WATCH: For Once Trump Gets It Right

Robert Scheer discusses Trump’s executive order banning government censorship and a range of free-press matters with Consortium News’ editor in chief Joe Lauria.

By Robert Scheer

This is the political season to be thankful for small favors of optimism, and in this edition of Scheer Intelligence, host Robert Scheer and guest Joe Lauria, editor in chief of the Consortium News website, are excited to have found a gift of striking significance to what remains of the practice of serious journalism on the internet.  It is Donald Trump’s delivery on a promise in his inauguration address that  “After years and years of illegal and unconstitutional federal efforts to restrict free expression, I will also sign an executive order to immediately stop all censorship and bring back free speech to America.”

What Trump is referring to is summarized in his executive order, “Restoring Free Speech and Ending Federal Censorship,” asserting:

“Over the last four years, the previous administration trampled free speech rights by censoring Americans’ speech on online platforms, often by exerting substantial coercive pressure on third parties, such as social media companies, to moderate, deplatform, or otherwise suppress speech that the Federal Government did not approve.

Under the guise of combatting ‘misinformation,’ `disinformation’ and ‘malinformation,’ the Federal Government infringed on the constitutionally protected speech rights of American citizens across the United States.” 

Despite its presence in the egregious pile of Donald Trump’s otherwise deeply frightening executive orders assaulting logic and decency, both Scheer and Lauria, who edit internet publications that have been targeted in this manner, argue that this particular executive order is a gem of sharp brilliance that should not be shunned for the tawdry company it keeps.

Credits

Host: Robert Scheer

Producer: Joshua Scheer

Video Producer: Max Jones

Introduction: Robert Scheer

Transcript

This transcript was produced by an automated transcription service. Please refer to the audio interview to ensure accuracy.

Robert Scheer: Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of Scheer Intelligence, where the intelligence comes to my guests. And in this case, it’s Joe Lauria. He’s the editor-in-chief of Consortium News. I respect his journalism enormously. I repost a lot of it. And he had, and it’s interesting, because a lot of us now on the internet are there because the mainstream media is no longer as friendly as to honest reporting and hasn’t been for some time.

But generally a number of us, many of us come from traditional journalism. I spent 29 years at the LA Times and worked for a number of other news organizations. Joe Lauria is a former U.N. correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe.  He’s written for papers like The Montreal Gazette, the Johannesburg Star.

He was an investigative reporter for The Sunday Times of London, a financial reporter for Bloomberg News and began his professional work as a 19-year-old stringer for The New York Times. He’s also a guy from the Bronx, right? Is that fair? 

Joe Lauria: That’s right. That’s right. You, me and Ray McGovern, yes. 

Scheer: Yeah, but there’s plenty others. I’m blocking on the guy’s name. We ran a piece by a guy just this week. But we come from a group of people who grew up– I’m much older than you, right? I think. And I should mention the founder of your publication.

Lauria: Yeah. 

Scheer: He also had a strong journalism background. Why don’t you tell us about Consortium? 

Lauria: Yeah, that was Robert Parry who died on, coming up to his seventh anniversary of his death. It’s hard to believe; January 27, 2018. I became editor in April 2018. Bob Parry was an investigative reporter, a real one, you know, spending months on a story when news organizations had that kind of money and patience to let a reporter really dig into a story. And he worked for the Associated Press.

And he is responsible for breaking most of the really big stories of the Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980s. He revealed the name of Oliver North. That’s how we know about him. But AP started really trying to spike his stories. They were getting uncomfortable about what he was finding out, particularly that story on Oliver North. They wouldn’t run the story. They kept saying, “why don’t you get Oliver North to confess?” 

Even though they had like 20 sources saying that he was running this operation out of the basement of the White House — in which he was breaking the law because Congress had cut off funding to the Contras, the Contra rebels in Nicaragua, and they overturned that. They just went around that and created a way to raise money by selling weapons to Iran and then giving the money to the Contras.

So Bob revealed all that and AP basically by mistake put it out on the Spanish wire. So Bob Parry started Consortium of News in 1995 because he got fed up. He worked for Newsweek. They did the same thing to him then; spiking his stories.

He started in 1995, 30 years ago. We’re going to celebrate our anniversary this year. A consortium of journalists whose work has been suppressed by their corporate editors, a place for them to publish. That’s what Consortium News is. 

Scheer: Consortium? How do you pronounce it?

