The Ricochet Podcast - Accept NO Imitation

Episode Date: February 23, 2024

The forces against free speech are at again! Whether or not you've heard of NewsGuard or the Global Disinformation Index, rest assured that they're intently interested in where you get your information. Joining Peter, Rob and James today is David DesRoisers, Publisher of RealClearPolitics.com, whose scrupulously down-the-middle site was flagged by the groups above as a 'disinformation site,' and has lost a great many advertisers as a result. David's here to remind us of the threats institutions like these are to a free press and a free society.The guys also have thoughts CPAC and Google Gemini.- This week’s audio is from Donald Trump’s townhall with Laura Ingraham on Fox News

Well, we're talking about Sinatra and using the term chicks, which we might as well be the rat pack. We're going to be kicked out of, you know, whatever. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and Rob Long. I'm James Lalix, and today we talk to David DeRogers about the war on real, clear politics. So let's have ourselves a podcast. How will you put up that kind of money? Because you have a bond to put up.

Even if you appeal, you've got to put up escrow money. That's a lot of dough. It's a form of Navalny. It is a form of communism or fascism. The guy's a nut job. America is a nation that can be defined in a single word. I was going to put him, excuse me. Welcome everybody. This is the Ricochet Podcast number 680. I'm James Lilacs here in Minneapolis where it's a little bit cool and overcast. Something like Jack Webb starting every dragnet with the weather in LA. Who cares? I'm just setting the stage. And different stages across the country. We have Rob Long in Gotham and we have Peter Robinson in California. Gentlemen, welcome. How are you today? Well, it's a little cool and overcast here, but again, who cares? Exactly. I'm well. It's a nice respite from the ordinary beautifulness it was friday in los

angeles it was cold that was it i you know thank you thank you very much joe friday um we uh you know we never did broadcast live from cpac probably never will in the future because it seems to be sort of a diminishing concern does it not um it's gone from being sort of where everybody goes to do the cpac thing to being sort of silly and now underpopulated and uh and overrun by guys who get up and say it's time for us to reclaim our democracy and end it uh right jack so posso who was saying that uh and other people are saying, you're policing his language. He was kidding. He was just making a joke and the rest of it. But it seems to be irrelevant. Does it not?

As so many parts of the right seem to be just painting themselves into corners and climbing the walls. Yes. Yes. However, it's amazing to think that CPAC has to be considered a legacy institution these days.

I think it does. As far as I can recall, it was founded during the 80s, during the Reagan years. In any event, even as certain legacy institutions seem to wobble and grow less relevant, if not completely irrelevant, there are new institutions growing up. A lot of activity is taking place in Florida. The Global Liberty Institute, founded by Scott Atlas and Josh Rao, two colleagues of mine here at the Hoover Institution, just had a conference at which it seems to me, frankly, that half of our recent guests spoke at this conference, including Christopher Rufus. So there's activity. It's

not... There's a lot of activity, actually, but things are shifting. Well, Rob, let me ask you this. One of the speakers that I would have liked to have heard was the gentleman who happens to be the head el jefe of El Salvador at the moment. And he... Yes, yes. Talking about how El Salvador has turned things around, and he'd write it and quote the so-called international community, and quote the NGOs, and of course the fake news,

just like it happens here in the United States, he and talked about the you know the sclerotic bureaucracy and the indifference that had cared that had plundered and characterized the nation's fall and now el salvador has turned things around because they just said what if we took all the criminals and put them over here in a jail what would happen if we did that and you're going to see this model elsewhere and you're going to see a lot of people in this country fretting and chewing their nails about it because authoritarianism and fascism and the rest of it if you put the gang members in jail do you think that's a model that actually is going to spread to the united states at least rhetorically the model of putting bad guys in jail yeah uh yeah i think probably so i mean

it's a it's a tried and true look law and order is always a big issue i mean i think the cpac problem is really i mean my personal political feelings about it aside um it's a cpac used to be this place where you went and it was this uh you know the keeping of the tablets and most of the speeches were our politicians even the conservative ones are wavering in our conservative beliefs and the idea was you went to cpac just to remember what it was what pure uncut conservatism was supposed to be uh we aren't a political organization. We're a theoretical organization, right? Now it's just really so close to a candidate, a specific candidate, who also has rallies and conventions and also has speeches where he sells his merch. And sometimes in places that were unlikely, that the point of CPAC is sort of, well, why go? I mean, why not just go to a Trump rally?

It's a much, much more, more seems like a much more fun and um and then there's a there's a really lingering and i think serious scandal with the leader of cpac that isn't going to go away um so why why go to this uh broken institution when you can go to the real thing um which is a problem i think a lot of the people in the trump um you know orbit have which is that there can be only one trump trump is sort of uniquely trump and trumpy trumpiness is really his and his alone and the more people try to be you know trump the more they seem more like frank sinatra jr and not frank sinatra um and that ultimately is the problem um even donald trump jr is frank sinatra jr if you know what i mean um so i would say yeah that's that's a problem but in general it's a problem for conservatives who still believe in conservatism

