International Rage—From EU To Brazil—Over Zuckerberg’s Vow To End Censorship; Lee Fang On Financial Interests Behind H1B & LA Mayor Skipping Town
International outraged erupts after Mark Zuckerberg's vow to end internet censorship: from Brazil and throughout the EU: Why do powerful governments want to restrict internet freedom? Plus: Lee Fang explains why LA Mayor Karen Bass was abroad when the wildfires tore through her city. He also outlines the financial incentives behind H1B Visas.
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Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight...
On Sunday, Facebook founder and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a set of new social policies designed to eliminate or at least reduce the censorship of political speech on Meta's platforms.
Also to banish the fraudulent disinformation and fact-checking industry from its association with Facebook, Instagram and Threads and have them replaced with the community notes that X uses.
And in general, he sought to warn the world about the dangers of the growing censorship industrial complex in the West.
We covered this announcement in quite a lot of detail on Monday night, as well as the fallout from it, including the many reasons to view Zuckerberg's announcement with great skepticism, given his own history.
And long imposing and aggressively defending exactly the sort of political censorship that, with Trump's inauguration now looming, he now suddenly condemns.
That skepticism is undoubtedly warranted, but it should not distract from, because it does not minimize the true shockwaves, fear and anger that this announcement generated around the West, particularly in those countries that are most devoted to building their censorship regime online, from the EU and the UK to Canada and Brazil.
Americans are understandably focused on the multi-day, still uncontrolled fires that are ravaging most of Los Angeles.
At least most of the country is focused on that.
The House of Representatives today spent the entire day solely on a single bill, having nothing to do with Los Angeles or the United States.
It was simply a bill to protect Israel and Benjamin Netanyahu by imposing sanctions on the International Criminal Court, a bill that passed overwhelmingly as Los Angeles burned.
As a result of this attention being elsewhere, the ramifications of Zuckerberg's announcement in the U.S., but even more so in the countries that are really seeking to impose censorship on the Internet generally, have been largely overlooked, so we want to report on them and analyze them for you.
Then, the independent journalist Lee Fong is someone we have on our show often, in large part because he does the kind of shoelace reporting, especially tracing financial trails in Washington that so few do these days.
He has been doing exactly that sort of work, and it's been quite enlightening in unveiling the money trails behind the intra-right debate over whether H-1B visas should be increased and more foreign workers brought into the United States.
He is also a longtime resident of California and has been reporting on and digging in both the raging fires in Los Angeles as well as the actions of the city's mayor, Karen Bass.
And we will speak to him in just a little bit.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
On Monday night, we delved into great detail about the multi-pronged and quite surprising announcement by Facebook founder, current Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, in which he essentially current Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, in which he essentially took up the banner of free speech online, waved it quite assertively.
Denounce not just online political censorship in general, including of the kind Facebook and Instagram have frequently engaged in, but took direct aim, probably the most consequential part of what he said because it was so specific and so much condemnation, at the so-called disinformation and fact-checking industry that has been concocted and fabricated and that has originated after 2016 as the tip of the spear to justify the imposition of political Censorship
on political discourse online.
And we delved into the components of Zuckerberg's announcement, the new meta-policies that he laid out, the reasons to be skeptical of both him and those policies, the possible holes in them.
But we also talked to a great deal about the undeniably significant Aspect of this announcement and the rage and anger and fear that it was provoking inside the United States, particularly among the disinformation groups and the fact-checkers whose credibility suffered a huge blow when Zuckerberg denounced them as being politicized and unreliable and therefore people with whom Meta's platforms would no longer be doing business.
That rage and that...
That outrage and that fear has only proliferated since Monday.
It's gotten much more intense, not just in the United States, but remember, Meta is obviously a huge international, even global company.
Instagram is extremely popular in numerous countries throughout the West, throughout the democratic world.
So still too is Facebook, if you can believe that.
And Threads even has gotten a few more users over the past few months.
So we're talking here about one of the most influential and powerful tech companies, probably corporations in general, on the planet that has just radically reversed.
It's one of its core views on one of the most hotly contested issues of our time, which is the extent to which political free speech can be permitted on the Internet or whether governments have to work with corporations to restrict it in the name of creepy-sounding objectives like facilitating and engendering safe conversations or protecting the world from disinformation and hate speech and all of these other evils that these people have anointed themselves singularly competent to identify in.
But this censorship regime has developed at least as much in other countries throughout the West as it has in the United States.
In fact, it's been more difficult to develop in the United States because of the huge obstacle called the First Amendment.
But in other countries that don't have the First Amendment, that don't have the tradition of protecting free speech as robustly as American courts do, That is where censorship online has become much more institutionalized, much more extreme, much more threatening.
And in those countries the reaction to Zuckerberg's announcement has been utterly unhinged.
It is constantly varying between fear and upset and sadness.
Or anger and rage and threats toward meta that these states almost certainly would be incapable of carrying through for a whole variety of reasons.
We want to show you just some of what's happening internationally and also as a window into understanding the reaction of the United States.
This really is a huge deal for one of the issues that we focus most on, which is the crucial objective of preserving free speech online, political discourse that remains free from corporate and government control.
In Brazil, we've covered often how Brazil has really become the leader in increasingly tyrannical efforts to curb huge amounts of political speech.
Not just to curb political speech by ordering posts to take it down, but just banning people with no due process from using the Internet.
And threatening platforms with massive amounts of fines, imposing those fines in the event that they don't instantly remove whoever the courts in secret decide should be removed.
And obviously, that was what led to First Rumble being unavailable in Brazil, a refusal to cooperate with that.
And then it led to a one-month ban or so by Brazil of X when Elon Musk proclaimed he would no longer obey these unjust censorship orders.
And only when he reversed himself, because it was a huge...
...migration of Brazilian users from X to Blue Sky and other platforms.
Only once he reversed himself and promised to obey these censorship orders did the Brazilian Supreme Court reverse itself and allow X back into Brazil.
But it definitely suffered harms because of it.
But if it's only Rumble standing alone or it's only X standing alone, even X is a small platform compared to Google.
Google's platforms like YouTube or Meta's platforms like Instagram and Facebook.
The fact that Mark Zuckerberg has now joined in, essentially saying he's going to use the model of X, which is no longer censoring based on claims of disinformation or falsehoods or hate speech, but instead will simply rely on the same community notes method that X relies on, where you don't take content down, but you allow the community to correct it if it's really demonstrably false.
It has created an immense amount of...
Anger and fear inside Brazil.
I have very much participated in, in fact, very aggressively, advocated for free speech in Brazil, denouncing the efforts especially by this one Supreme Court Justice, Alexandre de Mareche, to rule over the censorship regime single-handedly.
And it's a secret censorship regime.
It's one that has no safeguards, no due process.
The people who are banned by the courts have no opportunity even to be told ahead of time that they're being censored, let alone an opportunity to contest the validity of the order or even be told why they're being banned.
It's all done in complete secrecy.
We've shown you the orders before that we were able to acquire and publish, where there's just an order sent to every social media company saying, you are hereby ordered to ban the following people.
And if you don't do it in two hours, you'll be subject to massive fines.
And oftentimes the people who are ordered to be banned aren't just random people on the internet.
They're journalists, they're activists, and even elected members of the Congress and the Senate who criticized the Supreme Court, who expressed criticisms that have been deemed illegal in Brazil.
And this ability to control the Internet, to censor the Internet, has become fundamental to Western governments, to governments in Europe, governments in Canada, in the UK, and certainly in Brazil.
I published an article on Monday.
The day after the meta policy was announced by Zuckerberg.
And there you see it on the screen.
