Tucker Carlson exposes Democrats’ push to silence One America News (OAN) by pressuring DirecTV, Verizon Fios, and Frontier to drop its signal, citing "disinformation," despite OAN’s 10–15th place cable rankings. Host Dan Ball reveals coordinated attacks since 2020—YouTube demonetization, shadow banning, and letters from Sens. Anna Eshoo and Jim McGovern—after OAN reported on Hunter Biden’s laptop, COVID-19 vaccines, and election fraud. Carlson calls it a First Amendment violation, comparing it to mainstream media’s unchecked misinformation on Russia, vaccines, and borders while OAN faces White House exclusion and technical disruptions. Ball predicts OAN’s survival via streaming as younger audiences flee legacy media, framing censorship as a democratic threat. [Automatically generated summary]
If the First Amendment means anything, and it has to if this is going to remain America, it means that the U.S. government cannot censor the news.
It can't make laws to stop journalists from saying what they think is true.
So that's not an arcane legal question.
It's in the text.
It's the...
First Amendment to our Bill of Rights, the whole point of America.
And yet, out there in the open, Democrats are working to shut down news organizations all over the country.
We've reported on this for a couple of years, but in no case are they doing it more openly than their attempt to shut down a conservative news channel called One America News, OAN. So why are they doing this?
Well, they say the channel pushes something called disinformation.
Now, disinformation, you should know, does not mean that something is...
It's dishonest or factually incorrect.
It can be entirely true.
It just means that the people in charge don't want to hear it and they don't want you to hear it.
So it's therefore disinformation.
It's a term stolen from the intel agencies, which are part of the apparatus in the federal government that Democrats are using to shut down the news.
So here's California Governor Gavin Newsom going after OAN for daring to say that the vaccine might not be safe and effective.
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Well, the platforms are of concern, of course, and platforms have to do a better job across the spectrum.
But there are also those that are propaganda machines that are out there as well.
Let's be candid.
One American News, you're familiar with them down here.
Perhaps one of the great disinformation networks in America.
Oh, and it's one of the great disinformation networks in America.
There's a guy who lies.
Every day for a living, and it's not a guess, it can be proven, there's a guy who locked down the entire state and then went to the French Laundry in Napa for dinner without a mask on, that guy is accusing other people of disinformation.
So what you have here is the oldest story ever told.
The people in power don't want to be criticized, and in a so-called democratic system, they don't want voters to know that they're liars and incompetent, so they shut down.
Anyone who tells the truth about them or who spreads a message they don't care for.
It's just abuse of power.
It never changes.
It's been going on since Nebuchadnezzar, and he learned it from his grandfather because it's never not existed.
But this country officially disallowed it, made it illegal with the Bill of Rights, which is just now being ignored.
So House Democrats are putting pressure on cable providers to cut ties with OAN. Because that's not unconstitutional somehow.
So we're watching all of this.
It's getting no attention.
And we thought, why not speak to someone at the center of it, Dan Ball?
He's a host of Real America on One America News on OAN. And he joins us now in the studio to explain what's happening to him and his employer.
I mean, I've got nothing to do with OAN. I don't even own a TV, as you know, but...
I think it is, I hate the word, but it's existential.
It is a question of life or death for the country, whether or not the First Amendment stands.
And the idea that Democrats in power are trying to shut down a news organization for saying things they don't like, which, by the way, happen to be true things, is really a threat to life as we know it.
So thank you.
So tell us just, I'll ask you simple questions and get out of the way.
How are government officials trying to shut down your news organization?
And then, of course, COVID. We're in the middle of COVID. We busted through the narrative of the masks aren't working.
When Joe took over and he told everybody to get the vaccine, he was talking about that winter of death and everything.
We were talking about the irregularities, rather, you'd see with the vaccine when it comes to side effects and deaths.
They didn't like that.
So it was kind of cascading downward from the Hunter Biden laptop story to COVID coverage.
And then we had the 2020 election, okay?
And we had people on, of course, discussing irregularities in the election.
