TechLife: State Gov. Relations Manager for the Heartland Institute Samantha Fillmore Discusses Big Tech and the First Amendment

TechLife: State Gov. Relations Manager for the Heartland Institute Samantha Fillmore Discusses Big Tech and the First Amendment

 

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 Samantha Fillmore who is the state government relations manager at the Heartland Institute to the newsmakers line to discuss the institute’s mission ensuring First Amendment rights are protected from Big Tech censorship through state legislation.

Leahy: We are joined now by Samantha Fillmore. She is the state government relations manager for the Heartland Institute in cold Chicago, Illinois. Welcome to The Tennessee Star Report, Samantha.

Fillmore: Thank you for having me. Good morning.

Leahy: You are a Texan!

Fillmore: I am.

Leahy: You attended the University of Texas at Austin. You worked in the Texas legislature. You’re a big UT Longhorn fan and a fan of the Dallas Cowboys.

Fillmore: Yes, sir. That’s pretty much just about everything I’m passionate about. Football and politics, what more is there?

Leahy: What more is there? What kind of adjustment does a woman from Texas make when she moves into cold Chicago to work at the Heartland Institute?

Fillmore: Let me put it this way, my dog and I are not thrilled. And I just discovered that you have to own a shovel to shovel your car out of snow. This is news to me. Otherwise, though, I’m very happy to be here. Chicago is a great city and I love what I do at the Heartland Institute. So, I have no complaints.

Leahy: It is a great city. But it is also much colder than Austin, Texas.

Fillmore: Yes, sir. That is true. But I’m very happy to do what I do. And again, I think anyone who is able to maintain and keep a job in the last year that we had is I should only be grateful. So I’ll handle the snow. I’ll put on my big coat and look like a marshmallow and I’ll keep quiet about it.

Leahy: Where in Texas are you from? What county?

Fillmore: My family’s from Dallas historically. A very deep, Texas family that goes back about six generations. I definitely broke the norm by coming to Chicago. I’ll definitely be going back eventually, but this is just a fun place to be building up my career. But no I did definitely think often that Texas is calling me. (Chuckles)

Leahy: Are you from Highland Park in Dallas or you from Frisco or Plano? What part of Dallas are you from?

Fillmore: Okay, so you’re familiar with the area. My family has a historic home in Arlington. I grew up very close to the stadium and Six Flags. Which I somehow never got tired of growing up.

Leahy: My wife is from Texas near Nacogdoches in Saint Augustine, and we actually met when I was working in Dallas. I managed a retail store not too far from Highland Park at the intersection of Preston Road and Lovers Lane. I’m sure you know where that is.

Fillmore: I know exactly where that is. I can imagine that in my mind. A very smart man ends up with a Texan woman.

Leahy: Well you have a very important job. and tell us a little bit before we get into the government state relations work that you do. tell us about the Heartland Institute in the important work it’s been doing in the area of State sovereignty and states rights.

Fillmore: Absolutely. So the Heartland Institute is about 37 years old. And we are an independent and national nonprofit organization. So we have that 501-C3 status. And our mission is to discover and develop free-market solutions to social and economic problems. Generally, the way that translates is we just don’t like a lot of heavy government oversight regulation.

We think that states should always maintain, have, and push for as much sovereignty as they should. And so we are headquartered in Illinois as you mentioned around the Chicago area. And we just focus on providing local and elected state officials with research to push policy that goes along with our mission.

Leahy: So you wrote a great piece last week. Why Big Tech Censorship is Super Scary. The subtitle says, the rapid innovation of technology and the ways in which it affects our daily lives has baffled those of us who remember the pre-digital and dial-up days.

Fillmore: Absolutely.

Leahy: Talk to us a little bit about this alarming and frightening trend of Big Tech domination of individual liberty and what states and individuals should do about it.

Fillmore: Of course. So as we all know overnight basically in the blip of human time we saw this huge emergence of these massive innovations of Internet social media platforms. And there was something really good about that. It elevated this national conversation and political discourse to kind of become the modern-day public square for people to discuss their opinions and listen to thought. And that is still a miraculous thing.

But with that, we have allowed it to become factored into the hand than to a handful of powerful tech titans. And unfortunately, the way that laws are right now, they’re protected from liability and they operate as monopolies which has led to Americans becoming fearful. They see a lot of prominent and especially conservative politicians or people that might not have any viewpoint that falls out of the normal lose their ability to speak. And at what point does that stop? At what point does that just become the trend? And you get into the Orwellian almost dystopian novel of being silenced and unwritten.

Leahy: Some states have been pushing back in North Dakota some legislators proposed legislation that could or would allow the citizens of that state to sue Facebook or Google if they censored them unnecessarily. And that’s been quite controversial. I know your associate there who is the director of government relations Cameron Sholty had submitted testimony before the North Dakota House Judiciary Committee on that legislation. Tell us a little bit about that issue and where you see that going?