And just to give you the context, one of the things Zuckerberg said in explaining the, there's the English version, I'll get to that in a second, is that there's a growing censorship ethos and regime, not just in the United States, but internationally especially.
And he talked about how devoted...
EU countries and the UK are to threatening big tech companies that if they don't censor, they'll be destroyed.
And he referred to countries in Latin America, and everybody understood this was Brazil.
This is exactly what the description he used is exactly what's happening in Brazil and has been the criticism of Brazil.
He described there being secret courts, by which he really meant censorship orders issued in secret, that...
Go to these corporations.
They're required to obey and to censor.
And if they don't, they're subject to massive punishments, including as in the case of Rumble and then X being banned in the country.
And when he said that about Brazil, even though he said just Latin America countries, every media outlet that, of course, big media outlet, corporate outlet that is in favor of the censorship regime, which is not all of them, thankfully.
But most of them.
In the United States, most media outlets have adjudicated in favor of censorship.
In Brazil, the largest newspapers for the New York Times in Brazil, the one for which I write, Folio of Sao Paulo, has been quite editorially aggressive in denouncing the censorship regime.
Most of the big corporate media in Brazil has been very much in favor of it, just like they are in the United States and in Europe.
And they all immediately said that Mark Zuckerberg lied, that he spread disinformation when he claimed that in Brazil there are secret censorship courts.
But as you see on the screen, the headline of my article was, and this is the English translation, it was obviously published in Portuguese, Zuckerberg is right about Justice Moraes' secret censorship orders.
There are reasons to see political opportunism in Zuckerberg's statements, but the comment associated with the Brazilian Supreme Court is correct.
And I laid out there exactly what has been happening, everything I just explained that we've shown you many times that I've actually done reporting on.
We acquired some of these secret orders.
I've interviewed the people who were the subject of these censorship orders.
We had one of them on our show, a very well-known podcaster in Brazil who's been forced to leave the country.
And none of them are even told that they're the subject of these censorship orders.
Elon Musk in the Twitter files also caused a lot of these secret censorship orders to be released.
So that is where this is all going.
And I think it's so important, and I've emphasized this every time I talk about Brazil or what's happening in the EU and the UK, is you can sit in the United States and think, oh, we're not there yet.
But all of these countries are collaborating.
They're coordinating.
The U.S. security state is very much a part of this.
There's a consensus that Western governments, governments in the democratic world, can no longer tolerate free speech online, and they have to work together to normalize slowly and gradually, but inexorably, a censorship regime that people just start to assume is part of the...
Natural order of things, sort of like the Patriot Act got normalized and nobody even thinks about it anymore.
It was supposed to be a very temporary measure and now it's permanent.
That's what they're trying to do here.
And every time one country goes further, it becomes space that the other countries can then go further with too.
When Brazil ordered X, when this judge in particular, who basically rules the country, sort of like the unelected king of Brazil, ordered X ban from the country, it was only a few days after France had Here
is, as I said, there's no single person in the democratic world with more centralized The Brazilian left called him a fascist,
a racist, a coup monger.
He had been part of the justice ministry in Sao Paulo, where the left long believed that they were deliberately murdering black protesters.
He was accused of that as well.
And just overnight, he became a hero to not just the Brazilian left, but to most of the big media, because he spends a lot of his time throwing Bolsonaro supporters either in jail or banning them from the Internet with no due process, with no limits of any kind.
And here he is reacting to the Zuckerberg announcement by essentially threatening Meta.
That they too will be banned in Brazil if they continue with this and be subject to major punishment.
And we have the subtitles on the screen, which I'll just read for people who are listening to it.
Do we have the subtitles on this in English?
I see the subtitles in Portuguese.
For some reason we decided to put the subtitles in Portuguese, which is the language that he's using to speak.
So I'll do my best to try and translate it for you.
He says...
This today is our challenge and the challenge of the world.
The challenge to not permit these gigantic big tech platforms that are conglomerates with their irresponsible managers to think that they can, because of their money, rule the world.
The challenge of regulation, of making them responsible.
For the rest of the world, we cannot speak.
But for Brazil, I have absolute certainty and conviction that our Supreme Court will not permit that big tech companies, social media platforms, continue being instrumentalized.
Whether guilty or not, or still only searching out profit, they're instrumentalized to amplify hate speech, Nazism, fascism, misogyny, homophobia, and anti-democratic ideas.
Here in Brazil, our electoral justice system and our Supreme Court Both of them have already demonstrated that here we are a country of laws that has law.
Social media platforms are not lawless land.
In Brazil, you can only continue to operate if you respect Brazilian law and legislation independently of the bravado of the people who run big tech companies.
So he's essentially saying that if you don't censor in accordance with everything we tell you to do, Even though there's no due process involved, there's no rationale involved, there's no appeal involved, there's no transparency involved, we will ban you from operating here.
Now, they did do it with X, as you know, and it created a lot of debate at the elite level, but as it's true in the United States, although it's even more true in Brazil, X is not the platform that most ordinary people use who aren't completely connected into politics.
So it didn't create this mass uprising like, hey, why don't we have Twitter?
Why don't we have X? But if they were to do that to Meta, in particular to Instagram, which is one of the most important social media platforms for Brazilian celebrities, for Brazilian influencers.
I mean, remember, Brazil is a gigantic country.
It's the second largest country in the hemisphere after the United States.
It's the largest country in South America.
It's the sixth most populous nation on the planet.
We're talking about a gigantic country.
And Instagram, Brazilians use Instagram continuously.
It's one of their most important platforms.
So the idea that the Brazilian Supreme Court could tell Brazilians you're no longer allowed to have access to Instagram, even though the rest of the world does, you're being cut off.
Your cultural connection to the rest of the world is being severed.
The whole world can have Instagram, but you can't because they won't censor in accordance with our court's orders.
That's the sort of challenge, to put that mildly, that Brazil and other governments, like in the EU, as we're about to show you, that are threatening the same thing, really are going to face.
The president of the country, at least nominally, is Lula da Silva, who actually is on the left, and as I said, the left hated this judge for a long time, and now it worships him, and Lula supports everything he does.
Here's an article in Folia, the newspaper for which I write, that...
Is published in English.
They published the Portuguese version as well, describing how Lula reacted.
Lula sends message to Zuckerberg and calls a meeting about Meta, quote, this is extremely serious.
When questioned about changes announced by Meta, the president states that no individual can violate a nation's sovereignty.
So the argument is if Brazil has a court that says you're not allowed to criticize the court, you're not allowed to criticize the president, except in ways we deem permissible, The only way Google and YouTube and Instagram and X or any other platform can stay in Brazil is if they censor on command of the government.
That's their argument.
Here is another statement by the president of Brazil, Lula da Silva.
There you see in Globo.
That headline in Brazil, he says, quote, you can't have one, two, three people who think they can infringe the sovereignty of a nation, says Lula after being questioned about Meta this week.
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of the technology giant, announced he would end the fact-checking program and he attacked Latin American courts.
Lula asked that people be held responsible for their content posted on social media.
This really is the central war in the West, in my opinion.
The internet is the most important innovation, certainly in the last century, arguably longer.
It has enabled human beings to do things that had previously been unimaginable.
And with new innovations coming online, including artificial intelligence and things like it, those capacities are only going to grow.
The centrality of the internet is going to be more pronounced in our lives and everything that we do, and in particular how we...
How we disseminate news and information, how we share opinions and perspectives, how we organize politically.
And that, as I said, was always the reason why I consider the Snowden reporting so crucial, because the debate there was, is the Internet going to be a tool of what it was intended to be, which is liberation, or will it be allowed to be degraded into the greatest and most repressive instrument of...