because you end up having to do these weird things like saying well i don't know i think 10 tariffs across the board is a good idea which may be a good idea but it's certainly not a conservative idea um it's kind of literally the opposite of conservative idea so um yeah it's uh the all these all these institutions are gonna have to fall away and be busted up and smashed and cracked in half and that's a good thing because institutions don't shouldn't last that long certainly not these these kinds of institutions they should be regenerated they should be more um more relevant to the people who use them you know maybe cpac in the future will sound a lot more like um old line you know big government uh 1950s liberals than 21st century conservatives who knows um that's that's good oh that's good well peter let me ask you do you think that

frank sinatra jr was undervalued as a band leader he was by frank sinatra that's for sure here's what i think about first of all i am wondering how many of our listeners are now saying what frank sinatra jr Legacy, Robinson and Long. So I'm wondering about that one. I'm conscious of this. Look up Frank, if you're of the younger age, look up Frank Sinatra Jr. Kidnapping. Yes. Well, look, I mean, here's my point.

Yes, yes. You kind of don't have to know anything, any specifics, because you kind of understand. Exactly. Whatever you imagine is the difference between Frank Sinatra and Frank Sinatra Jr., you are correct. You are correct. That is what I am saying. Yes, yes, yes. And that is the point that it's very, in fact, I would argue it's simply impossible to evaluate Frank Sinatra Jr. in his own right. I mean, the man, he marketed himself as Frank Sinatra jr. in his own right I mean the man he he marketed

himself as Frank Sinatra jr. the comparison with the father is in your head yeah fairly or not fairly it's just in your head when you look at him and he just wasn't his father was he but nobody was really fair no you know he was nobody was completely legitimate that's an interesting point isn't it that when you get to i was thinking of this the other day somehow or other i don't know but the academy awards are coming up and i thought to myself there's good even even at the top of the profession which i suppose hold on i've got dogs who've just come back from a walk thank god i'm worried with what those were now that i know they're dogs, much better.

Sound was completely confusing. Okay. Wasn't my stomach. So you have politics, you have show business, and you look at the very, what you'd think of as the very top, the very best performers. And even when you get it into that select group, you say to yourself, oh, no, no, no. There's a long tail here. There are some who just are better

Meryl Streep is just a singular actress Gary Oldman is just better than almost anybody else in his generation I've started I Sean Penn I his politics are so strange to me that I tended to write him off but his cameo in Licorice, whatever that movie was, was just, I mean, some people just, even within the top of the profession, in politics, I just look at the people who might have been president, this goes back, makes me legacy, I know, but look at the people who might have been president in place of Ronald Reagan, and he was just better than they were. He was better on camera, he was better in writing, he was just better.

And Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin didn't come, all the people who might have been Frank Sinatra instead of Frank Sinatra, so to speak, the closest in some ways was Tony Bennett or Jerry Vale, and Sinatra was just better. Now, I don't know quite what I'm going on about this for. I don't know, I haven't heard Jerry Vale in a long time. Good Lord. Exactly.

Yeah. Now, that one does not contain within itself the message the way Frank Sinatra Jr. does. But it is weird about human achievement. Oh, I know what it is. I was looking at some Twitter posts by Charles Murray who wrote a book on genius and discovered that it all took place within a certain geographic area. He sort of ranked scientific genius and discovered that it was quite specific and that the geniuses really were geniuses. James, I dropped that one in your lap and try to give, and we're going to watch with

wonder how you segue from my total tangent back to the show. Well, for him it's, I's exciting genius um is it inheritable you can look at the work of lon cheney and then lon cheney jr and perhaps wonder if there was not to mention lon he chen it passed along in the genes there but then it makes you wonder i mean lon cheney jr was noted for the shambling wreck of his his life and you wonder whether or not the organizations like uh like cp, how they will do if Trump loses. Because you spoke before about the new institutions that are coming up. Rob spoke about the need to crack the old institutions and either reform them or replace them with new ones.

I'm open to the new ones thing. So that's the question. What happens then? Should Trump lose? Do we see then everyone just resetting, upending the etch a sketch and saying, we're going to start from fresh with these? Or is there another two to three, four remnant years where Trumpism wafts through the new and the old institutions? In other words, in 2024, if he loses, will they open the windows and let the fresh breeze in? Or is the institutions just simply corrupted for good? No, corrupted, dependent, in your opinion, just changed for good. If there can be no Trump Jr., if he loses, what happens? Well, the Republican Party is going to have to sort that out. I mean, they're going to have to sort out what happens.

I mean, that's going to be as fair and judicious as I can be, the institution then has to decide whether its primary loyalty is to its set of principles, or it needs to change some of its principles to maybe update some of its principles um or its primary loyalty is to the is to the leader that's always an issue that's always going to be hard um let me pivot on this one how do you think trump would approach the um the student loan bailout the student loan forgiveness thing biden announced 1.2 billion dollars in student loan forgiveness right which is 130 billion dollars to do this and he plans to spend 345 billion over the next few years presuming he gets in and biden in that quote the supreme court blocked it he said um but that didn't stop me now people are looking at saying well imagine if trump said that right i can easily donald trump is the risk to democracy it is just astounding right i can imagine any of them saying that the reason being is that the sentiment on the right is, you know, if the old institutions block what needs to be done, let's not be a vellum fetishist. Let's not just say, well, you know, the Supreme Court blocked it. We don't have to listen to them. We have to do the right thing. I can easily see that idea taking purchase on both sides, if it hasn't already.

