Dan Schneider warns AI weaponization—backed by Biden’s 2023 executive order and Kamala Harris’s past influence—threatens free speech by silencing conservatives, citing DHS grants under Majorkis targeting groups like PragerU and CBN. Legacy media, despite Trump-era pushback (e.g., Daily Wire exposing bias), still dominates narratives, with Google allegedly censoring Israel post-October 7 while mislabeling Hamas. CBS’s Margaret Brennan, tied to Biden via her husband, falsely equates conservative speech with Hitler’s tactics, illustrating systemic bias. Without urgent congressional action, Schneider fears free speech could vanish in a single election, leaving America isolated as other republics collapse under similar pressures. [Automatically generated summary]
Hey everyone, it's Andrew Claven with this week's interview with Dan Schneider from the Media Research Center, one of my favorite places running one of my favorite websites, Newsbusters.
I've mentioned this before on the show.
I'm not sure I've talked about it during the interviews.
On the night that Donald Trump was elected, I felt an extraordinary and uncommon peace come over me, which had nothing to do with the fact that Donald Trump had been elected, although it couldn't have happened without him.
What it had to do with was my realization that to some degree, the mainstream media, which I considered one of the most corrupt and harmful institutions in the country, had been defeated.
And it had been defeated by places like the Daily Wire and Joe Rogan and Megan Kelly and all the people who had earned the ability and created the ability to debunk what they were saying in real time.
However, even though it has to some degree been pushed back, there doesn't seem to be a lot of impulse to reform.
And so I wanted to talk to Dan about what he thinks is the future of the media and where he thinks it stands now.
He is a lawyer, a policy professional, a political strategist, and he's the vice president for free speech at the Media Research Center, which, as I say, runs Newsbusters, a fantastic site, keeping a full record of the lies we are being fed daily from the news media.
Dan, thank you so much for coming on.
It's great to see you.
Andrew, it's great to be on your show.
And congratulations to Brent Buzzell, your president who has just been sent out off to South Africa.
I think it's congratulations as an ambassador.
I will miss him, but I think that's a great honor.
I'm not sure who's going to sign my paycheck.
He may be back sooner than he thinks.
So in the aftermath, I mean, this election, I think, without question, was a massive defeat for a media that had done everything, every single thing in its power to demonize Donald Trump and make people think he was Hitler against the evidence of our own eyes.
And I'm wondering, do you see any move on the part of the big media to answer this with reform, to say, gee, the people don't like us, we're going to change?
Andrew, just recently, the heads of NPR and PBS had to testify before Congress, and we were actively involved in that.
And they were completely recalcitrant.
The CEO of NPR said that she's never seen any bias whatsoever.
The head of PBS was shocked, shocked to discover that the great bulk of coverage of the Democratic Convention was positive by our standards and our scorecard, and the great bulk of the Republican convention was negative.
She was flabbergasted by those studies.
They have shown zero interest in changing.
I would have expected them to come forward and say, you know, ever since Uri Berliner wrote the editorial that showed how biased NPR is.
And Uri Berliner is a longtime NPR employee, self-proclaimed liberal, who's had it.
Maybe the head of NPR would have come forward and said, you know, I have vowed to hire two conservatives for every one liberal that we hire from now on.
No, no, she just said that her editors are solid and she stands by them.
Wow, that's amazing.
Before I ask you, I want to ask you more about this, but what does it mean when you help out the Congress to ask those questions?
You supply them with evidence?
Is that what you're doing?
Well, you know, the Media Research Center has been studying NPR and PBS literally for 36 years, documenting their bias, their prejudice, their manipulation of information and data.
Had we printed out all 36 years of our stories and studies, we estimated it would have stacked up to be 18 feet high.
We couldn't do that.
We did create a six and a half foot tower of 15 years of our studies.
And so that was in the hearing room, our left-leaning tower of bias.
And those 15 years worth of studies were entered into the record by Congressman Brandon Gill of Texas.
