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All of a sudden, these floods just ravage through all of these neighborhoods in Valencia and left hundreds, if not thousands dead as a result.
So completely reckless response from the government.
What happens when the greatest threat during a natural disaster isn't the storm itself, but the response. My name is James Lee, and you're watching Beyond the Headlines on Breaking Points here in the United States. Hurricane Helene devastated communities across western North Carolina in late September of this year. While official reports list just over one hundred fatalities. Survivors and volunteers on the ground believe the true death toll
is far higher. Allegations of mismanagement, delayed aid, and a lack of transparency have left many questioning whether the government truly has the public's best interests at heart. But are these failures unique to America, because across the Atlantic Spain faced its own catastrophic disaster just a few weeks later.
The floods in Valencia were some of the worst in the country's history, and like Hurricane Helene, they've exposed deep flaws in the government's response, from ignored warnings to suppressed death tolls and widespread mismanagement of aid.
The parallels are striking.
So today we're going to explore what we can learn from these disasters and if they reveal a deeper crisis in government corruption in countries around the world. So joining me today is Ierra Modarelli. She's an investigative journalist and associate editor at twenty first Century Wire, and she was recently on the ground in Valencia. Her reporting has uncovered shocking details about what really happened during and after the floods, something the mainstream media has failed to do.
Ira. Thank you so much for joining us today.
Thanks so much for having me. James.
What I want to start off saying is I think Americans we often only focus on domestic stories in our media, But when I came across your reporting, I noticed that there were so many parallels between what happened in Spain and what happened in North Carolina with Hurricane Helene, which we're going to get into. But for our audience who may not know too much about what happened in Spain and Valencia, can you give us a brief recap of that disaster.
Yeah, for sure.
This happened over a month ago, So on the twenty ninth of October, there were some really devastating bloods over here in Valencia, particularly in flood prone areas, very urban areas. The government was very aware that these were blood prone areas, but over the years, they just kept building out in these areas and pushing people towards this region of Valencia. This was, you know, marked as as the worst natural
disaster that's ever hit Spain before. And one of the things that really compounded the tragedy massively was the fact
that the early warning systems failed. So we have just like you guys in the US, we have a Spanish meteorological agency called imet here issued a red weather or in the morning of the floods, but the Valencian President, Carlos Son kind of dismissed it, ignored it and told people, you know, that there was there was nothing to be worried about, downplayed it, and people went about their days and all of a sudden, these floods just ravaged through
all of these neighborhoods in Valencia and left hundreds, if not thousands dead as a result. So completely reckless response from the government, very similar to what happened with Hurricane Helene.
Yeah, when you speak, when you mentioned the failure of the early warnings, that kind of brought back memories of what happened in Maui with the wildfires that happened. There many people on the ground saying that they got no warning of that. And then you also just mentioned the death toll being very high into the thousands, which I don't believe is the actual death count. And I know that when you actually went on the ground and talked
to people and recorded exactly what they saw. You know, one of the most shocking parts of your reporting was this discrepancy in death toll. So can you tell us a little bit about what the locals are saying and why they think the number is so much higher and what kind of evidence is there to support those claims.
Yeah, one prefacing this with I will be in violence here for five days my first visit there, and then for another two days. I just came back last weekend. I've spoken to about thirty or forty neighbors, maybe more when I was on the ground, kind of just start conversations, and every neighbor wants to tell you what they saw.
And every single person I spoke to had told me that they'd seen more than one body being either pulled out of a garage or people being stuck on the highway on the night of the floods, and just hearing how all these cars were being washed away on the highway, and you know, they were all beeping, and the beeping sounds got more faint and less and less cars were beeping, So in other words, people were literally dying and and and these people that were trapped there were watching this
horrifically happening in front of their eyes, unable to do anything about it. And I spoke and saw a bunch of things myself when I was there. So let's start with the government is reporting this as two hundred and twenty plus deaths right now. The missing toll is in the one eight hundred to two thousand. Initially was at that count, but I've spoken to various neighbors who had.
And I go through this in my investigation too.