Fillmore: Absolutely. So we actually currently now know that there’s somewhere between a dozen and 15 states that have already begun to propose legislation that looks like that. And if not, we are speaking to them and try and help them craft that. So this will definitely be a sweeping legislative trend for the 2021 session.

And that’s important because every state legislature is meeting this year, which is not always the case. so pretty much as I’m sure you know, President Trump signed his executive order on social media censorship in May 2020. And that cracked down the ability of the Communication Decency Act and Section 230 for social media outlets to begin to censor.

Leahy: And if we can stop here just for a moment. You’re talking about Section 230 of the 1996 national law called the Communications Decency which prohibited citizens from suing Facebook and Google and other social media outlets for censoring them. Critics have said what they’re doing is they’re privatizing the government’s ability to violate First Amendment rights. That’s the criticism of it.

Fillmore: Yes sir it is. That is correct. So the way that it’s written and what in the law of Section 230 it absorbs these large platforms from ever having to be liable for material that their users post because they are just simply hosting platforms. However, the more that they censor certain tweets or certain people they turn into an editorial context.

So then the logic is that if you’re that in turn to this editorial contact, you should then be able to be liable for these actions. And the way that states are fighting against that such as North Dakota are is with legislation that would allow that you said private citizens to take private action in court if they feel that they have been silenced unnecessarily.

What is important to note about this is that it does have to be proven through all this legislation that they did not break any of the Good Samaritan laws or rules-based in the industry that goes along with posting. Which I think should be fair. Obviously, anyone outwardly pushing for violence was saying atrocious things which we have seen on social media that that does violate the terms and conditions that you sign up for and some of these platforms.

But if you were saying something simply political or something that has nothing to do with politics until it got taken down and you were still within those agreements then that is actionable to be taken into a court of law.

Leahy: So give us an update on the possibility and likelihood that this legislation in North Dakota will move towards passage in both the House and the Senate and then signature by Governor Doug Burgum.

Fillmore: Well, it is still pretty early in the legislative process however, the committee meetings are going very well. And I am very confident in the ability of the good legislators in North Dakota to see the value in this. And it is a concern for both the Senators and the Representatives that I know in North Dakota but also around the nation. I think this could be sweeping legislation that has lasting effects and can stick in many states and hopefully go across a multitude of Governors’ desks.

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.
Photo “Samantha Fillmore” by The Heartland Institute. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dan Gainor VP of MRC TechWatch Explains the Left’s ‘Freedom of Speech Does Not Equal Freedom of Reach’

Dan Gainor VP of MRC TechWatch Explains the Left’s ‘Freedom of Speech Does Not Equal Freedom of Reach’

 

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 VP of MRC Tech Watch, Culture, and Business Dan Gainor to the newsmakers line.

During the first hour, Gainor made the case for liberty explaining how the MSM and Big Tech are controlling speech, de-platforming, and censoring the content of right-wing media outlets. He recognized the control as an attempt to have America online mimic that of Europe online by systematically removing our Bill of Rights. Gainor outlined how the left games the system as citizens have moved most of their life online.

Leahy: We are joined Now by our good friend of many years Dan Gainor Vice President of Business and Culture for the Media Research Center. He also has a section there called Tech Watch. Welcome, Dan.

Gainor: It’s good to be talking to you. It’s been a while.

Leahy: Dan, we first met back in the Tea Party days.

Gainor: Yes. I was just going to say that. And we go way way back. And in today’s environment that’s like, you know dog years and we’re like both a hundred or something.

Leahy: Well, we first started corresponding in 2009 at the start of the Tea Party Movement. We met in person and talked about Tea Party strategy and related things at a restaurant in Alexandria, Virginia back in 2010. And we’ve been friends ever since. Big question Dan. How has the case of liberty proceeded in America in the intervening 11 years since we first met in person?

Gainor: Oh, it’s like a snowball rolling downhill and it’s heading toward a cliff. I mean, it’s in bad shape. When you have major media outlets calling to de-platform major media outlets. When you have Big Tech basically controlling what you can see say or do online, that is not the path for freedom. That’s not the path for liberty.

Look, we just finished it seems like forever ago already, but we just finished an election where Big Tech, Facebook, and Twitter fixed the election by censoring content. In Facebook‘s case, it openly violated its own policies to the point where its bogus fact-checkers threw them under the bus and said that they weren’t even obeying their bogus fact-check rules.

So then you get to this point now where CNN is blatantly calling to de-platform and for people that don’t know, what that means basically remove from any platform that’s available on. So if you want to remove OANN, Newsmax, Fox, and Fox Business, that means sure they can broadcast but nobody can see them. So if you’ve got Verizon or you have Comcast they’d be kicked off. If they broadcast online on Facebook or YouTube they’d be kicked off. That’s what the media team at CNN is trying to do.

Leahy: Well what kind of opportunity do we have the push back here Dan?

