Why are Big Tech Execs Integrating into the US Military? CBS Pays Trump $15 Million: With FIRE's Nico Perrino; Diddy Verdict Locals Exclusive
Silicon Valley's close collaboration with the military reaches a new level as tech executives are now being commissioned as lieutenant colonels in the Army. Plus: FIRE's Nico Perrino breaks down Trump's lawsuit against Paramount and warns of this administration's continued attacks on media outlets and free speech. ---------------------------------------------- Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Become part of our Locals community Follow System Update: Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook LinkedIn
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.
And just a quick note, I saw in the chat, one comment that we see fairly frequently that we say every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern.
And yet, for example, last night we did not have a show.
That does happen occasionally.
Usually the reason is, unless there's something involving me or my time or our staff time and we have a guest host, it's because we just don't have a topic that we think is worth considering.
As I've said before, we're very mindful that when we hit go on air, that we're making a claim to your time.
And we want to make sure that if we're doing that, we actually have something worthwhile to say.
We don't want to just cover things for the sake of covering them.
So when I say every Monday through Friday, that is the, I think, typical week.
That is the time that our show appears.
And although, of course, we do miss occasionally, we try and keep it to a minimum.
And I think we do.
All right, having said that, let's talk about tonight.
Several senior executives of America's leading tech companies, including major tech companies like Palantir and Facebook, have recently and proudly boasted publicly that they had just become commissioned officers in the U.S. Army.
Even though they had no previous career path in the military, they were just made like lieutenant colonels out of nowhere, the chief technology officer of Palantir and Facebook and others of that kind.
Now, strange and sudden as that is, one could write it off as symbolic if not for the fact that it is all part of an ongoing years-long strategy to integrate what we were always told were just all private, independent, social media and tech companies that make their own decisions to integrate them fully into the U.S. military and therefore the federal government.
This integration now is multi-pronged and it has been developed over many years and it has serious implications and we will examine those.
Then President Trump shortly before his inauguration and since has repeatedly sued various media outlets, not on the grounds necessarily that their reports allegedly defamed him, those cases, defamation when you're a public figure, especially the president, are almost impossible to win, but also that they were somehow otherwise harmful to his political reputation and to his political interests.
Many of the lawsuits that he brought against these media giants were extremely weak, to put it mildly, such as his lawsuit against CBS News and 60 Minutes, claiming that they edited Kamala Harris's interview prior to the election to make her look more favorable than her comments actually made her.
Now, many of Donald Trump's anger, much of it, and his criticisms of media behavior, including this case, are, in my view, completely valid as media critiques.
In fact, I have voiced many of those same critiques myself.
But few, if any, have any real chance of surviving even the earliest stages of a lawsuit, let alone prevailing with a jury and then on appeal.
Earlier today, though, it was announced that CBS News is paying $15 million to settle that lawsuit Trump brought over the editing of Kamlo's interview by 60 Minutes, and they're paying that amount to Donald Trump's presidential library.
The reason for this is clear, though it's not the one CBS gave.
CBS's parent company is in the process of a big merger and acquisition selling itself and needs the approval of the U.S. government in order to do so.
And they believe they can only get that approval from the U.S. government and the relevant agencies if they agree to pay millions of dollars to settle Donald Trump's lawsuit.
And conversely, they believe the Trump administration will block that deal if they don't pay.
Several other big media outlets have similarly paid to get out of lawsuits brought by Donald Trump, even though those lawsuits, any lawyer will tell you, let alone one specializing in press freedoms or media law, are just cases that would instantly be thrown out.
Fire.org is, in my view, the most reliable and nonpartisan free speech and free press group in the country.
We've talked about that many times, and we are delighted tonight to have back on the show the group's executive vice president, Nico Perino, to discuss the free speech implications from all of this, from suing media companies and outlets knowing that their parent company needs things from the federal government and then having them pay despite being very weak lawsuits either to Trump or to his presidential library in the hope of getting something favorable from the U.S. government.
Finally, and this will be a segment that we broadcast exclusively on our locals platforms after the show is over, exclusively for our local members, the music mogul and entertainer Sean Diddy Combs was acquitted by a federal court jury in Manhattan earlier today of the most serious felony charges against him,
namely racketeering charges and two counts of sex trafficking, which means that he coerced people to cross state lines in order to have commercialized or paid sex.
The jury acquitted him on those counts.
The only two charges on which they found him guilty were relatively minor counts.
They're still felonies, but compared to those others, minor counts of transporting consenting sex workers across state lines voluntarily.
And he's likely to get little, no jail time for those charges.
It was overwhelmingly a victory for Sean Combs and his legal team and a major defeat for the prosecutors who brought this case in federal court.
For our local members after the show on the locals platform, we'll analyze not so much the case itself.
I want to instead dissect how we think about criminal justice and why prosecutors often bring criminal charges they are unlikely to be able to win and prove.
And what lessons we can really learn here about our justice system and the discourse that emerges around it.
Obviously, there was endless media attention paid to this particular case, not because it involved landmark questions of justice, but because the defendant is a very famous celebrity.
But oftentimes trials that the public ends up following for that reason are really excellent vehicles for analyzing the dynamics that drive law and our thinking about it and the justice system generally.
So if you are a member of our locals community, you can watch our analysis of that verdict in the Sean Combs Diddy case.
Or if you would like, you can also join our locals community by clicking the join button right below the video player on the Rumble page.
It takes you to that community where you can join.
It gives you access to a wide variety of benefits, things like this exclusive discussion tonight that we'll stream only there.
We put a lot of video, exclusive video segments and video interviews there.
We sometimes stream exclusively there if we go too long on our show, such as tonight.
It is also a place we put professionalized written transcripts of every show we broadcast here.
We publish there the next day, but most of all, it's the community on which we really do most rely to support the independent journalism that we do here every night.
You can either go to greenwald.locals.com or just click the join button on the page that you're watching and it will take you directly there.
One more reminder, System Update is also available in podcast form.
You can listen to every episode 12 hours after the first broadcast live here on Rumble, on Spotify, Apple, and all the major podcasting platforms.
If you rate, review, and follow our program there, it really helps spread the visibility of the show.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update starting right after this brief message from our sponsor.
Summer's here.
I don't know if you know that or not, but it is here, which means it is time to relax and hit the refresh.
But if stress and sleepless nights and sore muscles are getting in the way of that summer relaxation, CB Distillery has got you covered.
CB Distillery's 4th of July sale is on and you can save up to 50% site-wide with the code Rumble.
Our sponsor, who has been with us for years since the beginning of the show, CB Distillery, offers targeted formulations for just about every ailment.
Sleep, stress, mood and focus, pain after exercises.
They even have CBD for pets.
And it's all made with the highest quality, organic, clean ingredients.
No fillers, just premium CBD.
I've talked about more.
My favorite product is their pain relief stick, which I use after playing tennis if I get some weird tendinitis or just a little pain in my wrist.
I swear to you, this is true.
I wouldn't say it if it weren't.
I take that pain stick, I rub it on my wrist, and instantly the pain subsides and I can go back to playing.
I've also been hearing a lot from other parents whose kids go to school with my kids, as well as like teachers and stuff, that CBD isn't coming increasingly popular as a treatment to just treat hyperactivity or attention deficit in kids without having to use pharmaceutical products like Ritalin.
It's a very natural way of dealing with it.