Who had identified either family members as dead, or friends or neighbors or such as dead effectively steamed the bodies and identified them, and yet family members were marked as missing instead of dead. And one of the reasons I believe why this is happening is because for every deceased person, the Spanish government needs to allocate around seventy two thousand euros to the family members. And one of the big clues that I got when I was on the ground
was I went into a garage that was flooded. The floor below, I later found out, had a bunch of bodies still in it. So I was on the first floor and the floor below that was completely inundated. Still on my first visit, there were three body bags in that one garage that I went into, and I filmed them.
I went in and I filmed them, and then.
I talked to the locals about what they saw, and they saw people being called out of this garage specifically.
And I went back.
Two weeks later, and the state forces, whether that be you know, the military or whoever is pulling these bodies out, needs to mark these areas garages mostly of tunnels or so they need to a little mock on the garages an s specifically, which means sa gala, which means we
remove bodies from here. And so I asked the neighbor, where is that, because we can clearly see the body bags, but we can't actually see that they've not They said they don't do that because then you could obviously kind of go around all these towns, count the numbers and see that massive discrepancy. So neighbors on the ground believe that there are thousands of people that have perished, and that most of these bodies are in the sea at this point, they've been washed into the sea, and every
single neighbor I talk to shaw bodies. So it's much much higher, I believe than what they're saying.
Wow, so you're saying that there's actually a financial incentive from the government's perspective to classify people as either missing or just forget about them completely, because if they are reported as dead, there's some coverage that the government needs to provide for the families. And I think in the US, you know, we witness complete dysfunction, some would say corruption, kind of like what you're talking about in terms of
the federal government's response. You had people like yourself, you know, or volunteers, aid organizations going in and having to step in and help, and we also heard reports here of those organizations being turned away. It was kind of a complete mess. And I think you talked about something similar happening in Spain as well. Can you tell us a little bit more about.
That, Yeah, for sure.
I mean when I first heard about FIEMA turning away volunteers and hurricane, and then I was completely stunned at that happening. And then I saw it for myself when I went to Valencia, a different organization, this case, the Red Cross. I spoke to an interviewed also in the investigation, an interview with an independent aid worker that was on the ground at a distribution center that was next to where I was sleeping.
So I was in this distribution.
Center quite a lot gathering things for neighbors and so, and I came across her and she said, I want to tell you, you know, what's been going on here, because she was really visibly upset, and she said, every day I come here independently, I just want to hand out things to the neighbors, and the Red Cross follows me around and monitors what I'm doing and impedes me from handing these donations out to neighbors. So you know,
these these items are being flown away. The Red Cross is instead asking people for financial donations, seems what they're most interested in. And when I was on the ground, I saw a couple of Red Cross cars kind of just fitting tightly there and not doing much, and not once did I actually see the Red Cross handing something out.
And another volunteer that I was there with told me that she saw the Red Cross putting a big camera on their car and filming themselves handing something out to the neighbors, something that we've never seen on the ground. But you know, they were doing this for their social media channels to show that they're they're helping, but they weren't the big majority of people that were there on
the ground helping were mostly volunteers. And this is also something that a neighbor tells me about in another interview, that not neither the state forces nor these human rights organizations or NGOs are actually helping. That it's mostly individuals and volunteers and nobody else. And on top of that, we have a massive media blackout around the story too.
Yeah, so I wanted to ask you about the media because I think, at least from our perspective here in the States, we have very very high I think media distress is probably at an all time high, perhaps warranted writing in relation to some of these natural disasters, the reporting that they've done right always see you know, it's funny because we see these fact checks right people on the ground are saying, hey, FEMA is blocking aid, and
then they would do these short segments or articles saying, oh, we fact checked that we've called FEMA. They said, that's not happening, and then they just kind of move on. I know that you're on the ground there, so and I read like some of the stuff that you talk about, like claims of the media actually misinforming people or even sometimes staging events, can you or staging certain events to portray a certain narrative. Can you go into that a little bit?
And also what's the.
General public sentiment that people have towards mainstream media in Europe?