Lauria: According to the dictionary, both pronunciations are acceptable. 

Scheer: I want to make this point because the traditional media always had these enormous contradictions and served big power, and in every society, and certainly no exception here in the United States. And Bob Parry’s example is that you still had to go against the grain. We still needed alternative media. But what happened with the internet was this suddenly was a Wild West in the best sense of it, maybe, or maybe sometimes the worst sense. But there was certainly a freedom to the internet in its early years. 

And I know I… was doing Truthdig, you know, I think I  started in 2007, among the first, but there was a vibrant journalistic force there. And what we saw, and here I’m going to really squarely blame the Democrats, a mood developed that if news stories were embarrassing to the government, they somehow were now fake news. 

A part of an irresponsible – it was almost by definition; if a story is uncomfortable to people of power, it must be fake, because people of power, people in our government don’t do bad things, right? And certainly not when they’re criticizing your party, as happened with the Democrats, particularly where there came this fierce campaign, and then of course it happened under Republicans as well… 

But this fierce campaign to get the monopoly operations of Facebook and Google that were on the internet. And they only had the freedom to be free of libel and everything, because they were thought to be news aggregators. And that’s why they were not considered monopolies, right? This was the whole sort of illusion there. 

But nonetheless, the idea was they should be responsible and no one wants to use the word censor, but that’s really what was said. And in cases this was done without government money going in, but sometimes government money went into so-called watchdog groups. But the main thing is it was government pressure. 

Government didn’t want to be embarrassed and whistleblowers were stepping forward and others were doing stories. And one of the most famous publishers of that kind, Julian Assange, of course, was imprisoned for a long time. And now, you know, finally was released very late.

And so I really want to get to an amazing thing that happened in the inauguration. And there’s many reasons to criticize Donald Trump. We could do lots of podcasts criticizing Donald Trump. My favorite contender would be his outrageous inhuman immigration policy. But we could go to a long list. 

However, I think it was the – yeah, it was the singer Leonard Cohen who said, “There’s a crack in everything and that’s how the truth gets in.” In another way of saying, there are contradictions of power. And Donald Trump certainly embodies some enormous contradictions because he is coming on as a populist, a right-wing populist, but nonetheless he’s promised from the very beginning to drain the swamp of Washington and so forth. 

And in that spirit of being willing to challenge power, along with his speech and his presidential orders, he did something that I think should be applauded. Let’s just, let me be right out there. You know, I think if… doing objective journalism is we, you know, I always gave credit to Richard Nixon for the opening to China.  And, you know, so the… I think in this issue, Trump, maybe because as he puts it, has been a victim of government censorship in the internet years. 

He said in his speech,

“After years and years of illegal and unconstitutional federal efforts to restrict free expression, I will also sign an executive order to immediately stop all government censorship and bring back free speech to America. Never again will the immense power of the state be weaponized to persecute political opponents, something I know something about. We will not allow that to happen. It will not happen again.”

Now, that’s gonna, anytime you say something nice about Trump in the crowd that I run it with, you know, they denounce you and wanna not have dinner. But both Joe and I know having been publishers on the internet, as I say, I was the editor, not the publisher of Truthdig, and now I have ScheerPost. We have seen a dramatic change, a challenge, emasculation, if you like, destruction of the vibrancy of the internet. 

It was not always wonderful, but it was an amazing degree of freedom on the internet. You could get large audiences to consider positions. Remember when Jill Stein was being ignored? I managed to get an interview of her up for why she was running. And boom! Suddenly, a million people could have access. This alarmed the establishment that news could find an audience. And then they said, “It’s not news and only legacy newspapers can make that determination.”

Now they’ve got a real problem since Jeff Bezos, one of a number of billionaires who owns what remains of a legacy newspaper. They don’t like him because he’s now touting Donald Trump. So is The Washington Post now a proper guardian of [inaudible]? Or The Los Angeles Times where you have another billionaire owner or even The New York Times, I shouldn’t say even, that went to the richest man in Mexico [Carlos Slim] at one point to get money to bail [it] out and certainly has this kind of funding.

What is particularly alarming, these companies did it, they claim reluctantly. This was all revealed by Edward Snowden early that the NSA and others, the NSA that he worked for as a contract worker, were going in and using these companies, grabbing their data and forcing them to do lots of things that they said they didn’t want to do. 