Social coercion and surveillance ever invented in human history that was at stake there with allowing the internet to become a lawless world of state surveillance that's ubiquitous.
And this is really the new frontier of that same fight, which is, is the internet going to liberate people, which can only happen if you're free to express whatever views you want, no matter who's offended by them.
Or...
Will governments be able to, working with billionaire-funded think tanks and activist groups and corporations, impose on human speech far more centralized control than ever previously existed?
I think it's so important to understand this dual aspect of technology to understand why this matters so much, both in the United States and internationally.
One of the things that surprised me that I hadn't really considered until it happened during the Snowden reporting was when we were starting to reveal...
The extent of the ubiquitous surveillance, how they could collect and store every human communication, every human activity online, what you browse, what you read, what emails you send, what messages you get.
Obviously, they can't read them all in real time.
They don't have an interest in doing that either, but they can store them all.
And if they want, they can go and analyze them.
They can retrieve them.
And when this controversy of the Snowden reporting came to Germany, which happened because President Obama...
Got caught.
His administration did spying on the personal cell phone of Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, who was supposed to be an ally.
And she grew up in East Germany under Communist Germany, East German government, with the notorious surveillance agency, the Stasi.
She called Obama and said, what you're doing is basically replicating the evils of the Stasi.
And then...
Members of the Stasi, which obviously doesn't exist anymore, it fell with the Soviet Union, but former members of the intelligence surveillance state of the East German government said, actually, this surveillance system is so much more advanced than anything we had.
It can do so much more than we could ever dream of doing.
We could open mail, we could read mail, but we didn't have anywhere near the capability to monitor.
Things got past us all the time.
But the more this technology becomes centralized in our lives, the more dangerous and menacing and truly repressive government control over what we can say is, along with accompanied by a surveillance state.
It becomes much more difficult to escape it.
It becomes much more difficult as well to critically evaluate what the government wants you to think because they have the power to eliminate dissent.
The ability to hear other people who think differently, who are trying to show you evidence and information that might get you to change your mind, that is absolutely critical, and that is what is endangered.
That's the reason why governments want this power so much, why they're fighting so much, why they're so angry at what Meta did, because this power is crucial to them, and they understand that it's being endangered if big tech companies really do unite, as Zuckerberg vowed that they would do, not just unite with one another, but he said unite with the U.S. government.
To fight this international censorship regime, and obviously a country like Brazil, obviously countries in the EU, still depend upon and are intimidated by what the United States could do to them in terms of sanctions, in terms of all sorts of other acts that the United States could take.
And with Elon Musk so close to Trump, with now Zuckerberg obviously currying favor with Trump, with Trump already believing that online censorship is...
A menacing instrument, at least insofar as it targets conservative speech.
We'll see whether it's a principle that applies to all speech.
Clearly, this is becoming a war that is escalating and has several powerful new combatants in it on the wrong side from the perspective of governments that want to censor in Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and now Mark Zuckerberg.
And you already have platforms who are going to fight even harder, like Rumble, that have demonstrated Their commitment to this cause.
One of the amazing parts has been watching quote-unquote disinformation experts and fact-checkers basically react to what Mark Zuckerberg said by saying, we fact-check him!
And we're here to say, we're not bad for democracy.
We don't censor it.
This is, we re-rate this false.
These arbiters of truth that have been self-anointed to justify censorship.
Hear from The Guardian January 8th.
Which is yesterday.
Quote, Brazil says Meta getting rid of fact-checkers is, quote, bad for democracy.
The decision by the social media giant Meta to end fact-checking in the United States is, quote, bad for democracy, Brazil's newly appointed communication minister, Sidonia Palmeiras, said on Wednesday.
Meta's founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, stunned many with his announcement on Tuesday that he was pulling the plug on fact-checking at Facebook and Instagram in the U.S., citing concerns about political bias.
Palmeiras said Meta's decision was, quote, bad for democracy because without fact-checking, you don't control the spread of hate, misinformation, and fake news.
Quote, that's the problem.
We need to have control.
Exactly.
Listen to that, that quote.
We need to have control.
We need to regulate social media.
That's what's happening in Europe, he said.
On Wednesday, the Brazilian President Luiz Anasio Lula da Silva raised a scourge of disinformation during a ceremony marking two years since supporters of his predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro, stormed the seats of power in Brasilia.
Quote, we defend and will always defend freedom of expression, but you always know that a tyrannical sentiment is coming when someone starts off by saying, yeah, of course, I believe in free speech, free expression, but...
What comes after the but is the only part that matters.
The first part is just throat clearing.
And it's always to negate that cursory affirmation of a belief in free speech.
And that's exactly what he says here.
Quote, we defend and will always defend freedom of expression, said Lola.
But we will not tolerate hate speech and disinformation which endanger people's lives and incite violence against the rule of law.
As always, it's a nice idea and concept.
Who would ever say, yeah, I want...
False ideas to circulate.
I want hate speech to circulate.
The problem is these are very malleable terms.
They're very subjective.
What your political inclination is will absolutely determine what you interpret.
These terms can be or not to be, and we've seen that over and over.
And that is what Mark Zuckerberg said that has really upset them the most, as he pointed out, that this is a fraudulent industry.
They are completely politicized.
They're not engaged in fact-checking.
Or in disinformation, anti-disinformation activism, they're engaged in pure political activism and political censorship masquerading as something more noble.
Here is another article by Globo that tries to highlight a very particular aspect of the meta-policy that they regard as particularly pernicious.
And this has been emphasized in the United States so long.
I think it's so important to underscore the Falsehood and the deceit that's at stake here and people claiming our society will be in danger.
Democracy will be in danger somehow if we don't permit free speech.
This is the English translation of the headline.
Quote, meta publishes a Portuguese language version of hate speech rules that allow for the linking between mental illness and sexual orientation.
The new community standard rules are global and already in effect.
So they're extremely angry in Brazil.
That you're now allowed to express the view that you think homosexuality or bisexuality or transgenderism are byproducts of mental illness.
This to them is proof that no society can allow free speech because that's the sort of thing that...
We'll be permitted to say.
And it's not just in Brazil.
It's also here in the United States.
American media outlets are also pointing to all the parade of terribles that are going to happen now that on Facebook or on Meta's platforms you're not going to be censored anymore.
Here from Axios, echoing the Brazilian sentiment, which has no Brazilian culture, has very little tradition of protecting robust free speech.
Here in Axios, January 9, 2025, that's today, Meta's new policies open the gate to hate.
And then it says, Zoom in.
These are the little Axios headers that they think allow people with short attention spans to ingest the news in three minutes.
They say, quote, Meta's revised policy around hateful conduct, previously referred to as hate speech, removes some prohibitions entirely while also making new exceptions that allow people who are women, transgender, gay, or immigrant to be targeted in ways prohibited for other groups.
Quote, we do allow content arguing for gender-based limitations of military law enforcement and training jobs, Meta's husband, to revise policy quote we also allow the same content based on sexual orientation when the content is based on religious beliefs elsewhere meta says we do not allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation given political and actually go back i think i read that wrong so yeah
elsewhere meta says we do now allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words like quote weird the new policy also makes room for people to call for gay and trans people to be excluded from specific places while the company kept language that says quote we believe that people use their voice and connect more freely when they don't feel attacked on the basis of who they are
The company removed a line that said hate speech, quote, creates an environment of intimidation and exclusion.
In some cases, it may promote offline violence.
The expert said that the change is taken as a whole amount to, quote, given a free pass for cherry-picked issues that align perfectly with culture war hot topics for the right.