Well, I mean in Europe, as in the entire world, people don't trust the mainstream media anymore, very rightfully, so I should say on this particular instance, there were a.
Couple of different instances that we can go into that kind of went viral, and then one that I saw myself.
So a couple of things that went viral around this was reports and videos of journalists or a journalists in this case kind of ducking down covering himself in mud after being completely clean in a you know, zone full of mud everywhere, completely clean, meaning he had just arrived, so covering himself in mud real quick, and then grabbing the microphone and saying, you know, I'm ready, let's go. And this this was caught on camera. So that was one for a big outlets here called.
Bodies on It. And then to what I saw, you know, minutes twenty minutes or.
So after I had left this garage and see lead bodybags and just you know, spoken to completely traumatized neighbors. I see another big outlets in the street with their microphone kind of waiting and setting up and I start of seeing what's going on here? What are they setting up for? And the neighbors tell me this is the police is about to march down the street together with the military kind of in a in a show of you know, we're helping so much here and look at us.
And those are the stories that they were covering when we were seeing, you know, not that much military on the ground, very little police, to be honest, and when we were seeing them, they were often seen smoking, growing on their phones, kind of chilling while volunteers we're doing the heavy lifting.
Yeah, it's so disturbing to hear all of these stories and where my mind goes and when when a population deals with something like this, there's almost no other path them to start going down other than to think, okay, is there some sort of you know, conspiracy going on here?
Right?
When you talk about these certain powerful, nefarious figures or institutions taking advantage of these disasters here, you know, we have stories about maybe there's deeper motives at play, real estate interest covering up you know, the mismanagement that's going on, or facilitating a land grab, something like that. So I'm just curious what is your overall opinion about these kinds of ideas and is there anything on the ground that would suggests any truth to these things.
So I think, you know, not to get too conspiratorials here, but I think that of course, there was a lot of money that was made out of this tragedy, and the governments very obviously could care less. There's massive protests on the ground that are not being covered by the media because people want both the Valencian president and Philip Sancheus, who's the president of Spain, to step down. That this could have really easily been avoided, and they chose not to.
They chose to play party politics. Even the Valencian president was at an award ceremony on the day of the bloods.
Oh.
You know, it just gets worse and worse the more you talk about it. But I think, of course, in this instance, it's opportunity and money that was available that they made that's not going to get handed out. So where is that money going to go?
Who knows?
Yeah, well, we appreciate you for going on the ground, and I think, you know, between all of us independent media, I think is the future. I think mainstream media has shown that they're going to they've they've abdicated their duty, so it's kind of up to us to pick up the pieces there. So before I let you go, I do want to I do want you to tell the audience about the kind of reporting that you do and where they would be able to go to find more of your work.
Yeah, thanks so much.
So I work for twenty plus century. Y. You can find all that work on my profile. You can find the investigation link to my Twitter and yeah, I'm mostly active on Twitter, and you can see a catalog of all my investigations and work on the twenty first century.
Why.
Well, thank you so much Eric for joining us today on Breaking Points and look forward.
To talking to you against sin.
Thanks for having me me.
That's it for me today.
If you want more stories that the mainstream media is unwilling to tell, please check out and subscribe to my YouTube channel fifty one to forty nine with James Lee. The link will be in the description below. As always, thank you so much for your time today and keep on tuning into Breaking Points.
On November fifth, twenty twenty four, right after voting for Donald Trump, millions of people turned their ballots over and voted for things on ballot measures that Trump will almost certainly never give them, abortion as a constitutional right, or higher minimum wage, paid leave. These are all promises of the Democrats, and clearly people want them. Yet when it came time to vote for the candidate who supports those things, millions of people chose the other person.
So why is that.