With over 2 million satisfied customers and 100% money-back guarantee, CB Distillery is the source to trust.
If you're struggling with sleep or stress, other health concerns, and you don't want to use pharmaceutical products or otherwise haven't found relief, make the change like millions are to CBD from CBD Distillery.
Their 4th of July sale is the perfect time to stock up and save up to 50% off with the code Rumble.
And if you haven't tried CBD, there's no better time.
Visit cbdistillery.com and use my promo code RUMBLE.
That's cbdistillery.com.
Promo code RUMBLE.
product availability depends on individual state regulations.
Thank you.
Social media platforms and big tech companies in general have obviously become extremely powerful, extremely consequential, play an increasingly central role in almost every aspect of our public lives.
And for that reason, we have covered that industry extensively in all sorts of different ways, starting with their censorship and the government's attempt to control their content, to pressure them to censor, but all different other ways as well.
And one of the topics I've reported on, though not as much as others, but might be ultimately the most consequential of all, is the very continuous, even if it's gradual, it's inexorable, integration of social media companies on the one hand, tech companies like Palantir and Facebook and Google on the one hand with the U.S. government and the U.S. military on the other so that it's a virtual merger.
There have been some developments and events along those lines that got way too little attention, far less than they deserve in my view.
And so we want to do a segment explaining these recent developments and understanding exactly why this is happening and what the implications and the real dangers are.
First of all, here is the Wall Street Journal from June 13th, just a couple weeks ago.
The Army's newest recruits, tech execs from Meta, OpenAI, and more.
You have, as I just said, some of the top executives from Meta, which controls WhatsApp and Facebook and Instagram, OpenAI, Palantir, which we did a whole show on a couple weeks ago, and others.
And these top executives, they're not military people, but they're nonetheless joining the U.S. military.
Quote, the Nerd Brigade is reporting for duty.
They probably won't win any push-up contests and might not be sharpshooters.
Yet for part of the year, a set of brainy Silicon Valley executives will trade their corporate-branded vests for U.S. Army Reserve uniforms because they know a heck of a lot about artificial intelligence.
The chief technology officers from Palantir and Meta platforms, Shyme Sonker and Andrew Boz Bosworth, respectively, will join Keith Wheel and Bob McGrew of OpenAI Pedigree to make up the inaugural cohort of a new Army Innovation Corps.
Their mission, swap corporate suites for bases, military bases, and bring some badly needed tech upgrades to the Army.
Bosworth said Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg supported his decision to join the reserve.
Quote, there's a lot of patriotism that has been under the covers that I think is coming to light in the Valley, he said.
The tech recruits will be sworn in as uniformed officers in a public ceremony on Friday, the day before the Army's 250 birthday.
Many in Silicon Valley assert that their cutting-edge know-how can equip the military for a conflict with a hot tech powerful adversary like China while profiting the tech sector.
Everybody wins.
New wars, massive profit for the tech sector, and a merger of the U.S. military and the corporations that know the most about you and that can most control your communication And the information you receive and how you think.
For the Army, the deepening ties can help it prepare for the wars of the future.
They are expected to be waged in part with ground robots and drones and rely on networks of sensors and artificial intelligence to coordinate it all.
Detachment 201 is the first deployment of tech elites.
Brent Parameter, the Pentagon's chief talent management officer, who has been leading the creation of a tech reservist program since late last year, is pushing for other services in the armed forces to follow the Army.
The tech reservists will serve for about 120 hours a year because of their private sector status.
Each will carry the rank of lieutenant colonel.
Also, the executives will advise the service on acquiring more commercial technology.
They will help the Defense Department recruit other high-tech Wizzes.
Now, let me just stop there before I read the next part, which is we often throw around the word fascism.
I don't mean we as in the show.
I mean we as Americans, we as people in the West who comment on politics.
Obviously, calling Donald Trump a fascist has become almost obligatory in liberal circles.
Lots of other leaders, including those who are democratically elected, get called fascist typically if they're right-wing populists.
And I think a lot of people use that term without ever really stopping and thinking about what it means.
Typically, when you study fascism as a kind of scholarly pursuit, you look at the dogma as shaped and defined by Mussolini and the thinkers on which that fascist government was based.
And then obviously Adolf Hitler as well.
And one of the primary defining factors is that there's no more separation between the public sector and the private sector, which has been foundational, at least in theory, to the United States.
Instead, there's a merger.
So now you have corporations and the government that work in conjunction with one another for the same goals and no longer separately.
And that's exactly what this is.
Here's something that the Wall Street Journal says in the next paragraph that I want you to listen to because it's extremely dubious, if not demonstrably false.
Quote, less than a decade ago, says the Wall Street Journal, even working on technology that might be used in the military, never mind suiting up for service was anathema in Silicon Valley.
The new reserve program reflects how the relationship between the Pentagon and the tech industry has deepened.
It's absolutely true that the relationship between the tech industry and the Pentagon is deepening.
And we ought to, that's why it's really worth stopping and thinking about, even though it's not much in the headlines in the news, it's probably as significant as anything that is in the headlines and a lot more significant than many things are.
But the idea that there's been some aversion to having serious cooperation between tech companies and the military and intel arms of the government is laughable.
A major part of the Snowden reporting, which was now more than a decade ago, reported how Silicon Valley companies, the leading ones, Google and Yahoo and Facebook and et cetera, Microsoft, were working hand in hand with the NSA to provide massive amounts of data without the need for a search warrant or any other legal entity.
Many of the largest tech companies like Amazon and Google have gigantic contracts with the CIA, with the intelligence community as a whole, with the NSA.
Palantir certainly has warmed its way in to the U.S. military, into the U.S. intelligence services, as our show that was very comprehensive about Palantir two or three weeks ago documented.
But that's been true of this from the start, especially about companies like Palantir.
Here from New York Magazine, the intelligence are part of it from September 28, 2020, a profile of Palantir.
Quote, back in 2003, John Poindexter, and this is something we talked about, but just a reminder, John Poindexter was Ronald Reagan's national security advisor, who got really caught up in the Iran-Contra scandal, was one of the key players in that, got discredited and disgraced for a little while, but as always in Washington, they all come back.
And by 2003 in the War on Terror, John Poindexter was in a very powerful position, and he got a call from Richard Pearl, an old friend from their days serving together in the Reagan administration.
Pearl, one of the architects of the Iraq War, which started that year, wanted to introduce Poindexter to a couple of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who were starting a software company.
The firm Palantir Technologies was hoping to pull together data collected by a wide range of spy agencies, everything from human intelligence and cell phone calls to travel records and financial transactions to help identify and stop terrorist planning attacks on the United States.
Poindexter, a retired rear admiral who had been forced to resign as Reagan's now security advisor of his role in the Iran-Contra scandal, wasn't exactly the kind of starry-eyed idealist who usually appears to Silicon Valley visionaries, yet he was precisely the person Peter Thiel and Alex Klarp, the co-founders of Palantir, wanted to meet.
Their new company was similar in ambition to what Poindexter had tried to create at the Pentagon, and they wanted to pick the brain of the man now widely viewed as the godfather of modern surveillance.
So this idea that Silicon Valley had some deep-seated, principled, mission-driven aversion to working with the Pentagon and the U.S. military-industrial complex of the intelligence community is utterly laughable, as the Wall Street Journal tried to convince you.
