Negotiating with Shadows: Retired CIA Officer Sam Faddis on Iran's Ten-Point Plan and Middle Eastern Tensions

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I love the work you do on your sub-stack and I think the reason is it's based in reality. There's always happy talk when a tenuous deal like this gets put together. But then there's a reality of getting to some finality without it falling apart. Walk us through where we are. It's been a bumpy day. Iran and the United States seem to not have all the details buttoned down. They're kind of working through it maybe. Where are we in that process and how concerned should we be that this could fall apart at some point? Well look, we have a ceasefire and I think we have an agreement that we're going to sit down in Islamabad. There have been some bumps as you said with apparently some missiles and drones still flying back and forth. I'm not super concerned about that because I think you're talking about on the Iranian side a very decentralized system at this point. So the fact that not everybody's on the same sheet of music, not everybody got the memo yet, not everybody necessarily is pulled in the same direction. Okay, I think that sort of comes with the territory. The bigger issue from my perspective is when we sit down in Islamabad, what are we negotiating? I don't mean, I mean we're obviously trying to negotiate an actual peace agreement, a permanent end to hostilities, but what are we negotiating from in terms of a basis? The Iranians are being very clear that they are stating very publicly that we are negotiating from their 10 point plan that they have trotted out, which from my perspective is a non-starter. We remove all sanctions, the UN revokes all its resolutions, they get to keep that nuclear program, we pull our forces out of the Middle East, we promise never to attack them ever again, they control the Straits of Hormuz, they keep charging $2 million a ship, etc. and so forth. So that I cannot imagine is, I mean right there probably all of those terms are terms to which we cannot agree. Right, well and Sam, I know that the White House felt the exact same way, because the press secretary today said that they literally threw it in the trash, and I know in any negotiation, even for a country like Iran, you start way further on your own side than you know you're going to end up, but as you said, I mean this was a wish list, this was absolutely delusional. To you, does that show that this entire process has not been serious and therefore for whatever this ceasefire can be effectively, that it's not serious either? Right, well I mean the way I would characterize their 10-point plan is it's a surrender document, but we're the ones who are supposed to surrender to them. So yes, non-starter, are they always going to push you too far? Yes, are they always going to ask for the sun, the moon, stars? Yes, these are smart guys and they're very aggressive and this is the Middle East and haggling is the deal. Even for them, this is really, really extreme. I mean I think I am afraid that what they're saying is they don't think they're losing. They think we want the peace more than they do, and as anybody knows in a negotiation, leverage is everything. So again, even for them it's a tall order. Yeah, Sam, I want to talk. I had an unusual experience of negotiating with the Mullahs back in 2009. My reporter was taken when I was the editor of the Washington Times and it was such a surreal experience because publicly they were saying we're never going to release his infidel, we're never going to do it, he was a spy, he's going to be tried, and behind the scenes they're actually negotiating. Is that a norm for them and could it be that the propaganda is designed to keep their reputation with their people intact even though they know that on the backside they've taken a pretty big hit? Well, it is without question this element that you just touched on that a lot of what they're going to say is going to be for domestic consumption or in the rest of the region. That's a given. Yeah, that means they're going to talk smack and there's going to be a lot of trash talk and then you get behind closed doors. But they're going to take you for as much as they can get. Yeah. Right? I mean, that is the nature of the beast for them in the entire region. So what is critical is that they understand that we are prepared to walk away and go back to beating the hell out of them. And I don't want that to happen and I hope that does not happen. But the second they feel like we need to want the deal more than they do, we're done, obviously. That's a great point. Well, and Sam, I think that one thing that could be propelling them to that place where they delusionally think that we want it more than they and what maybe is not delusional. We do. We do want peace that President Trump has spoken about that a lot. Is their main bargaining chip, whether they realize it or not, a Hormuz Strait because they no longer they don't have military superiority, is the Hormuz Strait is that their big, biggest and best bargaining chip? And if so, how do we eliminate it? Well, look, the center of gravity of the whole conflict is oil and natural gas, right? And it's not just the Straits of Hormuz. It's the production facilities in the Gulf and in Saudi. Right? So, you know, our military is beating up on them. Would they sink a carrier battle group if they could? Obviously, do they realistically think they have a chance against the US military? No. But so we shoot it. We shoot at them and they shoot at gutter. They shoot it Dubai. They shoot it Saudi. And it's not just keeping the Straits closed. It's, you know, if we really get in our backs are against the wall, we'll just burn the whole place down. Like permanently, we'll burn it down. We'll send it so many drones that Saudi won't pump a barrel of oil for five years. And that, you know, kind of a giant suicide vest kind of mentality. That's, that's their real, their real leverage. And we will see whether they feel like we've hurt them enough that they're going to make a deal. Or if we're going to have to go back to fighting and take away that leverage, take away their capacity to