Alaska, Missouri, and Nebraska all had ballot measures having to do with paid sick leave. If you are, for example, a part time worker in Nebraska, you probably don't get sick leave, since, as of twenty twenty, only eleven point six percent of part time workers there have any kind of paid sick time. So if you're not in that group, you will probably at some point have to choose between staying homesick and earning rent money, and hopefully you don't
have a job handling people's food. Let's look at Trump's position on paid sick leaf. There is nothing from his campaign website and there is nothing in the official GOP platform. Conversely, Tim Wallas recently signed a bill establishing a statewide paid sick leave program. During Harris's campaign, she listed paid medical leave as priority, and medical leave would generally include sick days. So if you're one of the thirty four million workers who lack paid sick leave and that was your concern,
Harris gives you a lot more to work with. These states obviously went for Trump, they also voted for Republican governors, senators, and Alaska gave their one congressional district to a Republican. Yet after sixty percent of Nebraska voted for Trump, up seventy four percent voted for paid sickly, as did Alaska and Missouri.
When we think about politics through a two party lens, there's this sort of assumption that you can categorize all the issues in one or the other, and then there's this assumption that goes along with that that if people are voting for candidates from one party, they necessarily would vote the way that you would assume on all those issues, and that's just not true. I think that's never been true,
but I think that's increasingly. You know, the sort of affiliation of the parties with what they stand for is becoming destabilized. So I grew up, for example, in northern New Jersey, just outside New York City, all Democrat in local politics, and so functionally you have a one party system there so ballot initiatives present an opportunity to vote on a policy directly apart from the party politics of wherever you live.
So let's take minimum wage. Since two thousand and two, there have been twenty six measures for statewide wage races. Democrats have talked a lot about raising the minimum wage and if you want to hire minimum wage Harris again made the most sense because she supported raising the minimum wage though on her campaign website and only said that
she'll fight for a higher minimum wage. She eventually committed to a fifteen dollars minimum wage on October twenty second, which is still lower than the living wage in most places, and it was probably too late for enough people to notice. But Trump is decidedly worse on minimum wage. His website and not to mention, the official R and C platform
does not mention minimum wage at all. Despite this, people went to the polls and voted for both minimum wage and Trump, such as the case with Missouri and Alaska, which both voted to raise the minimum wage after first voting for Trump. In fact, out of the twenty six minimum wage measures so far this century, all have passed except for California.
This last election in California, I think is a is an outlier that it does bear some consideration. For a long time, California has been kind of like the ballot initiative Dystopia the minimum wage and cree.
It was a very small.
Minimum wage increase, was one to two dollars, and they already have a minimum wage that's tacked to inflation, so they're going to see a raised in January anyway. So the specifics around that, I think have more to do with the with the sort of broader political culture and what's going on in California than a specific vote against wage increases.
But generally this is a winner.
Because most people work for a living and lots of people make low wages. So if you ask people, should you make more money, most people are going.
To say yes.
But no issue exemplifies this more than the issue the Democrats drive the hardest in the fight.
For reproductive rights.
You mentioned reproductive rights, abortion.
Abortion, reproductive rights, reproductive rights and freedom.
What do you want to say, Madam Vice President, I'm just so sorry.
Why is it that in the state of Missouri fifty three percent of voters voted to put abortion in the state constitution, but forty percent of those voters voted for KAMLA. That means over one point five million people voted in favor of protecting reproductive rights, but against the part which is most passionate about it. And just to recap, Trump
has said abortion should be left to the states. Every Trump Supreme Court justice voted to overturn Roe v. Wade, and his VP Vance stated in twenty twenty two.
I certainly would like abortion to be illegal nationally.
The VANCE has walked back that claim recently to fall in line with Trump's position, and the official party position is to protect and defend a vote of the people from within the states. Essentially, they're shifting their attack on reproductive rights to focus on action at the state level, where ballot measures play a critical role in codifying those rights. So to be clear, it's not that conservatives feel so strongly about states rights. Rather, it's their way of rolling
back reproductive rights in their entirety. Out of ten states that had abortion on the ballot, seven of the measures passed New York, Colorado, Missouri, Arizona, Nevada, Maryland, and Montana. Only three South Dakota, Nebraska and Florida did not.
If we looked at polls going back years, we would see that a majority of American support did some measure of abortion rights. What ballot initiatives do is they sort of bring that reality to the foe. So in twenty twenty two, when the Supreme Court issued their Dobbs decision, when they overturned the Roevwade abortion protections, the Republican legislators in Kansas rushed a vote onto the ballot to allow them to ban abortion, and you know, they got crushed.