They didn't like any of that.
So it started several ways.
YouTube demonetized us.
I mean, every time we put a story about COVID, masks, distancing, the laptop, boom, take it down, 30-day suspension, 60 days, or just try to kill the whole account.
And then all of a sudden, letters came out.
I think about 21 or 22. And somebody can correct me if I'm wrong on the date.
But you had a letter, and I think I gave them to your producers.
There was a letter from four Democrat senators and two California Congress folks, Democrats, who sent letters to not only, All of the satellite and cable carriers, but also to advertisers.
And they use that little thing from NewsGuard, which I've heard you talk about NewsGuard and that ESG rating and pyramid system.
I mean, Breitbart, Gateway Pundit, places like that would cover it and say, OAN's under fire, da-da-da.
But when you have 98%, as you know, of the mainstream media that leans heavily left, and every other day we had an article from Mediate, Media Matters, Daily Beast, Rolling Stone even, ripping OAN. There's dozens of them online.
Myself, too.
Calling me out, calling me a purveyor of disinformation, a liar, a propaganda.
When I was out there talking about ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, which worked, by the way, because I did them when I was sick with COVID and I felt better in 36 hours, I would get death threats and messages going, you're killing people by saying that.
Why are you telling me to take chlorine in a horse tranquilizer?
Morons.
Hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin around for decades.
But it's the same group, neoliberal, effectively state media organizations that don't represent a huge percentage of American voters or any meaningful percentage of American voters, but they're just like, they're all working in concert.
So in the year of 2022, from May, August, And November, if I got those three months correct, and it went in this order, I believe, DirecTV, Verizon Fios, and Frontier all dropped us.
So that means you produce the product, the programming, the shows, and then those shows come into the homes of your viewers through wires owned by and services provided by the companies you just listed.
And there's contracts worked out and whatnot, and I can't go too deep into all that because there's pending lawsuits, of course, but that's another way they've tried to silence us is through lawsuits.
Are you satisfied, is management and the company satisfied, do you sincerely believe, no BS, that you were dropped from those providers because of pressure from the Congress?
Listen, right before they started dropping us, Comscore, which is a rating service I'm sure you're familiar with, at Nielsen, not the old school books and stuff, but Comscore had us in the top 10, 15 networks of all the cable channels, 200 and some channels you get on like Direct and Dish.
You're working for a company that you think is doing a good thing, and they're kind to you, and you don't want to inadvertently cause them more problems by talking too much.
We had to not rebuild because we still were on, I think, a hundred and some small cable affiliates around the country in different states where, you know, you might have a town of 50,000 and their local cable is a co-op.
Wait, and just to be clear, without getting into the details, but just so our audience can make their own judgments about what happened and why, these companies are not connected to each other.
So I think a fair, without knowing any other information, and maybe you guys committed some heinous crime that I'm not aware of, I haven't heard that, but just on the basis of what you said, which I think is checkable, a fair person would conclude they did that in response.
Well, I think I would conclude on the basis of that information.
So, yeah, I mean, I've been accused of being a tool for Putin, of Putin, of Russia, for, you know, which is, I would say, material affected my life.
I've never sued anyone over that, you know, and I never will.
So I've never sued anybody.
I never will sue anybody because I don't believe in lawsuits.
But anyway, leaving that aside, it's just interesting that coming out of, this is whining, but I can't resist, you know.
Eight years of non-stop lying by the Daily Beast and Rolling Stone and NBC News and CNN and MSNBC and all the rest about really big things like life and death things, insurrections and potential nuclear wars.
Why aren't they getting kicked off for misinformation?
Thank you.
That's my first question.
If we said something y'all said was misinformation, then I can point to, as you just said, probably 10 or a dozen major stories that CNN, MSNBC, and others have lied or falsely reported about over the last, well, since 2015, 16, since Trump came on the scene.
Our country's being invaded, and we are literally on the cusp of nuclear war, actually, all because of lies told by NBC News, CNN. I mean, told by their masters in Washington, but repeated by them.
