Greg Lukianoff analyzes the FCC's weaponization against protected speech, arguing Brendan Carr targets political enemies via pretextual punishments like the ABC license review over Charlie Kirk comments. He contrasts "get rid of" rhetoric with incitement, critiques SLAPP lawsuits used to chill discourse, and notes private employers must reflexively avoid firing employees for opinions to safeguard democracy. The segment concludes by highlighting the U.S. fiscal crisis, where federal debt exceeds 100% of GDP at roughly $40 trillion, underscored by Senator Mark Kelly's testimony against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's unnecessary $1.535 trillion budget request. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Brendan Carr's Free Speech Shift00:02:45
And getting remarks there from Senator Kelly.
And you can also look back if you missed any of his remarks on our app, C-SPANNOW and online at c-span.org.
We'll also bring you live coverage shortly from the White House, where President Trump is meeting with the President of Brazil.
For now, some more of today's Washington Journal.
That's much more explicit than someone seeing seashells on the beach that say 8647.
Now, concerning the press, I want to ask you about the Jimmy Kimmel issue.
There's been two issues now.
There was the comments he made following the shooting death of Charlie Kirk.
And then recently before the White House correspondence dinner about First Lady Melania Trump, the FCC has ordered a review of the license for ABC.
What's your reaction to that?
Brendan Carr's FCC has been a disgrace when it comes to freedom of speech.
Brendan Carr used to be someone who would say great things about freedom of speech before he was FCC commissioner.
And he would talk about how the FCC should not be weaponized to punish First Amendment protected speech.
But since he's been in charge, the abuse of the FCC's power has been rampant.
So the Jimmy Kimmel, the first Jimmy Kimmel investigation, which was again in a situation where Charlie Kirk was murdered, it was horrifying.
But unfortunately, the administration took advantage of that tragedy to go after their political enemies.
We saw dozens of cases of people getting in trouble across the country for saying things that were, in some cases, you know, gross about basically saying Charlie Kirk had it coming, or people saying things as tame as my opinion of Charlie Kirk is that I disagreed with him on any number of things.
So and they went after Jimmy Kimmel for making a joke related to what he saw as the scrambling of the administration to prove that, I think as Jimmy Kimmel put it, that the shooter wasn't actually conservative.
And that is absolutely protected speech.
But Brendan Carr was on the record saying we can either do this the hard way or the easy way, you know, clearly threatening FCC attacks.
Meanwhile, Trump never, he must be the most frustrating client in the world because you could sometimes get away with pretextual punishments on speech as long as you don't actually say, by the way, I'm going after you for your speech.
Trump has been incredibly clear time and time again that the latest investigation of Jimmy Kimmel and of Disney broadcast, he's been very clear that this is about what you said, which of course is going to lead to them losing in court if this comes to court.
The Rise of SLAPP Lawsuits00:08:20
Let's talk to callers.
We'll start with James Madison, Wisconsin, Independent.
Good morning, James.
Thanks for taking my call.
I had a question for when you played the signal with Caroline Levitt saying that the left is responsible for this and that.
But if people remember, Vice President, ex-vice president Dick Cheney went on national TV and stated that Trump is a threat to democracy.
This is a Republican ex-vice president.
This isn't the left.
And if free speech is protected, question, all the people that were chanting hang pence, hang pence, would that be considered a protected speech?
What do you think, Greg?
When it comes to hang pence in a situation where you might actually be able to hang pence, that's arguably incitement.
But certainly in a lot of cases, those same people who are chouting hang pence were also guilty of other offenses.
So, yeah, when you have a situation where something's possible or even likely to happen, and you're actually saying, let's go do that thing, then you're really looking at something that's a lot more like Brandenburg incitement and might not be protected.
There's something called slap lawsuits.
What are those?
Slap lawsuits are strategic litigation against public participation, not necessarily like the most memorable name.
We've got to work on that.
But slap legislation is fantastic because what it does is if you file a frivolous, if I'm a jillionaire and someone says something hurdy about me and I'm like, you know what?
I'm not going to win this lawsuit, but if I file this lawsuit against this person, that's going to chill speech.
They're going to think twice about saying something against me again.
It's an expedited way rather than that person having to spend a ton of money to get that shot down in court so you're not actually, so that jillionaire cannot chill everyone else's speech.
Slap lawsuits are things that fire very much opposes.