And there were even, and let me just particularly mention one NewsGuard, which you have been suing, I’m not gonna go into the details, because you have a live suit, but they actually at one point got a lot of money from the Defense Department, yet they were supposed to be a watchdog raiding news organizations. More blatant actually than what Google and Facebook and others did… In the case of Amazon and Bezos, he does have government contracts, defense contracts, and so forth. 

But I just wanna say in this executive order, you can read it or I’ll read it. I think it’s powerful. Anyone who’s teaching journalism or evaluating media in America who does not take this executive order seriously is not serious about freedom of the press. Do you have a copy of it or should I read it? 

Lauria: You could read it, Bob. 

Scheer: OK.

“The First Amendment to the United States, an amendment essential to the success of our republic, enshrines the right of the American people to speak freely in the public square without government interference. 

Over the last four years, the previous administration trampled free speech rights by censoring American speech on online platforms, often by exerting substantial coercive pressure on third parties, such as social media companies, to moderate the platform or otherwise suppress speech that the federal government did not approve. 

Under the guise of combating misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation, the federal government infringed on the constitutionally protected speech right of American citizens across the United States in a manner that advanced the government’s preferred narrative about significant matters of public debate.”

Government censorship of speech is intolerable in a free society. And then the executive order sets out, and I’m sorry, I’ll post this, but people really should study it because it’s really significant.

[See: Trump Issues Order to End Censorship]

“The executive order sets out to secure the right of the American people to engage in constitutionally protected speech, to ensure that no federal government officer, employee, or agent engages in or facilitates any conduct that would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen. 

C) ensure that no taxpayer resources are used to engage in or facilitate any conduct that would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen. And D) identify and take appropriate action to correct past misconduct by the federal government related to censorship and protected speech.” 

And the executive order goes on to talk about the attorney general and what should be done, and then gives the background to it. It’s a major document in the historic battle in this country and worldwide over free speech, free press. Major. And the fact that it came from Donald Trump, maybe it takes a victim of overreach by government. 

And Donald Trump, whatever you think, certainly was severely criticized by arms of the state, the Justice Department, presidency and so forth. Even some of them when he was president, but certainly after… And criminal charges and everything else. You know, so maybe, again, I’ll be shot for, you know, giving him any credit, but, you know, maybe you have to. 

As Joe has certainly, and many of us, myself included on the internet, we’ve seen these attacks. We’ve witnessed them, these raidings. So I talk too much. I always promise myself I won’t talk this much. So Joe, take what remains of our show and tell us what you think is going on and what the significance of all this is. 

Lauria: Thank you, Bob. You’re absolutely right. In this hyper-partisan time that we’re living in, you’ve got to begin with a disclaimer about Donald Trump.

He is trying to remake the political culture of the United States in three or four days with this plethora of executive orders. It’s impossible to follow all of them. And everyone that I know of, except the one we’re discussing here, I disagree with strongly. I disagree with getting out of the WHO, out of the Paris climate deal, as weak as it is, even the blanket pardons of January 6th without examining each case individually. So there’s a lot of things I just don’t agree with what he did. But this one…

And as you say, maybe because he was the victim, and because the perception amongst conservatives is that it’s only the conservatives that the government went after in terms of suppressing their speech, that also plays into it. But it’s not true, because we’re not a conservative publication, nor are you. And we were certainly victims of this. 

And what Trump is zeroing in on here, what’s important to understand is that a private company is not is not subject to the First Amendment. They can suppress your speech, whatever you want. It’s the government that cannot do that. So because the federal government can, or any government, local as well, cannot abridge someone’s speech, according to the First Amendment, they use, in certain cases, they have tried to use private companies as proxies. 

And there have been Supreme Court decisions, one about a bookshop in Connecticut some years ago that the local government ordered them not to sell a book saying that it was obscene. And they sued and the Supreme Court ultimately decided that the government cannot use a private company like a bookshop to suppress free speech. 

The shop itself could have decided, we don’t want to sell this book because it’s obscene. That’s not a violation of First Amendment. But once the government intervened and used them to do it, that’s where the problem begins. It was also the most recent case of the National Rifle Association against Vullo. 

Again, they decided, the Supreme Court, that it’s illegal for the government to use a private actor as a proxy to suppress free speech. So this is what Trump is addressing in this extraordinarily important, as you point out, Bob, executive order. He’s saying that the government can’t do this. And this is something that we have sued NewsGuard because we’re alleging in our suit that that’s exactly what happened here, that the NewsGuard had a contract with the federal government.