Well, I don't know. I've had conversations... I love the phrase, vellum's fetishist, by the way. I just want to... I don't want to go too far from that without... Yes. As you speak, James, Rob and I are taking notes on what phrase that you toss out should be the title for the episode. Vellum fetishist. My vote so far is Upending the Etch-A-Sketch, which I like that for the title. Where the episode is going to go, I don't know. Well, I'll tell you where it goes, and it goes here.

All of this money is being spent on higher education. I was seeing something today where there's a class at the University of New Mexico on fat acceptance and fat fashion and the rest of it. You can get a degree now in fat studies, and the instructor declined to grade anybody because to grade anybody is ableism. To establish any sort of hierarchy of abilities whatsoever is ableism. And you wonder why, I mean, and I speak as somebody who poured an

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Well, whatever age you are now, you can go there. hilsdale.edu slash ricochet. And of course, we thank Hillsdale for sponsoring this, the Ricochet Podcast. And now we welcome to the podcast, David DeRosier. David is the president of Real Clear Foundation and is the publisher of RealClearPolitics.com, along with its many other sister sites. David, welcome to the podcast. It's great to be on. Thanks for having me.

Those of us who have been reading Real Clear products for years are happy to have you here. So, let's just start off telling us about the Real Clear Foundation and the Real Clear Mission. Well, I mean, we started in 2000, and it was really at the day and the dawn of, I think, the promise of what, you know, kind of the internet could do to kind of free up and democratize communication. You know, so we were right there at the beginning of it, and our kind of simple insight was to say that we live in a 50-50 nation and we should give a curated account of that conversation that's happening. And we've done so for really, you know, we're going to be celebrating our 24th year.

And wow. Yeah. And but, you know, things have changed. I mean, you know, this when we started, it was Bush v. Gore. You know, we're in a very different world with, you know, Trump versus Biden. I mean, I think, you know, the news has gone through some fundamental changes, but I really think what has changed is the attitude that we as a people have to really our cornerstone political value, which is the First Amendment. I think we've taken a dangerous turn since 2016, and it really is having an effect on the American mind and the future of this experiment of ours. So could we talk a little bit about, hey, David, it's Rob Long in New York. Thanks for joining us.

Um, so most people, I mean, I'm not saying most people, I'm really generalizing it from me. Me, most people, go to Real Clear. Most of Rob generalizing it from me. Me, most people. Go to Real Clear. Most of Rob, most of the time. Yeah. You go to Real Clear, and you've got Real Clear Politics. You've got Real Clear all sorts of different verticals. Whatever you're interested in, Real Clear has a really thoughtful, curated aggregator for the news that day, for the longer stories. I mean, you really get a snapshot not just of the world news and political news but also specific news and it's pretty fair i mean um i know people who are really on the left who

are extremely proud when they get uh or are actively trying to get a link from real clear because it means something means that their readers are going there smart readers are trying to follow up it's a place to go where you want to see both sides and then you have real clear investigations which is i mean our friend um well molly hemiway was here for a long time her husband mark hemiway is a friend of ours for a long time he's uh he participates in that great investigative stories you've broken some really big stories um but it doesn't and of course everyone knows the real clear polling average that That's a big deal for people. Trusted brand. And then suddenly, somebody decides that you are disinformation.

And I mean... Not just disinformation, top 10. We're in the top 10. Congratulations. Thank you. So somebody decides this, and it's a complicated chain of events, right? But it isn't the same thing as the government sending an email to Twitter or to Facebook saying, hey, this guy, squash him. It's, in my opinion, just reading the story, I want you to tell it. It's a lot more complicated

and a lot more nefarious. Oh, yeah. And sadly, it's supported by our own government, right? So I do think the origin story has to start there. But, you know, what has happened is that, you know, there are two kind of corporate entities, right, that exist in order to censor media through advertising starvation, if I could have put it that way. So the way to brown out, like, opposing viewpoints is to choke them off to access to capital. So there's two primary outlets for that. You know, one is a United States-based company called NewsG newsguard and the other one is a uk-based company called gdi global disinformation index like you know everybody in media knows how hard it is to do the business everybody has kind of looked at like the competition for eyeballs and you know

and not the rising cpms but the falling but it's. But it wasn't until Matt Kaminsky at the Washington Examiner, it's not until he kind of exposed a story that kind of showed that Real Clear was on a top 10 blacklist. And not only was there a blacklist, there was a white list too. And I think both of those lists were indicative of what their vision of a proper media diet and future of media is. So, you know, Real Clear is labeled by all sides to be independent and centrist, right? On that list, the blacklist, there were only conservative outlets. You look over at the whitelist side of things, and what you do is you find one centrist to conservative out with the Wall Street Journal, and then nine other kind of liberal to progressive entities. So the world that they're working towards is a nine-to-one world, where that one entity that is allowed to survive with advertising dollars just happens to be behind a paywall.

Because the mechanics of this i think are really interesting so um if you read a piece of you read the newspaper and it says the global disinformation index is put real clear on it as a disinformation you know whatever and you've got to roll your eyes and you think oh there's ridiculous progressive like what what possible ripple effect downstream effect could be on this stupid list by this shadowy NGO or whatever it is that I've never heard of before I don't care about? What possible effect could this have downstream? Oh, my God. It's media extinction.