And the administration, the Trump administration in particular, uses slap lawsuits all the time.
Like what?
I'd say probably like one of the most dramatic examples was the Wall Street Journal lawsuit, where essentially they published a picture that by all accounts was drawn by President Trump and sent to Jeffrey Epstein.
And Trump sued saying that that's defamatory to have said that when truth is an absolute defense to defamation.
So that's a slap lawsuit.
That's when someone engaged in clearly protected speech, but a powerful person is just trying to make sure that they think twice.
Though in that case, he sues Rupert Murdoch, which is another powerful person.
Yeah.
But yes, I understand your point because there's a case, for instance, Kash Patel, FBI director, suing The Atlantic about their reporting.
Yeah, and that's one of the big ones in the news at the moment.
And what's amazing watching this develop on social media is that you have people saying, well, maybe this time it really is defamation.
And I'm like, after you've looked at three dozen of these kind of cases where the claim that's defamation is just nonsense, you have a right to be pretty skeptical anytime someone in this administration makes those allegations again.
All right.
We'll talk to Ken on the Republican line in New York.
Good morning, Ken.
Good morning.
How are you?
Good.
Yes.
The guy you're talking to right there, I got a question for him.
Bring it.
You know, if you don't mind.
Now, I know I've been sitting here listening to you, and all you do is talk about Trump.
Something this, something that.
But I've never heard you say anything about what's going on in Chicago, what's going on in Minnesota, all the lets that are frauding.
I mean, the people.
No, but we're talking about speech, Ken.
We're talking about free speech.
So is there some speech issues that you want to talk about?
Yeah, 8647 on the details.
Why would somebody put that up?
Why would he put that up if he didn't mean it?
If he didn't mean to threaten the life of the president, you mean, Ken?
Yeah.
Okay, let's get an answer for you.
Okay, so Ken, this is, and all of my Republican friends out there, nobody has done more to take on censorship from the left than me and fire.
We take it on all the time.
And I'm tired of the whataboutism as a way of not facing what your Republican president is currently doing against freedom of speech.
Now, your argument assumes the conclusion that 86 means kill as opposed to get rid of.
I'm used to 86 meaning get rid of and saying get rid of the current president to say like this person should no longer be in office is 100% protected speech.
And I believe, to be clear, I believe the administration even knows that.
And watching a lot of people line up to say, oh, this is definitely a threat on the president.
Try to be just as critical of your own side as you are of the other side sometimes.
And Robert is calling from Washington, D.C., Independent.
Hi, Robert.
Thank you for taking a call.
You had to say, you guys at C-SPARA were the first casualty of Donald Trump's anti-speech movement.
Do you remember at the debate between Biden and Trump and one of your moderators from the Washington Journal, Mr. Scully?
And right after whatever, I don't know what happened, but the next day, I never heard of that bastion since that time.
And what happened to Mr. Scully?
And I hope he's listening because he's one of the best moderators on the Washington Journal.
And I really miss that guy.
All right, Robert.
Let's talk to Maude in Toledo, Ohio.
Democrat, you're on the air.
Yes, I'd like to say I think that first you have the hostility, then you have the negative rhetoric, not the other way around.
When the Jews were being herded into the gas chamber, they were assured that it was a shower.
This assured peaceful assent to the wishes of their murderers.
I really think that you've got the cart before the horse.
The hostility is there first.
Wrinkles do not cause old age.
The older we get, the more wrinkled we become.
The more hostility, the worse the rhetoric.
The one is not causing the hostility.
So, and I think, in my opinion, the immigrants are the new Jews, trans people are the new homosexuals, and the homeless are the new Roma.
What do you think, Greg, about the hostility being the cause of the more violent rhetoric that you're hearing on the left specifically?
Yeah, no, I think that this is, it's kind of remarkable for me to watch the right sort of adopt language that was developed by the left on college campuses.
So, for example, like the really academic, awful term, to be frank, is called stochastic terrorism.
That essentially, like, if you say really negative things, it's going to have some kind of violent reaction.
So, therefore, maybe you can go after speech that we used to think of as protected because somehow down the line, it's harmful.
The right has entirely adopted this language as well.
And we've been through this before.
The Supreme Court used to have something called the bad tendency test for several years there, that essentially was saying that if you can make the argument that what I just said might somewhere down the line have a bad tendency to lead to bad results of some kind, then it isn't protected.