And we believe we’re the victim of that contract, of that government using a private company to suppress us. We have sued the First Amendment– for a First Amendment violation, the federal government, and we’ve also sued NewsGuard for defamation. That’s still going through the courts. They’ve moved to dismiss. We’re waiting for the judge to make a decision. 

But what is important to understand is that this phenomenon of the government using private companies to suppress speech on social media in particular, and on the internet in general, really started around 2016, when Donald Trump was elected president, when Brexit happened in Britain. The established order became very nervous about this.

The population of their countries that they’ve ignored, especially in the United States without any health insurance, government health insurance, caring for the needs of the people are worried about a backlash, spending so much on foreign wars and so little on the needs of the people domestically, that there’s been this backlash. 

Social media has given a platform for average people to express themselves. Alternative media has exploded using the internet. So the established order had to do something to try to stop this and preserve their power. And one way they have done that is to use the government to suppress speech via private companies. 

And how we know about this in particular is the Twitter Files. The Twitter Files, Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, and other journalists were asked by Musk to come in and look at when he bought Twitter —  Elon Musk. He invited these journalists to search the database of all the emails and all documents at Twitter, which he inherited when he bought the company. And Matt Taibbi says, (and we had him on our show some years ago as well, our own webcast) he says that he had free rein to look at whatever he wanted to.

Musk didn’t just farm out what he thought they wanted him to write about. They were able to search whatever they wanted to. And what Taibbi and the others came up with is proof from the emails, if you believe it, in black and white, that the F.B.I., the Department of Homeland Security in particular, severely pressured executives at Twitter to take down people’s posts or suspend people. 

So this was a direct violation of the First Amendment using a private company, Twitter, to do it. And Facebook also — [Mark] Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan a couple of years ago that the F.B.I., you know, warned him about this Hunter Biden story that’s going to come out. And he felt pressured not to publish that. And that’s one of the worst examples of this because the Hunter Biden laptop story was a week or so before the election of 2020.

And Twitter not only suppressed that, but The New York Post, which broke the story, [Twitter] actually suspended The New York Post’s account. So it turned out later that it wasn’t Russian propaganda, as 50 retired intelligence officials lied about or misled the country about. Even The New York Times and the old established media had to admit a year or more later that it was really a genuine laptop left at that Delaware repair shop. 

And it did have all this seemingly incriminating evidence against not only Hunter Biden, but his father who participated in business meetings. So this was a shocker, the Twitter Files. Of course, they did everything they could, the Democrats, to destroy Matt Taibbi’s reputation, dragging him before a House committee hearing in which he was smeared as being a “so-called journalist.” This guy is a… And he was in the same game you were, Bob, in terms of covering campaigns, which he did with Rolling Stone. 

Very similar to the piece you did, the kind of journalism you did with Playboy on [Jimmy] Carter — Matt Taibbi was doing at Rolling Stone and covering the boys on the bus kinds of stories. So this is where we’re at. And Trump, you’re absolutely right, Trump was the victim and the conservatives were mostly the victims, but not only because we have been, we believe, we allege, also victims of this. So this [executive] order is extraordinary. It seems to overturn a Supreme Court case.

Because in 2023, let me look up the actual, there was a court case on July 4th, I remember July 4th, 2023, on Independence Day, a judge in Louisiana ruled that a whole slew of members of the Biden administration were not allowed to speak at all with Twitter or Facebook or any social media company. They were barred from speaking with them based on what the Twitter files revealed.

That they were pressuring a private company to suppress and abridge free speech, which they are constitutionally — not allowed to do. So this is an important case. What happened was it went all the way to the Supreme… It was Missouri versus Biden. It was Missouri and Louisiana, the attorneys general of those two states, that sued the federal government to stop them from doing what we’re describing here. And unfortunately, the Supreme Court in June, June 2024 ruled that neither Louisiana nor Missouri had standing to bring the suit.

So it fell apart, allowing the government in this case to continue to do this, the Biden administration. And this [executive] order seems to overturn that Supreme Court decision. And we’ll see what happens with it. Don’t forget now, another thing about Trump — he has said that students who are demonstrating on U.S. university campuses against the genocide in Gaza, against Israel’s genocide in Gaza should be deported. 