It is nonetheless true and more important that they are now working together hand in hand to the point where their executives are being commissioned into the U.S. military.
And even though it's a symbolic commission, it comes with responsibilities and duties and vows and oaths to bring these two entities, the U.S. government on the one hand, these tech companies on the other, more and more intertwined.
The name of the office that John Poindexter wanted to create that attracted Palantir was the Total Information Awareness Office.
And even in the post-9-11 climate, when pretty much anything went, that was a bridge too far.
It was just too creepy, too overwhelming.
And of course, so many of these intelligence programs, as we now know, and it should have been obvious at the time, though, justified in the name of monitoring terrorists, were in fact trained on the American people.
Here's Shyam Sankar, the chief technology officer on Palantir, who went on to X June 13th, two weeks ago, to celebrate his new role.
Quote, today, I'm joining the Army Reserve alongside some of the titans of the tech world, Boz Tank, Kevin Wheel, and Bob McGruel.
Our mission, help the Army transform for future missions and adopt bleeding-edge technology.
America wins when we unite the dynamism of American innovation with the military's vital mission.
Now, I want you to look at that language there.
America wins when we unite the dynamism of American innovation with the military's vital mission.
This is the key to our triumphs in the 20th century.
It can help win again.
Now, that should be language very alarming and very creepy.
As I said, one of the hallmarks, the defining features of fascism is when corporate power and state power are no longer separated.
They're combined.
So they're united, to use his words, and they work toward the same goal.
And while it certainly was true that tech companies and the military-industrial complex got very rich serving the U.S. government in the 20th century and the Cold War through contracts and through weapons and the like, there was still separation.
They were still, they were after profit.
The government was after its own goals.
There were all kinds of conflicting interests with competitors, with all sorts of different missions.
And even then, even with that separation, this is exactly what Dwight Eisenhower warned about, was the militarization of all aspects of American life, our corporations, our institutions, our universities.
That is Dwight Eisenhower's warning.
This is Dwight Eisenhower's warning on steroids coming true.
And they're very open about it.
He concludes, I'm humbled by this new opportunity to serve my country, my home, America.
Here is a tweet also from the same person, the CTO of Palantir, who says, you can read my reflections on patriotism, service, and joining the Army here.
You'll never guess who published him.
I'm grateful to Barry Weiss and the Free Press for publishing this article.
And the headline of the article was, I'm the CTO of Palantir.
Today I joined the Army.
Here's Kevin Wheel, who is the chief product officer.
Is it for Palantir?
I believe it's for Palantir.
I'm sorry, it's for OpenAI.
He's the chief product officer for OpenAI.
And this is what he says, quote, today I joined the Army Reserves as a member of the new Executive Innovation Corps, aka Detachment 201, alongside Sankar, BozTank, and Bob McGruel.
Thank you, Secretary of the Army and General George, for the opportunity.
A strong America is good for the world.
I'm proud to do my part.
Now, again, I don't really even necessarily have anything against these companies trying to get contracts from the military.
If the military wants weapons or technology, oftentimes they develop it themselves.
One of the points that often has been overlooked when we talk about these tech billionaires is that the innovation on which all of their wealth is based was not developed in the private sector.
It was developed by the U.S. government, funding of the internet and internet browsers and the like, as Mark Andreessen has described previously.
And somehow it all just ended up getting privatized.
The American people paid for it, but never got any of the rewards.
But you can argue that by having these American companies profit greatly, turning huge numbers of people into multi-multi-billionaires, if you believe that multi-multi-billionaires are beneficial to society, it kind of trickles down to everybody.
You can at least make that argument.
But there was always at least a separation, even when they were serving the U.S. military.
This is now an integration.
It is symbolic, but it's symbolic of something very pernicious.
When we did our whole show on Palantir, we showed you a lot about the ideology of Alex Cart because of just how warped it is.
Obviously, he's a, to begin with, as steadfast a loyalist of Israel as it gets.
That probably just goes without saying.
And he loves to say extreme things about the need for Palantir to make the United States feared throughout the world through its terrifying and terrorizing weapons that Palantir wants to develop for it.
Here he was at the 92nd Street Y in New York on February 18th, and here's some of his descriptions of Palantir's goals.
Jurg, you need a higher purpose, and I also think you often need a lower purpose.
Like the higher purpose for me.
What's a lower purpose?
Well, I love the idea of getting a drone and having light fentanyl-laced urine spraying on analysts who tried to screw us.
So that's my...
He's talking about fentanyl-laced urine, that drones will come and shoot at analysts who have criticized Palantir or doubted it.
But if you listen to his entire warped worldview and the weapons he envisions and the way they're supposed to terrify our enemies into full-scale submission, I don't really think that was a joke.
It may have been the kind of joke that embodies truth, but the truth is often told to Jess, and he might have wanted to say that and kind of wrapped it in the package of a joke so that there's plausible deniability.
But if you listen to his entire kind of mindset, his mentality that he's becoming increasingly comfortable with expressing and not hiding.
It's very consistent with a lot of things and a lot of the ways that he thinks.
Here's the rest.
Lower purpose.
And yeah, but and others.
But the higher purpose for me was to get this nation to be the preeminent power in the world because whatever faults we have, they're nothing like anyone else's.
All right.
So he definitely is a vocal advocate of America projecting its military strength throughout the world, not through the kind of peace through strength that Ronald Reagan talked about, that Trump likes to describe, but through actually killing people.
He's talked about how it's vital that people who are our enemies or Israel's enemies know that not just them, but their families, their wives, their wives' families, their children all have to live in fear about what we can do to them and what we will do to them if they oppose us.
So now this is not just the company that is overseeing and running the entire intelligence state, the surveillance state that of course is directed at American people, but they increasingly are looking to take over key functions of the U.S. military to the point that their top executives are now commissioned officers in the U.S. military.
They're not just business partners with or contractors for the U.S. military.
They're actually integrating into the U.S. military in a way that's formal.
A lot of this, of course, has to do with the government's desire to use AI, artificial intelligence in future wars.
You could just send robots to analyze based on algorithms who should be killed and then they just kill them.
We've been using algorithms of that sort.
One of the first stories, the very first story actually, that Jeremy Scahal and I did together after we founded the intercept in the middle of the Snowden story, he came down to Brazil because I couldn't travel at the time.
The U.S. government was being a little bit threatening about what would happen if I left Brazil and tried to come back to the U.S. So he came down and worked.
We worked on the story for over a month.
He had a lot of different sources.
We put it together with the Snowden archive.
And it was about how the Obama administration had created software and a framework for determining who they ought to kill by drone in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
And it wasn't based on human intelligence.
It was based on algorithmic analysis.
So they would collect the list of people with whom you were communicating by cell phone or in whose vicinity you were, and they would assign point values to all these activities that they were monitoring you engaging in.
And once you got a certain number that was above the threshold they had established, you became eligible for their kill list.
And some of the people, as it turned out, who had the highest numbers on this list and therefore eligible to be killed were people like journalists or government officials who obviously, if you're a journalist at Al-Jazeera, you're obviously talking to the Taliban, you're talking to al-Qaeda operatives in Pakistan because you're interviewing them, you're reporting.
If you're a government official, you're trying to mediate.