But here's what we found out pretty quick.
That means nothing is protected at all.
So we're going back in time to a darker period for freedom of speech on both right and left, justifying censorship that is rightfully banned by the First Amendment, but not even understanding our history well enough to know that we're doing that.
Whataboutism and Corporate Chilling00:06:59
We've got a question for you from Sally Sue about AI.
And she says, as AI begins to moderate more of our online speech, how do we ensure First Amendment principles are baked into the algorithms rather than just corporate safety guidelines?
What an absolutely wonderful question.
I think about AI all the time, and I think everybody should be thinking about it as well.
And my position is that we need to be thinking about how we actually come to know what's true and how we actually better test the entire corpus of human knowledge and how we make sure that truth is not something that power is able to take over, that it's not hyper-centralized, that there are multiple nodes looking into it at the same time.
I think that you can.
I think that you can turn AI into a technology for freedom and make sure it stays that way.
But one thing that's important is competition.
Make sure that power can't control it.
Make sure that ridiculous laws that will shift AI in the direction of what some people in power wish truth would be.
This is one of the reasons why we very much agree with XAI's lawsuit against algorithmic discrimination laws in Colorado.
So I think you were asking one of the most important questions of the day.
And I am working very hard to make sure that FHIR has a deeper bench and a larger tech practice so we can make the, so we can fight for the continuing existence of free speech and truth.
On the Independent Line, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Mark, you're on with Greg Lukianov.
Good morning.
Thank you for C-SPAN, and thank you to the guest for defending free speech.
I actually was not going to call in on this because he's doing such a good job of explaining it and defending it.
But I got to tell you, Mimi, a moment ago, you really triggered me when some guy called and tried to bring up Steve Scully and how C-SPAN was one of the, and Steve Scully were one of the earliest victims of Trump attacking media and hurting media people.
And you kind of like brushed it off and said, okay, thanks, goodbye.
And never mind.
So, Mark, sorry, all that happened before I got here, and I really have nothing to say about that.
You don't have to discuss it.
You should let the guest discuss it and tell us what he thought about that situation.
Okay, go ahead, Greg.
I don't know a lot about it.
He doesn't know about it.
Sorry about that, Mark.
Patricia, Minneapolis, Minnesota, Republican, you're on the air.
Yeah, I want to agree with that last caller.
Mimi, when somebody says something that you don't like, you cut them off and don't let them.
Do you have something for Greg Lukianov?
He's our guest right now.
Yeah, see?
You're doing it again.
And also.
Thanks for your call.
Ricky, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Independent.
Do you have a question for our guest?
Yes, ma'am.
Good morning to both of y'all.
My question is kind of different with free speech on the First Amendment.
I want to ask the guest, what is the difference between, like, you know, there's a former NBA player, Jalen Ivey, mention something about, you know, Pride Month against the LGBTQ community.
Now he was, you know, cut from the team and pretty much blackballed.
I just want to ask, like, what is the difference between, you know, if someone working in a private industry, if they say something, then they automatically get terminated and their livelihood is getting taken away from them, you know.
I know the difference between, you know, hateful speech, but if they make the speech against something they like disagree with, they get punished about it.
I just want to find out in that aspect, sir.
Thank you very much, and I enjoy y'all day.
Excellent question.
And by the way, the headquarters of FHIR is actually in Philadelphia, so it's nice to hear from you.
So private employers are not bound by the First Amendment.
They can fire you for your opinion, even if it would be protected in other circumstances.
But I did write a whole book with the great Ricky Schlott called Canceling of the American Mind, where I try to make an argument that we shouldn't be always so technical about like the idea that, yeah, sure, I can fire someone for their speech.
But employers should ask, but should I?
Because here's my caution.
Do you want to live in a country where you can have a job or an opinion, but not both?
And I think that we've been at different times in our history, particularly maybe 2020, 2021, at a moment where it did kind of seem like if you disagree with a lot of employees at your work on something of a hot-button political issue, your career might be over.
And I don't think that's very healthy for democracy.
I want the corporation to have the right to fire you, but I do want people to be a little more reflexive before they go right to getting rid of someone because they don't like what they have to say.
Jody, Independent, Seminole, Florida.
Good morning.
Yes, hello.
My question for your guest is, clearly he's coming from a democratic view.
So I think it's kind of ironic that they're crying free speech now when all through 2020, 21, 22, anybody questioning, let's say, COVID was completely shut down, blacklisted.