They lost by something like sixty percent.
And actually a majority of Florida voters also chose to put abortion in the state constitution, but didn't meet the sixty percent threshold. And so even Florida is mostly in favor of protecting abortion rights, even though Trump won that state by a large margin. And wait, why does Florida require sixty percent? So in two thousand and six, Florida passed an amendment to the constitution that would require a super majority or at least sixty percent of the vote
to pass all future ballot measures. And that amendment passed with ironically only fifty seven percent of the vote, the same amount of people who voted in favor of protecting abortion rights in Florida. Their states also have some sort of supermajority rule on the books. For instance, New Hampshire requires two thirds of the vote to pass an amendment, and Arizona currently requires a supermajority only to pass tax
related measures. But in addition to the issues I've already talked about here, with increasing frequency, ballot measures have been used to take up causes like marijuana legalization, redistricting, expanding medicaid, and so what would seem to be a direct response to the success of these ballot measures are amendments requiring a supermajority to pass ballot measures in the first place.
They've been popping up all over the country. Ironically, these amendments are being voted on through the same ballot measures legislators are trying to make harder to pass, and so.
We see an increase in the past few years of legislative moves to try to limit the direct vote by raising the threshold to win, raising the threshold to qualify, you know, making it harder to gather signature is making you gather them in more places.
All these ballot measures have something important in common. They're all dealing with material issues. And in particular ones that voters might find it hard to have a saying through other means. So minimum wage hikes and paid sickly are pretty obvious material issues, but reproductive rights are as well, because unfettered access to abortion is often framed as a right to autonomy over one's body. My body, my choice.
Being denied necessary emergency care, especially in red states where providers may be reluctant until or unless the life of the mother is actually in jeopardy, that is a critical issue. But one of the most common reasons people and pregnancies wanted or otherwise are financial. Thing about the couple, for example, who are barely scraping by with one kid and they know a second child would just be a financial burden
they can't do so. Having the right to self determination over one's body is obviously human right, but you can't separate that from one's material conditions. So my takeaway from this is that people want material change and will vote to affirm this when it's presented with clear and predictable outcomes.
Voters are less interested though, in campaign promises that may or may not come to fruition if the candidate wins, or in declarations of theoretical support, neither of which help working people pay their rent or feed their kids, and ballot measures are one of the few ways for people
to engage with direct democracy. So if the Democrats ever want to see the inside of the White House again, they would do well to embrace more than paltry messages of general support and start committing to the concrete material things that voters keep saying they will show up for, and that will do it for me. My name is Spencer Snyder. If you found this video interesting, make sure you are subscribed to Breaking Points. You can find me on Twitter or at my own channel. Liking sharing always helps.
Thank you to Breaking Points. Thank you so much for watching, and I will see you in the next one.
Not obvious why this case would be limited to TikTok or limited to China. Once you accept the idea that the government can protect us from foreign manipulation by preventing us from access saying foreign media, there are lots of other platforms the government might become concerned about.
Do national security interests outweigh your constitutional right to free speech. My name is James Lee and you're watching Beyond the Headlines on break Points in April of twenty twenty four, Congress passed a law that would ban TikTok if their Chinese parent company, by Dance, refuse to sell the app to an American buyer, and just a few weeks ago,
a federal Court of Appeals upheld that law. The government claims that it's protecting Americans from foreign manipulation and data theft, but critics warn the decision weakens the First Amendment and sets a dangerous precedent for free expression. So to help us understand what's at stake, I'm joined today by Jamil Jaffer. He is the executive director of the Night First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. Jamille, thank you so much for joining us today on breaking Points.
Sure, thanks for the vization absolutely.
I guess just to catch people up, can you summarize for us what the recent ruling was from the DC Circuit Court? Specifically, why do the judges decide that banning TikTok does not violate the First Amendment of the Constitution. A term that I've heard being used is something called script strict scrutiny. That's tough to say, strict scrutiny. So can you break that down for us in layman's terms, so we can all understand what is going on here.
