Live from Music Row Tuesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed liberal, feminist, author, and freedom lover Dr. Naomi Wolf to the newsmakers line to discuss her permanent ban from Twitter after questioning COVID vaccines, citing current state legislation and Moderna website published content.
Leahy: And we are welcoming to our newsmaker line. Our good friend Dr. Naomi Wolf, the author of the 1991 feminist classic, The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women.
She was an advisor to Al Gore in 2000. And now the left doesn’t like her because she’s talking about some health freedom issues. Good morning, Naomi.
Wolf: Good morning to you. How are you?
Leahy: I’m glad to have you on. So Twitter has suspended you? Oh, my goodness. What did you do? (Laughs)
Wolf: (Chuckles) Well, that is a good question. I certainly didn’t violate any of the Twitter rules, and Twitter is set up so that there’s no way to know why you’re suspended. There’s no one to call and there’s no editor to challenge this decision about.
I know it’s widely reported that I was de-platformed for reporting on adverse reactions to the COVID vaccine. And it is true that I’ve broken some stories about that which were picked up in many other news outlets, and I’m proud of the reporting I did.
People deserve all the information about any medical process. But I don’t believe that’s the real reason I was actually de-platformed in the act of posting a two-minute video in which I literally read verbatim a press release from a state senator in Oregon named Kim Thatcher, who had introduced a bill to ban vaccine passports and mask mandates in the state of Oregon.
There were a couple of other things that I had posted that day that I also think were over the target, honestly. So that is my best guess about why I was de-platformed.
Leahy: The mainstream media has reported and they apparently know why you were de-platformed, right?
Wolf: Yeah. Which is such terrible reporting. A, nobody in the news media has called me for comment to find out from me why I think I was de-platformed or what I actually said. And a lot of tweets have been taken out of context.
But if Twitter won’t talk to me about why I was de-platformed then who’s talking to mainstream media? Right. It’s almost as if they’re just making it up or else Twitter is leaking to news outlets without giving me the courtesy of contacting me and saying, look we are de-platforming you for this reason.
It’s dangerous and scary, not just because of what happened to me and my 140,000 followers who now can’t talk to me. It’s really much more dangerous and scary for everybody else out there and for democracy because if indeed, the reason was that I was reporting a transparent civic process, a state bill, then that means Twitter and these big tech platforms have the power to silence one side of the aisle or one side of the political discussion even though I’m not a Republican.
Which is the irony. And only let people hear about bills on the Dem side. And we’ve seen the de-platforming of conservative voices across a range of voices and commentators. So that’s really, really scary.
That quickly becomes a one-party state in the Chinese Communist Party model. So that’s super terrifying. And it’s also super terrifying because this is the world that we’re living in now. It’s not going to stop just me.
If somebody says something about the administration that is not okay or reveals some flaw in a product then that industry has a lot of power, it’s really a way to suppress dissent and debate. And that’s just not American.
Leahy: Naomi, in studio with us this morning is our all-star panelist, Clint Brewer. Clint is a recovering journalist, and Clint has a question for you. (Wolf chuckles)
Brewer: I haven’t fully recovered, so I’m going to ask a question live on the air. Ms. Wolf, some of the language around medical freedom concerning the pandemic is not dissimilar to language around pro-choice arguments.
Wolf: Right.
Brewer: You’ve got a nuanced history on the issue of abortion. For the listeners reconcile your positions on medical freedom as it relates to COVID and on abortion. And do you think there’s a growing number of people who share that sentiment that I think you’ll explain?
Wolf: I’m not sure I fully understand your question. I think what you’re saying and I’ve made this point on Twitter is that liberal feminists like myself who are pro-choice, have always had a gospel of my body, my choice and that it is really dangerous and unethical when the state can say, you have to have this baby or you can’t have an abortion or any other kind of forced decision making by the state that gets between a woman and her doctor, a woman, and her body. Is that the analogy you’re looking for?
Brewer: Exactly. And it sounds like a similar argument to medical freedom around COVID. I mean, people should be able to make a choice about masks. They should be able to have a choice about vaccines and control their body in between them and their health care professionals.
Wolf: Yes. I mean, I do agree with you, and I would go further. I think with abortion, good people can reasonably make arguments in both directions. But when it comes to whether or not to wear masks, whether or not to accept an experimental medical procedure, which is still the COVID-19 vaccine that hasn’t completed its clinical trials.
I would go further and say, really, there are so many laws, including the Constitution, that make it unlawful to coerce people to have that vaccine. It’s unlawful. It violates HIPAA, for instance, to have a vaccine passport system.
It violates the Fourth Amendment and the Right to Privacy to ask whether someone’s vaccinated or not vaccinated before they can enter a business, which is what was happening to me when I was in New York City, where the signs like this all over the city.