It's an incredibly dystopic way of determining who lives and who dies, but it's been in use for a long time and Palantir is trying to integrate it all and perfect it, not just through their control of the intelligence community, but also through the use of AI that will just analyze these numbers and data and not only determine who should be killed, but then go through drones or robots and everything they're else developing and actually go kill.
And I think wars where that you can fight without any risk to your own life, where you just can kill people, but don't have to risk your own soldiers, are wars that are far more likely to start.
Obviously, other countries are developing these too, not just the United States.
Here in the Wall Street Journal, this is at the end of last year, December 4th, OpenAI enters the Silicon Valley's hot new business, namely war.
So they're looking at war as their main growth path for Silicon Valley and specifically for OpenAI.
Quote, the world's most valuable AI company, and let's just take a minute to note here how much, how many billions and billions and billions of dollars have been invested in Open AI.
They're not going to get that money back because people pay a monthly subscription to chat with ChatGPT.
Their ambitions obviously are far beyond that.
And they need wars in order to make that happen.
And that was all the hullabaloo when China introduced their own version of AI, DeepSeek and others that were at least as sophisticated, but far, far, far less costly in terms of the amount of server they need, amount of the computational power they need, because there's a huge profit model embedded in OpenAI and Microsoft and everybody in the United States investing in AI.
And the biggest growth path is war.
And that's what's leading to this integration with the military.
Quote, the world's most valuable AI company has agreed to work with Adoral Industries, a leading defense tech startup, to add its technology to systems the U.S. military uses to counter drone attacks.
The partnership, which the companies announced Wednesday, marks OpenAI's deepest involvement yet with the Defense Department and its first tie-up with the commercial weapons maker.
It is the largest example of Silicon Valley's dramatic turn from shunning the Pentagon a few years ago to now forging deeper ties with the national security complex.
OpenAI, valued at more than $150 billion, previously barred its AI from being used in military and warfare.
In January, though, it changed its policies to allow some collaboration with the military.
This year, OpenAI added former National Security Agency Chief Paul Nakassoni to its board and hired former Defense Department official Sasha Baker to create a team focused on national security policy.
And of course, that's the other side of the equation.
It's not just that these executives are joining the U.S. Army and becoming officers in the military and expanding their collaborative and cooperative overlapping efforts with the Justice Department, the CIA, the NSA.
It's that they are also hiring for these key positions people from the CIA, people from the NSA, people from the faith, from the Pentagon, all to make it overlapping.
And this has been going on for quite a while.
Here is an article from Palantir, kind of, I guess, the press release, where they're announcing openly what they intend to do.
This is from November of 2024.
Anthropic and Palantir partner to bring Cloud AI models to AWS for U.S. government intelligence and defense operations.
Quote, Anthropic and Palantir today announced a partnership with Amazon Web Services to provide U.S. Intel and defense agencies access to the COD 3 and 3.5 family of models on AWS.
The partnership allows for an integrated suite of technologies to operationalize the use of COD within Palantir's AI platform while leveraging the security agility, flexibility, and sustainability provided by AWS.
Quote, our partnership with Anthropic and AWS provides U.S. defense and Intel communities the tool chains they need to harness and deploy AI models securely, bringing the next generation of decision advantages to their most critical mission, said Shyam Shankar, chief technology officer of Halandier, who's now proudly a U.S. lieutenant colonel, a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army.
Quote, we are now providing the same asymmetrical AI advantage to the U.S. government and its allies.
This is where the action's at.
This massively expanded military budget as part of the Big Beautiful bill, Trump's first ever trillion-dollar budget, it's going all to these companies, as we documented when we discussed the bill a few nights ago and the military increase that's part of it.
And these people have funded the Trump campaign, have their people and their minions all throughout the government.
And they're hiring people away from the CIA, the FBI, the NSA.
And this is barely ever discussed.
As usual, the most significant actions of the U.S. government are the ones that get almost no attention.
They give you this theater of other things.
How's Lisa Murkowski going to vote?
And is Trump going to get these things?
And what about the trans stuff?
And what about this and that?
While this is where the trillions of dollars are being transferred, the war plans are being laid for the future.
Here's Meta, which as I said, owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, three pretty significant platforms, to put that mildly.
In their own press release on November 4th of last year, open source AI can help America lead in AI and strengthen global security.
Quote, Meta's open source LLMA models are increasingly being used by a broad community of researchers, entrepreneurs, developers, and government bodies.
We are pleased to confirm that we are also making LLAMA available to U.S. government agencies, including those that are working on defense and national security applications, and private sector partners supporting their work.
Now, I want to just show you something that also has gone under the radar quite a bit that I think is really worth highlighting.
When we were talking a lot about the censorship of Facebook and Google and the pre-Musk Twitter and even TikTok, one of the things that was happening was that those social media platforms were hiring people right from the CIA and the Pentagon and the NSA and the FBI in order to oversee their
content moderation, meaning their censorship, to make sure that their censorship, their political censorship was aligned with the foreign policy goals of the United States government or the health goals of the United States government in the case of COVID, to again integrate the two.
So you put a lot of those people inside the Defense Department.
Now you even make them commissioned officers in the military and the CIA.
And then you hire people from the CIA and the Pentagon and the NSA to run your quote unquote content moderation.
And this has been happening for a long time.
Even independent of that, here is what Meta has been doing.
This is from May 8th of 2025.
Quote, Meta is recruiting former Pentagon officials as it ramps up its military ambitions.
Quote, Meta is courting national security and former Pentagon officials to help sell its virtual reality and ASI services to the federal government, Forbes has learned.
Multiple foreign government officials said they were aware of the recruiting efforts.
The company is seeking two public policy managers, including one to focus on the White House, preferably with a security clearance of previous Pentagon work to, quote, leader outreach to national security and foreign policy agencies within the executive branch of the U.S. government on policy issues and adoption of our technologies.
In January, Meta hired Francis Brennan, a former Trump advisor, to lead strategic communications out of D.C. Another recent hire who, according to their Lincoln work for an undisclosed federal government agency for more than a decade, posted about joining Meta to focus on its, quote, intelligence sharing with the government.
Meta declined to comment.
Look how overlapping this is.
From the verge, June of 2024, the former head of the NSA joins the Open AI board.
Paul Nakassoni stepped down as NSA director in February and will now join the company's Sam Altman-led safety team.
Defense Scoop, August 2022, ex-Pentagon chief data officer David Sperk joins Palantir.
The former defense official who served as the Pentagon's first chief data officer is joining Palantir as a senior counselor.
From Business Insider, May 2012, Google just hired the head of the Pentagon's research arm.
A Twitter account who goes by the name Namerdacted, who we've recommended many times before, built her or his entire page and account on tracking how many former members of the intelligence community have been hired by Facebook, Google, and even TikTok.
TikTok's now doing it to assuage the U.S. Government to run their censorship decisions.
Here was a thread from August 2023: quote: Why has Meta hired more than 160 individuals from the U.S. intelligence community since 2018?
Is the Global Engagement Center directly providing funding to Meta?
Is this a modern-day version of Operation Mockingbird, which was an attempt in the past by the CIA to control media outlets and the output of them?
Here's one of the examples cited.
Quote, Aaron Berman possesses an extensive background at the CIA spanning two decades before joining Meta.
In 2019, he built the, quote, misinformation policy team and wrote content policies overseeing censorship during the 2020 U.S. election and COVID-19.
Notably, he collaborated with fact checkers to censor, quote, misinformation in U.S. and foreign elections.