And we were working with the members of Congress, getting them ready for these hearings, making sure they understood how biased NPR and PBS are.
But those two state-sponsored taxpayer-subsidized media outlets, they are reflective of ABC, NBC, CBS, the New York Times, the Washington Post.
They are all recalcitrant.
They are not changing.
They are only getting more aggressive in their bias.
Do you think, I visited your plant once many, many, many years ago.
It's just an amazing place where you have all these records of bias and of news media reporting.
Is it your opinion that when these people sit and tell Congress that they see no evidence of bias, are they telling the truth as they see it or are they lying like hound dogs?
You know, I got to meet the CEO of CBS years and years ago, the former CEO, a guy named Tom Wyman, who was probably the last publican to hold a senior officer position in any of these media outlets.
And Tom told me that he couldn't, even though he was the CEO, he was powerless to make any changes whatsoever because all of the other leadership were to the left.
And any effort on his part to change anything would have only resulted in his termination.
I think they probably, they certainly know that they've got a point of view.
They don't think they're biased, however, they just think they're right and that all of us Neanderthals are wrong and we just need to get in shape and get in line.
Yeah, yeah.
So I watch CNN from time to time.
Now, CNN, when it started, was a really good spot news, you know, really gave good spot news coverage.
And the seeping into the coverage of left wingism until now, it's really just a propaganda outlet, has destroyed it.
Nobody watches CNN.
More people see CNN when the Daily Wire plays a clip to make fun of it.
When you guys put it up, I think, on your website on Newsbusters, I think more people see CNN then than actually see it in real time.
Is there no profit motive?
Is there nothing that will stop them from going there that maybe say, hey, we'd like people to watch us?
You know, Andrew, I think there are two really important things to keep in mind.
Most of these companies seem to have abandoned a profit motive.
They've targeted a market, but it's not based on maximizing profit.
Instead, it's about a political agenda.
And connected to that then, let me just preface.
I am a lawyer.
Here at the Media Research Center, I cover First Amendment free speech issues, big tech censorship, but I care very deeply about our constitutional rights.
So it's important to keep in mind what the First Amendment is.
It comprises five elements to it.
First, freedom of religion.
And most people should know what that really means, though there's still some dispute about that.
The second is freedom of speech.
And that's for the individual, because our founders had the wisdom to understand that the only way for a country to be free is if the people can express their point of view, especially when they're in the minority.
When we're in the minority, if we cannot argue based on logic and reason why our point of view is right and superior and why people should vote for our side as opposed to those in power, then all will be lost.
And here's the critical point, Andrew.
It's only until we get to the third element that we discover that there is a freedom of the press.
The first two elements, freedom of religion, freedom of speech for the individual, those are reflective of our natural God-given rights.
God did not come down on high and say that the press, these corporate entities, that they have a God-given right.
Instead, our founders understood that the best way for the individual to amplify their voice, to exercise their free speech rights, would be through the press.
The press, then, certainly is protected by the First Amendment, but they bear a responsibility, a responsibility to express information and news in an accurate way.
Now, we're always going to have bias.
We always have had bias, always will have bias.
But the media has completely, legacy media, has completely abandoned their responsibility under the First Amendment to provide a platform for individuals to express their point of view, for information to be disseminated fairly.
Sure, there will be bias, but no longer is that what they're doing.
They are propaganda outlets.
They are political arms of the left.
And so not only are they abandoning a profit motive, they're also abandoning the constitutional responsibility.
And that is a real threat to us.
Now, I saw with the networks who of all the media, I mean, they're obviously not as bad as cable.
They're not as bad as MSNBC, although NBC and MSNBC are connected.
But, you know, they got rid of Nora O'Donnell.
They got rid of Lester Holt after the election.
But at the same time, they had that woman on CBS whose name just went out of my head who actually said, was it to JD Vance, said that Hitler weapons?
Margaret, thank you.
Margaret Brennan, that Hitler had weaponized free speech, which the ignorance of it was almost as appalling as the point of view.
Free speech caused the Holocaust.