It violates the Equality Act to say, and I’m hearing from people across the country, you can’t have a job unless you get vaccinated. Your child can’t go back to college unless he or she accepts this experimental vaccination.
I’m not an anti-vaxxer, but I absolutely believe in the rule of law and the Constitution and our human rights law that you need a convention. You can’t force a medical treatment on people.
It’s illegal to experiment on people. That’s the Nuremberg Code. We have a nexus laws in the free world that prevents us from being forced to accept medical treatment or from being experimented on. My condition is not anti-vaccine, and I wouldn’t even call it medical freedom. It’s just Western democracy with its rule of law.
Leahy: Naomi, Yahoo News about 22 hours ago posted this story about you. I’ll read it and get your reaction. ‘Twitter has suspended author Naomi Wolf after she posted outlandish vaccine misinformation on the platform, including a claim that the shots were a ‘software platform that can receive uploads.’ Did Yahoo contact you before they wrote that story? And what’s your reaction to that?
Wolf: Well, they certainly did not. And this is such a gross example of big news outlets that really rely now, and I’m in the news business and I know your guest is there as well. They really rely on a kind of unholy partnership with Big Tech. The language in that Tweet is from the Moderna website.
And they were boasting on the website that their lipid nano-particle technology is like software that you can kind of upload or change in the future. And they were boasting about that as a revenue model, as opposed to a traditional vaccine where you just get it once.
After I reported on that, we did hear that there were going to be booster shots. There are going to be booster shots and it’s not just going to be one injection. I literally used the language off the Moderna website and their analogy.
And the trouble with Twitter, of course, is you can take these out of context. And certainly, Yahoo News has no excuse for taking that out of context.
Listen to the full third hour here:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to the Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “Dr. Naomi Wolf” by Dr. Naomi Wolf.
Live from Music Row Wednesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – guest host Ben Cunningham welcomed Star News Media’s CTO Christina Botteri in studio to discuss Big Tech censorship and the concept of publisher versus platform.
Cunningham: Christina Botteri is across the table. Cristina, thanks so much for joining us. Appreciate it.
Botteri: Great to be here.
Cunningham: Chief Technology Officer of Star Media and Grant Henry with Americans for Prosperity. Grant, thank you so much for joining us, too. Two days in a row here. Thank you.
Henry: I’m available for three if you need it.
Cunningham: I’m actually a little bit more alert this morning than it was yesterday, so I don’t know, maybe I’m acclimating a little bit. I was a little foggy yesterday. We were talking about Facebook and Project Veritas and their disclosures from a Facebook insider that Facebook has been censoring the people who have vaccine hesitancy.
That sounds like a disease itself. And it’s extraordinary the hubris that the corporate leaders have to come out and tell Americans, we’re not going to allow you to say that. That is not allowed speech on the Facebook platform.
That’s scary as the devil. And if they’re censoring something like that, you know, they’re censoring other stuff. What other speech on Facebook is censored? And I get messages every day about people that got a 30-day suspension for this or a seven-day suspension for that.
This literally is like some morality bureau where they are sitting up there and punching the button and the floor falls out from under you and your chair goes down in a hole. (Botteri laughs)
And nobody knows where you’re gone and you’re never to be heard from again. It’s almost like that, you know? And the arrogance of these people that believe that they can censor our speech. And obviously, there are lots of people concerned about this.
And Marsha Blackburn, in particular in Congress, is saying we need to revise Section 230. Grant, you were talking about Section 230. What does that involve? Where would that get us if Facebook became not a publisher? That’s what you were talking about, right?
Henry: Yeah.
Cunningham: They would not be a publisher, they would be?
Henry: A platform, basically. This all started, obviously, in the tech bubble wave, and we’re in the 90s into the 2000s. And the idea was if we have a website that has a message board or a forum, if you will, you can’t hold the website accountable for any random individual that would jump on there and just post whatever they want to.
Especially if there’s no process by which you vet this information before it gets on there. It’s logical. And to not stifle the growth of the Internet itself, the great frontier of information you have to give them some elite as some allowance, is that you wouldn’t give a normal publisher.
And to be fair, Facebook has always said that we’re not going to be in the game of dictating what is and is not true. We’re just going to let you get out there and have an interaction. But I will say, Ben, whether it’s from Twitter, say, censoring the information of the Hunter Biden story during the election.
Or whether it’s from Facebook censoring this vaccine information right now and whether it’s from Google shutting down stories about this Wuhan Lab leak, it seems to be fairly ubiquitous that we have a problem with access to information.
If I could be so bold as to play Devil’s advocate for a minute here, there are several libertarian-leaning Conservatives that will make the argument, or should I say just conservatism in general that will make the argument of, hey, this is a free company.
