Welcome to Kibi on Liberty.

Welcome. Great speech downstairs. Thank you. I really enjoyed that. We're at the New Hampshire Liberty Forum. And one subject you brought up is particularly Something that I'm really passionate about right now because it's happening. And you talk a lot about being a recovering Democrat. I'm a recovering Republican, so I can appreciate this. And what I would call the unit party in the house just passed by overwhelming majorities, a TikTok band or a divestiture. I don't think there's much of a difference in practice. And Thomas Massey rallied maybe a dozen Republicans against that. And whenever the two parties come together on that, I'm like, something is really bad here. And that's your view.

Yes, strongly so. And it's unfortunate that very often the one thing that they come together around has to do with either war or finding a way to use an excuse of a national security threat to further curtail our liberties. That's exactly what happened here. I think this is something I didn't mention downstairs, but I know you know very well that the very same tactics they used in passing the Patriot Act of immediately calling someone a traitor for having the audacity to even question the authorities that they sought out in the Patriot Act is exactly what they're doing now with this TikTok ban. I've heard it from both Republicans and Democrats in Congress, but on the five, Harold Ford Jr, who's the Democrats seat at that table on that show, essentially called those who were against the bill, but also those who showed up on Capitol Hill and held a press conference and were calling their members of Congress who say, Hey, I support my family through TikTok, or this is so helpful for my small business, and don't get rid of TikTok, calling all of these people treasonous. Treasonous. This is the fear mongering tactic that we have and the smear tactics that we've seen, unfortunately, before.

I hope that people will start paying attention so that this doesn't become one of those pieces of legislation that will live on in the books because As our friend Tom Massey pointed out, there is no census clause in this legislation, which did exist in the Patriot Act, and which allows at least for this debate to continue. It's still rubber-stamped in a lot of ways, but at least it allows that opportunity to continue to try to make some necessary changes to it. The details of this legislation that they say is used to ban TikTok in practice and in reality, it goes so much farther than just banning TikTok that they're very intentionally trying to cover up.

The comparison to the Patriot is apt because it's going to become a monster. And as you pointed out in your talk today, it's basically a blank check for the executive branch to not just ban TikTok, but to ban anything that they would view as a threat to their narrative, as a threat to democracy.

Yeah. Again, the similarities between the Patriot Act and this bill are very clear in the vagueness of the language and in the unilateral authority that's given to the executive branch to determine who they want to target and how they will weaponize the law, essentially, to go after that person. I really hope, and I'm encouraging people to call their senators, but I really hope that the more people talk about this and speak the truth about it, that it will, at a minimum, scare some of the senators from allowing this to sail through as they did in the House.

The irony, and I think Rand Paul has pointed this out, the irony is that we just went through this two-year process of discovering how much the security industrial complex, all of those alphabet agencies have been censoring our speech and planting false stories and stopping true stories and not allowing people to question the COVID lockdown narrative to speak.

Often at the direct behest of the White House and other federal agencies.

And so this strikes me. Banning TikTok is part of that project. It's the same thing. They're scared that all of these social media platforms, these independent journalists, are able to call them out And so they're just trying to strangle free speech in America. Yeah.

I'm curious about your thoughts because you live in DC and you deal with a lot of these folks even more than I do these days. But what What's the conversation in the Republican conference right now that drove so many of them to cast their vote yes on this?

It's fear. It's the same as a Patriot Act. If you vote the the right way, if you vote for free speech, if you vote for independence, someone's going to call you. You said traitor, but someone's going to say, I'm going to blame you when something bad happens. That's the problem. They're afraid, they're not principled.

They're afraid they're not principled, and they're reflective of how many sheep we have in these positions and how few actual leaders with courage. The timing of this, I think, is not accidental as well, and how quickly they're trying to get this through, how quickly they want it to be implemented. Even the whole divestiture argument is saying, Okay, well, within 180 days, this massive multinational business really has to be sold to an American company in order to make it okay. I mean, it's just not realistic. And again, the election is not very far away.

Thank you for doing this, and thank you for fighting.

Thank you, Matt. Thank you for being such a strong voice for freedom.

Thank you.

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