That's the downside of this. I mean, but this is just not just, you know, NewsGuard and GDI aren't just some efforts of folks that sit out there and say, this is what we think you ought to do. I mean, these folks are, you know, paid entities. They have put themselves as the, like the guardians of advertising dollars. Right. And what they do is they go out there and they label a marketplace according to disinformation, misinformation, malinformation, and then they give ratings to entities, right? So we made the top 10 list on GDI. I got a rating on NewsGuard of 62. That's not a good number, right? So what they do is they go out there and advertisers actually do their media buys on this stuff.

Right. That's kind of what I want to talk about. So if I'm a company, I'm selling tie detergent. Or I'm giving information to my ad buys for Google. I'm just going to say, well, what's the list I don't want to be on? I don't want to be on that GDI list, right? I don't want to be on the NewsGuard list. I don't want to be on? I don't want to be on that GDI list, right? I don't want to be on the NewsGuard list. I don't want to be there.

So everybody put that. And suddenly, I have stepped on the artery that pays for and funds RealClear. Is that kind of what happened? Yeah. funds real clear is that kind of what happened yeah and the thing that i think you know i don't think real clear is on that list by accident i think you know i think we're the crown jewel of the design of that list because if you bring down real clear like real clear's job is to is to kind of be the bloomberg news terminal for media and and polling. You come to our site to see what's happening. You get a sense of the media arc by being on our page. And what we've done is we've built a business model and an editorial kind of approach that's viewpoint diversity.

If you blow a hole in the floorboards of our ship, right, if you attack us on traffic, you attack us on traffic you attack us on advertising if you bring us down the you know the the ascendant republicanism and conservative movement that we do our best to curate every day all of a sudden that gets broken apart and diluted so i mean i think they purposely put us on this list and it's because we believe in viewpoint diversity. We'd like to show all sides. We like our people to think outside their own tribe. Right. But I think that in today's America, you know, gets you marked for, you know, for death through, you know, advertising starvation. That's the beautiful thing about it. avenue have outsourced the guardians of news and advertising dollars to a cutout group that was funded by the state department and and supported by left-wing philanthropies now has grown into

an industry where i think you know they really can control the news the future of the news and they've done it in a particularly i mean just to give them props, clever way, because no one's hands are specifically dirty here, right? You have this NGO, and they're just putting a list together. You don't like the list, I'm sorry. And then you have advertisers who are saying, well, just give me a list. I'll follow any list. And what you have is a squeeze on probably one of the last places on the web where you can reliably get a fair, balanced picture of the national, political, economic, social, cultural conversation. And there's like one more part of that where it gets a little worse so the origin story of this i think came uh really in the response of 2016 and the the really the coordinated but really kind of started with one perfect a couple of people

against breitbart so breitbart we had its hands dirty because of trump but also brexit there was a there's a small little effort a guy i think I think it's San Francisco, and a partner in crime. What they did was they went out there and started pressuring all the advertisers that had the temerity to actually want to get a Breitbart audience. I think it was called Sleeping Giants. Sleeping Giants, I think, was, and Breitbart was victim one, and Sleeping Gi giants was the kind of the code to the future and how to move forward on this. But it's like that has developed. In fact, one of the co-founders of that, she went on and she has this entity called check my ads, check my ads is supported by George Soros. The purpose of check my ads is if you don't take newsuard and GDI seriously enough, they'll do that to you.

They'll go after and harass you, have people sign petitions, call you every name in the book. You know, you're against, you're transphobic, you're Hitler and the rest. And pretty much what happens, you know, what's to be expected happens that, you know, these guys cave. And what happens is free speech gets diminished. And instead of having a vibrant dialogue, we have a monologue. And sadly, when it happens and it's exposed, instead of the fourth estate being jealous of its prerogative and privileges, they're either silent or cheerlead for it. You know, and my thing, this is how democracy dies in broad daylight, and actually with the clapping of the fourth estate.

Right. David, I'm getting all this information for the really sort of the first. I was only dimly aware of all that you're describing. Can you go right back to the beginning? Where did NewsGuard come from? Gordon Krovitz is the founder of NewsGuard, who used to be at the Wall Street Journal. Former publisher of the Wall Street Journal, right? Yeah. And also, I'm forgetting his partner's name, but kind of came from kind of the legal profession. I think they saw the

opportunity and quite frankly they were supported by our State Department. So they got seed funding for their company by our government, which is an obvious violation of First Amendment. And on what possible justification, if you were making the argument that the State Department official had in his or her head, what would the argument have been? I mean, I think it makes sense for the State Department to get in the business of grading websites. Well, I think it gets back to I think the State Department is it became conserved not only in the United States, but globally with populism. Right. You know, so they saw the the shock of of like of what brexit did to europe

they saw the you know kind of the ascendancy of trump you know you know whether true or not i think it's not you know it's like you know they were part of a narrative that was saying russia russia russia like all this nonsense about a danger to our democracy, blah, blah, blah. And again, there's, and this is something that's really happened. There has been a complete shift, you know, from this kind of recognition of free speech and what it means and what it requires. Yes, right. Right? And, you know, and healthy speech. And healthy speech is this thing that, you know, like disinformation, misinformation, and malinformation.