Now, I wonder whether these people have ever heard of the First Amendment, because under the First Amendment, Which journalists, people who call themselves journalists, are supposed to be duty-bound to defend?
Journalists are not supposed to have political opinions, at least ones that they purposely integrate into their work, but there are values journalists are expected to defend.
One of them is free speech, one of them is a free press.
Obviously, under the First Amendment of the United States, under free speech ethos in the United States, you're allowed to express any of those views.
It's not even a question.
Of course you're allowed to say that you think homosexuality and transgenderism is the byproduct of mental illness.
You couldn't be prosecuted for that.
Of course you're allowed to misgender people.
Of course you're allowed to say that women shouldn't be in combat or homosexuality should be a basis for excluding people from the military or transgenderism should.
These are all unquestionably permissible ideas.
And the thing that I think, aside from the evils of censorship on principle and the dangers they create when put in the hands of government that will always abuse them and expand radically what they mean by hate speech and disinformation to prevent and even criminalize criticism of what they do, which is exactly what's happening in Brazil and in some parts of the EU, aside from all of that, let me just say that when...
Gay rights in the United States first started really being debated in a serious way, which happened in the late 80s and into the 90s, throughout the 90s, into the 2000s.
It was extremely common for people to believe and to say that they thought homosexuality was a mental disorder.
That had been in medical, official medical definitions of diseases.
For many, many years in the United States, for decades in the United States, homosexuality was considered a mental disorder.
And the reason so many people ended up changing their minds about that, the reason why the gay and lesbian movement ultimately won not just acceptance socially but full legal equality is not because they convinced people to make it illegal to express those views.
views.
It's not because they engendered a prohibition on people saying those things.
It's precisely because those things could be said.
And as a result of that freedom to say them, other people who disagreed could engage those arguments and convince people that it wasn't true.
And over time, people got convinced.
The reason why the gay and lesbian right movement won in the United States, the reason why legal equality was obtained is not because people were forced to accept it.
It's because people got persuaded through free debate and free discourse and free association.
Thank you.
Either that they were wrong in their views of homosexuality or that they shouldn't try and get the state to regulate it because adults could do what they wanted in their private lives and it wasn't a harm to them, which was a huge change.
That happened not because of censorship, but because of the ability to engage that debate.
I can't tell you how many debates I had with people, civil, constructive debates I had with people in the late 80s and throughout the 90s who believed because of religious views, because of cultural views.
Because of what they were taught since childhood, because of what they just believed as adults, that homosexuality was some sort of moral evil, that it was a byproduct of mental illness.
And all you have to do is look at polling and the changes in mores and the changes in law and see how many people, most people, change their views on that because of the ability to freely debate it.
The idea that somehow people are protected...
When you prohibit others from expressing the views that, whether you let them say it on Facebook or not, they're still holding, is preposterous.
And I should also point out that censorship is never, ever an instrument of the marginalized.
It's always an instrument of the powerful, by definition.
It's always the powerful who ends up wielding it, and they wield it for their own interests, not for people who are, quote-unquote, marginalized.
So, even that example...
That, oh my god, this is so civilization-ending that meta is now going to be more permissive because you can't argue that transgenderism is a mental illness.
Whether you allow people to say that or not, they believe it.
A lot of people do.
And of course it's better to have that freely discussed and debated.
That changes minds.
History proves that.
All of the whatever you want to consider social progress in the United States and elsewhere in free countries has been the byproduct of free debate and persuasion and engagement, not prohibition and censorship and repression.
That doesn't change minds.
If anything, it solidifies those views because people just keep them inside.
And resentment grows over them as well.
Similar trends are being seen in the EU. Hear from Reuters yesterday.
Quote, we do not censor social media, the EU says in response to Meta.
Can you imagine being an EU official and with a straight face saying, we don't censor social media, even though they've enacted major legislation designed to punish social media companies for failing to censor what they regard as hate speech or disinformation?
Quote, Meta Platform scrapped its U.S. fact-checking programs and its CEO said he would work with President-elect Donald Trump to push back on censorship around the world.
Quote, Europe has an ever-increasing numbers of laws institutionalizing censorship and making it difficult to build anything innovative there, Zuckerberg said.
But the European Commission, the EU executive, said its Digital Services Act, that's the law that they adopted that we've gone over many times before, did not force or request platforms to remove lawful content.
Only, only take down content that may be harmful, such as to children or to the EU's democracies.
Quote, we absolutely refute any claims of censorship of commissions, spokesperson said.
Do you see what they're all saying?
The Brazilian officials, the EU officials, the fact checkers, and the disinformation experts, the self-anointed ones in the United States.
They're saying, we don't engage in political censorship.
We just identify and ban ideas that are dangerous.
Which, of course, is the definition of censorship.
That's what every single censor...
You go to Saudi Arabia or Egypt and they're going to say, we don't censor.
We just, for our national security, ban certain ideas that might incite violence and instability in our country that might attack the fabric of our nation.
That's every censor has that rationale.
It's still censorship no matter how you justify it.
Here from El Pais, the...
Spanish newspaper, the Daily Newspaper, earlier today, Mark Zuckerberg's excuse for ending fact-checking programs is a hoax, say experts.
Everyone's an expert who has the views that these newspapers want to promote.
Quote, it is a lie that we are censors.
Quote, Clara Jimenez Cruz, a fact-checker, and president of the European Fact-Checking Standards Network, the EFCSN. This is a group of people.
Who can identify truth.
They check.
They check to make sure that what you're saying is true.
And if they say that what you're not saying is true or that it's false, you can be banned.
But it's not censorship.
They're just identifying false claims.
The chairwoman of the European Fact-Checking Standards Network denies Mark Zuckerberg's claims, quote, it is a lie that we are censors.
What fact-checking does is add verified information and facts to the public discourse.
Meadow's own evaluations prior to the decision to remove fact-checking followed Trump's victory, highlighted the effectiveness of the service that it is now dispensing with.
During the 2024 European Parliament elections, the company underscored that 68 million pieces of content were labeled on Facebook and Instagram after monitoring the data, and 95% of users avoiding consulting them after seeing the warnings.
This power is going to shift from a handful of highly politicized, self-anointed experts to the broader community.
And so you'll see the original claim and you'll see the community's response with documentation showing why it's false.
And these people will lose control.
So will government.
And that's why they're apoplectic.
Hear from the Politico, EBU version of the Politico on April 23rd of 2023. Quote, Facebook and Twitter to face new EU content rules by August 25th.
Quote, the European Commission today will designate 19 very large online platforms called VLOPs, very large online platforms, and search engines that will fall under the scrutiny of the wide-ranging online content law.
These firms will face strict requirements, including swiftly removing illegal content, ensuring minors are not targeted with personalized ads, and limiting the spread of disinformation and harmful content like cyberbullying.
Clients can go up to 6% of their global annual turnover, and very serious cases of infringement could result in platforms facing temporary bans.
The EU chief censor, who was the chief censor from France, said one of the first tests for large platforms in Europe, it's Thierry Breton, One of the first tasks for large platforms in Europe will be elections in Slovakia in September because of concerns around, quote, hybrid warfare happening on social media, especially in the context of the war in Ukraine.
That's what they were concerned about was dissent or support for candidates in other states and other countries that they do not support or dissent on the war in Ukraine.
That's what they want to censor.
"I am particularly concerned by the content moderation system on Facebook, which is a platform playing an important role in the opinion building, for example, of the Slovak society," said Breton.
Meta needs to carefully investigate the system and fix it as needed ASAP.