They can do what they want. A private company, let them do what they want with their own product. If Facebook wants to create a terrible product and drive its revenue into the ground, then, by all means, let them do it.
Something else to come up and take its place. And I don’t know, I’ll throw it out there to the audience to see. I have my own personal opinions on this, but it is something that Conservatives are left in a little bit of a conundrum to figure out how to deal with. Part of our world uses the free market. The other part says this is a major, obvious, objective problem we have here.
Cunnigham: Christina, what’s your take on that?
Botteri: (Chuckles) Well, you are wrong. People who think, oh, we’ll just wait until something better comes along. And the problem with that is that, as you mentioned, in the early days of the whole tech boom in 1999, I’m old enough to remember 1998, let me tell you something. (Laughter)
Cunningham: Cry me a river.
Botteri: At that time, the Internet was this grand frontier. That’s a wonderful way to put it. And special deals, carve-outs were provided for these new companies, these new endeavors that were going to connect people across the globe.
So Section 230 was sort of one of those special deals. And so companies like Facebook and Google and others, Twitter, and MySpace at the time got these special exemptions. And they grew and they prospered for the most part. (Laughter) They did. They grew.
They prospered. And because they knew what they were doing, and they improved as the technology improved. I’m thinking of Facebook in particular, Twitter, especially, they were able to effectively create a monopoly of instant communications and a freely available communications monopoly on the basis that they were going to be a platform.
And so when they start picking the winners and losers, they very quickly do not become a platform. They are a publisher. I think it’d be really tough for anybody and I’ll go nose to nose with anybody on that one.
Cunningham: And Facebook owns Facebook, of course, huge. They own Instagram. They own WhatsApp. And those are probably three of the biggest social media platforms around. And Microsoft owns LinkedIn. I can tell you that from first-hand knowledge because the Nashville Tea Party was thrown off of LinkedIn with 40,000 followers three weeks before the 2020 election.
And we asked, why did you throw us off? And they said, well, you were trying to influence the election. Us and like 100 million other people were trying to influence the election. It was just an absurd, absurd thing. They obviously didn’t like our politics and that I think they are beginning to respond.
The creation of this board where they decided about whether that they should keep Trump off is at least a PR attempt to create transparency. But they’re going to have to create a whole lot more transparency about how they handle these complaints.
Henry: Well, this is always what happens, right? The law always takes a prolonged period of time to catch up with technology. You certainly understand that. And I think that’s where we are.
But I will say ever the optimists, at least this morning, let me tell a quick story about what happened in the Tennessee legislature just this past session. Representative Mike Sparks, actually carried a bit that was fairly similar to what DeSantis just signed in Florida, and his ability to crack down on Facebook and social media’s quite obvious bias that’s going on right now.
Now, I don’t believe it made out of sub-committee. I’m almost certain it didn’t make it out of committee, but Representative of Michael Curcio made a fairly interesting argument in subcommittee, something to the effect of…
Cunningham: For or against?
Henry: Against.
Cunnigham: Good. Thank you for that.
Henry: Yeah, he made your arguments against why this shouldn’t pass. And his argument went something like this. He said, hey, I was just hanging out with my nieces over the past weekend, and I asked them something about Facebook.
And they almost give me this stunned, stoned perplex look on their face like they didn’t know what it was. They just don’t know what Facebook is. They’re not on there anymore. They don’t use Facebook.
So Curcio’s point was given another five years, and this entire argument itself will be moved. It will be obsolete because the product itself will no longer be used by the upcoming generation.
There are such a plethora of things to choose from nowadays, whether it’s Snapchat or Twitch, or TikTok. I can’t even remember all of them. And here’s the point that I’m making. Conservatives, here’s the optimism thing.
Conservatives, we believe in free-market choice, and we are doing that. If we can’t get the legal side, we are making the act of choice. Look what we did with Parler. We pushed that to the moon and back.
We pushed it so far that they shut it down and you can’t download the app anymore. Conservatives, we do believe what we say. We believe to some extent. And I think we actually go out there and use the alternative forms of media if we’re being censored on the other one.
Now, I think there is some conjunction use between making the legal aspect there. I mean, understandable fair, and free and at the same time, forcing free-market decisions to hold Facebook accountable at the same time.
Botteri: I’m sorry, but the thing of it is that when you have behavior that is unacceptable where a platform is, behaving like a publisher, you need to enforce the law.
Cunningham: Yes. I don’t think there’s any question. Something’s gotta change. Somebody has got to feel some pressure for free speech. And hopefully, that will evolve into something that’s useful to everybody.
Listen to the full second hour here:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to the Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Live from Music Row Monday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. –host Leahy welcomed authors of Uprising, Diamond and Silk to the newsmaker line to weigh in on what’s going on in D.C., their new show on Newsmax, and social media site Chatdit.com
Leahy: We are joined now on our newsmakers line by Diamond and Silk! Good morning, Diamond and Silk. How are you doing?
