All Episodes
Previous Next
Jan. 18, 2025 - The David Knight Show
31:24
Dinosaur Media And The TikTok Ban
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
As Biden leaves, however, I want to do something special.
I haven't had the chance to speak to this man on camera for a little bit, and I want to do so.
He is coming to us from near the belly of the beast.
He is Eric Shiner.
And now we've got the audio, we've got it rolling.
I want to do a mind meld going back to my days on Star Trek with that man, Eric Shiner of MRCTV.
I must try to mind meld with it.
Gimmels.
Eternity ends.
Gimmels.
Mine's a merging doctrine.
Our minds are one.
I feel what you feel.
I know what you know.
And joining us is the director for Mind Meld.
Yes, fellow Vulcan.
Long live and prosper.
Eric Scheiner, director of MRC-TV.
How are you, my friend?
Good, good.
I see Eric the Overlord showing up in the...
Well, that works fine for me, Eric.
You are the landlord of MRCTV and all we do there.
And I welcome you to the David Knight Show, Eric.
Thank you for joining us.
Short notice.
I really appreciate you being here.
And you are close to the belly of the beast.
Far enough away that maybe you can escape.
In your office there.
I can still smell its digestion.
It's not good.
Not good.
It's like that man who got swallowed by a whale.
A real man, just like Jonah.
A real man actually did get swallowed by a whale once on a whaling expedition.
When they opened up the stomach, he came tumbling out.
He was pale, but he was alive.
You're looking not so pale, and you're tumbling out of the belly.
Thank you, my friend.
Eric, so located in Virginia, outside of Washington.
Tell us a little bit about what you've been watching at MRCTV regarding the transition.
Everything's trans nowadays.
The transition from Biden to the Trump administration and some of the things that you're seeing from some of the pop media, whether they're freaking out and also some signals you might be seeing about Donald Trump and things like Freedom of speech,
which has been a big, big problem for us at MRCTV and others like Jay Bhattacharya and RFK Jr. Why don't you sort of run us through some of the things that you're noticing that are really prominent as we look at this transition from any signals from the pop media or your hopes about what can happen to establish a better, firm ground on which we can stand for free speech.
Well, you know, starting off with the pop media, you know, they're watching Biden go out right now, and the rose-colored glasses are on completely at this point.
I mean, CBS actually was pontificating after Biden's farewell speech.
Do we compare him to George Washington or another president that, you know, like JFK, who was doing some great things, but he couldn't, you know, he got killed, he couldn't remain in office.
Boy, only if Biden had another four more years.
So those are your options.
George Washington or another four more years.
No one wants to say, yeah, we're looking at inflation and economics like the Carter administration.
And they're ignoring Gallup polls that just show people have a negative, completely negative view of this administration.
And they feel that historically that's how it's going to be remembered.
The media will not accept that.
I believe The View, Joey Behar, I miss him already.
She actually said that.
She misses Joe Biden already because now she just has to worry every morning when she wakes up about a bomb going off or something.
I mean, complete insanity.
It's amazingly unrealistic as well.
The idea that somehow Joe Biden was good for the people who engage in...
Free speech.
It shows us that they don't like free speech there, and they don't like free market economics.
Joy Behar doesn't have to worry so much because she's got her network spot, and they were playing favorites with the Biden administration.
The folks at Twitter under Jack Dorsey didn't have to worry so much because they got $3.5 million from the FBI to censor people like you and me.
NewsGuard didn't have to worry so much because they were getting money from DARPA, the global...
Well, Engagement Center didn't have to worry so much.
Newsguard, our favorites.
Oh, Newsguard.
I told the audience, Eric, about that last time that they sent us those letters and how you allowed me to keep that challenge.
And hopefully it was a friendly challenge to just say, hey, why don't we engage in a debate about climate change?
It might be a fruitful conversation.
They don't want to debate.
They just want to be the arbiters of truth.
And they stayed exactly to that line.
They didn't want to debate.
Yeah, exactly.
And you cannot question them, but they get to question you.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Precisely it.
Precisely it.
Now, by the same token, I'm looking at signals from the Trump administration.
I just had Eric Peters on.
We had Eric and Eric today.
Two Erics.
Eric squared.
It's an all-Eric day.
Yes, it's all-Eric day.
I'm going to change my name to Eric the AFB. But I'll get Eric Idle to sing songs about me.
But I'm curious to see what you think about Donald Trump.
Let's look at it this way.
Remember when Donald Trump was, I think, unjustifiably accused of hating free speech when all he did was call out people like Jim Acosta and say that the pop media is the enemy of America?
He didn't say, I want to engage the FBI to pay...