I mean, it's unbelievable.
I believe Margaret Brennan said.
And look, look, I just, Andrew, I can't help myself.
Margaret Brennan's husband worked for Senator Joe Biden.
You know, like so many of these so-called journalists, legacy media outlets, they all either worked for Democrats, like Chuck Todd and Jake Tapper, or they're married to people who worked for Democrats, or they were political operatives themselves, like George Stephanopoulos.
Over and over and over.
Margaret Brennan is a left-wing political hack who also seems to hate Jews.
And so much so that she tries to silence us by claiming that this most cherished right of ours, free speech, is in fact a threat to humanity killing Jews, which of course is absurd.
It's incredible.
And what I keep wondering, somewhere there's a businessman who owns, there are businessmen who own these entities.
And I understand that there are motivations.
You know, I understand why NBC Universal covered up the Harvey Weinstein story.
I get that.
But at some point, I'm looking at the TV and I see a woman say something that stupid, that ignorant, and that biased, and that against her own interests, because if they're going to silence people, they're not going to run the government forever.
One day, maybe she gets silenced.
How come she doesn't get fired?
I mean, what is it at the top that motivates these guys?
These are capitalists.
They run these very profitable companies.
What is it at the top that makes them say this is all right, do you think?
You know, I talked with some of the CEOs, not at media outlets, but other very big corporations during the Black Lives Matter protests and asked them why they were doing what they were doing.
Middle-of-Night Wake-Ups00:03:46
And they fessed up.
They were terrified.
They were terrified that their employees would abandon them.
There's one well-known corporation that engaged in a boycott of sorts of a famous sporting event who confided in me that he was terrified that such a boycott would cause his company to lose tens of millions of dollars.
I don't think that's what's going on with these media outlets and social media companies like Google and Facebook, Meta.
They have a political agenda.
If I could just, Andrew, if I could just expand this to social media companies, Google is my nemesis.
Here's an example of how radical Google is.
And Google's got all the money in the world.
But after the October 7th attacks on Israel, when the other platforms expressed sympathy for Israel and stood by Israel, Google failed to have a response for at least three days, any response whatsoever.
Finally, Sundar Pichai finally issued a statement three days later simply saying that Google has employees in Israel who are Christians, who are Jews, who are Muslims, and he hopes they are all safe.
But we did our own little investigation into Google's AI system.
Back then it was called BARD.
We asked BARD, what's the capital of Lebanon?
What's the capital of Egypt, Syria?
All the countries that not only border Israel, but are close to Israel.
And BARD, Google's AI system back then could tell us the capitals of every single country, except for one.
When we asked BARD, what's the capital of Israel?
It was not able to tell us.
And when we asked Google's AI system, what is Black Lives Matter?
What is the Irish Republican Army?
What is Red Dawn?
All these things, AI could tell us all of those things.
But when we asked, what is Hamas, suddenly Google's AI system couldn't answer that question.
It didn't know.
It wasn't capable.
Over and over and over, Google in particular, but these other tech platforms have shown how biased they are, how they manipulate information, manipulate our minds.
Our legacy media is bad.
So are the social media outfits.
Now, many of you I know would love to have a Helix sleep mattress so you could sleep in ultimate comfort.
I have a Helix sleep mattress because I never sleep and I want to be awake to feel my ultimate comfort.
You guys miss it because you're fast asleep because it's so comfortable.
But for me, Helix Sleep is wonderful because I'm awake all night and I can feel just how comfortable it is.
One thing I've loved about my Helix mattress is how well it does with temperature regulation, which really eases some of those annoying middle-of-the-night wake-ups, which I do get.
Plus, it's easy to connect to other wearable devices so you can actually see the data to back up your sleep improvements.
What makes Helix different is they don't just sell you a random mattress.
They actually match you with the perfect one for your body and sleep style.
Whether you're a side sleeper, back sleeper, or like me, a non-sleeper, they've got you covered.
And trust me, when you find the right match, you will wonder how you ever slept or lay awake on anything else.