As of May 2023, Berman holds the position of lead for elections policy content.
And there's a bunch more.
Katherine Rose spent a decade at the CIA and Director of National Intelligence before joining Meta in 2020.
And she collaborated with the CIA's Aaron Berman in composing the presidential Daily Brief.
And then after leaving the White House, became a member of the oversight board of Meta in 2022, where they were among the top 20 individuals involved in the decision to suspend Trump from all Meta platforms.
And this Twitter account really demonstrated just how extensive this is, where the people who were making the decisions about what should be censored, and obviously this is something that we covered extensively, the people making those decisions were people they purposely hired from the CIA, from the NSA, from the Pentagon, from national security state, the surveillance state.
They were the ones making the decisions about what ideas you were allowed to express on our biggest media platforms and what ideas you weren't.
They even put out propaganda videos featuring these people.
Here's Aaron Berman, who spent a long time at the CIA and now who is one of the primary centers at Facebook.
And here he is making a cute little video about his role first at the CIA and now as part of Facebook's chief censor.
My name is Aaron.
I've been with Facebook for two years now and I'm a product policy manager.
What does your job entail?
We're part of the team that writes the rules for Facebook.
If something violates our standards for safety and security, what Facebook could, should, can do.
You and your team are faced with very important decisions, especially when it comes to content.
There's very little agreement whether we should be leaving more content up, taking more content down with any particular rule or issue that we're looking at where something has come up where the rules are not 100% clear, we're not going to make everybody happy.
How does your team work on that?
Transparency is incredibly important in the work that I do.
How do we think about the balance between harmful content and protecting freedom of speech?
It's a balance.
Does it ever make you feel uncomfortable to be put in a position where you're having to draw the lines?
and I think it should make me uncomfortable and all of us who do this work.
If 99% of the people are expressing their...
There's so many people like this, Aaron Berman, in all of these companies.
And as I said, TikTok, in order to stave off the attempt to shut them down, began creating Facebook and Google of all their former CIA and Pentagon officials, as well as people right from the government itself.
This is the integration that we're talking about.
The last one I want to make, because our guest is here and I want to get to him and to that topic, is one of the things that I began noticing during the Biden administration was that there was often legislation passed, or rather proposed in the Congress that would weaken big tech in some way.
The official bipartisan position of the U.S. Congress has long been that Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google are monopolies.
And there's various legislation that has been passed to either break them up, to make the marketplace more competitive, to otherwise limit the control that they could have over our discourse.
And usually when anybody proposes some kind of a weakening of the power that big tech has to control our political discourse, the people who are the first and the loudest to object, who argue that it's vital that we preserve the monopolistic,
gigantic power of big tech, are former military and intelligence officials who say, no, the sprawling power of Facebook and Google that obviously they control and that they're overtly integrated increasingly all the time is crucial to our national security.
It helps us spy on our country.
It helps us spy on other countries.
It helps us propagandize.
It helps us determine the flow of information.
Here's an article I wrote just one of them when I was at Substack in April of 2022.
Former intelligence officials citing Russia say big tech monopoly power is vital to national security.
This was at the height of the fear over Russia.
Russia had invaded Ukraine and they were saying, look, if you want to fight Russia, you need to keep these platforms gigantic and free of limits on their power.
And then they just moved on to China or whatever.
And the open letter that was written urging big tech to be preserved as is was people like James Clapper, Leon Panetta, Michael Morrell, Michael Rogers, all the standard suspects, including most of them who signed that letter suggesting that the Hunter Biden laptop was not in fact authentic, even though it was, but was likely the byproduct of Russian disinformation.
These are all the people who are building this mass sprawling military and surveillance apparatus that now not only includes the federal government, but also increasingly a unity, as they call it, between our private, our nominally private sector biggest tech companies and those aspects of the federal government that spy on us, that create wars.
And they're very open about the fact that their future profit is increasing their surveillance state and starting more wars and playing a major role in them.
And The fact that they're now openly celebrating their commission into the U.S. military while also serving as the key executives of these biggest companies is not just symbolic, but it's a way of announcing we want you to see that this union is happening right before your eyes.
And obviously that means far less constraints on both the government and the corporate entities themselves because they're consolidating as one big, gigantic entity intended to have very few limits or safeguards on what it is that they can do.
It deserves a lot more attention.
We have a lot more to report on.
continue to do so even if nobody else does or very few people do as all of this continues to unfold Celebrate Independence Day.
As you might know, that's happening this week on Friday.
And some people celebrate it Thursday as well with an epic July 4th sale.
Stock up on the best supplement from brickhouseenutrition.com.
Save big, 25% off everything with the code Fireworks25.
Get Lean, their number one weight loss supplement packed with natural studied ingredients.
No injections, just real results to help you slim down for the summer.
Or try Field of Greens, the superfood drink.
So powerful, they guarantee your doctor will notice your boosted health or your money back.
They've been a sponsor of ours for quite a long time and we've heard nothing but good things about them.
Collagen peptides are yet another fan favorite for glowing skin and hair.
Beauty experts say collagen is the fountain of youth for skin and hair.
And I'm sure you're looking at me saying, well, you, Glenn, have the fountain of youth.
You've preserved your youth.
And it comes from thinking about how to do it with all of these products.
From weight loss to wellness, Brick House Nutrition has it all and our listeners can't stop raving.
The sale is huge, but it's only here for a few days and products will sell out.
Don't wait.
Head to brickhouseenutrition.com and use Fireworks 25 for 25% off.
Let's go big this 4th of July.
BrickHouseNutrition.com, stock up now.
Thank you.
We've often talked on this show about our admiration for fire.org, which essentially does what the ACLU for many decades used to do as well, which is defend our core civil liberties, including free speech and free press, without the slightest regard to who are the ones attacking it or who are the ones whose rights are being eroded.
Nico Perino is a friend of the show.
He's the FHIR executive vice president, and he's also the creator and host of FHIR's, so to speak, the free speech podcast, where a lot of interesting discussions take place.
I believe I was on there once, and if not, I'll demand an appearance very soon.
Prior to his current role, he led FIRE's communication department for nearly a decade, and his writing has appeared in many places throughout the country and the world.
He has become one of the foremost, and I think one of the most interesting civil liberties advocates.
He's also the author of the forthcoming book, Triumph of the Civil Libertarians, How a Generation of Lawyers, Writers, and Activists Created America's Free Speech Century.
Nico, it is always great to see you.
Thanks for joining us tonight.
Glenn, happy to be back here.
All right, so there's this spate of very unusual lawsuits that have been brought by Donald Trump against numerous media outlets.
And I think if these lawsuits were plausible or viable, nobody would have a problem with them.
President Trump has the same rights as a citizen as anyone else, not to be defamed, not to be defrauded, etc.
But I think at least in most of these cases, if not all, any person who's a lawyer or even, let alone someone who's specialized in media, would tell you that they would never take that case for fear of being sanctioned.
That's how dubious and weak they are and almost certain to get booted out of court.
And in so many of these cases, these big corporations have paid massive amounts of money, unthinkable amounts, millions and millions of dollars.
They've never paid anybody else.
In order to settle the lawsuit, they go to Donald Trump or his presidential library or somewhere else that he directs it.