Yeah, So, I mean, the first thing you have to recognize is that, you know, this is sometimes characterized as a ban on a foreign company operating in the United States, and that is not actually an accurate characterization of what's going on here. The effect of the ban is to prevent one hundred and seventy million or so Americans from accessing a media platform that they would like to access.
So it's a restriction on the rights of US citizens and US residents who want to consume particular expressive products but also participate in the conversation that takes place on TikTok, you know, share their own videos, watch other people's videos, engage with the various communities that have been built on that you know, on that platform, the d C Circuit understood that the law restricts American's First Amendment rights, and so, uh, you know, started with basically the premise that you know,
this law is subject to scrutiny undo the First Amendment. Now, you know, in some ways that's unremarkable, but worth noting that the bind administration did argue that the law shouldn't even be subject to First Amendments scrutiny that basically the First Amendment was not implicated here at all, which is kind of a crazy argument. But the court rejected that argument. Then the question became, well, what kind of scrutiny, like how how closely should the court examine the government's motivations
here and examine the law itself. And that's the debate that you reference, you know, this debate about strict scrutiny versus intermediate scrutiny. There were judge two judges on the court who believe that strict scrutiny was the right standard. Another judge thought that intermediate scrutiny was the right standard. But ultimately all the judges concluded that the band satisfies First Amendment.
Requirements.
So that you know, this dispute over the level of scrutiny, it didn't turn out to be consequential. You know, the the ban was upheld by all three judges. Basically the argument so there were really two arguments for the ban. One has to do with data collection. The theory is that TikTok collects a lot of data about its usual It obviously does collect a lot of data about its users, just like other social media platforms do, and so one justification for the ban as well, this is a way
of limiting data collection by TikTok. The other justification that the government offered was that TikTok is controlled by a Chinese corporation. That Chinese corporation, Byte Dance is under the influence of the Chinese government, and at one point or another, the Chinese government might decide, well, we want to use byt Dance and TikTok as a means of propagandizing or manipulating Americans. And there's a kind of degree of speculation here.
I mean some people would say a large degree of speculation. Even the government conceded there's no evidence, they have no evidence that TikTok is actually being used in this way. But this was the fear that motivated, or at least the government said in court, this is the fear that motivated the ban.
Yeah, I know that.
You co wrote an op ed in The New York Times recently where you talked about this a little bit. You argued that the court gave quote near categorical deference to the government's national security claims. Like you said, we haven't been shown evidence of these claims. The dj did release that report, I believe a couple months ago, almost the whole thing was redapted, so we didn't really actually see any of the evidence that they were talking about.
So is that normal or can the government.
Just use national security if they want to pass laws that basically push up against what's permitted by the Constitution.
Yeah, well, I mean, unfortunately, there is a long history in this country of the courts deferring to the government in national security cases. Now there is a kind of counter history, or at least a thread of of case law that is inconsistent with that sort of larger body of the national security case law, and that thread of
case law involves the First Amendment. So when you know, while it's true the courts generally defer to the government in national security cases, they have tended to be less deferential in First Amendment cases because the courts understand that free speech is so important to our democracy and the integrity of public discourse is part of what gives legitimacy
to the government's national security policies. In other words, you know, the only reason we have faith to the extent we do have faith that the government's national security policies have democratic legitimacy is because we believe people can debate those policies openly and that the debate is informed. And so when the government invokes national security as a means of
constraining that debate, the courts have been less deferential. So in this particular case, the judges were very deferential to the government. They basically accepted at base value that the government was motivated by those two concerns I mentioned data collection and foreign manipulation, even though the legislative record makes it very very clear that many legislators were motivated by disagreement with particular categories of content. There were lots of
legislators who said this quite candidly. They said, look, I don't like the videos I see on TikTok, but they are encouraging our kids to do terrible things. They are calling into question our government's policies. They are pro Russia, they are pro Palestine or programs is the way that they put it. And the justification, the actual justification for the law, which legislators were quite open about, was let's suppress stuff that we disagree with, and the court dismissed
all of that in one phrase. The court said, oh, there were some It's true, there were some stray comments in the legislative record. It wasn't straight is the whole legislative record is replete with those kinds of those kinds of comments. So that's one sense in which the court was, you know, extremely deferential to you know, the government's factual assertions here, even though the evidence was inconsistent with those assertions.