And the whole idea of malinformation, the definition of it, I'm probably going to butcher it. But malinformation is not untruthful. It's just not helpful to, you know, insular minorities and blah, blah, blah. Right, right. Okay, so I just want to understand where this, so the State Department gives NewsGuard some sort of seed funding. And now their business model is what? They go around to all the big advertisers in Manhattan and say, buy a subscription to us, we'll keep your advertisers out of trouble. And if you're P&G or some, name it, you're a big you're an executive you say look i'm general mills i make cheerios i don't

want trouble okay i don't want no trouble i don't want trouble and that's and then newsguard starts is there competition to newsguard gdi where's the push i mean gdi oh the competition to news guard i mean um you know there's people uh who like fire phil hamburger at american news civil liberties unions they're pushing back into the courts but you know the difficulty that you have is that you know they're embedded in advertising right it you know they have they you know they have a ranking system they'll defend their ranking system they invite you to participate in arguing your score right but newsguard does news but it's so to give you a quick sense so state department newsguard gdi i check my ads as the enforcer but then outside of that there are 60 universities across the united states and a lot of the big name philanthropies

are funding the universities they're funding ngos around it. And you have a whole, I would, it's too big to be called a industry once you hit 60, just in higher education. Their job is to go out there and be the media minders to go out and say, this is different information, this is misinformation. They keep in the naughty and nice list. So NewsGuard can can say we're looking at these trusted you know independent ngos we're looking to these higher universities harvard and the like and and we're getting this information it's going into our rating and then you know then the advertisers you know act on it the thing is the advertisers always wanted the excuse to do this too like so everybody's pushing on an open door here right it's like you know i i'm like i don't like any

of this stuff i hate fox news therefore give me a reason not to fund it i don't like the new york post give me a reason not to fund it and and then all of them are kind of working in this kind of coordinated circle of jerk and this happened. And the net effect is they're browning out the free speech rights of half of America, and it's being done in the notion of safe speech. David, I'm in the fourth estate. I'm here in a large, luxuriously appointed newspaper office, which happens to be empty at the moment. And one of the things that has afflicted my profession is thankfully not evident here in our new hires. But elsewhere I hear, and I hear from people who are in J school and the rest of it, is that the new idea amongst journalists who are coming up is that they're really, the idea of objectivity is outdated. Because we face so many existential, extinction-level events

coming at our society. We're about to have a fascist government. We're about to lose the world to global warming. We're about to all of these things that are wrong. So therefore, the idea of an even-handed approach is hopping right in the cradle with evil. There's no time for objectivity. So people like you, who are facilitating the end of the world because of your refusal to go along with every single

prescription that we need to do now, that it's a natural reaction to say no, that these places should not be subsidized. How the devil do you get around that when you have, as you say, when you mentioned with the clapping of the fourth estate, you just simply give up about up in them entirely we can't they're still setting agendas i mean i think we have to like houston we have a problem the problem is that you know academia the commanding heights have been corrupted by this thinking i mean the atlantic did a survey and it finds it turns out you know not surprisingly but i'm sure surprisingly to most out there, that the higher levels of education you receive, the less tolerant you are of other people's opinion. And you have these monocultures out there. I mean, like, you know, so, you know, the left started a long march in entertainment.

You know, you know, it started in bill you heirs when he goes to the university they go into entertainment but they've marched to everything you know so now they have like that big company they have big tech they have advertising and pretty much they're at a point where i think they know what their power is and they're projecting it and the real thing is it's like try to stand up against it, you'll be labeled a fascist, you'll be chilled out. Right. So I think they've created something that's very dangerous. But, you know, my thing is, it's, I think a lot of this has happened, and, you know, and I think it can be stomped. You know, maybe I'm kind of reading too much

into Havel, right, and the courage of, you know, be not afraid. But if we keep on being adjacent and looking at our shoes, and we don't say, this is un-American what's happening here, this is the hallmarks of red or brown fascism, whatever you want to call it, right? But this is not America. We have a First Amendment protection. Sadly, Europe doesn't, but we do. And I think we have to stop looking in our shoes and stand up and straighten our spines and say no, right? We have to go after this and rip it out root and branch. You know, it's like if it's being funded by any state universities of these 60, I think there's more than a few that are, and they're in red states. I think Republican

governors should lean on these things right i think it should be very clear you know advertisers are doing this i think they have to be realizing you know there has to be just it's an all of society effort that they've built i mean so they're enlisting civil society philanthropies higher education advertising big tech it has to actually be at least recognized and refuted. And what ultimately, I think, is the best thing is just to replace a bad idea for a better idea, right? I think these folks who are out there with this Miss Dish and Mal, they really think they're doing a good. I think we have to show this for what it is. It's an Orwellian project that is like being pushed. And, you know, and this is

something I think that, you know, I don't care who you are, like a Democrat, Republican, if we do not actually have the First Amendment, in a real sense, you know, you know, the one that follows it is kind of the recourse. And we don't want to go to such a world and i think the way that we do it is to come out and say it what separates us is we don't have an uno something that connects our pluribus anymore i would say you know one of the foundational ones is the first amendment and that's why it's first i think it's pretty interesting theory the um uh the best way you know uh strict adherence to the first amendment means we probably don't have to go down to the second amendment right that's it seems like a good idea um so i mean i guess what i would say is that what surprised me about