Right now is actually the perfect time to upgrade your sleep because Helix is offering a sale for their spring savings event.
Go to helixleep.com slash Clavin to get 20% off site-wide.
Hey, that's good.
That's helixleep.com slash Clavin for 20% off site-wide, start sleeping better, and even lying awake better with helixsleep.com slash Clavin.
Common Carrier Conundrum00:06:32
Let me ask you about this because, you know, it seems to me that during the last election, during the last two elections, social media went out of their way to suppress information, to silence dissent, to, you know, they kicked the New York Post, one of our oldest, maybe our oldest newspaper, off, you know, social media.
If Elon Musk had not taken over Twitter, I'm not sure there would have been a conservative voice in this last election, and they almost, they went after Elon Musk hammer and tongs to stop him.
What is the answer here?
Now, I've repeatedly said, and I'm kind of feel a little bit alone on this, on the right, that we need regulations to stop them doing this.
I mean, it seems to me you have new industries, you need new regulations.
The word regulations makes conservatives throw their hands up in the air, but everything we do is regulated.
All human relations are regulated in some way.
And when these institutions were formed, when these companies were formed, they were given a special right to act neither as a publisher nor as a common carrier.
That was to help them thrive.
They thrived.
There's no question about it.
They're thriving.
Is there something we can do without violating our principles of free speech to stop these guys from cutting off Americans' voices?
Well, Andrew, because I have a brain, I am not an anarcho-capitalist.
I am instead a free market conservative, classical liberal.
So I understand that there is a critical and necessary role for regions.
The free market is not God.
The free market does not exist in perpetuity all by itself.
Just like, you know, your lawn, if you don't take care of the lawn, it's going to get weedy and terrible.
So it's really important that we have laws that say things like, you can't blow up your competitors with dynamite.
That's a crime.
We need lots of laws and regulations to ensure we have free markets.
And when it comes to big tech, I actually do think that they're common carriers.
I know they are common carriers.
If you look at the definition of common carrier law, they fit squarely in what a common carrier is.
And just for our listening audience here, common carrier law has been the law of the land even before our nation was founded.
And it was the controlling law of the land in our country, except for a short time in our nation's history when we said it's okay to deny service to black people on trains.
And that was finally overturned in the Topeka Board of Education decisions.
But common carrier law prohibits discrimination from people precisely because in those situations where denial of a service will prevent the free market from working properly.
So we do need laws.
We do need regulations so that the free market works properly so that people can be free.
Right.
But now people say, well, you know, on a common carrier, I can call up my friend and tell him I'm a Nazi or whatever horrible thing I want to say.
And the phone company can't stop me from talking as long as I'm not committing a crime.
Is that a problem on a website like X, you know, where I get attacked by Nazis all the time.
And I can see that they have free speech, but I do wonder, is there something special about social media where they should have some control over people who talk on it?
Yeah, look, I love your first and second examples here.
Let me just amplify on this.
AT ⁇ T, if somebody is a terrorist, not known to AT ⁇ T as a terrorist, applies to AT ⁇ T for service, AT ⁇ T is required to provide that service.
There's no discretion allowed.
AT ⁇ T must provide service as a common carrier.
If that terrorist then uses those phone lines to call in a bomb attack, because AT ⁇ T is a common carrier and did not have the discretion, then AT ⁇ T is not liable for that attack.
Just like these big tech platforms should not be liable when people put things on their lines that are criminal.
Now, once it's known that something criminal is going on, then they are required to act, but they are not required to investigate in advance if somebody's a bad guy.
I am sympathetic to private companies when there are really heinous, horrible people doing heinous, horrible things on their platforms.
They do have some recourse there, but what they cannot do is discriminate based on political viewpoint or race or gender.
But this is exactly what these big tech platforms have argued before the Supreme Court.
Justice Alito in the NetChoice case, this is literally what happened.
Justice Alito asks the NetChoice, that Google lawyer, is Uber, which is actually a tech platform, is Uber allowed to deny service to a black man because of his skin color?