I want Anthony Fauci.
I'm working with Anthony Fauci to try to find a way to counter the argument of the Great Barrington Declaration people.
He was unaware of those emails from Fauci until maybe now.
Maybe people might remind him.
And I don't like the fact that Trump gave an award to Fauci before he left office.
But the signals from Trump seem to be...
That those types of things won't happen as much.
When he entered office last time, he stopped the Portman-Murphy thing for two years, where they were given $75 million a year to fund newspapers or old guard dinosaur news agencies that would promote the government line.
Trump seems like he's more in favor of free speech there, but by the same token...
I'm seeing signals from him where, for example, he said Kamala Harris shouldn't be allowed to say those things on Fox News.
Do you think those are just rhetorical slips on his part?
We've already seen him talk about college campuses and speech and so on.
What do you think Trump is going to do regarding things like News Guard and things like using the FCC or Section 230 to try to now push...
Well, I think Section 230 needs to be looked at and revamped, and I think that is a lot where they are heading.
You know, does it really apply to the Internet as it does to telephone communications, which is what it was originated for?
I think a lot of that is going to be looked at.
You know, will it be thrown out?
Will it be revamped?
Those are all important discussions.
What I think is really funny is, you know, the media is always, you know, Trump is against free speech.
This is horrible.
You know, look what he's making.
Poor Mark Zuckerberg and Meta do.
It's like Zuckerberg admitted himself.
Hey, you know what?
We were forced into this situation and, you know, we made some mistakes.
And guess what?
The fact checkers were politically motivated.
I mean...
The media's like, well, Trump says the so-called fact-checkers were politically motivated.
This is a Republican conspiracy.
No, Zuckerberg himself said it.
Right, right.
Zuckerberg said it.
And let me ask you, Eric.
Conservatives and Trump have been saying for a long time that the fact-checkers have been politically motivated.
Right.
And he's switching over to the community notes now.
Right.
And that's horrible because Elon Musk does it.
It's a horrible thing.
The media doesn't like it.
Exactly.
I'm curious about this because...
If you look at the way Community Notes works, and we look at Section 230, as you know, the leveraging language in Section 230 of the 1996 Telecommunications Act is that The two things that it does, as you know, but for folks who might not be familiar in the audience, most probably I've already looked into it, but just in case.
Section 230 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the federal government grants indemnification against...
For ISPs and social media sites, against states going after them, if one of the users posts something that might be illegal content, the actual platform can't be found guilty or liable under any state statute.
They can't bring those to court, and they will get that protection.
Plus protection against people suing them for defamation or slander if one of the users posts something that's defamatory about another user.
They say, you, the ISP, you, the social media site provider, we're going to grant you this beneficence and protection, but...
You'll only get it if we, the federal government, determine that you are curating your material in good faith.
That is the hinge clause.
Well, there's also the hinge clause, too, that they're not editors.
You get that protection if you're a platform, as in, I could call you up and say negative things about the president over the phone.
Well, that's it.
But they'll call them a platform only if they are curating.
And that's the key.
So they get that term platform, but that too is contingent on the good faith clause.
They won't be called a platform.
They'll be called something else if they don't conform to what the government says is curation in good faith.
But what I think is interesting, Eric, is now that they're giving their community notes the ability to put the information up there, in a way...
They sort of circumvented the, well, we're not the ones who are curating this now.
It's the users who are curating this.
How can you blame Musk?
And that's the move.
That's probably why Musk did it in the first place.
Right.
I only realized that a couple weeks ago.
It was when Zuckerberg gave his announcement, I thought, wait a minute, that actually makes a lot of sense.
Now, they can still be found for curating...
Things that the federal government doesn't like, let's say there's child pornography or there's something else that even something innocuous that the government doesn't like, that they can still go after and eventually say, no, you're not curating these things.
But as far as the truthiness of things goes, they will, I think, be able to skirt that.
And, you know, it's possible maybe the government, the federal government, even under Trump, could come up with some excuse.
But I do think that...
By doing so, they might have found a way around at least that little bit.
At least for now.
I think Section 230 is going to be looked at and revamped, especially in how it's applied to the internet.
And it might become more how a newspaper treats an opinion column.
It might be looked at more in that regard.
But obviously, there's a lot of work to be done there.
But I think a lot of people need to take a pause and a breath here.
This is a huge victory.
For free speech.
Yeah.
What Zuckerberg and Meta announced.
You know, now we got to see if Alphabet, you know, Google and all them, YouTube, follow similar suit.
My guess is because of what you mentioned about the legality and how they get around it with the community notes, maybe just simply the comments will be enough to let them say, you know, we need to roll this back.