threaten that. That's really smart, Tim. That's what I'm hearing from the inside. That really is the concern. When we were in the Cold War, we had detente because we had something the other side feared enough. What is it, and you know, Donald Trump always wants to know what does his enemy want most and what does he at least want to have happen to them and then negotiate between those two parameters. What is it that Iran would fear more than anything from us? Look, I think if we could take away their capacity to threaten other countries oil and natural gas, and if we could then cut off their capacity to sell oil, which we can do anytime we want, because we can blockade them, that really puts them in the box from which they cannot escape. First step in that is we have to be able to protect oil and natural gas in the Gulf and in Saudi Arabia. And we're, you know, shooting down 90% of the drones is great. If 10% of the drone still get through, that's too many, right? Yeah, yeah, it still causes damage. Yeah, Sam, before we let you go, I had, I was in another state and I had a friend who asked me, you know, what more should the Iranian people be doing to assist in the overthrow of their own country? I know that they live in a fear of this regime they have been forced to for the last 47 years, but is there anything they can do as far as uprising to assist in overthrow? Is it possible for there to be an overthrow of the regime? Yeah, today, no. Are they organized enough, armed enough? No. I mean, having participated in that kind of activity on behalf of our government, the actual amount of infrastructure you got to build, the legwork you got to do, the support, the training, the weapons, you know, it's not just ask everybody to go out in the street tomorrow. It takes a lot of work. They are not anywhere close to that. The regime killed 30,000 demonstrators recently. They'll kill 300,000 in the street and not bad enough. That's, you're talking about very, very ruthless guys. Folks, we're going to think of quick commercial break. What a great conversation. We'll be back in a minute right after these messages. Hey, folks, I used to think of mattress with just a piece of furniture and then I got ghost bed. I was wrong. Every night when I sleep on ghost bed now, my ghost bed mattress, it is an incredible experience. The mattress literally adjusts to my temperature. If I'm a little warm, it cools me off. 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And not that it's surprising because he was on the show a few months ago predicting this very thing. But Peter Schweitzer warned us about the danger of anchor babies and particularly the Chinese program of anchor babies. The two Chinese defendants in that case are both anchor babies. Their families were in here illegally. They got born here. They got citizenship by virtue of their parents, a legal act of coming to this country. And now they're charged with trying to carry out an assassination attempt, a terror attack on our soldiers here to put that in a whole lot more perspective. The bestselling author of, I think, one of the most important books in a decade or two, The Invisible Coombe, and number one bestseller. Why? Because it actually showed how immigration is being weaponized by countries like China and Mexico. He's our good friend, one of the greatest journalists I've ever met in my life, Peter Schweitzer. Peter, welcome to the show. Peter Schweitzer. Great to be with you, my old friend. Glad to be joining you. Wow. We love the work you're doing. By the way, congratulations on this incredible run of this book. Everybody's talking about it. It's a number one bestseller by a mile. This case in Fort McDill, I think, is the ultimate case study of exactly what you were warning about. You came on the show and said, this is going to happen. Here it is in real life. Two Chinese anchor babies working with Iran and trying to cause mayhem and danger to our soldiers. Pretty crazy case, but pretty real. Yeah, exactly right, John. I mean, what's interesting about this case is you've got a lot of different elements. Certainly, it's an example of what I call weaponized immigration, right? Their parents were in the country illegally. They gave birth to these twins, a brother and a sister. There was this, apparently, this attempted terrorist attack at a U.S. base. The sister was arrested for helping the brother to flee to China, which is also very interesting that they consider China a safe haven, having, yeah, convicted this attack. It's part of this broader pattern that we see when people talk about immigration anchor babies. They want to paint this portrait of, well, these are just friendly people that want to be Americans. The fact is that a lot of nefarious actors have used this technique. You have this case, the current head of one of the drug cartels is a U.S. citizen who was born in the United States via birthright citizenship. The Wall Street Journal reported that. And the fact that the head of this cartel, this is the Holisco cartel, is a U.S. citizen actually complicates it for U.S. law enforcement because if you're monitoring a U.S. citizen, it's different than if you're monitoring a foreign national. I would add to that the other major drug cartel in Mexico, the Sinaloa cartel, which was headed for many years by El Chapo. El Chapo in 2012 sent his wife, Emma, secretly to the United States. So his twins born that year would be U.S. citizens as well. So this birthright citizenship is exploited by our enemies to weaponize immigration. And we're really the only superpower that allows this. So it's a national security threat. And we need to start thinking about immigration the way that our enemies do so that we can actually protect ourselves. It's so amazing. And people say, well, is this an accident? Is it intentional? I think when you came on the TV show a couple weeks ago, you mentioned 100,000 a year in Chinese babies is the estimate. But about a decade and a half ago, it was maybe 2013, 2012, I remember this correctly from the book, the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party actually put out an extraction man, go to America, this is how you do it, is how you make an acre