The latest case is the CBS settlement by CBS's parent company, Paramount, paying $15 million to Trump's presidential library, not even because he claims they defamed him, but because they claim they edited Kamala Harris's pre-election interview in a kind of way that made her look better than she really appeared, which could be valid, but I can't imagine that would be the basis for a lawsuit.
What is going on?
Why are these media companies that usually take the very hard line when they're sued over their journalism suddenly opening their pocketbooks and pouring millions and millions of dollars out?
Yeah, well, to understand that, I think it's important to get some background here.
So let's talk about the Kamala Harris interview, right?
So she's interviewed for the election.
Donald Trump actually declines to be interviewed by 60 Minutes.
Bill Whitaker is interviewing her.
Bill Whitaker asks her a question about Israel, and she gives a two to three sentence answer.
In its broadcast, 60 Minutes uses like the first part of that answer and leaves out the second part.
In a social promotion, it uses the second part of the answer and leaves out the first part.
But both parts of the answer essentially say the same thing.
But it's Kamala Harris.
She speaks often in word salads and 60 Minutes edited for length and clarity, as all news programs do.
I mentioned to you, or you had mentioned in introducing me, that I created the documentary Mighty Ira.
It's a 90-minute documentary that has about 50 hours of recorded footage that we needed to combine down into 90 minutes.
All documentaries, all TV-edited TV segments, all Netflix-limited series that you watch, edit their programming for length and clarity.
That's just the nature of broadcast or televised media.
Now, some people say, well, this is election interference, but I want to caution people.
Trump didn't file a lawsuit alleging election interference.
He filed a lawsuit in Texas alleging consumer fraud, the idea that this was a fraudulent interview.
Now, you might think it is.
You might think it isn't.
You might buy that it was just edited for length and clarity.
But there are two things you need to understand about the First Amendment, that lying, so long as you're not defaming anyone and no one's alleging defamation here, is protected by the First Amendment.
You can lie about receiving the Medal of Honor, as the Supreme Court has ruled.
Other than that, what is this?
This is just another way to go after misinformation.
We opposed it when the Biden administration did it.
Now we're opposing it when the Trump administration does it and calls it something else, whether it's consumer protection, consumer fraud, Or news distortion.
These are all words for the same thing, and they're all protected by the First Amendment.
Let's assume for the moment that the allegation about the 60-minute editing, in terms of their motives, is correct, namely that Trump's view of what they did and what their view of the view of a lot of his supporters did was accurate.
Namely, that CBS, 60 Minutes, are known Democrats.
They are hostile to President Trump like most of the media.
They were really desperate that President Trump lose the election and Kamala Harris win.
The answer Kamala Harris gave was kind of incoherent.
And let's say even worse than incoherent.
Part of it might have been offensive.
And therefore, 60 Minutes edited that video in a way to protect Kamala Harris and her political reputation and her chances in the election.
Let's assume all of that is true.
Is there any basis for a opposing politician to sue a media outlet based on the fact that they edited an interview in a way that was too favorable to that subject?
No, I don't see any viable claim that would withstand First Amendment scrutiny.
I mean, MSNBC does this all the time.
Fox News does it all the time.
At the same time that Trump was making these allegations about CBS, people were on the other side were making these allegations about Fox News when Trump appeared at a barbershop in the Bronx and Fox News had edited out a bunch of stuff that was also incoherent.
Look, there's going to be no love lost here on the media.
I'm not here to defend the media.
All I'm here to do is to defend the First Amendment.
And if we are going to oppose using the tools of the federal government or the most powerful person in the United States of America and the world to prevent them from making an exception to the First Amendment for misinformation, then you need to stand against this, just like we needed to stand against it when the Biden administration alleged that social media companies were tweaking their algorithms to favor one thing or the other.
I mean, this is something that you need to stand against regardless of who's in power.
And if the more that media companies, whether it's Meta or X, which have also capitulated and settled over claims that were frivolous, the more they do this, the more the Trump administration or a future administration is going to see this as a viable way to put media organizations under the boot.
Behavior that gets rewarded gets repeated.
And Trump was rewarded today to the tune of $16 million.
Yeah, I mean, it would be like if you sued Fox News for their 18 months of coverage, convincing Americans that Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons and we started a major war based on those lies and it turned out to be untrue.
And then suddenly you're suing Fox News or the New York Times that did the same thing or the New Yorker or all the journalists involved.
Part of a free press is that they're permitted to say things that end up being partisan or spun or ideologically motivated or even in error or false.
Again, as long as you're not defending anybody.
Obviously, if they had 60 minutes published a report saying Donald Trump is a pedophile and they knew that was false and it turned out that it wasn't, then he would have a good claim to sue.
Let me ask you this question though.
So, okay, it's a threat to press freedom to have these companies held liable for these kinds of reports, but the reality is, and I can say this with 100% certainty, absolutely none of these cases were going to go anywhere.
They were going to be thrown out right away, precisely because of what you just said.
And yet, you have these media companies that, again, usually if they're sued, you know, like Sarah Palin sued the New York Times because they had implied, I think very unfairly, that she was somehow responsible for the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords, that congresswoman in Arizona, because she published a report putting a target,
you know, a kind of like a gun target or a rifle target on the districts, yeah, put it in the crosshairs of the districts she wanted to turn red, including Gabrielle Giffords' district.
And the New York Times published this crappy, sleazy editorial suggesting she was responsible for the murder.
And they fought Sarah Palin for, you know, five years, up and down the appellate process, two different jury trials.
They ultimately prevailed.
They spent millions and millions of dollars.
That's what media outlets typically do in a case like this.
Here you have a far less plausible case, and yet these media companies are opening their coffers and turning over many millions of dollars to Trump or entities that he has an interest in.
Why are they doing that?
Well, there are two reasons for that.
The first has to do with the unique position that Paramount, CBS, the parent companies of 60 Minutes are in right now.
They're trying to merge with Skydance Media.
And in order to merge with Skydance Media, they need to get FCC approval, the Federal Communications Commission.
And in order for that to go through, there is this perception that Trump needs to essentially sign off on it.
So Trump had criticized 60 Minutes, not just in this lawsuit, but in a tweet, and urged his FCC chairman to impose maximum fines and penalties on 60 Minutes for this news segment.
After that, and after the lawsuit, we saw that Bill Owens, the longtime executive producer of 60 Minutes, 24 years executive producing the show, had resigned because he said for the first time in his career, the suits at the top of 60 Minutes, at the top of Paradont, were telling him how to direct his coverage at 60 Minutes.
So there was this merger that they needed to get through and they needed the federal government to approve it.
The second thing is that we have seen that Trump is willing to file lawsuits and is willing to use the power of the federal government to go after his political opponents.
So even if you keep fighting this out in court and you win at every stage, there's the risk that Trump's going to find a new way to go after you and make your life miserable, just as he's done with Harvard University, by the way.
Harvard has won at every stage that it has fought the Trump administration in court.
But as the Soviet Union once said, show me the man and I'll find you the crime.
And there's something like nine or 10 different investigations Of Harvard for all these alleged infractions that are going on right now.
And it's all seemingly retaliating against them for standing up against the Trump administration in the first place.
So it's the merger and it is the standing up to the Trump administration.
I'd say one other thing about Brendan Carr, the head of the FCC, who was really good on policing misinformation and threatening news outlets.
Oh, yeah, he was on my show.