But, you know, historically, that hasn't been true.
You know, if you call a biological male that dresses in a dress, a he instead of a she, you know, Alphabet will come and zap your video.
You'll be flagged.
You know, will that loosen up?
It all remains to be seen how they'll fall in line.
But I think it's a great first step.
It's huge in this ongoing war.
For free speech, it's huge as far as, you know, even what the MRC has been able to push forward with Free Speech America and that effort here in Washington about making this a forefront issue.
And you're also going to see the secondary issue of free speech is going to be AI. That's going to be the next technology that people, who controls AI, what is it basing?
You know, we've already seen if you feed AI nothing but right-wing, you know, or left-wing news.
It's going to give you the divergence.
It's going to give you, if you feed it left-wing news, it'll give you a left-wing take for facts.
If you feed it nothing but right-wing news, it'll give you a right-wing take for facts.
So how do you get something that encompasses both?
What are the rules going to be there?
And that's going to be the next, the future of the battle for free speech, I think, is going to be AI. I agree with you.
you.
I agree with you 100%.
In fact, it's interesting because Joe Biden just signed 40 pages worth of executive orders.
And one of those executive orders pertains to AI.
And any company, they want to start up basically sort of a fascist AI support system where the federal government is going to be working with private companies.
And those private companies will work on AI.
And they will, any company that is doing business, with the United States government will have to show, if it is using AI, they'll have to give their keys to the federal government.
And the Biden administration wants these organizations that are working on this to essentially start to find ways.
That they can come up with digital identification for all Americans.
And it remains to be seen whether Donald Trump is going to enforce that or not.
Let me see if I can find that information for you, Eric.
You know what would be more interesting and probably more practical is instead of the digital identification for all Americans, how about a digital identification of where the AI is coming from?
A reversal of that kind of concept, I think, would probably be more successful.
So if you have a certain AI and you're getting information from it, because of whatever identification it has, it tells you what it's taking in.
And you have an idea where it's taking in its information to come up with whatever information is coming from it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I'm finding that I would prefer to not have to get have the government getting involved at all, because to me, anytime they're asking for this information, They run the risk of breaching the Fourth Amendment.
So it's going to be very, very tricky.
It's interesting, you know, you mentioned Free Speech America, and I'd like for people to know...
Just the types of fights under Biden that you have been experiencing.
And Free Speech America is sort of an offshoot of the Media Research Center and other groups that really have been sort of behind the scenes trying and fighting and fighting and fighting on free speech matters.
Can you tell people about that, Eric?
Well, Free Speech America is a division of the Media Research Center.
They've done a lot of work both in cataloging...
And organizing, and this is what's really important is they're providing kind of the ammunition for lawmakers that are going in and looking at these issues, especially regarding free speech.
So they will have a series of reports of all the censorship.
That has happened on Facebook or on Google.
They catalog it.
They measure it so people can report it to them.
And they actually have it documented because not every single report.
Someone can say, oh, I was censored on YouTube because I said this.
FSA will look into the case, contact Alphabet, see what's going on there.
Sometimes, yeah, you know, well, you clearly violated the rules here.
So, you know, you're in the wrong.
This isn't a legit complaint.
But many, many times.
Yes, it's clearly censorship.
They just didn't like what you had to say.
There is no actual rules violation.
So they catalog that so lawmakers can go into these hearings and make these arguments about things like NewsGuard and their government funding and why that is unnecessary and why they shouldn't be funded by the government by having all the instances of everything that NewsGuard's done and where their bias is.
It's all documented and it's available for everyone to see.
Boy, you know, you think about the amount of time and effort that has gone.
It's a lot of time and effort.
It really is.
They're a busy group over there.
And, you know, and you mentioned NewsGuard, you know, and I've spoken with people about this, Eric.
You know, the fact that many people weren't familiar with NewsGuard, we would talk about it, Matt Taibbi, Michael Schellenberger, they brought that up.
And, you know, the...
Just getting these emails from these people.
They send us these things.
They give us this busy work so that we can't do the work that normally would be out there for people to see.
Fighting the collectivist ideals, exposing the green canard, exposing a lot of the payoffs, exposing the pop media and their Marxist ideologies and things like that.
And in most cases, as you know, if they actually clicked on the links inside the articles, Their questions would be answered.
Exactly.
They send things like, well, you say this.
Where the heck are you getting this information?
It's in the article.
I just hyperlinked it.
Yeah, exactly.
And at the same time today, we're going to be probably hearing from the Supreme Court about the TikTok ban.
I think they have held it.
I think we've heard.
Oh.
Okay.
I think we've heard just before.