baby. This was planned, it was actually orchestrated and maybe even instructed, right? Yeah, exactly, John. I mean, imagine the irony here, the Chinese Communist Party People's Daily, their main newspaper, runs an article for members of the Chinese elite that says you have a constitutional right according to the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution for your child to be granted citizenship. So, you know, the immediate question is why would the Chinese Communist Party want members of its own elite to have children that are U.S. citizens? And I'm going to assume that is not for our benefit, that is for their benefit. And then you have after 2013, after they announced how the system works, the explosion of what's called the birth tourism industry. And these are Chinese companies that are paid to make all the arrangements for people to, you know, airdrop, so to speak, their wives or girlfriends into the United States for the purpose of getting U.S. citizenship, and then flying them back to China. This is an industry that now has more than 1000 companies in China that openly advertise their services. So, again, not only is the Chinese Communist Party explaining how to do this, they're allowing this vast industry to advertise openly in China. That is tacit approval, that is encouragement, that is facilitating this process. And we don't really have numbers because we don't keep track of, you know, the nationalities of the parents on birth certificates. But the Chinese, exactly, but the Chinese have looked into this and the estimates vary from 50,000 to 100,000. Some Chinese companies believe that in a single year there was 180,000 that did it. And this has been going on now for about 15 years. So, just do the math. I mean, you are looking anywhere from a low number of 750,000 to one and a half million Chinese nationals who are, quote, unquote, U.S. citizens that are being raised in China. And when they turn 18, they're going to be able to vote in our elections. You, we look at this, and I think a lot of people had great, looking forward to great hope for the oral arguments in the birthright citizenship case. I think they didn't go very well for the Trump administration. I kept thinking as I was listening to Sosir Jenner, who by the way, normally argues brailingly, but he could have used some of the anecdotes in your book, which were better than some of the ones he offered, the justices, right after that. Jonathan Turley wrote and said, this probably is not going to be a good ruling for birthright citizenship. So, let's start a 28th Amendment. Get it going. The fact that this is such a vibrant debate right now, your book has created this debate. And there are two options. What will the court do? I'd like to get your feeling on that. And if that goes the way that a lot of the experts think that it's going to affirm birthright citizenship, a 28th Amendment movement who thought would be talking about that. Yeah, I think you're right. I mean, look, I'm not a law professor. I would defer to Jonathan Turley on that. But what I would say is, and you've known me a long time, I'm kind of an inherently an optimist. And my hope is there are a couple of issues that the court needs to settle on this issue. Number one is the constitutionality of Trump's executive order. I think based on the way the arguments went down, it's probably likely that a majority opinion is going to say the executive order is too broad, it's too far reaching. Maybe he doesn't have the authority to do it just as an executive order. But the second issue that they have to grapple with, and there was some interesting questioning by Judge Kavanaugh on this, is the question of is birthright citizenship absolute? Meaning if you are in the country by hooker by crook, if you set your big toe across the Rio Grande and give birth and return to another country and show up 25 years later, are you a US citizen? And it seemed to me that the justices were not as convinced that this is absolute. So my hope is, my optimistic hope is that we're probably not going to get an affirmation of the Trump executive order. My hope though is that they will come back and say that, look, Congress can within certain parameters limit this scope. Because if they are not allowed to limit it, if the court comes back and says it's absolute, it goes to me, the old saying, the US Constitution is not a suicide pact. Well, that would be a suicide pact because you create an opportunity in a situation where what's already happening is going to continue. And that is you're going to see huge numbers of people getting US citizenship who have literally no connection to the United States whatsoever. They grow up overseas, and they're going to be voting absentee ballots in our elections and swaying those elections. Probably from Beijing or Mexico City. It's just crazy to even contemplate that. But that is the reality of what this is created. If we don't get a clearer definition on it soon, it's really, really quite remarkable. I want to talk a little bit about beyond the Chinese strategic plan to use birthright citizenship to our detriment, that they've been increasingly meddling in our elections. We now know driver's licenses were sent here to create false identities to vote in the 2020 election by China. We now know that the multiple state voter databases, we don't know how many yet, though I wouldn't be surprised if it's 12 or 18, some big number like that, got penetrated by China. We know that China was working on Eric Sua, while the Democrat congressman through Feng, Christine Fang, a Chinese spy. And we now know from a really profound letter, this is work I originally did on Act Blue, that the lawyers for Act Blue recently told them they probably didn't say, they probably didn't tell the truth to the Congress in some of their testimony. But while that's been what's been seized on, what the lawyers are really saying is, hey, you had some foreign donors coming through there, that's what they were actually talking about. The fact that foreign money might be flowing through an online platform that China's hacked the databases or the voter databases, that voter registration database, let me be clear, not the