Does that sound like a group of people in a legislative framework that perish the thought actually censors political speech as they're insisting they don't?
From the New York Times all the way back in 2019, Facebook can be forced to delete content worldwide.
Worldwide, the EU's top court rules.
Quote, the decision that individual countries can order Facebook to take down posts globally sets a benchmark for the reach of European laws governing the Internet.
And then here in the Deutschworld politics version, on January 7th, you see the chairman of the European People's Party, the largest in the European Union, who's saying that, Meta needs to be aware of its obligations to stop Russian disinformation.
So there's all these justifications floating around for how these social media platforms have to censor.
They've been very explicit about it until Mark Zuckerberg accused them of being censors.
Now they're all saying, oh, we don't want to censor.
We just want to remove information that we regard as destabilizing or that we regard as false, that our fact-checkers have told us are false.
Here from NDTV World today, France voices, quote, concern over the halt to Meta's U.S. fact-checking.
So all these countries that want to censor are weighing in.
And then here's a newspaper in the Netherlands, one of the leading ones, Ein Van Dog.
Here you see the headline in Dutch.
The one in English says, quote, no more shared truth.
These are the consequences for Dutch users when Meta stops fact-checking.
Quote, meta-founder Mark Zuckerberg stops fact-checking on his social media platform in the United States.
In doing so, he chooses Donald Trump's course just before the inauguration.
What does this decision mean for the Netherlands?
Quote, this undermines democracy.
It's a common thread.
Free speech undermines democracy.
That is absolutely their argument.
From CBS News today, this just gives you an example of how twisted they are in their jargon without even realizing it.
Mark Zuckerberg says ending fact checks will curb censorship.
Fact checkers say he's wrong.
Just the hubris of these people who really do think that they are uniquely competent to impose their judgments about truth and falsity and have them bind, or about hate speech as well.
Let's recall that the EU, six days after the October 7th attack in Israel, It was the accusation of the EU against X. The
investigation, the first under the EU's new tech rules, will also look at the way complaints are handled.
Axe, formerly known as Twitter, said it had removed hundreds of Hamas-affiliated accounts from the platform.
TikTok and Meta were also warned by the EU for not doing enough to tackle disinformation.
Social media firms have said a surge in misinformation about the conflict between Israel and Hamas, including doctored images and mislabeled videos.
So the EU is threatening to punish X because they were allowing too much anti-Israel disinformation, too much content critical of Israel and in favor of the Palestinians.
hands.
Just to close this up to show you just the kind of emotional reactions that are taking place throughout the censorship industry, The Guardian interviewed a longtime fact-checker interview, and he called it dispiriting.
Fact-checker reacts to Mehta's move to scrap roll, and this is what he says.
Listen to these people.
I think this was so illuminating about how these people think.
Quote, I have been a fact-checker at Full Fact in London for a year.
What is Full Fact in London?
These are all these groups that have proliferated.
No one knows who funds them.
They're often funded by billionaires or by the U.S. or British or EU intelligence agencies.
I have been a fact-checker at Full Fact in London for a year investigating suspicious content.
Suspicious content on Facebook, Acts, and in newspapers.
That's already so authoritarian.
I mean, I investigate suspicious content newspapers.
Our bread and butter includes a lot of video disinformation about wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, and AI-generated fake video clips of politicians, which are getting harder to disprove.
Colleagues work on COVID disinformation, cancer cure hoaxes, and there's a lot of climate stuff, as we're seeing more hurricanes and wildfires.
It was quite difficult to hear Mark Zuckerberg, quite difficult.
To hear him say on Tuesday that fact-checkers were biased.
So much of the work we do is about being impartial, and that is instilled in us.
We're above subjectivity.
We're impartial.
We don't have political views.
These European fact-checkers, quote, It feels like a very important job where I am making a difference and providing good information for people.
Zuckerberg's decision was dispiriting.
We put a lot of work into this, and we think this really matters.
Look how many people, especially people in power sectors, in the ruling class frameworks, have been convinced that freedom and democracy cannot exist unless a handful of people whose ideology is pre-vetted to make sure it aligns with ruling class ideology are empowered to dictate what you can and can't say.
To judge, not in a...
Opinionated way, not in a way that they get to express, which of course they should, but in a binding way, what is true and false.
And the reaction of these governments to the mere prospect that people might go back to an Internet that existed for the large part of the Internet's existence, where people were free to say what they thought, free to express their views, rather than...
Constrained and punished for expressing prohibited views shows how important online censorship has become throughout the democratic world and that's why I continue to say that this debate, this conflict, this war over information freedom that Mark Zuckerberg has joined on the side of free speech at least ostensibly with whatever his motives That is absolutely the most important one because if the internet is permitted to be turned
into either a ubiquitous tool of surveillance or a full-scale authoritarian censorship scheme where governments control what can and can't be said, then the internet will become the greatest tool of repression and coercion and propaganda in all of human history.
That's really what's at stake.
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Independent journalist Li Fong is a longtime colleague of mine.
We worked together for many years at The Intercept.
He's also a friend of the show and a friend of mine.
And one of the reasons why I have Li on a lot is because he does the kind of reporting that has really become increasingly rare.
Including in all the places that claim that only they are professional journalists, Lee really has become a specialist in figuring out how to trace the flow of financial information and the flow of money through Washington and how it shapes the ideology of various groups, how it shapes the willingness of politicians to change their mind, how it makes them go to bat for all kinds of lobbying groups that are shoveling all sorts of money to them.
And he's been particularly digging into, over the past months or so, both the issue of the debate that arose, the intra-conservative, the intra-right debate among Trump coalition factions, about whether or not H-1B visas should be maintained at their current levels, whether they should be about whether or not H-1B visas should be maintained at their current levels, whether they should be increased as people like Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have been insisting they should be, or whether they should be reduced or even eliminated as Trump in his first term wanted to do and as a lot of his longest term or whether they should be reduced or
And it seemed like a very vibrant debate, a very intellectually spirited debate, which it was, but there was also a lot of lobbying and a lot of money involved behind it, which we really, as usual, delved into and helped expose.
And he also is a longtime resident of California, spends a lot of time focused on politics in places like San Francisco and Los Angeles.
And so there's a lot of work he's done and a lot of things he has to say about the fires that are raging throughout Los Angeles and the behavior of Los Angeles's mayor, Karen Bass, including the fact that she was in Ghana as the fires broke out, despite having been told, according to his reporting, that these dangers were quite imminent.
It's great to see you.
As always, thanks for talking to us tonight.
Hey Glenn, good to see you.
Alright, so let's start with these fires because it's kind of remarkable seeing these images of just entire communities of a pretty iconic American city, Los Angeles.
Very beautiful city going up into flames and who knows when this fire is going to get under control.
And there's been a lot of focus on, as there would be in this kind of instance, on officials in California, to some extent California Governor Gavin Newsom, but especially the city's I think she was elected in 2023, if I'm not mistaken.
And she was also someone who was on the short list when Joe Biden said he was going to pick a black woman for vice president.
She was one of three people with Kamala Harris, another person who was a possible vice president to pick.
And as these fires broke out, she was nowhere to be found.
She was actually on some sort of international trip to Ghana.
And there's been a lot of criticism about this.
You wrote an article.
On your Substack, which is usual, I highly recommend that we put this on the screen, the title of which is LA Officials Warned of Extreme Fire Risk Days Before the Mayor Skipped Town.
Now, before reading your article, when I first heard about this criticism of her, part of me thought, for better or worse, governors, mayors do go on these kind of trips internationally.
Usually they're just opportunities to...
Get free travel to places these people want to go.