He’s also, we have to be worried that he might support legislation that the last House actually passed saying that the Treasury secretary is allowed to remove the nonprofit status from any group, including publications, that criticize Israel for their genocide in Gaza. So Trump could very easily be suppressing speech or supporting the suppression of speech when it comes to criticizing Israel. So the guy is not pure on this issue whatsoever. 

Needless to say, this is an important, extremely, even if it was of his own selfish interest, it has an enormous point of importance historically in terms of preserving the First Amendment. It’s a really important document. You’re absolutely right, Bob. 

Scheer: Yeah, and I’m tired of the disclaimers. You know, I think anybody who knows our work knows we’re not Trump supporters. It’s garbage. It’s a way of intimidating people. And the fact, you know, the charges against John Kiriakou, the brave C.I.A. person that some people were hoping he was hoping Biden, you know, in addition to pardoning his own family, and other people in his administration might extend a pardon to John Kiriakou served, you know, two years in prison and was forced into accepting that, you know, for revealing that the U.S. government had conducted torture.

And you know, that’s an attack on freedom of speech and freedom of the press and so forth. It was the Bush administration, which was supporting the torture, didn’t go after Kiriakou for remarks he made on ABC television, it was the Obama administration. So, you know, it turns out no government anywhere in the world and certainly not ours wants to have a free press.

This is why it was put into the Constitution. After all, the amendments were put there because the public, which was obviously white and more affluent of its time, nonetheless felt that this new government of theirs would go the way of the English crown and suppress ideas and free speech and so forth. So it was a warning about what our government done by our heroes, you know, Jefferson in Washington might do. 

Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. That is the essential wisdom of the American experience. And I say that, you know, with full congratulations and respect for it. But the odd thing, and this is why I want to talk to you, is it’s a lonely business being a critic of any government, but certainly of what is, I clearly, I don’t want to defame liberalism, but what is the Democratic Party establishment.

And they have actually been more ruthless in the modern period in suppressing ideas and, I dare say the main – as they often have said, the first casualty of war is truth – they have been the most warlike since Bush anyway. You know, and Trump at least seems to be moving in a direction maybe, or you don’t need all these wars. You could win with other means, you know, some notion of capitalism. I don’t want to get into that, but I do want to challenge the conceit that there couldn’t be a legitimate Republican and even indeed a Trumpian fear of excessive power. 

After all, he has experienced it a bit, as I said earlier, and anyone who lives in this society knows it can be turned against you, you know, and you can be made to suffer for your ideas. I think that’s an issue here only for one major reason. People get their guard up about freedom when the opposition is in power. They don’t get their guard up about when their own folks are in power, the people they voted for. 

That is always the contradiction. And anywhere in the world, when your religion is in power or your political ideology is power, then you start lying through the teeth and rationalizing and everything else. And there are very few examples, there are whistleblowers and so forth, where political movements of any kind, governments of any kind, will be consistent about a free press and free speech when it’s turned against them.

We see it everywhere and all the time. Okay. The reason I’m giving that little primer, I said I would shut up, is it relates to the TikTok case now. Where again, Trump has flipped his position because suddenly these hundreds of millions of Americans are being told you can’t trust TikTok because the Chinese government might be using your private data to do blah, blah, blah, blah. 

Now, first of all, if that’s a reason for not using something, then no American product should be used because it has been clearly established — first and most vividly by the Snowden revelations but it’s been conceded by Apple, by Google and so forth — that they can’t protect your data against the American government. And the American government is rifling through your data on a daily minute by minute basis, right?

But even before the internet — we just celebrated Martin Luther King Day — and Martin Luther King, the most famous advocate for civil liberty and civil rights in this country, was a target of a Democratic administration, Lyndon Johnson, Bobby Kennedy was the attorney general, and J. Edgar Hoover was given the license to smear blackmail and try to drive Martin Luther King to suicide. And did it with a false document that they pretended that it came from the general public to King’s wife, you know, accusing him of all kinds of personal crimes after they couldn’t, they couldn’t find anything at all about political crimes. 

And, and, you know, that was done by Democrats in the pre-internet. But now with the internet, we know we’re operating in the internet, they can manipulate like crazy. So I would like you to talk about your life as a leading editor, really, you put out an amazing publication. It’s a struggle.