voter machines, that they were sending driver's license here. It seems like foreign adversaries are increasingly bold in trying to stick their finger in the American electoral drink. How serious is that as a security issue for America? Well, I think it's huge. And yes, you've done amazing work on reporting of the China angle of this. And it goes really to the heart of something John, you and I have talked about over the years, which is China represents an absolute threat to the United States. They are an enemy. They are not a partner. They are not a friend. And as important as the military competition is, China doesn't want a war with the United States, especially based on what they've seen we've done in Iran. They know they're not capable of competing with us. Their strategy has always been subversion undermining the United States. And a key component of that is trying to sway our elections. In the 1990s, we know they were funneling money to the Democratic National Committee. We know that more recently, there have been other instances of money flowing to candidates. And this represents on a wide scale what China is prepared to do. And they know how high the stakes are. If you're in Beijing and you're looking at a choice between Joe Biden in 2024, whose family has taken money from Chinese intermediaries, and Donald Trump, who is going to reassert American power, who's going to deal with fentanyl, who's going to deal with tariffs, technology theft, the choice is easy. It's not even close. And then the question becomes, are you going to be bold enough to try to do something about it? And the evidence is overwhelming that they are. So this to me is the sleeper national security story. I think in Washington, people get very familiar with ideas. And when they think of the US-China rivalry, they immediately start thinking about aircraft carriers or missiles or Taiwan, all of which are important issues. But what they're failing to miss is this larger story, which is China wants to subvert the United States as an in fact is trying to do so in a very active, direct way, not just by a media campaign. They actually want to influence who our leaders are. It is pretty remarkable. And it's a war by fiat, electoral meddling fiat. They don't want to have a real military war, but they're going to try to use all these other advantages. And it seems to me that our guards have been down for a long time, at least since the beginning of the Obama administration. It could argue maybe the Bush administration as well. But it seems as though China kept moving and moving and moving, and most of our government either yawned or tried to excuse it away. How did we have our radar down for so long? A great question. I think part of it has to do with what the Chinese call elite capture. This is something I wrote about in a book called Red Handed. And this is their desire, and John, you reported on this as well. Their desire to form commercial ties with prominent political Americans on both sides of the political aisle, because it makes Beijing less threatening, right? So if you if you get into deal with the Bidens or you get into a business deals with Mitch McConnell's family, they're going to be less prone to be hawkish on China. So I think that's part of it. I think the other part of it is our mindset towards China. Mine was in the 1990s. Hey, the more we trade with them, the more we open up with them, they're going to become more like us. Well, that in fact did not happen. And then the President Xi, they have become more hard line, more hostile towards the United States. So it requires a mindset change. It requires us to continue to expose these financial ties between the American political elite and China. Let's remember in Donald Trump's first term, when China was very upset with what Donald Trump was doing, they didn't go and lobby the White House. They went to Wall Street and Silicon Valley and said, you guys are going to lobby the White House on our behalf. So there's lots of strings that they can pull. Yeah, we need that we need to be alert to what they're doing. And I would say the other final factor I would say is that, you know, look, there was stories that came out in the 2020 election about voting machines have been hacked. And there was no evidence for that. And there were some big legal settlements that were made. So I think people are also gun shy about this issue. But at the end of the day, the evidence is the evidence. And if you've got China penetrating America voter rolls, if you've got them sending false driver's license to create alternative identities for the purposes of voting, you have to ask yourself why. And the evidence is pretty clear. They want to influence and shape American political elections. And I think we're probably going to find as time goes along that they've actually in fact been doing so at some level. Yeah, and you're right that 2020-21 era made us many people gun shy to look at things that are factually true. Not the things that weren't true. But there are many incredible factually true things that haven't gotten the attention that they need. And I think that we're starting to get a good sense of that now in the in the disclosure that we've been getting in the last few weeks. Last war front right now with China or the next war front, I should say, didn't have the last but AI, it's pretty darn clear that AI is a major force in the battle between America and China. Important that we win it. What are some of the things that you see China doing to get a leg up in AI that would not be necessarily even fair competition, but consistent with the way they go about competing with America? Well, it's a great question, John. I mean, obviously, there is the constantly the problem of technology theft, intellectual property theft. So certainly, AI companies in the United States need to be at the highest level of security and protecting their algorithms, etc. But then you have the other issue of their ability to, you know, try to pressure or lean on American tech companies, I mean, companies like Microsoft and Google that have operations that have research facilities in China that have been at least in the recent past, have been doing joint