Diamond: Wonderful. We hope you are doing well.
Leahy: Well, the last time we met was about a year and a half ago in Washington, D.C. A lot has happened since then. Give our listeners an update on what Diamond and Silk have been doing lately.
Diamond: Well, what we’ve been doing is calling out the obvious. When we look at everything that’s happening in our country when we look at what’s happening in D.C. You have the military in D.C. You have somebody that says, hey, the President, but we look at him as the resident.
Leahy: That’s a good line.
Diamond: We’re checking all of this out and we’re calling out the obvious. That’s what we’ve been doing. And what we’ve also been doing is telling people to drop the party affiliation and stopped picking a side and get on the same side. Because right now, our freedoms are being dismantled.
Silk: That’s right.
Diamond: Piece by piece and bit by bit and we’re tired of it.
Silk: And when you look at the parties, they’re both the same thing. One dirty bird with two corrupt wings. And with the way that our Republicans, even though they fought for our freedom, during slavery, and they are supposed to be the party of freedoms, they handed our freedoms over to the left, Liberal, white Liberals.
Leahy: Your phrases are really good. One dirty bird with two corrupt wings. I like that one, too. That’s very good.
Diamond: Well, we figured it out after this election. I’ve never seen anything like this here. And I know people don’t want you to talk about the election of 2020, but let me tell you something. There would never be another free and fair election if they don’t straighten out what happened in 2020 because constitutional laws were broken.
Silk: That’s right.
Diamond: We are a Republic government by constitutional law, and there’s no other law that supersedes that. So when you see people breaking the law, when you see the highest court in the land ain’t standing up for the law, where do we go? Where do we turn? What’s happening? We’re not a Banana Republic. We’re the United States of America, and we want to remain that.
Leahy: I’m told and I think this is true that Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook doesn’t like you guys very much.
Diamond: Oh, no, he sure doesn’t. Let me tell you something. They censor us so much it’s pathetic.
Silk: But if you look at it, a lot of them, the one thing that scares a lot of these Liberals is the fact that you have Black women or Black people who are awakening from the Democrat stupor. So they don’t like that regardless.
Leahy: About Facebook, it’s hard for me to keep track of when you’re officially on Facebook when they censor you. What’s your current status? Are you on Facebook today, or are you in the censor mode with them?
Diamond: Okay, we’re on Facebook, but we’re in the censor mode. We have over two million fans and followers. But if we come on live, they’re only going to let a few people be able to see it.
Silk: Right. They are purging our page.
Diamond: Sometimes people can’t like our page. They can’t follow our page, they can’t see our content, they can’t see our videos. These are the games that they play. They do it to a bunch of Conservatives. They do it when you start questioning their motives. They do it when you start questioning things like the vaccine. They want to say you’re a conspiracy theorist. But there ain’t nothing conspiratorial about want to those facts before you tell me to stick something in my arm.
Leahy: Let’s follow up with that on Facebook because we’ve had our own experiences with them. And the question is, you don’t know why. So you’re up on Facebook, but they won’t let all the people that like your page see what you do. When you talk to Facebook, what do they say to you?
Diamond: It’s the same old, same old. We’ll check it out, we’ll get back to you. All you can do is document this stuff because one day I just believe that the chains and fences are going to open up and somebody is going to be able to sue Facebook.
Silk: That’s right. But keep in mind that you can still stay connected to Diamond and Silk on our own social media platform Chatdit.com. What we’re not going to do is just sit back and cry like babies. What we’re going to do is join them if we can’t beat them and that’s what we did.
Leahy: Okay, so give me that detail on your own social media platform. Spell it out again.
Diamond: C-H-A-T-D-I-T.com.
Leahy: I am going there right now, and there you are on Chatdit.com. When did you open up Chatdit? When did you open it up?
Diamond: Actually, it was a year ago, April 26, and it appeared to be the same day that we were on the Hill back in 2018 April 26th. So we utilized that particular day as our day of getting started. So it was April 26, 2020, that we started Chatdit and opened IT up to the world, and we are growing leaps and bounds.
Leahy: How many people are using Chatdit now?
Silk: We have close to over 200,000 and we’re doing it independently. You know, we’re not trying to be like Facebook. We’re trying to be better than Facebook. We want to be honest with everybody, and we want people to come there. You sign up at your own will. And then one thing we do not do, we do not censor you. If there is something on there that you do not like then you can block yourself and seeing that person. This is how we operate.
Diamond: And whenever we put out a live video if we want the public to see it. We like to put it over there because you can’t talk about certain things on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter anymore.
Silk: That’s right.