Mark Zuckerberg, forgive me, I don't remember if it was Congress or Senate, went on and said he testified that the Biden administration reached out to him and was telling him, you shut these accounts down.
Okay, let's get a response.
Okay, so this is what's called whataboutism.
It's when, and this is something that the right has been doing this entire time saying, where were you when this other thing was happening that was also bad for free speech?
Well, I'm here to tell you, FHIR has always been consistent on this.
We actually fought against what's called jawboning by the Biden administration, where they were pressuring social media companies to punish people for speech.
We've been leading the charge on that.
We've been recommending legislation on that.
We actually lamented the fact that Zuckerberg didn't join the lawsuit because by the way, they would have won that case at the Supreme Court if Zuckerberg or anybody else in social media had actually decided to fight.
They didn't get standing partially because a lot of people in social media weren't willing to fight.
But please stop it with the whataboutism.
FHIR is the most consistent free speech organization in the country.
But because someone did something bad in the past doesn't mean someone isn't doing something bad now.
Trillion Dollar Debt Crisis00:10:34
That's Greg Lukianov.
He is president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
He is co-author of the book, The War on Words, 10 Arguments Against Free Speech and Why They Fail.
You can find his organization at thefire.org.
Greg, thanks so much for joining us.
Thanks for having me.
Welcome to today's Washington Journal.
Start with that Wall Street Journal article from April 30th.
U.S. debt tops 100% of GDP.
It says federal debt exceeding the size of the economy is a potent symbol of the gathering fiscal stresses on the U.S.
It says that this would have been a once unthinkable threshold.
And it says, as of March 31st, the country's publicly held debt was, according to data, 100.2%, and it will likely climb.
It's saying the government is spending $1.33 for every dollar it collects in revenue.
And the budget deficit this year is projected at $1.9 trillion.
That's the deficit.
Well, yesterday on Washington Journal, we had Carolyn Bordeaux.
She's executive director of the Concord Coalition.
And she talked about what this means: that the debt is at 100% of GDP.
You do mention the debt and the deficit.
Sometimes people use those two interchangeably.
Explain the difference.
Okay, so the deficit is our annual shortfall.
We spend $7 trillion a year.
We bring in $5 trillion a year in revenues.
And that difference, that $2 trillion difference, is our deficit.
And every year, that then adds to our debt.
And our debt is approaching $39 trillion.
By the end of this year, it will be $40 trillion.
And one of the things you've noted is that the publicly held debt, so this is not the debt in the Social Security Trust Fund, but publicly held debt, is now the same as the U.S. economy.
And that's a real benchmark for people that it is getting out of control.
It is going to be a potentially serious economic problem going forward.
And that 100% number, so the amount that the U.S. economy is producing is the same amount as we owe.
In essence, yes, right?
So if you were to liquidate our entire economy, right, that was what it would take to pay off our national debt.
And why is that a bad thing?
I know that sounds like a simple question.
Most people would understand that, that it's a challenge.
So I often try to put this in terms of like a family budget of some sort.
So, you know, it's roughly a family making $70,000 a year, but having a credit card balance of $500,000, right?
So in essence, it is an amount of debt.
If you were a family, you would probably be bankrupt, right?
But we're the U.S. economy.
We are very strong.
We're powerful.
So it doesn't bankrupt us in that kind of way.
But what it starts to do is really put pressure on interest rates.
It starts to put pressure on inflation.
And it creates a really serious long-term drag on our economic health and growth.
And this is the committee for a responsible federal budget saying that Treasury and markets anticipate at least $2 trillion in deficit for fiscal year 2026.
That's our current fiscal year.
The deficit, the budget deficit being at $2 trillion.
Wonder what you think we should cut from federal spending.
Eddie, Atlanta, Georgia, Democrat, what do you think?
Well, I think, you know, if they stop paying into all these wars, every president that we have, and we could use our own money in the United States, put it towards it, and then you got all these restaurants, restaurants, and we got all these businesses open.
You know, they, you know, they pay into it.
And Trump, when Trump came in office, you're supposed to find the waste of spending and stuff, but ain't nobody putting it to the national debt.
You know, so, you know, we have to put the right people back in office that can handle, put more facilities in Congress to look at the debt.
And, you know, when the restaurants and all the Walmarts and everybody pay in it right and get these Trumps out of office, like Trump, then we can, you know, they can put some money towards the national debt, you know.