research on AI. We need to be mindful of the fact that if you are a partner with China in something, whatever that may be, they will lean on that and use that to try to pressure and manipulate you. So we need to be robust. We need to have good leadership, which I think we have in the Trump administration. And we also need to make sure that, you know, Silicon Valley, philosophically, ideologically, is kind of all over the place. You have people like Elon Musk, who are very patriotic and supportive of the assertive America. And then you have people at some companies and Propoc has been mentioned that are less in favor of America. So we need to be mindful of those dynamics as well, because in China, of course, research there is done through compulsion. You don't have the option of supporting the Chinese state. So these are all factors that we need to take into consideration because you are right. This race is going to be absolutely key into who wins the future. Yeah, pretty remarkable moment in history. And I think your book, actually your last couple of books particularly, have shown such an important light on China's intentions, how they made friends, how they captured the elite with contracts and gratuities and other things. And then, of course, ultimately, how they are trying to destabilize our country from the inside out. Without your great work, Peter, we'd be a lot blinder to this set. Amazing stuff for everybody. Listen, what's the best way for them to stay in touch with your great work or to get a copy of one of your great books? Well, thank you, John. Yeah, you can follow me on Twitter, X, at Peter Schweitzer. I also have a podcast once a week called The Drill Down, and you can go to thedrilldown.com to learn about some of the research work we're doing. Yeah, it's such a great show. Everybody should subscribe to it. Listen, it's amazing work. Amazing work indeed. Thank you, my friend, for all the great work you've done. Literally, I think this book has changed the course of history. It was clear at the Supreme Court hearing that your book was mentioned several times, and some of the facts from it were mentioned there. But what a great contribution and what a great impact your journalism is having. Great to have you on. It's great to be on with you, John, as well. And you've been a supportive source of encouragement and support and inspiration for me. So thank you. I appreciate it. Yeah, that means a lot coming from you, my friend. Great work. As always, can't wait to get you back on the show. Thanks for joining us. Thanks, John. All right, folks, what a great conversation. We're going to take a quick commercial break. More around the corner right after these messages. In the race to scale with AI, you need data infrastructure that can match your pace. EverPeer's data storage platform brings all your data into one hub. No silos, no scrambling, just instant access to tame your data chaos. And with EverPeer Storage as a service subscription, your storage and security upgrade automatically with zero downtime. Your infrastructure stays current, so your business never slows down. Visit everpeerdata.com to learn more today. With EverPeer, you're not just in the race, you're built to win it. All right, folks, welcome back for the commercial break. Earlier in the week, we talked to Senator Ron Johnson, who brought us up to speed on all of the dangers and harms that we now know the government knew in real time about the COVID vaccine, but they didn't disclose it to us for years. In fact, I think Senator Johnson said it is a magnanimous coverup, a huge coverup, heart inflammation, ischemic stroke risk for older people, heart inflammation for younger people, lots of things inside in the middle between those two points. We clearly didn't have a full amount of informed consent. And part of the reason for that is that there was a censorship machine, that anyone who dared to challenge the convention that maybe MRNA was ready as a vaccine technology or that the COVID vaccine should be mandatory, they got crushed. Our next guest actually got crushed in that machinery, but he persisted. He ultimately won a major settlement in a case that I think is the most important free speech case of our generation, Missouri v. Biden. Joining me right now, Dr. Aaron Cariotti. Dr., great to have you on. Great to be on, John. Thanks, and thanks for your willingness to discuss this important issue. It is so important. I think we look, you know, when we were going through it, it was kind of hard to appreciate how insane the censorship machinery was back in the middle of the pandemic. Fear became the ultimate excuse for really violating a lot of our rights. You're a board certified physician. You get fired because you refuse to take the COVID-19 vaccine. Walk us back to that time and what was it like? And what happened to you? What did you go through yourself personally? So I was at the University of California, Irvine, where I was not only full professor in the School of Medicine, but I was the director of their medical ethics program. And I had the temerity to challenge their vaccine mandate in federal court because I thought it was both unethical and potentially illegal. And in retaliation for challenging their mandate, they fired me. The pretense was they fired me because I hadn't taken the shot, but they had accommodated other faculty members to work from home and so forth. So really it was because I challenge, I like to tell people if you want to go sideways with your employer really quickly, a good way to do that is to sue them in federal court, which is what I did to try to change their vaccine mandate. And then after I was fired, I was subjected to, as were so many people at that time, all kinds of online censorship on YouTube, on Twitter. And at the time, I think we all assumed that it was the platforms themselves doing the censorship. But what we came to discover was, no, this was not coming exclusively or even primarily from those private corporations, the platforms, the social media companies. It was coming from the US government that was pressuring those companies to do its bidding and to censor disfavored information like any critics of the