the story was that i just never i mean i look i mean there are other there are other names on that list i'm like i i know why the liberals don't like the Federalists. I get it. Like, it's not good, but I understand, right? But Real Clear makes a scrupulous effort. I mean, Carl Cannon, who is the editor-in-chief and pretty much the editorial guide there, is about as scrupulously down the middle as you can get. And whenever you ask, I have all my liberal friends, and pretty much that's all my friends but they say look i'm i just want i just want to be fair i

just want both sides and then here you have a uh an institution that was started with both sides in mind and continues to do that being labeled and it gets um and then the idea we're getting punished for showing that other side getting punished financially so um let's talk a little little bit about, obviously, you're fighting that the way you can fight that, but you're also sort of celebrating free speech, which is a new thing for the Real Clear Foundation. So could you tell us a little bit about the Samis Dot Prize? And I should say, spoiler alert to our listeners, you are honoring a dear friend of ours of mine and peter's and james and also of the podcast and i think a dear friend and sent in many ways of america uh jay batacharya who who needs not just this award but all the awards i think for the next couple years could

you tell us a little bit at the beginning of that the reason for that and um and then we can talk about how much we love jay for a minute yeah i mean and also i want to say to people listening um just because i don't want you to have to do it uh the prize is actually going to be in a couple weeks um march 7th in palm beach so it's going to be if you're if you're in a cold place right now and you want to go to a warm place this is a perfect reason to go to a warm place uh it's going to be at the breakers which is a gigantic and beautiful hotel um And you're honoring a couple other people. But, you know, for me, it's just all about Jay. Thanks.

I mean, you know, we wanted to actually create an event that highlighted what we think is the cornerstone. You know, so, like, everybody likes the reference that we're in 1860s moment. I think, you know, for Lincoln, it was the principle of equality. I think equality needs a better redefinition now because with the DEI stuff, but I think what we want to do is stand up what we see the paramount political value. And, you know, and the thing that keeps this experiment in self-government going, it's the source of American exceptionalism. And why an event? You know, why are we doing a prize program? Look at what the Oscars has done. Look at what the Pulitzer Prize and Pocahontas Prize has done. You get the world that you praise, right? And I think part of the reason why we're

living in this Orwellian world is because we're praised and rewarded it, right? What we want to do is stand up, arrival to that, that rewards people of outstanding courage, who, when the rest of us look at their feet or bend or would hem, like, and pull in their sails, people who stand up in front of history and do what Buckley said and yell stop. And they yell stop by actually living up to the highest standards of their profession. You know, so, you know, Dr. J, I mean, he's, you know, that is the scientific method, right? Here's a man who stood up for science. And he was, instead, he was kind of told that he was a flat earther, in a sense, and that Fauci was Galileo. I think the reverse roles is, no, Fauci was a pope, and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya was Galileo. And one of the things I would say about our prize program, and we'll go into the other people there, we're not just defenders of free speech.

We're looking, and I think if you look at the people that we've chosen, we are looking for people who stand up for free speech, that model the behavior of their profession, and also have been proven right. Jay has been proven right. We're not just giving him an award because he had a certain, you know, kind of MD cojones. We're giving him an award because he had a certain, you know, like, you know, kind of MD cojones. We're giving him an award because he was right. He stood up for the truth while everybody was bending a knee and he was right and they were wrong. And, you know, and I think that really carries over into the other two people that we have, you know. David, David, before you get to the other two people, I just, I have to engage in this much self-promotion the place jay stood up first was my show uncommon knowledge that's right that's right as j so what i want to know is is this a cash

prize because i figure j owes me 15 it is okay on on to the other two people. And maybe he'll let you have visitation rights to his beautiful trophy. Yeah. Nice. We talked earlier about this kind of shift in journalism where we've gone from, you know, kind of a recognition of a fact-based discipline trying to capture and render a true reading of things so readers can decide for themselves to activist journalists. And, you know, one of the things that we liked in terms of the choices that we made about the two journalists that we're honoring

is that Matt Tahibbi is like, you know, Rolling Stone magazine, Zuccotti Park, you know, but it's like, it turns out that this progressive believes in journalism, right? He believes in persuasion, not coercion. And, you know, when someone gave him the Pentagon Papers opportunity that Elon did, he walked in it, and he actually lived up to the standard of journalism, right? And then on the other side, you know, Miranda Devine at the New York Post, He walked in it and he actually lived up to the standard of journalism. Right. And then on the other side, you know, Miranda Devine at the New York Post. What journalists in their right mind, you know, if you would say no to Hunter Biden's laptop and the story that is actually in that, you wouldn't be a journalist.'d be a hack but you know both of these folks went into things rose to

the occasions didn't bend their knees showed the courage of of of of a profession like date uh that jay did for medicine and what came of it was a real awakening to the american people because it turns out like again getting back to hindsight well it turns out, again, getting back to hindsight, well, it turns out those 50-plus intelligence operatives that actually said Russian disinformation, that wasn't true. That wasn't true. And it turns out, while everybody would apologize for Twitter or Google because they're, even though they sold themselves when they came into their origin time, when they went public, that they were free speech utilities, they would say they are private companies and therefore they can do what they want but when