I mean, let's all remember, again, as I said earlier, you had the winter of death and you had hosts out there like Rachel Maddow saying, if you get the vax, you will not spread it, you will not die, go get it.
You wonder about, I always want to, I don't have any abortion ladies in my life, thank heaven, but when I see the abortion ladies on TV, I always want to say, whatever happened to my body, my choice?
To me, it's not even about the vax or how corrupt NBC News is, irretrievably corrupt, but it's about the First Amendment to the Constitution, which specifically prohibits Congress from doing what Congress did to you.
And so my question is, where are all the First Amendment watchdog groups and all the media organizations and the White House Correspondents Association and all the people who are supposed to be protecting us from totalitarian...
Having spent my life there and a lot of time at the White House, it's like the worst, saddest, emptiest, most insecure people in the world cover that stupid beat and pretend like it's important when, of course, it's not at all.
You can get it all on C-SPAN. And they're in such a bubble.
Yeah, liberals in general, I think, are miserable people.
And the ones in the press corps are even worse because they're so snotty and arrogant and elitist and they think they know better than conservative media people or just regular Americans.
I would just show up, you know, occasionally to do various things, but I always hated it, and they're living out of vending machines in a former swimming pool, waiting for some low-IQ political operative to feed them lies and pretending they're real, and it's like, that's your life, really?
Can your wife possibly respect you or sleep with you?
I don't think so.
It's just not possible.
It's just not possible.
So I understand their bitterness and rage because it's really about themselves and their own wasted lives.
But I do think at some point they have to take a stand on principle just on behalf of the profession itself and the country and say, no, government is not allowed to shut down news organizations because they don't like what they say.
We've spent 70 years hearing about the McCarthy blacklist and the darkest moment in American history.
All those guys went on to win Academy Awards or whatever.
They're fine.
I'm not defending the blacklist.
I'm not for it.
But all this constellation of First Amendment free speech groups arose in the wake of the Red Scare, and their job was to protect the principle of freedom of speech and the First Amendment as written, and none of them defended you.
I think that the American people are seeing through the facade of mainstream media, especially just what, two weeks ago with the bloodbath statement of Trump and thanks to Elon opening up X so people could see it, unlike everything's been stifled on all social media, thanks to Zuckerberg and those guys, right?
So I think just that one little tidbit where they saw how the media takes a soundbite out of context and then the politicians take it and make ads and you had millions of people on X for days we can have to go discussing.
And these were lefties, independents, and righties.
Everybody was discussing it.
I think that and the spaces and things on X where he's opened it up to free speech, that is the new town square.
And I hope that and places like OAN are going to save us because I think the people, some, are waking up and finally seeing the truth.
It took a long damn time.
Look at the border situation, right?
We've been reporting on the border.
I went down there the first week of March after Biden took over.
So six, seven weeks, six weeks into his regime.
I went to Yuma, Arizona.
They were already seeing three times the numbers from Trump in six weeks.
And now we've seen 500 times the numbers.
But no one in the country really knew about it because the CNNs, MSNBCs, the big old three, ABC, NBC, CBS, they weren't going down there.
They weren't going to Del Rio.
They weren't showing you what was happening.
We were, again, misinformation, disinformation.
And then what?
Three or four months ago when the polls came out that the border was tied with the economy.
All of a sudden, the regime changed their narrative, the media starts covering it, and now the American people are waking up.
But you've got to wonder, though, and you're in a good position to answer this because you've been in this business your whole life, those places do seem like they're in their death throes.
But I remind viewers of that, because a lot of American people are so busy, they're so stressed out with the economy, they're so worried about crime, their kids' education, going to a war, that they don't have time to pay attention, that everything in primetime is not a newscast, folks.
We appreciate the support and just getting the word out about who OAN is, where we come from, what we're trying to accomplish with speaking truth to power, and what's being done to us.
Because as you've said throughout this entire interview, it is a direct assault on freedom of speech and freedom of the press.