pandemic, any people who are asking questions about election integrity during the 2020 election. So we ended up filing a case called Missouri v. Biden. It was two states, Missouri and Louisiana, and five private plaintiffs challenging the federal government. The defendant in this case was not Twitter and Facebook and Google. It was various federal agencies, including the White House. And what we argued, right? Right. Yeah. Surgeon General, CDC, FBI, what we argued successfully was, you know, people can, people can debate about whether the social media companies can censor, but nobody should be able to doubt that the federal government can't do that. It's a clear violation of the First Amendment. But that's exactly what they were doing. And the 20,000 pages of documents that we got on discovery that came out simultaneously to the Twitter files revelations when Elon Musk bought Twitter and opened up some of the backdoor communication channels to independent journalists. Those two events, the Missouri v. Biden discovery information, the Twitter files reporting basically showed that there was this vast, what Michael Schellenberger called censorship industrial complex, this vast network of government agencies working with government cutouts, these kind of quasi private entities. I say they were quasi private because they look like nonprofits, but they were set up by the government. They were funded by government grants. They were staffed by former government, government employees that were basically doing the government spitting. And they were working 24 seven to censor Americans online and to funnel information from the federal government to the social media companies with the big stick of the government behind them saying basically, if you don't throttle these accounts, if you don't take down these posts, if you don't suspend these people who are saying things that we don't like, then we, the federal government, the White House, the FBI are going to make trouble for you. And that's exactly what happened. It's, you know, you, you, you mentioned at the beginning of the interview, you think this is among the most important cases of free speech in our generation. And, and I agree. And I think the reason for that is it's the first case of this kind of the digital age. So in past cases where the government was censoring citizens, it was usually a one-off event. It was, you know, the government pressuring one newspaper, one magazine, one book publisher regarding an article or a series of articles or strike out these paragraphs in this book that we don't like. So that's bad, but it was a one-time thing. In the digital age, when the government pressures social media companies, and in some cases, as we established in our case, gets those social media companies to change their own terms of service in order to throttle stuff that the government doesn't like, you end up with tens of thousands of Americans being censored literally hundreds of millions of times. So the scope and the reach of this censorship in the digital age goes far beyond anything that we had ever encountered, which is why John, a district court judge, when he issued the original preliminary injunction against the government, said if what plaintiffs alleged is true, this is quote, the worst free speech violation in United States history. That was a federal judge. That was, it was not one of the plaintiffs. That was not one of our lawyers. You know, deploying this strong rhetoric. That was it. That was a judge looking at the evidence that we had already submitted and nodding his head and saying, yes, this looks actually really bad. And so fortunately, we recently got a settlement from the government where we prevailed in that case. In a settlement, you don't get everything you want, but we definitely got a solid win that put a dent in this censorship machinery. Several of our plaintiffs have been co-opted by the defendant. So one of the plaintiffs in the case was- They're inside the government now, right? J. Boutichar, right? Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yeah, they've recused themselves. So J. Boutichar was a co-plaintiff. And of course, many of our listeners are aware. He's now the director of the National Institute of Health, Martin Koldorf is another co-plaintiff who has also got a very senior position at the Department of Health and Human Services. He's working for HHS. So those guys are no, you know, we're no longer plaintiffs by the time we got to the settlement. And interestingly, the legal mastermind behind the case was a man named John Sauer, who is Solicitor General of Missouri. When we filed the case, and again, our listeners may have heard that name before because as you know, he's Solicitor General of the United States now. So some of the talent on our side of the case has been drafted, let's say, which is a good thing. I mean, hopefully in their position. It brings their mentality into government where there was none. I mean, that's one of the, there was no one to say, isn't this crazy, guys? Let's think about this for a second. No one was saying that at the time. It's kind of crazy. All right. So I think a lot of people remember this case coming and going, the evidence is jaw-dropping. But then the Supreme Court in the summer of 2024 lifted the preliminary junction. A lot of people took that as a loss. But it turns out that was just a setback right at the end of the day. It went back to the district court where you've prevailed. And some of the most egregious evidence comes out after the Supreme Court ruling. So the body of evidence is stronger today than even when the Supreme Court looked at. Is that the right way of looking at the evolution of the case? I think that's exactly right. Yeah. So one of the reasons for confusion on that is the Supreme Court was not assessing or making a ruling on the entire case, just one small aspect of the case known as the preliminary injunction, for which there is a very, by the way, very, very high legal threshold. It's really hard to get that. So it's common that you don't, the court doesn't grant a preliminary injunction, but you do end up prevailing at the end in the case as a whole, which is exactly what happened