But sometimes there's legitimate reasons for a governor or a mayor to travel to a foreign country.
And it was this kind of bad luck that she happened to be in Ghana at the moment these fires broke out.
She couldn't have anticipated that.
She came back immediately when they started to spread.
And so this criticism seemed a little bit cheap and exploitative.
And then I read your article, which suggested that actually she probably had reason to know that she should have stayed in L.A. Not necessarily that these fires happened on this day, but certainly reasons to know that she had work to do that she didn't do instead going to Ghana.
What is it that you discovered about all that?
Well, look, Glenn, I had the same initial reaction when people pointed out on Tuesday evening that the mayor was not there, that as the fires had spread from Pacific Palisades to Pasadena to the San Fernando Valley and other parts of the city, there was...
A leader missing at the top.
And, you know, this is a moment just like any other kind of tragedy or crisis where people jump on social media and they attempt to score cheap political points.
They make commentary without any evidence.
You know, they attack their political opponents and inject their kind of pre-existing beliefs into anything.
So, you know, I am nervous about that and I was hesitant.
But I started calling around and doing some research online about this particular crisis.
And it's very, very clear that the mayor should have known.
This was really a success.
What should she have known specifically?
When you say she should have known, what should she have known?
She should have known exactly when the fires would have started because the government agency is tasked with predicting this very tragedy, this very crisis.
Did it perfectly.
The models were incredibly accurate.
You had the U.S. Forest Service, Jonathan O'Brien from the U.S. Forest Service, as early as December 30th, predicting this week that there would be a fire risk in Los Angeles and Southern California.
On January 2nd, just after New Year's, the U.S. Forest Service and the National Weather Service predicting that there would be extreme weather risk starting on Tuesday.
That Santa Ana winds of a very kind of unprecedented proportion.
You know, we've had 100-mile-per-an-hour winds last Tuesday, coupled with an extreme dry season in Los Angeles.
At LAX, they've had less than a tenth of an inch of rain over the last three and a half months, something like that.
And you bring those two conditions together, the extreme drought conditions and these unusually strong winds.
You had many meteorologists predicting this and warning of it, warning of this imminent danger many days before Mayor Karen Bass left for Ghana.
So let's talk about that because when I hear that, when I read your article, when I saw the evidence, my initial reaction was if she really knew that a fire, not necessarily even of this magnitude, but of a very serious magnitude was going to erupt, she would be able to anticipate as an experienced politician that being in Africa, thousands and thousands of miles away from the city that's burning that she was elected to govern,
would be an extremely embarrassing and harmful political mistake, would be an extremely embarrassing and harmful political mistake, and yet she did it anyway.
And I want to share with you my hypothesis and hear what you have to say about why somebody might do that, because we talk all the time about these career politicians, and I confess I haven't followed Karen Bass's mayorality very closely, so I don't have a lot of very strong opinions about how she's governed Los Angeles, and I confess I haven't followed Karen Bass's mayorality very closely, so I don't have a lot She entered Democratic Party politics and kind of activism.
She got elected through her local Democratic Party machine to the California Assembly.
She worked her way up the California Assembly, became the House Speaker.
Speaker of the House, Speaker of the Assembly in California.
Then when there was a House opening, because a Congress member retired, she ran for that seat, was endorsed by the local Democratic Party machine, got elected to that seat, spent a bunch of time in the House.
And usually people in the House, when they want to move up, they either run for governor, they run for mayor.
There's usually a, you know, if it's a big city, there's kind of a perceived step up to just getting an executive position.
And then a lot of times if they get to be governor or mayor, they want to run for Senate.
That's the natural progression of a career politician.
And it seems like these people kind of often just keep going up the ladder just because it's their career.
They're not...
She doesn't really have an interest...
It doesn't seem like she'd have a particular interest in governing Los Angeles, which is, you know, a lot of grunt work.
It's like, oh, do these leaves, these long-time leaves need to be removed from this forest?
Do we have enough water pressure for our fire department in the case of...
These are boring questions.
They're not glamorous issues.
But going to Ghana...
And, you know, meeting with the leaders of Ghana and having a kind of reception from the presidential delegation, that's a lot more glamorous.
And so it might be that she just has, like, more of an interest in doing that because running for mayor wasn't a passion.
It was just her next step up.
That's my perception of why so many of these people who want to govern end up not governing.
When you look at this evidence and you see she was told that left anyway, why do you think that happened?
Yeah, I think you're very astute there that that's essentially it.
And I think generally the public knows this, but I want to kind of focus in on this one dynamic.
One of the perks of being an elected official is the junket.
Junket, essentially.
Every month, you have these opportunities to fly to tropical destinations, exotic locations, world capitals, be treated as a foreign dignitary, staying in five-star hotels, flying in private jets, sometimes U.S. military jets, oftentimes first class.
Sometimes it's paid for by the taxpayers.
Sometimes it's paid for by lobbyists or foreign governments through these kind of nonprofit institutes they set up.
We have scandals up and down California.
You know, the recently recalled Oakland mayor, Mayor Shung Tao, you know, she's under FBI investigation from a Vietnamese-American business group, a recycling company that funded one of her junkets to Vietnam, where she went and partied and stayed in luxury hotels.
You know, I do see a role for foreign travel for, you know, a mayor of a major city.
You know, Mayor Karen Bass also traveled to Mexico for the inauguration of...
President Scheinbaum, Mexico is a major trading partner to Los Angeles.
Ghana is not.
So, you know, I don't see this as an essential trip when you're looking at a crisis unfolding in front of your city.
You're being warned repeatedly.
You know, your office is receiving this eminent threat.
The governor, I mean, I've been very critical of Gavin Newsom in other areas, but Governor Newsom, by Sunday evening, Monday morning...
He was gathering resources and committing Northern California firefighting vehicles and personnel and sending them to Southern California, realizing the risk of the fire that started on Tuesday.
He was reading the same meteorology reports.
He acted much quicker.
Karen Bass was still in Africa.
She did not decide to leave until Tuesday, until the fires had already started, even with this growing threat alert system that just ratcheted it up in terms of how alarming this was from Saturday to Sunday.
And she remained on this kind of non-essential trip.
So I went from a very similar sentiment to feeling some sympathy for Karen Bass.
If this was truly an act of God, maybe this is just unfair for people to criticize the mayor for not being there.
She has to travel sometimes.
But you scrutinize the details.
You look at these day-by-day reports from the U.S. Forest Service.
The National Weather Service, several research institutes in Southern California.
There have been a number of reports, even at the beginning of this month in January, warning of a risk throughout the month of these strong Santa Ana winds coupled with the dry conditions sparking a fire.
And then even the precision of these reports.
Last week, there were several reports predicting that the fires would start Tuesday, which is exactly what happened, and she still left for this trip.
Yeah, like meteorology is a science.
It's not astrology.
Like, there's a concrete, specialized knowledge that goes into these warnings.
But let me ask you about that, because a lot of the focus is on whether the firefighters have their resources they need, whose fault that is.
I want to talk about that in a minute.
But what I'm interested in is this idea of what could have been done, if anything, beforehand.
I mean...
This is not the first time that Los Angeles and California in general have suffered major fires that spread quickly because of the topography of the state.
This is actually something that has been common.
People's houses have been burned down before, not on this scale, but certainly in a pretty significant way.
So this is not something that's shocking.
It's not like there was an earthquake in Missouri and everybody was like, oh my God, we didn't plan for that because we didn't expect there to be an earthquake in Missouri.
This is a pretty...
Unsurprising event, even though again the magnitude of it is different.
Were there things that the state, the federal government, the local government could have and should have done to prevent this sort of thing from happening?