Diamond: So we put it over there so people can see the full context of the video.
Silk: And the video is on our home page where you can see it without having to log in because we want you to see our content. We want you to see what Diamond and Silk have to say.
Diamond: Right.
Leahy: So what’s the home page again?
Diamond: Chatdit.com.
Leahy: When you say the homepage it’s Chatdit.com. Are you two doing live appearances and speeches, or are you just online these days?
Diamond: Okay, so we are doing live. We were on tour when this pandemic hit. And now that we’re still in the midst of this pandemic, we stopped touring because we didn’t think it was fair to make our people wear masks and have to follow all of these Draconian measures just to come to a show. We do have our new show on Newsmax called Diamond and Silk Crystal Clear that comes on Saturdays at 8:30 pm Eastern at a time. That keeps us busy.
We have a weekly podcast that comes out. You could find it on where you find your podcast. That way you get your podcast that’s weekly and that keeps us busy. And we do have a best-selling book called And you can get the book at D&SStore.com and a signed autographed copy.
Listen to the full first hour:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to the Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “Diamond and Silk” by The Alex Jones Channel CC 3.0.
Live from Music Row Tuesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed Tennessee State Senator Mike Bell to the studio who discussed the status of a Big Tech pushback bill in the General Assembly and the bill he is carrying that would create three statewide Chancery courts.
Leahy: We are in studio with our good friend State Senator Mike Bell represents within County and a few of the counties down that neck of the woods. Mike, you were telling me something during the break. That a guy that you’re working with a stonemason building your house listens to this program.
Bell: He listens every morning and I want to give a shout-out to Ben Lances. My wife and I are building a home right now, and I did the stonework for us, and tile work does a great job and he listens to you. In fact, he’s probably the only one I know of there in my area because I’m three hours away who knows about your program and listens every morning. Hello, Ben. Good morning.
Leahy: Ben, thank you for listening. You obviously have good political judgment.
Bell: He does. He’s a hardcore conservative guy.
Leahy: Good. We broadcast over Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC here and 1510 on the AM band big 500 watt Clear Channel station. And the FM station just covers mostly Middle Tennessee. You can listen to us on the iHeart app, which I think great. But if all goes well, sometimes this quarter we will be syndicated to radio stations around the state of Tennesse.
Bell: Good.
Leahy: So you can listen to us from all around the state. If all goes well. We are coming into the last few weeks of the session. And as the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, you are involved in a very important bill. We’ll talk about that in a second. Our listers are interested in what’s happening with the Big Tech pushback bill. Several other state legislatures have addressed that. Florida, I think, has passed a bill that involves some pushback against the Big Tech censors, Facebook, Google, et cetera. Now I understand that you are the one carrying that bill.
Bell: I am myself and Rep. Johnny Garret are carrying that.
Leahy: Johnny Garrett. The Majority Whip.
Bell: He is.
Leahy: A great baseball guy.
Bell: Oh, good.
Leahy: Johnny is the President of a Little League. I think it’s the Goodlettsville Little League. And he and I have been talking with the guys at Music City Baseball and went down and had lunch with them. And we have some ideas to help spread baseball around Tennessee because I’m a big baseball fan, too. So Johnny he’s in the House and you are in the Senate.
Bell: That’s right. And we modeled it after the Florida legislation. So we essentially copied the Florida legislation modified at Tennessee. But we did it kind of late in the session and trying to the issue with this is how do you figure out where the state authority starts and where the federal authority stops. Because most of these institutions that we want to push back against as you mentioned, Facebook, Google.
Leahy: Twitter.
Bell: Twitter. Any of those are regulated at the federal level. And what can we do in Tennessee actually put teeth into law, not just pass something for show. We could have probably passed something for show. But we are going to actually put teeth into this law to push back against Big Tech censoring conservative views. This doesn’t go both ways. If you follow social media as I do, they’re not getting complaints from the liberal side.
Leahy: Because they are not censoring them.
Bell: That’s right. It’s coming from the conservative side.
Leahy: They are amplifying liberal messages.
Bell: That’s right. In that short time, we couldn’t figure out how to pass a bill that actually put teeth into a way to, I guess, punish Big Tech for censoring. So we laid it over. We’re going to look at it this summer. In fact, I expect both the Speaker of the House and Speaker of the Senate, to name study committees that will take a serious look at what we can do to push back against Big Tech. And I expect them to name those before the session ends.
Leahy: So that may happen. The bill could be recommended over the summer study period.
Bell: That’s right.
Leahy: Then possibly reintroduce it at the beginning of the next session of the Tennessee General Assembly in January of 2022.
Bell: That’s correct. That’s what the plans are.
Leahy: And you are also our chairman of the Judiciary Committee.
Bell: Yes. It is somewhat unusual being a non-attorney and being chairman of the Judiciary Committee.
