In a specific discussion, Thursday on First Principles with Phill Kline – host Kline talked with CEO and editor-in-chief of The Star News Network, and host of The Tennessee Star Report, Michael Patrick Leahy about the alliance that exists between Big Tech and social media giant’s threat to truth and misinformation in this new age of journalism.
Kline: We’re bordering on having a corporate oligarchy in America. I was reading and forgive me, I can’t remember the agency. I don’t know if it was the Election Assistance Commission or if it was Homeland Security, but it was an eight-page paper. I was just reading it this week on the vulnerabilities of our digital systems and elections.
And you and I have talked about this before. I have not seen proof that we were hacked from without. I firmly believe we were hacked from within. It’s the nonprofit shadow government dictating the way the election would be run.
And this time they ran it in the urban core as a campaign office for Biden. They put the money there and they did GOTV or voter turnout. They targeted potential Biden voters. And I believe that’s contrary to law.
But going back to this paper, our machines are vulnerable and they can be connected to the internet. Although we haven’t seen proof that they have manipulated this election, this has been known for some time, but the entirety of the focus of the paper, as it relates to digital threat, is stopping what they called hate speech and also de-platforming those who they believe gave misinformation.
Now, I’m sorry. As I went through the legislature, I had a lot of journalists that I believed were lying about me, but I would have never created a government truth bureau nor believed that the government should have the jurisdiction to define what’s misinformation and what is not.
That’s Pravda. That’s the KGB from our age. What are your thoughts about that? The government actually focusing their spooks, so to speak, on watching what Americans say and then trying to prevent it from being said?
Leahy: And there is I think if I can elaborate on that Phill, I think there’s an unholy alliance between the Big Tech social media giants. Facebook, Google, Twitter, mainstream media outlets, NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, that crowd and the federal government and the bureaucracy within the federal government.
We saw the term that has been the deep state but lifelong bureaucrats who work for the national federal government, we saw numerous instances of them contravening the direct orders of the commander chief under the Trump administration. Now they are all aligned kind of on one game plan, aren’t they?
And it is very dangerous for those of us who are simply trying to produce the truth and report on it. Now, when we report at The Star News Network, and as you know, we started The Star News Network back in February of 2017, I started The Tennessee Star, where I live. I live in Nashville.
I do a radio program in the morning from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. on the iHeart station here in Nashville. But we have grown from The Tennessee Star, which I think gets about a million users a month and growing rapidly. We have now seven other states about to be eight other states. And we’re just putting the truth out.
And it’s very interesting to see what gets picked up by other media outlets and what doesn’t get picked up. Let me give you an example of a very important story that is right in your bailiwick about election integrity that has gotten very little traction in the media. But also, we’ve seen a lot of Republican politicians that haven’t really paid attention to this.
And I think it is as close to a smoking gun about the questionable campaign contributions or questionable donations made by Mark Zuckerberg individually and his wife Priscilla Chan in the 2020 general election. And as you know, Zuckerberg and his wife gave $419 million to two nonprofit groups.
One of them, the Center for Technology and Civic Life, got $350 million. And they focus mainly on election administration at the state and county level. That’s an area that we worked on extensively. The other group is called the Center for Election Innovation and Research. I love that name, right? That’s $69 million.
Kline: Mike, I’m sorry. That’s just Zuckerberg’s money. That doesn’t include the other monies they got.
Leahy: We’re just looking at the Zuckerberg side. Individual money. They got $69 million Phill in 2020, and they used it in 23 states. And the idea that they had was for the secretary of state in that state to promote voting activity. They claimed this was in the pandemic era and how to vote safely by mail, et cetera.
Kline: How to vote safely. (Laughs) Don’t stab yourself with a pen.
Leahy: Yeah really. Don’t stab yourself with that pen.
– – –
Photo “Mark Zuckerberg” by Mark Zuckerberg. Photo “Jack Dorsey” by Wired. Photo “Sundar Pichai” by Sundar Pichai.