Gainor: To me first, people need to not buckle under to this stuff. And that means there are ways on their sites too, first of all, complain and to file and to reject it. And if you’ve got stuff suspended or whatever there are ways to appeal that. You do that. That’s just a bureaucratic thing you do it. Because know a lot of people don’t even bother but sometimes you win.

So there’s that’s the first thing. Next, Facebook has just announced this oversight board, so if you get content taken down, you could appeal to that. It’s just one more way of putting pressure. Then ultimately this is going to be something that gets decided I think on either Capitol Hill or in the courts or both because these companies are still American companies and they’ve decided that we don’t have the same rights we have offline as online. And they’re trying to make it worse. There is a strong push by these companies to make America online be more in line with Europe online. Well, the last time I checked we still have this Bill of Rights thing.

Leahy: It’s a good way for them to get rid of the Bill of Rights.

Gainor: Well it effectively does when you look at how much we live our lives online now. And more so obviously because of the COVID. I just heard the newscast coming on that kids are still going to school at home. You’ve got people working from home. You’ve got people interacting with the government expressing their opinion. And if you can’t express your opinion online then you don’t have free speech. If you can’t worship online then you don’t have freedom of religion.

Leahy: And by the way, you mentioned this Facebook Ombudsman appeal court, I guess you could say of review. And I looked at the members of it and  I did not see a single conservative news journalist.

Gainor: There is actually one.

Leahy: Who is that? Who is that? Who is that one? Is it Mike McConnell?

Gainor: He releases the social con of some things. But then you’ve got a Libertarian guy who isn’t especially conservative on a lot of things. So they almost cancel out. This is how the left games the system. They say they create a free-speech board. They have 20 members of the board, 15 of them are international.

Leahy: Exactly. That caught my attention too Dan. That caught my attention.

Gainor: So they don’t have any similar view of the U.S. for free speech.

Leahy: Did they call you to be on the board, Dan?

Gainor: No.

Leahy: They didn’t call me either. I’m shocked! I’m shocked!

Gainor: And so I mean they’ve already gamed the system. And here’s the funny thing. To show you how radical the left is the left hates the oversight board because it’s not left-wing enough. Because it’s not censoring content. They hated the rulings that they have already done because they didn’t want to censor content.

The left has this new line and if used for a while I but when you see it crop up on CNN, you know, it’s breaking through. And that’s freedom of speech does not equal freedom of reach. So in other words, you have a right to stand on your soapbox and say something but not in the public square. You can say it on your property. You can say it at your house.

Leahy: Where your nearby neighbors can hear it, but nobody else.

Gainor: Right, and maybe not even that. How dare you say that! A lot of this comes from the radical left on all sorts of issues particularly the transgender issue. If you say men aren’t women on Twitter you can be suspended.

Leahy: They are crazy!

Gainor: It doesn’t matter. They control the platforms.

Leahy: So do you have a particular plan to be on this Dan? I have some thoughts but do what do you think the pushback should entail and what are the chances of success?

Gainor: Well ultimately I think this is the Civil rights battle of this century. And I say civil rights battle because when there is an organized effort to target a group of people, doesn’t matter who the group of people is when there’s an organized effort to target a group of people for the way they think and to silence them, to shut them down, to cost them their jobs, to target their faith, etc, historically that’s seen in this country as a civil rights issue.

And I know that’s hard for conservatives to think of that we’re a minority that’s being targeted. but we are. And so ultimately I think that’s the battle to fight all the way up through the Supreme Court. and that takes a while. So I think that’s part of it. I think this is an international battle. We’ve headed up the Free Speech Alliance which is a coalition of 76 different organizations that are conservative around the world now.

We’ve added I think half a dozen members in Europe, South America, and Australia and we’re continuing to expand because we are fighting globalist international corporations of the most powerful corporations in human history. I always tell people that India was conquered by the British East India Company. And the British East India Company isn’t as powerful as Facebook, Google, Apple, and Amazon.

Leahy: Dan here’s a question for you. We are on a talk radio station right now here in Nashville, Tennessee. How long will talk radio allow freedom of speech or is it likely to continue in your view?

Gainor: Well, I mean, I think the left has wanted to go after talk radio for a long time. It’s just not their number one target. Right now their number one target is Facebook. They want to knock us off there. I mean they’re going after Fox because I think I think they think Fox is weak right now post-election. So they’re trying to bully as much as they can. And you always heard of the bully pulpit. They’re using the bully pulpit.

If they can silence people into being afraid to speak out then they win half the battle that way. They don’t even have to change things. But the Democrats are definitely in charge of Washington and not respective of the First Amendment. They don’t believe in it. They don’t believe in free speech. If you look at HR1 which they passed in the House under Trump that they wanted to get rid of Citizens United.

Citizens United is a free-speech ruling. They don’t believe in it. It was all about creating a documentary about Hillary Clinton when she ran for president. And they oppose that even though they control Hollywood and they produce documentaries all the time bashing the right.

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.
Photo “Dan Gainor” by MRC.