in our case. But many people interpreted that to mean, oh, they lost the case at the Supreme Court. No, the Supreme Court actually didn't rule on the merits of the case. They sent it back down to the district court and vacated the preliminary injunction on a technicality related to standing. But the court said that the plaintiffs still had the right to establish standing to bring the case as a whole. So long story short, without getting down into the weeds, the Supreme Court was a temporary setback on one specific aspect of the case. But in the final ruling in the case as a whole, we got what I take to be a remarkably favorable ruling. Again, we didn't get absolutely everything that we wanted, but we were able to get something that's going to both put a dent in the machinery of the censorship and more importantly, set a precedent for future cases. Because this is the first precedent setting case of its kind, the Fifth Circuit, when they were looking at our case, the appellate court. So basically, there's no, there's no federal or Supreme Court precedent that is really analogous to what we're looking at here. This is complained about the lack of precedent and had the site in 1970s case that had to do with a book publisher, the Bantam Books case, which was a weak analogy at best to the kind of thing that we're actually contending with in this case. So all that to say, and you know, John, I guess the last thing I would say about this is I said from the beginning, we got a win in the courts, which we did that we got at least a partial win in the courts. We also have to win in the court of public opinion. And I think the even more important thing that our case did was along with the Twitter files to help bring this to public attention, right? Such that by the time we got to the last vice presidential debate in the presidential election, JD Vance was asked, don't you think you're running made as a threat to democracy? This is the last question that they asked him. And his response was, I think the real threat to democracy is the government sponsored censorship that has been happening for the last several years on an industrial scale, a clear reference to what we had uncovered in our case became an issue in the election. The first day in office, Trump issued an executive order vowing to dismantle the censorship machinery that was making this possible. So, you know, what happened in the court was important, but even more important, bring this issue to the attention of the American people such that, you know, the political process then had to deal with it. And the candidates had to take a side and put a stake in the ground and say, you know, what are we proposing to do about this? To me, that was a real success that we achieved in this case. When you start this in, I think it was the summer of 2022, if I remember correctly, there would be few Americans that would believe that there would be an FBI agent whose full-time job was to call social media all day and suggest that they take down Americans' contents. But that really is what you discovered. And got named Elvis Chan. That's what we had. We had government officials. We had these quasi-private entities like the Stanford Internet Observatory, retired, you know, dozens and dozens of interns. It looks like it's a research enterprise at a research university. No, they were doing full-time censorship. They were just using complex algorithms to scrape the internet, flag stuff that they didn't like, send it to this government agency that nobody's ever heard of called CISA. And CISA would then, they had a whole complex ticketing system. I mean, they had built up this whole efficient machinery to do this 24-7. It was really, really remarkable. And initially, you know, when we filed, because the kind of censorship that the individual plaintiffs were subjected to, we focused on critics of the government's COVID policy, and we focused on election integrity issues, which there had been some buzz about. But as we got more documents on discovery, John, we figured out that once the government figured out it could do this, they started censoring all kinds of other issues. So the State Department got involved, and they were censoring critics of our foreign policy. The Treasury Department got involved, you know, censoring critics of our monetary policy. The Census Bureau of all places got involved in, you know, pushing stuff through CISA to the social media companies. So you take almost any contentious issue in American public life, culture war issues, like abortion and gender ideology, you name it, domestic policy, foreign policy. The government had it on the scale, and it was trying to exercise control over the flow of information online. That's where this whole thing ended up at the end of the day. Yeah. Once that door was open, a flood of censors went through that so quickly, and now everything was fair game, Hunter Biden, illegal aliens, your ability to contest your government's actions, which is built into our Constitution, suddenly was being eroded and thwarted in ways. That's what makes this case so important. All right, so you talk about the precedent. The settlement was a good way to create a precedent without having to go back to the Supreme Court on the merits. Give us what that settlement ultimately creates in terms of legal precedent. The United States government admits its censorship was inappropriate, right, when it came to determining falsity or truth, right? Yeah. Yeah, that's right. So the settlement articulated a few really key principles. One was that this new digital technology does not change the basic features of the First Amendment. Another is that euphemisms like disinformation, misinformation, and malinformation do not give you license to censors simply because you label something as such. So it was able to rearticulate the core principles of the First Amendment, describe what is and there's not a constitutionally protected speech, say that the digital environment doesn't change that and the government basic and then basically says the government is not allowed to coerce pressure, lean on, induce the social media companies to change the content of what's permitted to be posted. And