Another sense is when when it came to so both under strict scrutiny and intermediate scrutiny, the court has to look to what other ways the government would have had to achieve its stated goals. And here there are lots of obvious ways the government could achieve its stated goals without banning Americans from accessing this app So, for example, when it comes to foreign manipulation, the government says that
the concern is that Americans are being covertly manipulated. In other words, the Chinese Communist Party is or may at one point manipulate them covertly by you know, fixing the algorithm or or or screwing with the algorithm so that Americans see only what the Chinese government wants them to see. Now, again, it's highly speculative. But if that is the concern, it's not obvious why transparency doesn't address So why can't the government just tell Americans we think this is propaganda.
Yeah, if we were to stealman that argument a little bit in terms of the TikTok ban, even if the government hasn't provided this concrete evidence for us, and we say, okay, let's go with a more precautionary approach to this. And let's say TikTok is controlled by China. They're using it exactly how we say. They're using it for manipulating us to collect our data, this and that, and there are other apps that US Americans can use devoice our opinion.
Just do that. How do you respond to that kind of argument.
Well, I mean, I think it's a fine argument for the government to make to Americans. Like, if the government wants to say to Americans, use those other apps rather than this one, there's no reason the government can't do that. But I think that, you know, sort of core to the First Amendment, Like at the very center of the First Amendment is this idea that individuals get to decide for themselves which ideas are worth listening to, which media
to consume. I mean, this is the center of the First Amendment, and the government can participate in public discourse about the platforms or about media. The government can say, you know, don't watch MSNBC, it's you know, it's propaganda. The government can say don't watch Fox News, it's propaganda. That's you know, fine. But what it can't do is say, you know, we're going to shut down MSNBC because we
think you're being manipulated. I mean, this is just First Amendment one on one, and I think the government's arguments are inconsistent with it. But I just wanted to say something. But the data collection argument too, because here, you know, the court was also extremely deferential to to the Justice Department.
The Justice Department was saying, well, this is this is about you know, preventing to from collecting data, but every other social media platform is collecting the same data or even more data about about Americans, and this law doesn't do anything about those those other actors. To the extent the concern is, well, those other actors aren't controlled by China, and they're not you know, effectively puppets for the Chinese
Communist Party. Well, the government itself that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has observed in formal reports that China doesn't need TikTok in order to collect this kind of information in that Americans. You can buy this kind of information on the open market. You can buy it from data brokers. And we've seen very recently that China can also collect information, much more sensitive information, just
by hacking into American databases. And so it's not clear that this law really makes even a dent in the ability of the Chinese Communist Party to collect in about Americans. The much more direct way of restricting data collection is by restricting what data corporations can collect.
And I'm not sure, yeah, how much interest Congress has in doing that, in particular, given some of the lobbying around you know, big tech and things like that. But let's say, okay, so let's try to chart a path forward here. At this point, I know Trump has talked,
you know, verbally about doing something. He said he's going to take a look at I'm not sure exactly what that means, but I guess one avenue that is clear going forward is that if this case does get picked up by the Supreme Court, how do you think the justices are likely to rule, given on historical precedents, some of the past cases, and given some of the comments that you just you referenced before about you know, members of Congress explicitly stating that we're banning this app because
of the content on it we don't like.
So how damaging are those statements to the governments?
I mean, I guess I'm not ready to make predictions, but I accept that I will say that I think that TikTok will get a more sympathetic hearing in the Supreme Court than it did in the DC Circuit. I mean, there is case law in the Supreme Court. There's a nineteen sixty four case called Lamont versus Postmaster General, which involved a law that restricted Americans from receiving foreign propaganda
in the mail. It basically required them to register with the Post Office if they wanted to receive communist propaganda from abroad, and the Supreme Court struck down that law in nineteen sixty four. Is actually the first time the Supreme Court struck down a federal statute under the First Amendment.