Yeah, I think I've got it over here.
In fact, Supreme Court ruling upholding ban on TikTok if not sold.
So I'll show it right now, Eric.
Thank you.
This is great timing.
Well, what do you think?
To me, I don't see anything in the Constitution that allows this.
It's not owned by China.
ByteDance is not owned by China.
I don't see...
The federal government with any power to say you either divest your company or...
You have to leave the United States.
But the Supreme Court, and I thought Brett Kavanaugh was leaning in that direction.
Let's read this.
The Supreme Court on Friday unanimously upheld the federal law banning TikTok beginning Sunday unless it's sold by a China-based parent company.
Now, you've heard about this already, Eric.
I don't know if you know any details.
This is what I've been looking for, and I knew it was going to be coming, but this is my first blush sighting of this.
So, well, I only really heard about it right before I... I mean, at this point, this was passed as a separate law, so it's not like he can overturn it by executive order.
This is congressional law that's coming down.
I think maybe the government could have been a little more pragmatic about this.
I don't like TikTok censorship.
You know, MRC TV has been taken down from TikTok a gazillion times, you know, because, you know, we speak about free speech and the things that Chinese government doesn't like.
So I don't like their censorship.
I don't like their data mining either, but I don't like Google's data mining.
I don't like Meta's data mining.
I think there should have been a set of rules for what information you agree or not agree to let go forth.
And there should be some kind of set rules there maybe than just focusing on one particular social media entity, in my opinion.
But, you know, I have no love for TikTok as it stands personally.
But again, I don't have any love for any of the data mining and all the information that these social media companies grab from me.
Yeah, here's my take on it.
I was talking about this a little bit last night, and there are a couple things that come to mind.
First, the people who call themselves constitutionalists in Washington, D.C., the Congress, the President of the United States.
This is a great...
A great learning opportunity for people, I think, Eric.
And it's unfortunate because we've got almost 15 million people who use it and millions of people who are earning pretty good livings off of their use of TikTok.
The information exchange, even though there is some censorship on it, if you know or you're dissatisfied if it's open and you can leave and go to a competitor, then you should be able to go to a competitor if you want to, you know, if you don't like what they're doing.
the government shouldn't be getting involved with this and the first amendment clearly prohibits it but the other thing about it is that uh the president doesn't need to do an executive order on this the president has a sworn oath to uphold the constitution the constitution prohibits express expressly prohibits the infringement of free speech by congress and And by banning them from being on platforms, again, they're mixing things in.
You can't be online.
You can't be purchased.
You have to divest.
All those things are mixed in with an infringement on free speech.
Every member of every branch of government swears an oath to the Constitution.
That's why George W. Bush, even though he was made fun of for having his signing statements when he signed statutes, that actually goes back to the oath that the president takes, which is, I will only enforce...
Constitutional laws, just like a soldier will only answer to constitutional orders.
If the Congress passes a statute that is, in the eyes of the President, unconstitutional, he is not only allowed to, he's obligated to not enforce the statute.
And then the Congress, if they think that what he's doing is egregious enough, they can bring impeachment procedures against him.
And it's the same thing with the Supreme Court's ability to be able to...
Yeah.
But there's an element of the TikTok ban that involves national security.
It doesn't matter.
That doesn't matter.
That's their excuse.
The TikTok ban national security thing has nothing to do with it, especially during a time of no declared war.
But if you make an argument that it's for national security, I agree.
But it doesn't matter.
If they're going to do that, then you're getting to the Sedition Act under John Adams, where you can silence people.
They were claiming that the United States was close to a war against France so they could shut down newspapers.
It's the same, same attitude.
It's the same approach.
They can make up anything that means national security, and they'll just say, well, for national security.
It's the same sort of opaque, malleable idea that they can use for climate change.
It's the same thing.
So from my point of view, that's not an argument because the First Amendment doesn't give a carve-out.
For national security.
Congress shall write no law.
If they want to amend the Constitution, and you know, I'm an anarchist, obviously, so I don't even agree that the Constitution has authority over anybody, but those people swear to uphold it.
And this is where Donald Trump could offer a lesson to people to say, I don't need an executive order.
I don't have to do that.
Because I can just say, I will not enforce this.
And if people don't like it in Congress...
They can impeach me.
They've already done it for other things.
And that would be a very good opportunity to give people scholarship about the way their system is supposed to work.
Possibly, but can you imagine the media's reaction?
Talking about authoritarian, he's overruling what Congress and the Supreme Court has just upheld a congressional law that the Supreme Court upheld, and here comes authoritarian.