I mean, is there ways to clean the forest land and the trees and the leaves and other preventive measures that could have been done but weren't?
Look, I think there are going to be detailed investigations from the press and from government agencies looking into this.
To provide those types of answers.
I will say that since 2017, we've had an incredible number of forest fires in Northern California.
We've had the deadly Paradise Fires, the Sonoma County Fires, Camp Fire, incredibly deadly disasters that have killed many people, caused a lot of property damage.
And we've looked at investigative reports and how we could have prevented...
Those fires, a lot of it relates to PG&E, the utility interest that serves electricity in Northern California.
They had spent a lot of money in buying off politicians and fighting the very costly measures to bury power lines and deploying greater resources when there are storms and wind and lightning storms that tend to provoke these fires.
Since then, since these three major fires we've had since 2017, there have been power shutoffs when there are periods of high wind.
I've lost power even in San Francisco when there's been some power shutoffs due to high wind because they anticipate the potential for power lines to cause fires in those conditions.
As I understand it, all of the L.A. grid was still on, even with these 100-mile-per-an-hour I think that's one big question that has not been answered.
Why, if we already have this very recent experience in Northern California of needing to shut off the power grid to make sure that these power lines don't spark a fire?
Similar to the Lahaina fires, again, that was apparently also a utility-sparked fire where high wind conditions had knocked over a power line, started a fire, the wind kind of spread the fire, and the utility was too slow to shut off.
The grid, again, we still don't know why the grid was not turned off in Los Angeles County on Tuesday with those high wind conditions.
In terms of the water infrastructure, the personnel, the brush clearing, I mean, that just seems very sensible to me to look into where maybe there was inadequate resources deployed in terms of the infrastructure.
But I don't have the answers to that yet, and I think we'll have those in the next coming weeks and months as this is investigated.
Regardless of those specifics, though, let me just ask you this last question on this.
Donald Trump has campaigned for the presidency three consecutive elections now based on the argument that the United States is essentially becoming almost like a failed state, that things are broken, we have incompetent people running the government, things are corrupt, the government politicians don't actually care for the welfare of people.
And it does seem like for the country that's supposed to be the richest and most powerful country in the world, we not only seem to have a lot of these kinds of disasters, but they seem to get far more destructive and out of control than they need to be.
And we also have a lot of delay and ineptitude in providing services to people that they would need.
Also, the evacuation seems very chaotic.
The ability to stop this fire, I'm not an expert, so I can't say, but we just watched these hurricanes sweep through North Carolina and parts of Kentucky, and a lot of those people are still without homes.
We saw the oil spill in Palestine, in Pennsylvania, in Ohio, rather.
We saw the drinking water crisis in Flint, Michigan, and it just seems like we have this sort of crumbling infrastructure and a kind of ineptitude on the part of...
Government officials at all levels that is indicative of something fundamentally crumbling and broken and wrong in the infrastructure of how our country is run.
Do you think that's too much meaning to draw from this, or do you see how that might be valid?
No, I don't want to be chauvinistic here, but, you know, in many ways, California leads the nation both in terms of excellence and innovation and prosperity as the richest state with some of its most promising industries.
The country in decline, in ineptitude, in bureaucratic problems of inability to build and fix any major kind of crisis, whether it's the homeless kind of industrial complex of all these nonprofits that are constantly engaging in graft.
In San Francisco, we spend $700 million a year on homelessness.
That's basically $80,000 per homeless.
We have high taxes on many middle-class Californians, yet we have kind of a feudal tax system where many major corporations and commercial properties are basically not taxed at all.
In Los Angeles County, you have Disney and many hotels and other studios that basically pay no property taxes whatsoever.
And those taxes are essential because property taxes fund...
fighting and police, the kind of resources that are so needed in a crisis like this.
So there's both left-wing and right-wing critiques to what's wrong in California, bloated government, major powerful interests that don't get taxed and don't contribute in the same way that others do or should.
And nothing gets fixed, nothing changes, despite the kind of promises that the governors and politicians make, the supermajority that Democrats have in the state, nothing seems to get done.
Yeah, I mean, sometimes people forget how significant of a part of the United States California is.
It has 20% of the population.
It's the biggest state by far.
It has major industries, as you said, on which the U.S. economy relies, the entertainment industry, Silicon Valley, others as well.
And that innovation does continue at the top levels, but as you say, it just has become a symbol.
I mean, San Francisco in particular.
Which I think has been a lot of people's favorite city in the United States for a long time.
It was certainly mine, you know, has turned into this dystopia that has been well documented.
And watching what's happening in Los Angeles seems part of that same disintegration in a way that probably has a lot of different causes, but definitely seems to be reflective of something more than just a fire started as an act of God and it got out of hand.
All right, let me switch to this H-1B debate that happened between...
We actually covered this both on the show and then our after show.
But you've written this article about it.
I want to get to the article in a second, but one of the reasons I found that debate so interesting, so important, and it really erupted almost organically, spontaneously, started with this very aggressive and...
Not very delicately put post by Vivek Ramaswamy, essentially aggressively and harshly criticizing American culture for spawning sloth and laziness and an emphasis on non-productivity and, I guess, elevated Asian culture.
Chinese culture, Indian culture, as saying that that's the model that we ought to use and be more like, otherwise we're going to fall behind.
And for that reason, we just don't have a lot of Americans who are very high-achieving, and that's why we need to ship more people from India and China and other parts of the world who want to come to the United States into our country, otherwise we're going to fall behind, because basically Americans who live here aren't very impressive.
And that spawned this whole debate then about whether we want to be shipping more foreign workers into the United States under H-1Bs, which a lot of corporatists like Elon Musk and others who care about the prosperity of corporations favor.
And then you have these kind of hardcore MAGA ideologues who thought their movement was about elevating and prioritizing the American worker, not corporatist interest.
AND I THOUGHT THAT'S WHY I THOUGHT THE DEBATE WAS SO INTERESTING TO EXPOSE THIS KIND OF FAULT LINE THAT'S VERY REAL.
And I followed it closely for that reason.
I thought it was a very healthy debate to have.
But as it turns out, and I mean, I guess this isn't surprising, you were just mentioning this with the fires and the lobbyists in California, the utility companies who fight against regulations that might make them take certain precautions that are expensive but might avert a fire like this.
Same here in this H-1B debate.
There has been a lot of lobbying going on.
Your article that traces it was entitled How the Indian IT Industry Lobbies to Keep H-1B Visas Flowing.
There you see it on the screen on Lee Substack.
Talk about what it is that you discovered with this kind of indetectable money that you were able to discover that has shaped a lot of this debate.
Well, four years ago, Donald Trump campaigned on ending the H-1B program.
He kind of used the same formulation that he used a week ago in support of the program.
But on the flip side, he said, you know, I use these visas.
I'm familiar with this program.
Of course, it's used to exploit the American worker and bring down wages.
I'm going to end it.
You know, a week ago, he said, of course, I use these visas.
I'm familiar with the program.
I support it.
Changing his position there.
But when he was talking tough on the H-1B program four years ago, we had a similar debate.
It just wasn't quite as public, right?
Here we had, in the last few weeks, we had social media users.
We had major online personalities debating it, juking it out, and discussing the merits of this policy.
But in 2017 and 2018, you had a number of prominent Republicans, former governors, former Bush administration officials, and others.
Who are warning the Trump administration, the 1.0 Trump administration, don't touch this program.
If you touch this program, that is too much pandering towards the anti-immigrant sentiments.
You're hurting the American workforce.
If you want to prepare Americans for the 21st century, we need high-skilled workers.