We had him on my show at least a couple of times when he was not the chair of the FCC, but a member, a minority member, because he was very outspoken about the evils of big tech censoring political discourse, which we agreed with him completely.
And then he gets to be the chairman of the FCC and starts threatening media outlets that if they spread disinformation or partisan reporting, that they're going to have the government come after them, which seems very similar to the thing he was condemning.
Yeah, and he wouldn't call it misinformation.
He'd call it news distortion to obfuscate what's actually happening here, which is policing of what he alleges to be news distortion, but is actually misinformation.
But Brendan Carr was pictured going to a bunch of government meetings wearing a gold lapel pin with Trump's face on it.
So when you have the president of the United States, the man who appointed him to be chairman, who told him to impose maximum fines and penalties on 60 minutes because of this Kamala Harris interview, and that chairman is wearing a Trump gold lapel pin.
If you're one of CBS, Paramount's lawyers, what are you going to think about the outcome of this news distortion complaint?
What are you going to think about the outcome of this FCC review of your planned merger with Skydance?
You could understand why CBS or Paramount would seek to sell all the First Amendment behind them.
If there is no viable claim that Trump has that this is actually a form of consumer fraud, you could understand why they would come to this conclusion because they've seen what's happened to other people.
I mean, on the same day that, or within the same 24-hour span that they went after, or that they announced a settlement with CBS, Trump said that we should look in to Elon Musk and maybe sick doge on him because he criticized a bill in Congress.
And this is the president of the United States saying that we should investigate and potentially doge Elon Musk and his companies because he publicly criticized a bill in Congress.
I remember when Joe Biden stood at the podium and suggested that the federal government should look into Elon Musk's foreign ties around his purchase of X and conservatives were up in arms about this.
There is radio silence about this.
And Glenn, you know this.
We are nonpartisan advocates for free speech.
We were just as vocal over the last decade in going after liberal censorship.
But the opposition or the opponent of free speech is always power.
And right now, the Buddha is on the other foot and conservatives have power and they're wielding it to go after their political and ideological opponents.
If we believe in free speech as a principle, we need to call out our side when it's doing the censoring.
Yeah, I mean, look, when I first heard of FHIR, it was in connection with your advocacy.
And I'm not sure you were with FHIR at the time, but certainly at its founding when it became known, what FHIR primarily was doing was defending conservative students and right-wing speech because it was increasingly being the target of censorship and punishment by university administrators.
And a lot of people at the time believed that FHIR was a right-wing group because that's where a lot of its support came from because at the time it was battling against more left-wing administrators.
And then people like when you do that and get upset when you start applying the principle equally.
Let me ask you this.
You know, I certainly do share a lot of the right-wing critiques of media outlets.
I do believe they are overwhelmingly devoted to what they perceive as their mission that's superior to journalism, which is stopping Donald Trump and his movement.
I believe they manipulate the news and their reporting to propagandize on that behalf.
They skew things all the time.
I absolutely believe that I've been saying that for a long time.
That's nothing new.
But at the same time, I don't, every president in my lifetime hated the media and believed the media was extremely unfair to them and in favor of the other side, starting with Richard Nixon, who had enemies lists of people in the media.
That's how much he hated them.
And you go through all of them.
I mean, Bill Clinton thought the media was trying to destroy him and his personal life and his family because of their obsession with Whitewater and that whole scandal, George Bush.
I mean, every president you go through, no president ever thinks the media is on my side.
Really, I've never heard anybody say, by the way, oh, the media is biased in favor of my views.
But as much as all of these presidents have the same views of the media as Trump has of the media, they're manipulating the news on behalf of my opponents, they're propagandizing the public, have any of them tried anything remotely like this as a way of retaliating against the media or forcing them to get into line?
I mean, I'm sure they have in the past.
I mean, I've lawsuits for their personal benefit.
Yeah, well, in this case, it's important for your listeners to know, as you suggest, the lawsuit was filed by President Trump in his personal capacity.
And it's not the first time he's done this.
We're representing a client in Iowa right now, Ann Seltzer, who was a pollster, who got a poll wrong about the outcome of the 2024 election, predicted Kamala Harris was ahead, or the polling suggested that Kamala Harris was ahead.
And Donald Trump is suing her in the state of Iowa again for consumer fraud.
It's another frivolous, frivolous lawsuit.
But no, this is very unique.
And the last six months have been unique.
We haven't seen the threats to free speech from the executive branch at this scope, scale, and intensity, at least in the last two decades, not in my 13 years doing this work.
I mean, just in the last 24 hours, we have the forced multi-million dollar settlement with Paramount that was over obviously First Amendment protected activity.
You've threatened Elon Musk, a private citizen and his private companies with a federal investigation spoke out publicly against a bill in Congress.
President Trump threatened CNN with prosecution for reporting on the existence of an anti-ICE app.
And he threatened a mayoral candidate with added government because he is allegedly a communist.
I mean, what's going on here?
Conservatives, and I joined arms with conservatives for the last decade would have been up in arms over this if, for example, a presidential candidate or a president said that he was going to put extra scrutiny on a mayoral candidate because he was conservative.
I think we just, we need to apply the principles of free speech evenly, regardless of who is in power.
And even at the FCC, which oversees broadcast media, at the end of the Biden administration, they dismissed some news distortion, again, another word for misinformation, news distortion complaints against CBS, ABC, and Fox.
And they dismissed another one against NBC for an equal opportunity complaint, all because this was First Amendment protected activity.
There is nothing to see here.
There's nothing to investigate.
But then when Brendan Carr comes in and President Trump assumes office, they reopen the complaints against CBS, ABC, and NBC, but do not reopen the complaint against Fox.
This is just blatantly partisan.
It's a blatant violation of First Amendment.
We need to call it out when we see it.
But unfortunately, I think too many people are being quiet as these violations continue to occur.
And we haven't even talked about all the other threats to the First Amendment over the last six months related to criticism of Israel or to people who are here on visas or green cards who are getting deported because they're writing op-eds.
I mean, it's just ridiculous.
Yeah.
And by the way, you know, I was trying to think of an analog to threatening to deport Zoran Mandani after he wins a sleeping election.
It would be like, you know, if Arnold Schwarzenegger wins the governorship of California, which he did during the Clinton administration, and of course, Arnold Schwarzenegger was a naturalized U.S. citizen like Zaran Mandani and Bill Clinton said, you know what?
I feel like he misled us during the naturalization process about what his real views are.
Yeah, he won the governorship, but I think we're going to go ahead and deport him and prevent him from being governor.
I mean, just imagine the universal uproar over that.
I just have a couple more questions.
I actually want to show you this video of Trump.
You referenced where they threatened CNN with prosecution, criminal prosecution for this app.
That was really done by Homeland Security Director Christy Noam while she was with Trump.
And then Trump added on a separate threat to prosecute CNN for something else.
I just want to show you this video and then ask you about it.
Madam Secretary, CNN yesterday pushed an app that lets you track where ICE agents are.
Tom Homan was saying that perhaps CNN should be prosecuted for that.
As a construction of law enforcement, your response?
Yeah, we're working with the Department of Justice to see if we can prosecute them for that.
Because what they're doing is actively encouraging people to avoid law enforcement activities, operations.
And we're going to actually go after them and prosecute them with the partnership of PAM if we can.
Because what they're doing, we believe, is illegal.
And they may be prosecuted also for having given false reports on the attack in Iran.