Should have complained about it every time, every time they come up, whoever coming off.
That's what I think.
All right, Eddie, let's talk to Scott, San Antonio, Texas, Independent.
Good morning, Scott.
Morning, how are you doing?
Good.
Good, yeah.
I was just thinking that, I mean, obviously cutting is important, but the process itself is what needs to change.
Otherwise, it's just going to keep happening.
So you need to instill zero-based budgeting so we don't roll over budgets year over year.
And then we need to eliminate Christmas tree bills and eliminate the ability for people to pile in these pork barrel spending bills.
Scott, when you say zero-based, do you mean insist on a balanced budget every year?
No, so, well, yes, technically, but zero-based budgeting is you don't roll over last year's budget.
You have to kind of lobby for your budget in the current year.
So you don't have these situations where people are trying to spend money so they have the same budget next year.
Okay.
To lobby for what budget they need as opposed to what budget they had last year.
So we don't have these pandemic era budgets rolling over and spending just kind of rolls down a hill.
Okay.
So give me an example of something you would cut.
So we're at like $2 trillion deficit just for this current budget.
So give me something that could add up to $2 trillion.
Yeah, I mean, military's top of the chopping block.
You could probably, because they're looking for $1.5 trillion, I believe.
And you could cut a trillion off that.
A lot of generals say we could sustain ourselves with just $500 billion.
And then the rest you're going to probably take from entitlements.
Okay.
So like Social Security, Medicare?
Yeah, Social Security, you have to means test people.
A lot of people don't even need Social Security that are taking it.
So anybody who's like above a certain means, take them out of it.
And then you have to look at more seriously fraud and Medicaid and Medicare.
Got it.
And we might be able to pick up something there.
Okay.
And this is Anthony, who sent us this on X.
He says, very easy savings.
Close every military installment outside of U.S. territory.
Cut the Pentagon budget by at least two-thirds.
Eliminate the Department of Homeland Security altogether.
Well, so Anthony and our last caller talked about the defense budget.
So let's take a look at Mark Kelly.
He's a senator from Arizona and a veteran, Democrat.
He was testifying before the Senate last month, and this is what he talked about.
He asked Secretary Hegseth about President Trump's $1.5 trillion defense spending request.
I'm trying to understand, Mr. Secretary, what kind of detail did you guys work out like a detailed plan?
And at the end of the day, it came out, oh, it just happens to come out to be $1.5 trillion.
Senator, the exact amount is actually $1.535 trillion.
And it was a product of a highly rigorous process throughout our department, from COCOM commanders to the services with our comptroller, with our deputy secretary, with the chairman, and myself, to ensure the budget reflects the realities of the world we live in and the capabilities we're going to need.
And that's why there's $65 billion for shipbuilding, $120 billion for the defense industrial base, $331 billion for munitions, $44 billion for quality of life, $71 billion on our nuclear dib.
You name it, we're investing in it.
And the biggest reason for it is the underinvestment of the Biden administration.
I mean, what they spent on defense, the continuing resolutions and others, undercut the buildup that President Trump had created.
So, yes, we're doing a lot of deferred maintenance here around the world and in our department.
And this budget reflects it.
And it's a commitment, a generational commitment to the security of the American people.
And if the rest of the world won't spend on their defense, that's their fault.
The American Department of War will invest properly to defend the American people.
I've always been supportive of defense spending in my entire time here.
And after 25 years in the Navy, I want to make sure our folks have what they need.
I think you should go back and take a look and see if there are places where we are making investments that we actually don't need.
There are some systems out there.
I mean, we are constantly looking and trying to balance: do we want F-47, which I've been supportive of, B-21, also supportive, and then we want to make all these other investments in really inexpensive, low-cost munitions, because we suddenly realize that the expensive stuff, even through B-21, we can't really maybe not get close enough.
But the whole idea behind B-21 and F-47 is we can penetrate further into the H-2AD bubble.
So there's some conflict there.
So I'm just encouraging you to go back and see if there are some systems where we can bring that number, the overall number, down.
Because as I look at what the Department is trying to field, some of this stuff, in my judgment, and I know others might have another opinion, some of this stuff we either don't need or it's not going to work.
That was Senator Kelly speaking to Defense Secretary Hegseff.
And this is what Jersey Girl sent us on X number one.