you open up and you get to look inside the kimono there all you see is an alphabet soup of federal agencies in this marketplace of you know kind of this censorship industrial complex working hand in glove to actually brown out one side right I could understand if you're going after you know the outliers to you know because in a free world there are dangerous outliers but if you look at it they're going after a certain type of mainstream like a populist mainstream Republicanism and conservatism right and and they're going after it in the most brutal way because they're just trying to starve it. And everybody thinks out there that's like, I don't know how I get my media. I guess

they're able to pay themselves through advertising. Well, they're going to brown that out, choke it out, and then we'll be scratching our heads and saying, you know, whatever happened to conservative media? Right of center of media, because the Tea Party once existed, it was vibrant, and then all of a sudden it didn't show up one day. And then you find out it's because Lois Lerner killed it. You know, if they see something, they kill something. And I think that we have to be aware about it, because this is foundational. I mean, I do think that the fact that RealClear is on this list is an offense, and it should

offend anybody because it just shows its nature. They're not protecting from that evil outlier. They actually think that in a just world, there's nine liberals to progressives to one centrist conservative and that person's able to that person's on that list because someone has to be on that list and it's behind a paywall and then people who have it'll offend people who have principles and that's what we need more of so when it comes to strengthening principles or for that matter for those people who have different principles and just want to read the other side, that RealClearPolitics will provide them from time to time. I'm looking at the, I'm looking at the, just click to the

homepage today, right this minute, RealClearPolitics.com. Number one link is from MSNBC, number two is from New York Post, number three is the Washington Monthly, number four is our old friend VDH, Victor Davis Hanson. Then there's the Daily Beast, The Federalist, New York Magazine, Washington Times, The Atlantic, American Conservative, MSNBC again, Kim Strassel from The Wall Street Journal, another good friend of ours, Washington Monthly. I mean, it goes down.

This is... This feels like the news, David. It doesn't feel like the fake news. I think, you know, I love the opportunity. i appreciate the opportunity to come out and it's like people have to recognize that what these people want to take away in terms of voices and finances behind those things what they want to take away i think readers and philanthropy has to get behind and come to the aid of it. Because if not, it's going to be browned out and it's going to be over. We're going to be living in

a uniparty state with an idea that everybody has to go along with. And that's not an America that I want. Real clear politics. Stop going to false murky politics dot com people and go to real clear politics dot com. And david we thank you so much for showing up today and good luck with the prize and we'll talk again down the road i hope that you can come to our event all of you on this call and you know and all your uh viewers you're welcome as well i'll see hope to see you next uh next week bye thanks thanks david thank you you know one of the things we saw this week gentlemen before we go we got a little time here before rob has to run and peter has to run and i have to amble off to my lunch and that is this we saw Thank you. exposed to falsifying history in every single possible way, no matter what prompt you gave it. Gentlemen, you know the story, right? I assume everybody does by now. Probably shouldn't assume.

But what people found out was when they typed in, show me the founding fathers. The founding fathers did not look like the founding fathers. Show me a typical person from North Dakota. Well, you would get, shall we say, not the typical. In other words, the whole system had been devised, as we quickly learned, to insert the word diverse into any sort of prompt that you put. It was designed with a specific bias that steered your image generation results in one direction. And all of a sudden, people looked at that and realized how they were forcing you to do a thing that you were not requesting it to do and thought, might this characterize the rest of Google? Do you think? So just as we may have spent 2020 through 2023

learning about the usual institutions and government and education and medicine and the rest of that, not actually being up to the job and being actually quite incompetent. Now we're finding out that the company with whom we made a deal, as Cory Doctorow put it, we made a deal with Google. We'll give you control of all this information. We'll give you the ability to sort it all. But in exchange, you have to not be evil as you used to say you did not want to be. You've got to be on the up and up. And it turns out if they're cooking the books and steering people this way and this thing, people are thinking, well, wait a minute, the whole enterprise is suspect. The entire enterprise is suspect. What do you think of the, is, is this the start of

a conversation about Google or do we just drift off to duck, duck, go and Bing for a while before we go back to Google because it its tendrils are everywhere in our lives uh using duck duck go would not be a bad place to start i thought of this as we were talking with david i thought because as usual i'm slow on the uptake that when elon bought twitter and made public all the files that indicated censorship on the part of Twitter. And Elon, Elon invited the circles back to Jay. Elon invited Jay. But I saw Jay the day after he's Jay went up to San Francisco and Elon was

there to greet him personally and sat Jay down with, it was all much, much worse than even Jay, who knew he was being censored. He could feel it and see it, but it was even worse than Jay had imagined. I thought, okay, Elon called them on it. It was COVID. It's over. We've turned a page. Totally wrong. Totally wrong. David DeRosier just sat here and told us about the blob that's coming after him. Google, I'm sure they're red-faced with embarrassment because what they did was permit us all to, inadvertently, they permitted us all to peek inside. Of course, it is part of the, that's the other thing.