And the NetChoice Google lobbyist answered in the affirmative, claiming that Uber has a First Amendment.
I always scratch my head on this because we know what the First Amendment is about.
It's about religion, speech, press, assembly, and petition.
Google has a First Amendment, or Uber has a First Amendment right to discriminate against anybody based on religion, based on political viewpoint, based on race.
We've seen how Facebook has discriminated against people because of their religion.
Not because their religion is harmful, but because they didn't like the religion, the Sikhs, for example.
Facebook took down the website of the Sikh.
This is wrong.
This is un-American, and it should not be allowed.
Google was arguing this.
Google was arguing that Uber had a right to refuse service.
It's the NetChoice.
NetChoice is the lobby group that's largely funded by Google.
But so the NetChoice lawyer in the Supreme Court was arguing that Uber, one of the members of Uber or Lyft, one of the members of NetChoice, that they have a legal right, a First Amendment right to discriminate against anybody for any reason, that Uber or Lyft's rights to discriminate supersede all other rights.
Wow.
AI And Censorship Efforts00:09:44
It's absurd.
Yeah, it's not.
We're talking to Dan Schneider from the Media Research Center, which runs the fabulous site Newsbusters, which if you haven't seen Newsbusters, it's worth going to almost every day.
Let's talk a little bit about the state of art as it is right now.
The New York Times has become almost a joke.
I mean, I sometimes read the headlines out loud to my wife just to make her laugh because it's like they have every headline except look out, Trump is sneaking up behind you.
They hate this guy so much.
Do you feel that the New York Times still has the power to set the agenda of the cross-country media the way it used to?
Or has it lost some of that because they've gone insane?
No, it really does still have that power.
It's losing its market share.
Fewer and fewer people are reading the New York Times, but people reading it are the main influencers.
And that even goes for social media influencers.
These young social media influencers, they're not coming up with this stuff on their own.
The New York Times, network, TV, even though their audience base is shrinking, they're still highly influential.
And now, what is changing, of course, is that conservatives have alternatives.
We're not just stuck with Walter Cronkite anymore.
We've got the Daily Wire.
I listen to my Morning Wire every morning, and I listen to the Morning Wire afternoon update every afternoon.
It's an excellent place to get news.
And there are plenty of alternative media outlets, but the legacy media still drives the news coverage.
And is there something that you feel the right should be doing that it's not doing to counter that?
Because one thing that I'm frustrated by, and I know everything takes time, but I feel the New York Times has more reporting power than all the right-wing outlets put together.
I mean, they just have, they can go anywhere.
They can parachute 30 people into Alaska if they want to go after Sarah Powell and they're just have this amazing power of reportage that we don't have yet.
What are the things you want to see happen that will put MRC out of business, as it were?
Well, let me first say, just maybe not with my MRC hat, but just my personal desire.
Americans are woefully uninterested about international events.
And it's really hard to get news now overseas.
That's one of the things that CNN used to do so well.
And the New York Times used to do pretty well.
International coverage.
What's going on in Rwanda?
What's going on?
How many people can actually tell us what the Chinese Communist Party is doing in Palau?
It's really scary what China is doing throughout Asia.
Small countries, how they're literally taking over villages, buying off chieftains.
But how do you get that kind of coverage?
It's really hard now to get good and fair coverage about what's going on overseas.
And that's really important for us as Americans.
We cannot be the last constitutional republic on earth.
If we're the last one standing, then we'll be picked off easily.
Yeah, yeah.
What will it take to get the MRC out of business?
I think we're going to be in business a long time because the radical left is here to stay.
Do you think so?
I mean, it does look like, I mean, one of the things about that hearing with PBS and NPR is that Catherine Maher did have to back down on things she had tweeted.
She did renege, you know, and which was kind of shocking.
You had this feeling like she understood that whatever had supported her in the past had been fragmented to some degree.
Do you think that the radical left, I mean, I know the radical left is here to stay, but do you think that their influence is here to stay at the level that it's been at?