Leahy: How did you become chairman?
Bell: Well, I’ve been on the committee and I’m in my 11th year. And, of course, the chairman of any committee is named by the Speaker and the Speaker asked me if I’d like to do it. I think he appreciates the fact that as a non-attorney, how do I put this, sometimes attorneys may be a little hesitant to take on the judiciary because they work in that sphere. They work where they could receive retribution.
Leahy: From a judge.
Bell: I’ve got no fear of that.
Leahy: So tell us about the bill that you’re carrying, and why you think it’s important and where it stands.
Bell: Let’s take us back to last summer when we had our voting laws challenged here in the state of Tennessee. And they were heard before Chancery here in Davidson County because that’s what the state law says. Any time a state law is challenged, it’s always heard in Davidson County Chancery Court.
Leahy: Let’s just stop for a moment. How many Chancery courts are there in the state of Tennessee?
Bell: Oh, goodness. I think there are 31 judicial districts. And so there would be somewhere around that number of Chancery Courts.
Leahy: I can see where this is going. When the law was passed a long time ago, the politics in Nashville were probably not any different than the politics or the rest of the state.
Bell: Very, very similar. You got it. You know where this bill is going.
Leahy: So it didn’t make any difference 100 years ago where lawsuits against the state would be brought.
Bell: Absolutely.
Leahy: Now, common sense, since the state capital is in Nashville, you would say it would be brought into Davidson County. Except, the state of Tennessee has changed quite a bit. There are 95 counties and 92 of them are rock-rib conservative.
Bell: Absolutely.
Leahy: And two of them are far left. And Haywood County is kind of 50/50, 55/45 Democrat. Three counties, I think, went for Biden this time. And one was Shelby, which went overwhelmingly in the Memphis area. And then Davidson County went, and we’re about 65/35. But that’s it. So Davidson County is not at all representative of the state of Tennessee.
Bell: It doesn’t reflect the politics of the state of Tennessee at all. And that’s the reason for this bill. Why should a Chancery court that’s elected by the most liberal constituency in the state be deciding the cases? And I attacked when I presented this bill in committee, I attacked this argument head-on. I even mentioned Chief Justice John Roberts’s remark several months ago when he said there was any difference between an Obama judge, a Bush judge, a Clinton judge, or a Trump judge.
We all know that’s BS. That’s complete BS. (Leahy laughs) What’s the old line from Outlaw Josey Wales? Don’t pee on my leg and tell me it’s raining. Well, that’s what he was doing. And he was trying to tell us that there’s no difference between judges. Why is it a big deal every time we have a presidential election? Because we know who appoints that next Supreme Court judge and hopefully they’re going to reflect the philosophy of the party that elected the President.
And we know that at the national level. Don’t try to tell me that’s not going on here at the state level. I took it head-on that yes, I’m absolutely wanting to get cases out of a court that’s predominantly Democrat and follows a Democrat philosophy because that’s the type of people who are running for these positions. That’s the type of people who are electing these. And so why shouldn’t we…
Leahy: Far-left actually in my view.
Bell: And so what this bill does is create three statewide Chancery court positions that would be elected statewide.
Leahy: Three statewide. One for each division.
Bell: One for each division. Middle Tennessee, the East, Middle, and West. But they have to be elected statewide because of a provision in the Constitution that says they have to be elected by the people they represent. And so they would be from each grand division but they would actually run statewide. I would have preferred to have the East Tennesse judge be elected by East Tennessee people, Middle, and West.
But we can’t do that because of the language in the Constitution. So they would run statewide but then this panel of judges would hear any constitutional challenges against the state. They would hear any appeals of administrative law. But everything now that’s going to Davidson County Chancery Court would go to these three.
Leahy: Well, that’s a really great idea.
Bell: It’s a fantastic idea, and I don’t take complete credit for it. I’ve been working with our Lieutenant Governor, Speaker McNally. I’ve been working with him on this bill as well. And it’s something that came up before the decision on the voting law that I mentioned that came out of Chancellor Lyles court here in Davidson County.
Leahy: Chancellor Lyle. She has been very prominent in many decisions, few of which I agree with. (Chuckles)
Bell: Yeah, I would agree with that. But it’s modeled after our bill that passed goodness when I was still in the House 11 or 12 years ago, that allowed administrative law cases to get out of Davidson County Court and be heard in the county from where the defendant lived. And so we’re trying to move these cases out of liberal Davidson County.
Listen to the full first hour here:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to the Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Live from Music Row Monday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed New York City attorney Akiva Cohen to the newsmakers line to discuss the dynamics of the Section 230 law citing how it is constitutional in relation to the recently proposed state law by North Dakota legislators that would allow citizens to sue Facebook, Google, and Twitter.