In the old days, it felt to me as though the Soviet Union and dissidents had that, were're seeing the same structure repeated, that the Soviet apparat was just a blob. Certainly by the time you got to Brezhnev, who could, there were no great figures, they were all just bureaucrats. So you had this blob against individual heroic figures. You could name the figures who had the courage to stand up against it. Individual human beings, Solzhenitsyn, Havel, Lech Walesa, and so forth. And now it's happening here. We've got this nameless, faceless blob. People like Matt Taibbi are doing hard work to name names so we can go after.

But we all experience it as a faceless blob. And individual heroic figures, I love this Samistop Prize because it's pointing this out. The Jay Bhattacharyas, the Matt Taibbis. And where AI plays into this, I fear it makes everything worse. But what we saw of Google is, again, every time we get a glimpse of it, it's worse than we could have imagined, more deeply embedded, more prevalent. Yesterday was, I mean, in one sense, it was hilarious. I was delighted that Google was so thoroughly embarrassed, but it was very unnerving at the same time. It's a gigantic, immensely profitable corporation. And look at the AI.

It was prepared to roll out on the rest of us. Did roll out. Did roll out. It did. Yeah. And I actually don't think that Google, and it's probably what you said, Peter, but I don't think Google was, I don't think the response,

I mean, there's some crazy ones, like show me a picture of a Pope. And it was like, an Indian woman. I don't think that Google originated this craziness. I think that you can find this attitude uh in every public school in america i mean i think this is the institutional attitude

and i think what the strange part of it is that you can't actually control people's thoughts you can't actually do that you can't you can control people's beliefs for a little bit but eventually tyrants fall that's what they do they take a beliefs for a little bit but eventually tyrants fall that's what they do they take a lot of people with them but that's what they do the the the theory behind all of this is that if you if you have the information you will make a decision that we don't like correct so we're not going to give you the information and we're saving you from making errors so right the the emblematic of that was covid if you knew that the masks don't really

work if you knew that uh it's just old people you would then go about your business and um we don't think you should make that decision so we're simply we're simply going to lie to you and we're going to say later well we had to because you you cannot be trusted with information and the sad part about that is is that um the that only drives more i mean one of the reasons why we live in a world now which seems to be exploding with conspiracy theories and exploding with crackpot politics is because in a world in which i'm not the trusted information givers are not giving you the information then almost anything can be true um years and years and years ago we

had on this podcast uh peter pomerantsev i'm probably miss bob katsky's name uh who i a young guy i met in in budapest um uh with john o'sullivan actually and his because his father is a poet living in budapest and um and he wrote a book uh and i cannot i mean it was um every enough everything is possible and nothing is true i think it's the name of the book and he was a guest and he was talking about putin's russia um it's really kind of worth rereading that book and i don't want to say i'm not kind of Tucker Carlson-ness, but it is something that we have to be careful of, which is that information, even from the,

and the right has that problem too. Information is uniformly good. It is not something that can be shaped or trimmed or massaged or spun so that you come to the right outcome and that's why i feel like things like what dave is doing it real clear in the samizdat project etc why we have to celebrate people like jay is really really important by the way rob i i can put your mind at ease on one point no one will ever confuse you with tucker carlson that actually wasn't true at a certain point i did get confused a couple times truly we were both considerably younger reason why we have to push back um as much and loudly

and as often as possible because what google revealed that it was doing is inserting a poison into American and Western civilization, an acidic poison that drips down, is intended to drip down, I don't want to sound conspiratorial, but drips down to the foundation and eats away at the stones that hold the whole thing up. Somebody asked Gemini to generate some works in the style of Norman Rockwell. It wasn't me. And Gemini refused to do so. Could have said, no, sorry, copyright. But what first of all, there is the thought. Omitting or downplaying certain realities of the time, particularly regarding race, gender, and social class. Creating such images without critical context

could perpetuate harmful stereotypes or inaccurate representations. So the only context in which one can look at a painting of a fat cop sitting at a small diner looking at a kid who's got a bindle and is running away, you can show that, but you have to explain why there's harm, why there's stereotype, what it's emitting. You can show the picture of

the cop at the small town little diner talking to the kid, but you would damn well better come up with the 1953 crime statistics that show exactly how the department of police in that city was actually performing poorly toward this group that we now elevate. It's insane. It says that there must be a critical intermediary between every aspect of American history that nudges you and points you in the right place in the right direction. Norman fricking Rockwell. Now, the people who wrote this thing, and this isn't written, right? Nobody sat down and wrote this and coded it into it. It arose out of the mindset of the people who did it because they have a contempt for Norman Rockwell for a couple of reasons.

One, the wrong stupid people like him. Two, it's banal, kitschy art. They've been told. They've never actually seen it. They couldn't identify it. But that's the idea. And three, just sort of wafting up from the swamp of all the places that they scraped, like Reddit and the rest of them,

is the general idea that all of these things back, that an idealized version of American life is not something to which we should look and aspire and figure out how to attain and fix and all the rest of it. It is a bad, onerous, odorous thing to even consider that there can be an idealized version of American life, because American life itself, by definition, is full of every evil-ism in the world. And that's why the year zero, dare I say, upending the Etch-a-Sketch desire comes. That's it. I'm done. Anybody else?

No. No. I think Rob has to fly. I think Peter has to amble. I have to lunch. This podcast was brought to you by Hillsdale College. Support them for supporting us. And we thank Hillsdale.

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