we are reducing.
The other big thing we've done is we've returned FCC employees to the building.
When I started as chair, we still had 90-plus percent of the agency operate under COVID-era work-from-home policies, policies that included only having to show up in the building one day a week.
We flipped that.
90% were working under COVID era.
We now over 90 percent that are working under required in-person.
And so we are sort of fundamentally changing that.
And culturally, I walk the building.
We have a ton floors at the FCC.
Every day I try, although I've gotten a little lax recently, every day I try to get to at least two floors to walk around and participate there.
I think that helps as well in terms of a leadership thing.
unidentified
Thank you for being here and your vision for access and expansion of broadband and free speech and other things.
Could you talk briefly about the there was a lot under the Biden administration where they authorized broadband and then nothing happened in terms of contracts?
brendan carr ▲ ● ▼
Good news is another half-hour panel of me is starting right now on this topic.
No.
No, it's unbelievable.
Look, a lot of people heard this story.
President Trump ended up actually talking about it in a bunch of speeches.
The Biden-Harris administration came up with a signature plan to connect every single American in the country to high-speed internet, $42 billion.
Over a thousand days after that law was signed, not a single American was connected to the Internet with any of that $42 billion.
And it's worse than that.
Not even a single shovel's worth of dirt was turned.
Why?
The core reason is, in my view, they decided to pursue progressive policy goals rather than bringing people across the digital divide.
So they layered in things like promoting DEI.
They put price controls in there.
They put in a multi-dozen step regulatory process of hoops that you would have to go through.
And so Secretary Luttnick at the Commerce Department has been taking a look at that program.
But I think that is just sort of a symptom of this idea of too much regulation, too much bureaucracy, not moving fast enough.
You saw it with EVs, the same type of a story.
And we're working to obviously do to avoid that at the FCC.
unidentified
Yeah, go for it.
Thank you.
How significant is the potential interference between the Starlink low-earth satellite system and local cell towers on the ground-based?
brendan carr ▲ ● ▼
Yeah, there's no issue there.
So, one of the things that, whether it's Starlink or hopefully soon Kuiper, or there's a company I visited out in Texas, AST Space Mobile, they do a couple things.
One, they provide service to sort of standalone dishes, and they have their own spectrum band, so there's no interference there.
Second, I think what you're referring to, what you call direct-to-the-cell technology.
So, rather than having to put a service to a dish, you can get text and connectivity right to your phone from space.
And the satellite in that context operates effectively like a what we call terrestrial cell tower, but you know, from a little bit ways up there.
The way that's being deployed is they are partnering with terrestrial cell phone companies, and they're coordinating the use of the spectrum.
So, for instance, Starlink uses T-Mobile.
So, they use T-Mobile spectrum, terrestrial spectrum for the satellite service.
So, there's no interference from that, and we have sort of protections in place to ensure that.
Yeah.
unidentified
Well, I'll have a microphone, but with respect.
Oh, here we go.
Thank you.
With respect to the lawsuit that Donald Trump had against CBS for editing the interview with Kabala Harris, they settled that lawsuit, I understand.
What was the role of the FCC in all of that?
brendan carr ▲ ● ▼
Well, I don't know the status of that particular lawsuit.
When it comes to CBS, there are three things, and there are sort of three distinct things.
On the one hand, as you noted, there is a lawsuit between the President and CBS.
I think there was a complaint filed in Texas.
I haven't read the complaint.
That is outside of the FCC entirely.
There is a news distortion complaint filed at the FCC by a group called CAR, different than me.
We put that complaint out for public comment, and we're still open.
We're still looking at that.
And then, three, CBS has a transaction pending before the FCC that we're working through in our normal course.
So, there's three things going on.
The press loves to sort of conflate the first one with the FCC's one, but the first one is outside the FCC.
But we are looking at the transaction.
We're just running our normal course review on that one.
unidentified
Good morning.
I'd like to tie together two issues that you mentioned in your remarks, one towards the beginning and one towards the end.