But, you know, it’s really a rigged game. Because the government has, they have to permit these internet companies to have a monopoly. They have to go along with their having power. So even if they don’t directly give them money or plant people, which they often do, and, you know, in Google and elsewhere, they can cause these companies to have a lot of misery. 

And some of them, like in the case of Amazon, actually have big government military contracts. 

Lauria: Right, they do.

Scheer: So why don’t you tell us what it’s like to be an editor and what is the reality of the internet?

Lauria: Well, I want to say something about the Democratic Party first because you’ve been talking about that. This is no longer FDR’s party. It is no longer a party of George McGovern with an actual left wing that was anti-war. That’s all gone. Bill Clinton sealed that by making it a centrist, center-right party. And that is a terrible indictment of the fact that we don’t have a party in this country anymore that really defends the average person’s interest. 

Neither party does. But the Democrats have gone further in this issue of censorship. We have to remember now that Biden also tried direct censorship, government censorship, not using private companies as a proxy. He created what he called in the Department of Homeland Security the Governance Board. Was it called…?

Scheer: It’s in your article. 

Lauria: Yeah, yeah.

Scheer: I always block on names. 

Lauria: A governance board to control speech. And he hired this woman, Nina Jankowicz, to run it. And the outcry from the Republicans, particularly Rand Paul, but also in the public, was so strong, he had to suspend it and eventually end that. So Nina Jankowicz is out of her job. 

You know what she’s doing now? She’s got some think tank or whatever that she’s created. And she’s complaining in a video recently on Twitter that she’s a victim of McCarthyism! Because the censor was shut up. 

In other words, to silence, to stop someone from censoring is in her view, McCarthyism. Her free speech is being violated. Her right to censor others is being violated. And she’s interpreting that. So this is the insanity of what’s going on here. But social media and the rise of internet independent media like Consortium News, we were one of the first, actually the first online news magazine independent in the whole country in 1995. 

We went online before the LA Times did their… and The New York Times and Time Magazine. We were actually five days behind or ahead of Salon. I can’t remember. Salon.com was on that same era, the end of 1995. They have lost control of the narrative. This is freaking them out. I’m talking “they” being the established order of both parties, but particularly the Democrats because of Trump. 

When Trump lost – when Trump won, rather, in 2016, they started this cottage industry of so-called fact-checkers, the anti-disinformation organizations like the Nina Jankowiczes of the world. And then, as I said, the government tried directly to do it. This has risen up. So it is very much a Democratic Party thing to silence the internet, to silence people who are challenging the established order.

Now Consortium News has not been an easy job for us. We were first attacked back in November 2016, an organization called PropOrNot. Now to answer your question about what it’s like to run this organization in this environment. PropOrNot —  on Thanksgiving in 2016, there was a front page Washington Post story with a list of blacklisted publications that were supposedly peddling Russian propaganda.

Consortium News was on that list. Then October 20th… 

Scheer: Truthdig, which I was editing, also made your list. 

Lauria: Yeah. 

Scheer: Nixon’s enemy list. People argue about whether they are on or not.

Lauria: Exactly. And that was a… Washington Post published that piece and these were anonymous people. So they didn’t even name who those people were that were accusing Truthdig, Consortium News and a whole list of other independent publications. They didn’t even publish who did that. It was outrageously irresponsible of The Washington Post to do that.

In October 2020, a Canadian TV station, Global News, the second largest private TV station in Canada, ran a story on their website, and on TV, saying that Consortium News was in the forefront of a Russian campaign to discredit Canadian politicians. They’d gotten a document from the Communication Security Establishment, which is the NSA of Canada.

We sued them, but unfortunately our lawyer, which we had a not a very good one I have to say, sued in the wrong jurisdiction, so it was thrown out. They smeared us. We had nothing to do with the Russian government. It’s a totally outrageous thing.

Scheer: Let me ask you about the Russiagate. 

Lauria: Yes. 

Scheer: For me having written about, I’m a real old guy now and I started writing about politics when there was supposed to be a unified communist world and it fell apart. 

But mainly at the same time, communist China was firing at communist Soviets over the border. And the Sino-Soviet dispute between two communist countries was very real. Then, you know, now you have a situation where we want Apple to move its manufacturing to communist Vietnam instead of communist China. 

The irony of the whole Russiagate is that [Vladimir] Putin, growing up in Russia and succeeding as in the old system, was an early rebel against it, along with the Leningrad group that brought [Boris] Yeltsin to power. So it’s a complete caricature of history to blame what Russia is doing on anything to do with the Cold War issues or communism. 