that is the core thing that we wanted to get. Now, enforcement of that by this particular judge for purposes of this particular case is restricted to the plaintiffs. And that made some people wonder, well, are the plaintiffs the only ones who have First Amendment rights in this regard? No. When courts make a ruling, they always try to narrow the ruling to the plaintiffs in the issue at hand, right? But yeah, exactly. So the important piece is if other people experience the same sort of thing, now they have a precedent. They could say, well, in Missouri, we divide in the facts of our case or analogous to the facts of what those plaintiffs were dealing with, we should get the same ruling. We can rely on the language in that precedent to bolster our legal argument. And that's how the courts need to work. So did this definitively establish free speech online for all Americans for all time? No. No one court case is capable of doing that. But did it draw attention to the issue? Yes. Did we get a ruling where the court was able to articulate the relevant principles as applied to social media companies, the digital realm, the new kind of ecosystem in which we're working? Yes. And I think that's going to be very valuable moving forward as we continue to reassert our rights in the context of this new media. It's an amazing case. I've been watching it wind its way through the court system nearly four years, not three and a half years, I guess. Really, really amazing. And every time you got new discovery, I have to tell you that I can remember inhaling go, oh my gosh, I can't believe it. I can't believe it went that far. But the truth is that government, it really did go that far. Do you think that public sentiment is turning against this machinery? There was a period of time, I think in the fear of COVID in the bitterly divided nation where people seemed to be willing, maybe yielding some of the First Amendment for some comfort. But now it seems as though we look back and like that wasn't a good idea. Yeah. I think there has been a very significant shift since we got out of the COVID fog of war and that kind of mass hypnosis that we're all under for a couple of years. And also the fact that there's a new administration makes it interesting because the Washington Post was more or less either silent or dismissive regarding Missouri v. Biden when we initially filed when Biden was still in office. But remarkably, we didn't get a ton of coverage on our settlement in legacy media, but Washington Post's editorial board wrote a quite a fine piece on it, actually. And two cheers for the Missouri v. Biden ruling. It was pretty good. And toward the end of the article, it became clear that they're worried about President Trump having his hands on the levers of censorship power. And if this machinery isn't dismantled, just think of what President Trump can do with it. And you know what? I think that's a good thing because the plaintiffs, first of all, the plaintiffs in our case, the private plaintiffs, we existed across the political spectrum. That's right. We were not all, even though it was Missouri v. Biden, we had Democrats, Republicans and independents. That's really important. And we said from the beginning, John, this is not a partisan issue. This is a constitutional issue. And I've always said, I don't want Biden. I don't want Trump. I don't want any future president, left, right or center to be able to wield this kind of power. And so the fact that someone new is in power and now they're kind of a shoes, and I kept telling people who were ignoring the issue, one day the shoe is going to be on the other foot. But you know, you need to kind of look the other way and like the censorship when it's happening to people you disagree with. But then, you know, somebody else gets into power and all those mechanisms are now pushing in the other direction. And so I think that's a reminder that Americans have to stand by the First Amendment all the time. And that means even defending the rights of people with whom we disagree to at least say what they want to say. That's what the Constitution is about, ultimately at the end of the day. What our founding fathers always intended. I don't think they could have imagined the period of 19 through 24 in the censorship machinery that grew up so quickly and so assertively. But for today, it's a little bit more disabled, thanks to the great work that you and your lawyers did. NCLR did a great job working alongside you. Big, big win for all of us. Doctor, what a great honor for folks who want to stay in touch with your great work. I think some people are probably asking, did you ever get your job back? I didn't get my job back, but fortunately, I've got great support from the Ethics and Public Policy Center in D.C. I also get some support from the Brownstone Institute. So I'm working at some independent think tanks. I'm on Twitter at AaronKerryIDMD. You can find my sub-stack called Human Flourishing, where I post about public health, free speech, medical ethics, and the other issues that I'm working on. I love it. It's such important work that you're doing. And it took a lot of courage. I think people forget what it was like in 2022. But if you dare to speak up against the system, you were getting crushed for a while. That didn't attract you one bit. You kept going. You've made our country better by getting this settlement. Great to have you on the show today. Thanks for joining us, Doctor. Thanks, John. Enjoy the conversation. Yeah, back at you. What an important conversation and what an important case, folks. Go check it out. We've done a lot of coverage over at Just The News. We're going to do a little bit more. Our legal analyst is going to do some more work on this later this week. So stay in touch. It's such an important case and such an important precedent that has now been set. All right, folks. That wraps up another edition of John Solomon Reports, a podcast from Just The News. We'll be back tomorrow with regular programming. Until then, may God bless you. May God bless this extraordinary country of the United States, as he always has. You've been listening to John Solomon Reports, a podcast from Just The News.