So, you know, even under your setup, he'd be doing it under the guise of, hey, it's unconstitutional and this is free speech and this needs to be allowed.
And the media would lambaste him.
And yet, look at the hypocrisy.
What did they do when the Biden administration shut down RT, right?
They still allow the BBC. They still allow the CBC, right?
So you get these double standards.
What if it were, you know, CNN? Offering some app and they suddenly said, you know, CNN, for national security reasons, we're going to stop you from doing that.
CNN would bring up First Amendment concerns.
NBC would do the same thing.
The fact that this is from another country, evidently there's a distinction there.
There isn't a distinction.
There are very hard facts.
Don't forget, it really kind of depends on who's in office.
You look historically, who's the one who called up the AP phone records?
Well, that was Barack Obama.
Exactly.
Joe Biden.
Who went after James Rosen and James Risen?
With the government because they didn't like their reporting.
That would be Barack Obama.
You didn't see these institutions.
AP didn't rise up and sue.
No.
No, absolutely right.
Well, Eric, I know your time is short, and I really appreciate you being here.
This is great.
MRCTV, I hope people will head over there.
And one of the most popular segments, and you're going to be shooting that if you haven't already, the Wacky Mole.
Why don't you tell everybody about Wacky Mole before you go so they can check it out this afternoon and this evening.
Well, Wacky Mole is just a gathering of some of the most insane moments each and every week that you see from the leftist media.
If it doesn't make you laugh, you would have to go insane.
It would make you just so angry and frustrated.
So it was kind of a laughable take.
We poked some fun.
But, I mean, it really goes to the insane Trump derangement syndrome that they're in now.
By the way, you talked about the media reacting to Trump.
Rachel Maddow coming back five days a week because, I guess, ratings for MSNBC don't matter.
Yeah, she's coming back for 100 days.
Yay!
Isn't there a lotion to get rid of that rash?
I'm just wondering.
They're already gearing up.
You know, they're already getting their guns.
We saw Jim Acosta hold this big cartoon sign about Jim Acosta in free speech on his show.
Yeah, well, this is what I mean.
You know, you have all these cases of censorship under the Biden administration.
You have, you know, what do they care about all those national intelligence officers saying that Hunter Biden's laptop was Russian disinformation?
They all loved it.
They loved the censorship of that.
Not a single one of them complained until after the fact.
It was a conspiracy theory to say otherwise until, oh, that conspiracy was proven true.
So anyways, we gather moments like that.
We put them all together.
And we poke some fun at them every week.
And it's a good time.
It's a good time.
It is.
It is excellent.
And I wanted to mention inside the Rockfin chat, or Rumble chat, and also on X, if you have any final questions for Eric, we're going to be...
We're going to be looking at some big changes coming up, and I'm going to be very interested to see where Donald Trump comes down on free speech, and especially on the campuses, too, Eric.
I'm going to be curious about that.
I think the larger lesson, as you know in my writing, I try to remind people that the federal government's not supposed to be holding the carrot or the stick of federal funding for colleges at all, because they're not supposed to be involved with that at all.
Imagine how much the cost of college would go down if the government got under.
involved with its funding.
Oh, that's so true.
And yeah, the funding through the loans, increasing the demand, and then now shifting the cost onto all of us, of so many of those people who got college loans, over and over and over again, both Obama and Biden doing that, and they call it forgiveness.
And nobody asked the principal question, especially in the media, nobody asked the principal question, how does that bring down the cost of college?
I think everyone agrees the cost of higher education is through the roof.
As you know, I have children in it.
I know it firsthand.
We all know the cost of higher education is high, but how do any of these policies of forgiveness or anything inspire the colleges and universities to bring down their prices?
Absolutely right.
And unfortunately, the politicians claim they're making college more affordable by feeding more money into that.
And into that oven.
You're just feeding the beast.
Yeah, that's exactly it.
Eric, thanks so much for joining us, man.
I really appreciate it.
And I'll be looking at the Wacky Mole, MRCTV. Glad to be here.
Glad to be an overlord, I guess.
Yes.
Yes, Mr. Overlord.
I really appreciate it.
Coming on to the David Knight Show, the overlord is visiting.
And I appreciate very much everything that everybody does over there, Eric.
You guys are awesome.
So I'll talk to you later on text later this afternoon.
All right.
Watch them out for the moles.
Take care.
Eric Scheiner of MRCTV. That's right, boys and girls.
There's a post-election sale on silver and gold.
Trump euphoria has caused a dip in silver and gold.
It's time to buy some medals with fiat dollars before they come to their sense.
Go to davidknife.gold to get in touch with the wise wolf himself, Tony Arterburn.
▲
Export Selection