America doesn't produce enough STEM graduates and the engineering and sciences.
Kind of the typical talking points in favor of this program.
What they did not disclose is that almost all of the folks who are making these arguments in the pages of various newspaper op-eds at the fancy think tanks in Washington, the Wilson Center, the Council for Foreign Policy, I'm mislabeling the name, the CFP. Okay.
In any case, at these think tanks, These leaders were not disclosing that they were paid by the major IT outsourcers who overwhelmingly used the H-1B program,
or they were being paid by a trade group in India that promotes IT outsourcing, either sending jobs directly to India or using visa programs such as the H-1B to send replacement workers to America, essentially engaging in labor arbitrage.
You know, one of the things that struck me is, like I said, I found it to be an interesting debate.
I found it to be a healthy debate.
I was glad to see hardcore Trump supporters pushing back so hard against people who have become crucial in the...
Trump camp, like Elon in particular, because they understand that his interests are not theirs.
And at some point, this is all going to come to a head.
And it sort of all ended when, as they call him, the boss intervened, which is how they see Donald Trump.
And he pronounced in favor of Elon Musk and Vivek and all of his big tech financiers by saying, no, he loves the H-1B program.
It's absolutely crucial, which, as you say, was the exact opposite view he held, not just in the 2020 election, but during the first term of the Trump presidency when he and Stephen Miller worked to limit those H-1B visas, argue mostly on the grounds that they are being abused, that they're being exploited.
I think nobody or very few people oppose the idea that if there's really some position that requires an extremely high level of specialists, Specialization that's crucial to the success of an American company.
And there's only a few people in the world who can actually fill that position.
No one in the United States is available or who is qualified.
You have to bring in someone from other places to do this job.
That's what the H-1Bs are theoretically meant for.
That seems to be an appealing rationale.
But you have a different article on your Substack entitled Corporations Exploit the H-1B. And there, you know, you make the argument that although that's a nice aspiration, that's not typically what they're used for.
What is the reality about how H-1B visas are typically used and why they become so important to these big corporations?
Just to correct myself a moment ago, I meant Council on Foreign Relations is where one of the think tanks has promoted the kind of H-1Bs without any disclosure of funding from Indian IT outsourcing.
But yes, there's just really a long history of this.
Of course, there are some people who come on H-1B visas who are entrepreneurs, who are working in high-tech fields, who are not simply brought in to lower American wages, but we have tens of thousands of other instances of workers who are using this visa, of companies who are using this visa to lower American wages.
There are many indignations, too.
If you look at just the record, it's not just tech companies.
Who are bringing folks in using these visas and essentially, what the record shows, are paying them a lower wage.
But many American corporations, when they have an IT department and they want to replace that IT department with lower paid workers, they will tap the H-1B program either directly by bringing them in as direct filers of the visa or bringing in one of these kind of...
There are a certain number of firms like Tata, Infosys, Cognizant, that really kind of specialize as independent contractors that will come in and kind of serve as the inside IT department for a major corporation.
And what we've seen over the years is that American corporations, a number of insurance companies, audit firms like PricewaterhouseCoopers, Disney, many others, have...
Laid off American workers.
And in order to qualify for their severance payments, their benefits, they have to train their replacement workers.
So these are the kind of outrages that have led to simmering anger at the H-1B program for many years.
That's the type of anger that Democrats and Republicans have promised to reform, but like Donald Trump, have gone back on that promise time and time again.
President Obama talked about these.
These issues and never really work to reform them.
But I just want to emphasize, there are ways to bring in highly technical, talented folks.
There's the O-1 visa, which is not capped.
There's tens of thousands of people who come in using that visa.
There are some people who use the H-1B visa who are truly kind of...
Specialized and have technical skill that's not available in the market.
But overwhelmingly, that is not what this visa is used for.
And the record clearly demonstrates that.
I think it's, you know, it reminds me a lot, you mentioned President Obama, that when he was first elected in 2008, he was elected on a kind of theme very similar to what Donald Trump used to propel himself to the White House the first time.
Which was rallying against establishment dogma, saying he's going to radically reformulate how Washington works and for whom it works.
And a lot of people believed that, got very passionate and excited by President Obama that first time because they actually believed it was sort of a singular opportunity to dismantle this political system that had become ossified and corrupt.
It was in the wake of the Iraq War, then the 2008 financial crisis, which happened at the end of the campaign.
And he got into office and instead he did almost none of that.
He just was the ultimate reinforcer of the status quo.
He aligned himself with big business interests and the military-industrial complex.
And it disillusioned an entire generation of liberals who thought, wow, we thought this was our real opportunity to change.
And because he didn't, a lot of them kind of got jaded about politics.
Trump sort of saved the Democratic Party, gave them a reason to be excited out of fear and negativity as opposed to something positive.
But I think Trump has the real potential to either embolden, This movement, by actually following through with a lot of it, but if he ends up captive to these kind of newly arrived people who really wanted Ron DeSantis the whole time, whose interests are completely the opposite of the MAGA ideology as it's been defined by Steve Bannon and MAGA hardcore adherents over the years,
I think a lot of them are going to end up turning off Republican politics, thinking the Trump movement was a fraud, maybe even going back to the Democratic Party or independents or whatever.
I don't want to tie you to predictions, but how do you see this conflict playing out?
Because the people who are kind of the anti-Maga people who have insinuated themselves into the Trump movement are the people who are more powerful and have a lot of money and gave Trump a lot of money.
And those are things he really values.
Well, look what happened in England.
In the UK, you had Brexit and Boris Johnson, who really championed...
That initiative and a lot of the kind of ideology and rhetoric around that movement was to stem the tide of immigration, to fight the kind of neoliberal forces of the EU, to kind of bring back kind of British nationalism and British economic power.
And what the Tories actually did when they're in office in terms of governing was importing many new people, bringing in more immigrants, basically in deference.
To their business allies.
There were many business interests in the UK that still wanted a cheap labor force.
They wanted more workers.
They wanted kind of a quick way to stimulate GDP growth.
So they thought they could, by bringing in more immigration, they would help stimulate that.
I think, and many people are now turned off from the Tories.
You know, they were kind of wiped out in the last election.
The polls still kind of show that this new Nigel Farage party, the Reform Party, is taking up the space that they once occupied.
And we're seeing a similar dynamic here.
As you mentioned, there was a very core Democratic base, especially in the Midwest.
If you look at the congressional record, the folks who fought for American jobs, who fought against outsourcing, fought against free trade deals, fought...
For corporate accountability and indeed even criticized the H-1B and fought for reforms on some of these visa programs, these foreign visa programs, people like Byron Dorgan and the Dakotas and many of the Ohio lawmakers who are part of the Democratic Party, they're not there anymore.
You know, the Democratic Party is wiped out in the Dakotas.
It's being eliminated in much of the Midwest.
And in its place, we now have Trump, who's making similar promises.
But if Trump cannot deliver, if he's in deference to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable and the other kind of big business...
And the Israel lobby and the military-industrial complex, the war machine.
That's right.
I think we're going to see something similar where the Republican Party just kind of fissures into a state of civil war, very similar to what we're seeing in the UK. Yeah, couldn't agree more.
Well, I hope people see the value of the work you do on Substack.
It's not just analysis, punditry, and opinion, but it really is hardcore facts that are very difficult to find elsewhere.
You know I'm a big fan of the reporting.
I hope people will check out your Substack.
Always great to have you on and see you, Lee.
Thanks for coming on.
Great to see you, Glenn.
Thanks for having me.
All right, talk to you soon.
All right.
All right, so that concludes our show for this evening.
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