Struck down that law because the Court said it imposed a burden on Americans right to receive information from abroad and that was the case in which there was no dispute that what Americans were receiving from abroad was foreign propaganda. And even then, and even though it wasn't a ban, it was just a burden, the court struck that statue town. So I think that's a really a really strong precedent for TikTok here and for TikTok's users, and if the court departs from it, it'll be a pretty big deal.
I guess I'll just say one more thing, like just just getting away from doctrine, even apart from doctrine, these kinds of bans, like there's no precedent for the US government banning Americans from accessing a media organization like this. There's no precedent, Like there are cases in which the
government tries to ban people from accessing certain information. And the Pentagon Paper's case was like one of those cases where the you know, the government tried to get the court to restrict the New York Times and the Washington Post from publishing this classified history of the Vietnam War or stories about this classified history, and even then the
court struck it down, right. But here we're going a step further and saying it's essentially the government saying, well, don't just for the time from publishing that story, shut down the Times because they might publish that story. These kinds of bands, I think, for good reason, have historically been associated with autocratic and rights abusing regimes like that's when we think of these kinds of bands on foreign media,
those are the regimes that come to mind. And I think that the Supreme Court is going to be very wary of going down this road because we don't want to be in that company, and the First Amendment is supposed to keep us keep us out of that company.
Yeah, well, we'll see what happens there. Oftentimes there's no precedent unless until there is a precedent, there is, you know what I mean. And I think you know, the last question I want to ask is around this more broader context of you know, we're kind of living in an age of information warfare, right, because it used to be that publishing used to be controlled by just a few people, a few institutions, and now it's much more democratized.
So it's hard for me not to think of a slippery slope where today maybe they get rid of TikTok.
And those users. Let's say they migrate to other platforms. Let's say one of them is X.
Now, let's say they start saying stuff on there they don't like and X, I know, has a significant foreign ownership in this case Saudi Arabia. So let's say one day they decide, okay, well we don't like Saudi Arabia anymore. That's a foreign adversary when we get rid of X. So, you know, reading the tea leaves a little bit what do you see as the future of the First Amendment in the United States, you know, the attacks on it, and what kind of effect does that have on democracy overall?
Well, I mean I at first I think that you're you're absolutely right, that not obvious why this case would be limited to TikTok or limited to China. Like, once you accept the idea that the government can protect us from foreign manipulation by preventing us from accessing foreign media, you know, there's there are lots of other platforms the government might become concerned about. And you know, as you mentioned, like Musk has business interests all over the all over
the world. I mean that's true of Soccer Org too, any of these you know, the people who own Bezos has business interests all over the world. And if your concern is well, uh domestic, uh, you know, Americans might be consuming media that has been influenced by foreign pressure. You know, why why stop a TikTok? You know, why not give the government the ability to restrict our access
to the Washington Post or to to x or. I really do think that you know, once you once you open this store, not obvious, how you how you close it, how you close it again, and then your you know, your broader question. I mean, you're right, you know, for a variety of reasons, including the rise of sort of autocracy around the world, but also technological change and these new communications platforms that have emerged over the last twenty years.
You know, we're really in a totally new world. And you can't take for granted that the First Amendment precedents that the courts you know, set in the nineteen sixties and seventies will be adhered to today. And you know, to be fair, you can't take for granted that those precedents are the right ones for this new world we're living in today. And I suppose that you know, in some ways, it's kind of exciting because we're kind of building, you know, we have to build this kind of new,
new system to account for all of these changes. But it does it does feel like some of the freedoms that we've taken for granted are suddenly you know, fragile, and you know, these these cases, like the TikTok case, will have a huge effect on what the free speech landscape looks like in five ten years.
Yeah, we'll have to see how that all plays out. Thank you so much today for your insights, Jamal. Is there anywhere you want to point the audience to if they want to learn more?
H Yeah, the Night Institute, so at Nightcolumbia dot org.
All right, awesome, Well, thank you so much again for coming on the show. And we'll see how all this plays out.
Thank you,