Look here, there's one thing that is really going to create a moment for the left to contemplate their power base.
That's artificial intelligence.
It's a complete unknown right now.
What is going to happen?
When Kamala Harris was the AI czar, and people forget that she was the AI czar, they know she was the border czar.
She was also the AI czar.
That Joe Biden executive order on artificial intelligence was specifically designed for two purposes.
It was to drive out all competitors to just to the biggest AI companies because Joe Biden wanted to control all AI.
And you can't do that if you've got a thousand developers.
So he was trying to drive out of business, most of them.
And the second thing, and Kamala Harris spoke about this in her word salad kind of way, but she used three words that were very clear, in artful ways.
She was talking about how you have to feed information into the machine.
Of course, what she meant to say was how you train AI.
But she then explained that AI will determine people's opinions and policy outcomes.
And we have not yet broken some of the stories that we're about to publish yet, but we are going to show really the extent to which the Biden administration was paying AI developers specifically to exclude and censor conservative media outlets and conservative voices.
This was really greatest threat to, I think, American principles and values.
If the left could control AI and control the development of it to silence political opposition, we would have been done for.
But now there's a new world.
What is going to happen with AI in a fairer system?
How are we going to use it?
And it could be the case that AI is going to really replace the liberal narrative.
If AI programs can be trained on a broad set of data and produce more accurate, more compelling information, that could be the end of the left's stronghold on knowledge, their version of knowledge.
All of these things that happened under Biden, which I found incredibly, I found shocking.
I mean, it's hard to shock me at this point, but still, the fact that people allowed that sort of censorship to go on.
Will they be, do you think the Trump administration will put measures in place to make that more difficult in the future?
Or do you think if we're one election away from losing our right to free speech?
Yeah, Andrew, we just published a week ago our big study.
There were 93 different federal agencies involved in the Biden censorship cartel, where he was directing them to silence conservatives and can silence opponents of his agenda and his mission.
93 federal agencies.
We listed names, well over 200 senior people, many of them career bureaucrats, specifically involved in this censorship effort.
We shared that with every single agency head in the Trump administration.
We've shared that with Congress.
Of course, President Trump issued an executive order on day one banning federal censorship of U.S. citizens.
But that's, you know, look, I grew up in farm country.
You can tell a herd of cattle, they got to stop.
That's what the executive order did.
Now it's time to actually stop the stampede.
That's trickier than people may realize.
So it's a long effort.
Much of that censorship has been stopped, but even that which was stopped is still ingrained culturally.
And Congress really does need to act to prohibit these specific acts of censorship.
Let me just give you one example, something we uncovered here at the Media Research Center.
The Department of Homeland Security and their targeted violence and terrorism prevention grant program.
Our tax dollars, supposed to be used to catch terrorists at the border.
Instead, DHS under Majorkis was using our money to train people on how to infiltrate conservative organizations.
And they created the pyramid of far-right radicalization.
And you guys were implicated in it.
Thank heavens.
I would have been insulted if we'd been left off.
I know.
But you were, you know, many conservatives were equated with militant neo-Nazis, not just the garden variety, silly, stupid people we hear from from time to time, but the militant ones who have guns and bombs.
And our tax dollars are being used to say that Prager University and the Christian Broadcasting Network are part of this neo-Nazi consortium and have to be stopped.
Wow.
Wow.
You can't make this stuff up.
No.
Dan Schneider, the Vice President for Free Speech at the Media Research Center.
Again, go to their site, Newsbusters.
The reports, the studies that you guys do are great.
And also just watching the clips is hilarious.
Thank you so much for coming on, Dan.
It's really good talking to you.
I appreciate it.
Hey, thanks, Andrew.
All right.
Some of that stuff, really scary, the effort that they put into censorship in this administration and the fact that the press was on their side the whole way.
That's Dan Schneider, Vice President for Free Speech at the Media Research Center.
Terrific organization.
And congratulations again to Brent Pozzello who was just made ambassador to South Africa.