They were given totally false reports.
It was totally obliterated.
And our people have to be celebrated, not come home and say, what do you mean we didn't hit the target?
We hit the target first.
The pilots came home and they said we hit the target first.
They may be very well prosecuted for them.
What they did there, we think, is totally illegal.
Okay, let's go.
All right, now to be clear, what CNN did there was someone inside the government leaked to multiple media outwards, including CNN, what was in fact a preliminary assessment of the defense intelligence analysts, which was that we're not really sure that they actually obliterated the site in Iran through this bombing.
We think they might have severely damaged it, but not obliterated it.
CNN reported on it accurately, but President Trump was angry because he had said it was totally obliterated and this report contradicted it.
The idea of criminally prosecuting a media outlet for their reporting at all, let alone when they accurately report the contents of a government document, is so mind-bogglingly preposterous.
And yet it's almost become like a weekly routine that President Trump openly speaks about criminally prosecuting media outlets.
And again, there's been very few people expressing more contempt for corporate media outlets in this country over the last decade than I have.
But nonetheless, there's a pretty red line when it comes to the government threatening to criminally prosecute them for that.
What do you make of that particular threat?
Yeah, that's new.
I mean, these issues go back to when the New York Times and the Washington Post reported on the Pentagon papers.
But even in that case, they weren't threatening to criminally prosecute the news outlets for reporting on that.
They were just saying that this was a threat to national security and trying to prevent the outlets from publishing it.
This, as you note, was an intelligence report that the government put out that it does not deny and that CNN simply reported on.
It's just mind-boggling.
I don't even know what the claim would be here.
But this isn't the first time that President Trump has just thrown out the threat of prosecution.
As you know, he even threatened to sue the New York Times for reporting that legal experts have called his suit against 60 Minutes and CBS baseless and an easy case for CBS, which it is, right?
And he's threatening them with prosecution or a lawsuit because he's alleging something like tortuous interference.
Like he's just throwing stuff against the wall.
And fortunately, the New York Times doesn't have a merger before some government body that it has to worry about pissing him off.
But I would say this also about the app that CNN reported on, the anti-ICE app that tracks where ICE agents are.
I'm sure many of your viewers use Waze or Google Maps and see the notifications when there is a police officer ahead or there is a speed camera up ahead.
And some of your viewers might have actually clicked the button to help notify their other Waze users or other Google users that that police officer is up ahead.
Now, the DHS secretary there said that this is essentially criminal.
She's saying it's criminal to have an anti-ICE app that tells you where law enforcement is and that urges people or suggests to people that they actively avoid law enforcement activity.
Anytime that you Use that app that tracks where speed cameras are or where police are, you're actively avoiding law enforcement activity.
Is that criminally prosecutable too?
I mean, Americans do that every day.
You're allowed to report in the United States of America accurate information.
You are allowed to report also inaccurate information as long as it's not defamatory.
This is the United States of America.
So there's no claim here.
This is First Amendment protected activity, and we need to call out the chilling nature of these comments for what they are, which is an effort to censor.
All right, last question about all this, and then I'll let you go.
One of the things that bothers me the most about all this is not even necessarily the threats to criminally prosecute media outlets or to sue them or whatever.
It's the implicit undertone, which is very much, it's almost explicit sometimes.
You alluded to it earlier, which is, hey, you need government approval in order to get this deal you want done where you're merging with a big company that you consider profitable for yourself and your shareholders, but you need my approval in order to do it.
I'm not going to let you have that.
But here's a lawsuit, maybe not very meritorious, but nonetheless, it's a lawsuit that will allow you to pay me $15 million or pay my presidential library $15 million.
And if you do that, you're probably going to get the approval that you need from my administration to go ahead with this merger.
I mean, isn't that very redolent of, kind of has the stench of, if not in fact is a form of blatant bribery?
Yeah, I've called it extortion in the past, right?
This is how you get business done in a banana republic.
This isn't how you should be able to get business done in the United States of America.
This is extortion, bribery, I mean, whatever you want to call it.
I mean, that's what it smells of.
And all of this is also jawboning as well.
The threats that he's making against news outlets, like if you don't do this, there might be that.
Or the threats of criminal prosecution for clearly First Amendment protected activity.
I mean, this is something that on his first day in office, he tried to prevent with an executive order against jawboning.
He said he was going to be the free speech president.
I believe a lot of people voted for him because they thought he was going to protect free speech.
But we haven't seen the golden era for free speech in the last six months.
Quite the contrary.
We've seen repeated threats to free speech.
And we've seen repeated threats to free speech in just the last 24 hours.
I remember during the Kamala Harris Tim Walls campaign when Tim Walls trouted out shouting fire in a crowded theater to suggest that hate speech wasn't protected by the First Amendment.
And everyone in the First Amendment community, including myself and me and FHIR, spent a week going after him for that.
A week going after them for that.
But it's like, as soon as we go after one thing and call it out for its censorialness, it's like another thing comes up.
It's hard to keep up with.
Yeah.
And I should just say before I let you go too, that I do blame these media companies a lot.
You know, when President Trump was trying to force these big law firms into like a kind of surf or indentured servitude agreement where he said, like, I'm going to ban you from entering federal courthouses unless you agree you're going to do hundreds of millions of dollars of free work for my causes and my agenda and not do this.
And half of them signed it.
And the other half said, what?
We're not going to do that.
We're not going to take your threats.
We're going to fight you.
And they've all been winning because it's supposed to be the idea that if you're a law firm, especially a very big one, very lucrative one, that you have certain values you're supposed to protect.
But a lot of these media outlets that claim to be journalistic and have the obligation to stand up for the government when it did it, like the New York Times and the Pentagon Papers, are just such cowards.
They really only care about profit.
I think that's one of the things that has ruined journalism is the corporatization of it because corporate values are about avoiding conflict with powerful factions like the government, whereas journalism is about confronting them.
And I do think the few that have resisted like the New York Times, as much as I want to choke when I say this, deserve credit for having done so.
Nico, it's great to talk to you.
Even better to know that you and Fire are out there doing this work.
I sleep better at night knowing that, and I'm sure we'll have you back on shortly.
And it was great seeing you.
Have a great evening.
Thanks, Len.
Always glad to be here.
Good night.
All right, so, all right, so that concludes our show for this evening.
As a reminder, as I said earlier, we're going to do a segment about the verdict in the Sean Diddy-Combs case, not to talk specifically so much about Diddy and his case and what happened and who the witnesses were, but more to kind of draw out some important lessons that we can learn about the just system, how we think about the just system, how prosecutors often work, why this verdict happened, because it's some insight into how a lot of these trials proceed that don't get the limelight that this one does.
We're going to do that exclusively for our locals members on our locals platform.
So if you are members, you can just stand by right when we're done with the show.
It should take a minute or two and we'll be live on locals.
With that segment, if you want to join the locals community, which is what we rely upon to support the independent journalism that we do here every night, you can simply click the join button right below the video player on the Rumble page.
It will take you directly to that platform.
There are a whole lot of other benefits in addition to this sort of exclusive streaming that we do there.
And as I said, most of all, it is the community that really enables system update to be broadcast every night and for us to do the kind of job that we try and do here.
For those who have been watching this show, we are, needless to say, very appreciative.
We hope to see you back tomorrow night and every night at 7 p.m. Eastern Live, exclusively here on Rubble.