Leahy: We are delighted to welcome you to our newsmakers line to joining myself and all-star panelist Crom Carmichael Mr. Akiva Cohen. He is an attorney in New York City and a graduate of Columbia Law School where he was a Harlan Fisk Stone Scholar. Pretty smart guy. And also drew my interest because Mr. Cohen has commented on a proposed North Dakota law that would allow residents to sue Facebook, Google, Twitter, and all those folks. Mr. Cohen welcome to the Tennessee Star Report.
Cohen: Thank you, Michael. Thank you for having me on. I appreciate you guys making me jealous right at the start of this.
Leahy: Why are we making you jealous?
Cohen: You had me holding on listening to the radio through your weather report. It’s not going to hit 64 degrees here in New York for another several months.
Leahy: Akiva, let me do this. Now I know you practice law in New York City but you are a smart guy. We have no state income tax here in Tennessee (Cohen chuckles) and we have lots of great law firms. You all should think about coming down sometime. Crom wants to say something to you.
Carmichael: But yeah, the first test is, you know when we get into the back and forth on the question at hand is you’re going to have to defend living in New York. (Laughter)
Cohen: This is by far the most pleasant place in the world to be a Jets fan and there are not really many places where it’s pleasant to be a Jets fan. So, you know.
Leahy: All right. Well look, so caught our attention because you know, one of the themes of this program is that right now there needs to be pushback from state governments against the usurpations of the national federal government. that’s our key theme of this program. And we saw an article about six state legislators in North Dakota who had introduced a state law that’s not under consideration that would allow residents of North Dakota to sue Facebook and Google and Twitter if they censor them. And you actually don’t think that that’s got much of a chance. Tell us your argument.
Cohen: So there are a couple of problems. The first problem is just a purely straightforward technical legal problem, which is the Constitution has a supremacy clause. The supremacy clause says that if the federal government steps in and regulates something in an area where it has authority state governments can’t vary from that.
So for example, if the federal government says look, for purposes of interstate commerce we want to make sure that money and goods can flow through freely and therefore no state can impose a tariff on steel. You can’t have a state that comes in and says, well, you know what federal government that’s very nice, we’d like to impose a tariff on steel. That won’t be allowed.
The immunity section that these North Dakota legislators are trying to override is Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act which says that basically, internet companies can allow comments on their websites. And if they moderate user content on their website, they can’t be sued for what they do in moderating it. and in that section it expressly says and this preempts any contrary state law.
This is Congress making a policy decision that this is best for Interstate Commerce and no state law can vary from it. So right at the outset, you can’t have a state law that says well, we don’t care federal government, we’re going to create a state cause of action to sue for the very thing that you said nobody can be sued for and by the way, where pre-empting state law. So it’s dead in the water. the question then becomes aside from the fact that is dead in the water legally the straightforwardly, as a policy matter is this really something that we want? And to me, that’s the more interesting question.
Leahy: And Akiva, if you could hold with us. When we come back we’re going to push back…
Carmichael: On the part that he says is the most important policy matter. I like that. That would be a good discussion.
Leahy: Well just as a heads up. I don’t know if you’ve heard of Vivek Ramaswamy and Jed Rubenfeld, but they had a contrary view in The Wall Street Journal will talk to you about that after the break.
(Commercial break)
Leahy: I’m going to read an excerpt brief excerpt from an article in The Wall Street Journal. I don’t know if you read it by Vivek Ramaswamy and Jed Rubenfeld. Have you seen this article?
Cohen: I’ve seen bits and pieces of it. I’m looking forward to hearing.
Leahy: I’ll read the excerpt and get your reaction to it. Conventional wisdom holds that technology companies are free to regulate content because they are private and the first amendment protects only against government censorship. That view is wrong. Google, Facebook, and Twitter should be treated as state actors under existing legal doctrines using a combination of statutory inducements and regulatory threats Congress has co-opted Silicon Valley to do through the back door what government cannot directly accomplish under the Constitution.
It is axiomatic the Supreme Court held in Norwood versus Harrison in 1973 that the government ‘may not induce encourage or promote private persons to accomplish what is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish.’ That’s what Congress did by enacting section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act. Well, there it is. What’s your reaction Akiva?
Cohen: So my reaction is it fundamentally misunderstands Section 230. So Section 230 was enacted not in an attempt to induce anybody to censor things but to protect decisions that tech companies had already made that there was certain content they didn’t want on their servers. And essentially what had happened was somebody sued CompuServe because on a CompuServe message board where one CompuServe user had posted something defamatory about another CompuServe user.
And CompuServe in that litigation basically said look, we don’t have anything to do with that. This is between two users. We didn’t post it. We didn’t write it. We didn’t review it. And what the court there said was, yeah, but when people post things that for example offered to sell cocaine or offer to sell drugs you delete that stuff. So you have the capacity to moderate and you didn’t moderate it here.