And the first one is enforcing free speech protections on social media, and the second is deregulation.
And the thing I struggle with ideologically with the first issue is that it seems to necessarily require some more regulation by government of social media companies.
And specifically for your agency, it seems like you would have to treat them as common carriers.
Do you believe that they are common carriers?
brendan carr ▲ ● ▼
As a threshold matter, I don't believe they need to be treated as common carriers to address some of the censorship issues that have been taking place.
There's lots of reasons for that.
But more fundamentally, to your point, I think this is a tension that a lot of people have struggled with, but to me, it's sort of been reconciled in my own position, which is historically, people like to place DC politicians or regulators in like one of two camps.
Like, you're either sort of fundamentalist, libertarian, deregulate everything, no regulation, or you are sort of pro-regulation, populist, and people view the two in conflict.
In my view, is the whole point of sort of making telecom great again is you are blending those two things.
There are areas where we're going to do significant deregulation.
And there's going to be areas where there is room for pro-consumer regulation in the public interest.
And blending those two things is, I think, what is unique about this particular political moment.
It's not just the FCC, it's everywhere else.
But again, it was very binary before, and I think you're seeing this blended approach.
We're going to do massive deregulation, delete illegally.
But we're also going to put protections in place to look out for things that we value.
So, for instance, one of the things that Verizon just did in the context of a deal that they're pushing through the FCC is they made new commitments to take care of America's tower climbers and telecom workers.
And so, you'll see sort of this effort to sort of blend both of those approaches.
I think that's ultimately the agenda that I'm driving at.
Is this the hook over here?
unidentified
Yes, sir.
brendan carr ▲ ● ▼
Okay, well, I'll be here for a couple minutes on the way out, but thank you again so much.
Really enjoyed it.
unidentified
Thank you.
Being scared to death and saddling up anyway, as John Wayne said.
Y'all made it.
You climbed that mountain.
Take the risk, push yourself onto a new challenge.
Next week, watch commencement speeches from across the country featuring inspirational messages from political leaders, sports personalities, and celebrities.
Hear remarks by Veterans Affairs Secretary Doug Collins at Piedmont University, Maryland Governor Wes Moore at Lincoln University, New Hampshire Governor Kelly Ayot at Nashua Community College, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz at the University of Minnesota Law School, singer and songwriter Usher at Emory University, rapper and record producer Snoop Dogg at the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business, and former basketball star Carmelo Anthony at Syracuse University.
Watch 2025 Commencement Speeches next week starting Tuesday at 8 p.m. Eastern on C-SPAN 2 or online at c-span.org.
Democracy.
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A process shaped by leaders elected to the highest offices and entrusted to a select few with guarding its basic principles.
It's where debates unfold, decisions are made, and the nation's course is charted.
Democracy in real time.
This is your government at work.
This is C-SPAN, giving you your democracy unfiltered.
Sunday on C-SPAN's Q&A, travel writer Rick Steves talks about his 1978 journey along the hippie trail and the 60,000-word journal he kept of the trip, which he recently published as a book.
During the 3,000-mile trek, the then 23-year-old Steves and a friend visited Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and Nepal.
He recalls the people he met along the way, the challenges of traveling in foreign countries in the 1970s, and the lifelong impact the trip had on him.
rick steves ▲ ● ▼
It's fun to look back on it with the help of the journal and see how naïve and green and uneducated I was.
But it's the growing pains of a global perspective, of gaining a global perspective.
And I've got this notion that culture shock is a good thing.
A lot of people try to avoid culture shock.
To me, culture shock is constructive.
It's the growing pains of a broadening perspective.
unidentified
Rick Steves with his book On the Hippie Trail, Sunday night at 8 p.m. Eastern on C-SPAN's QA.
You can listen to QA wherever you get your podcasts and on the C-SPAN Now app.
President Trump has signed several executive orders intended to boost U.S. nuclear power.
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