So we are going to hold you liable for the private defamation that one of your users committed against another user. And this was a pretty big problem. And it’s a big problem because people keep misunderstanding what the internet is because we write stuff on the internet. So people think about the internet the same way they think about books or newspapers.
But really the internet Michael is more like your talk radio show. Users post things on websites without the website being able to review them in advance and decide if this something I want to be published or not. And I assume you guys have a seven-second delay or something on here in case I lose my mind and start cursing. But I got to ask you. If you were in a situation where you didn’t have a seven-second delay and any time a caller called your radio show they could say something that would expose you to millions of dollars in liability and legal costs. How many callers do you think you would have on your radio show?
Carmichael: Let me jump in. This is Crom Carmichael. I think you’re approaching it from one direction but that’s not what the issue is today. The issue today is not somebody posting something and then somebody else wanting to sue. The issue today is that these large companies are picking and choosing who they would like to be able to express themselves on their platforms.
And that’s an entirely different thing that is proactively telling Candace Owens a black female that she will not have a Twitter account. It’s telling Candace Owen, a Black female she cannot have a Facebook page. It is telling Brandon Straka a gay person that he cannot have a Twitter account because they don’t like what he is saying. So that’s the issue. The issue today is they are discriminating against particular points of view rather than doing what Section 230 is supposed to do. And that is to make them so that they can allow all parties to debate with each other and not be sued.
Cohen: Sure. But now you’re making a different argument than the argument in The Wall Street Journal. The Wall Street Journal piece said well, this is really state action because really what happened was Congress enacted Section 230 because it wanted private companies to have the ability, and to specifically they wanted them to engage in viewpoint discrimination.
So really when these private companies are engaging in viewpoint discrimination and saying we don’t want this type of topic or this type of commentary on our website it’s not really private. It’s really Congress doing it through other means and my point is it wasn’t Congress doing it through other means. That’s not what Section 230 was enacted to do.
As you said, what Section 230 was enacted to do was to provide a liability shield that enabled private companies to decide for themselves what type of content they want to have on their website. That to me is a core First Amendment right that anybody who cares about free speech should defend. One of my heroes from way before I ever became a lawyer was David Goldberger.
I don’t know if you guys know the story of David Goldberger, but he’s the Jewish ACLU lawyer who defended the Nazis marching through Skokie, Illinois in the 70s when Skokie, Illinois said look, we really don’t like Nazis. We don’t want them coming through. So we’re just going to ban them not because of any sort of neutral principle, but because they’re Nazis and we don’t like Nazi speech.
And it fell to a Jewish ACLU lawyer to say look, I don’t like their speech. But you the government have no right to say that they can’t engage in it just like any other group. And what that really comes down to is I may not like the moderation decisions that any particular private platform or website is making. They may not be the decisions that I personally would make. But it is critical from any First Amendment standpoint and from a free-speech standpoint that private parties get to make those decisions.
Carmichael: My argument is that members of Congress have threatened Big Tech with taking away their 230 protections if they don’t stifle speech that the members of Congress disagree with. And Big Tech has done exactly what those governments threateners demanded that they do. And so therefore that makes them a state actor.
Cohen: There the response to that isn’t to then say oh, well, then we should take away the 230 protection. It’s to reinforce that and to push back on the people who are saying you make your moderation decisions the way we want you to make moderation decisions, or if you don’t we’re going to open you up to all sorts of lawsuits. That would be the problem.
Carmichael: Does Candace Owens a Black person does she have a right to sue Big Tech for de-monetizing her?
Cohen: No, absolutely not. Not if she’s Black or if she’s White.
Carmichael: I thought we had federal anti-discrimination laws. And if we do and if she was being barred because of a protected characteristic, so if a tech company was barring somebody from their services because they were Black. Because they were gay. Because they were male. Because they were female. It doesn’t matter which one. If that was the basis for kicking them off the platform then that would be something that you could bring an anti-discrimination suit on.
Leahy: The basis is they don’t like what she’s saying.
Carmichael: So what you’re saying is these platforms are free to tell people who have a different point of view from the owners that the owners of these sites have a right to take away their first amendment rights?
Cohen: 100 percent.
Leahy: On that note Akiva. We have more to discuss. I think you’re also saying 230 is not unconstitutional?
Cohen: 100 percent.
Leahy: All right, we will continue the dialogue. Please come back because we’re going to load with more arguments of logic and perhaps law then and see what you have to say with them. Thanks, Akiva for joining us.
Cohen: My pleasure. Thank you, guys.
Listen to the full third hour here:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to the Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “Akiva Cohen” by Kamerman, Uncyk, Soniker & Klein