They have embraced capitalism in a very strong way. So it was like a reversion to McCarthyism. At the same time, at that time, we were getting along with China. They were making a lot of stuff we wanted to buy and everything. So it just goes to the Orwellian point that you get to define an enemy and there doesn’t have to be any rhyme or reason to that enemy. 

The interesting thing is that in this case, the American public didn’t buy it because we were supposed to accept the idea that Donald Trump is an agent of Putin. 

I mean, and they lied. I mean, they made up stories about his peeing with prostitutes. I don’t remember the details, who peed on who, but I mean they just came up with the most slanderous. 

Lauria: It was opposition research. It was opposition research that was peddled as an intelligence document, as being real. It was one of the biggest, most outrageous hoaxes. And Trump was, we hate to say a billionaire could be a victim, but he was a victim there. He was a victim. 

Scheer: I want to return to that point. You know, I wrote once an article about Nixon 10 years after he was in office, and I try, and I was objective about it. I believe in objective journalism. And Nixon, yes, I called him a war criminal and said this is for the LA Times. On the other hand, I pointed out that he basically broke the Cold War with the opening to China and so forth. 

You know, no one liked the article, so much for objective journalism, except Nixon. He wrote me and he said, “Hey, very interesting. I see that you had some kind things to say about some of my activities.” He invited me to New York to go talk to him.

So I am against the demonization, as a way of destroying logic and fact. And I don’t believe in the partisan stuff. I think the requirement of objectivity is we have to judge Donald Trump the same way we would judge Barack Obama without fear or favor. That’s hard to do. I could tell you.

Lauria: I tell you, Bob, it’s interesting. You mentioned Nixon going to China because when Trump went to North Korea, when he met with Kim, he was destroyed by the democratic media and by democratic politicians. 

I went back and looked at the coverage of Nixon’s trip to China and Democrats across the board praised him for that. They had the guts to do that. It was a different time in the politics… That Nixon could be praised, as you just said, for doing something that will lessen tensions where Trump was killed for trying to do the same thing with North Korea. We’re living in a different time. Now Nixon wrote to you and Ro Khanna wrote to me then. So this was…

Scheer: It challenges the notion of partisanship because you know you just can’t give the Democratic Party any safe pass or anything. And you mentioned Rand Paul. Whatever, I never know what my Wikipedia page is going to say from day to day. But one of my crimes is that I wrote a column in the LA Times saying that Rand Paul, who I thought was better than his Democratic opponent, and that there was something refreshing about his libertarian ideology that he feared big government power. 

And it’s in there as a negative, like somehow “Wow, gotcha. You had kind words to say about Rand Paul.” But the fact is, you know, when it comes to civil liberties, even the Roberts court, which everybody loves to attack, John Roberts, he actually came out with the best defense of privacy and Fourth Amendment freedom in the Supreme Court decision.

No, it does apply to the electronic era. It’s like your home.  It’s not, you know, the Fourth Amendment applies to modern technology is the most important decision. I know we’re going to wrap this up, but I feel this is a moment of truth for what remains of the liberal pretension of the Democratic Party and the part of the left that associates with Democratic Party. 

That it remained for Donald Trump, whatever his motives, to offer this executive decision, which is the clearest defense of freedom of speech and freedom on the internet that I know of. Okay. 

And so that’s painful to say it, you know, that it didn’t come from people I have been more at home with, you know, and so forth. You mentioned my Carter interview, but I’ve got a lot, I did get along with Clinton, got invited to a White House dinner. You know, I interviewed Reagan also, got a lot… 

But the problem is the Democratic Party is now really committed to a very pro-war, super patriotic view and really quite vicious towards anyone who dissents from this narrative. 

In fact, they might even, I noticed today our new secretary of state suddenly thinks, “Well maybe you should end the Ukraine war.” He supports that now. Are they going to attack him as fake news? I mean, we’ve got this crazy atmosphere where people that I had counted on to be rational and fear extensive government power have either shut up or joined the warmongering crowd. 

Now, I know this is two guys from the Bronx where, at least in my neighborhood, even when I thought you should vote for [Dwight] Eisenhower as a young person I wore a “I Like Ike” button because he said some good things about not, you know, building the atomic bomb and so forth. That was heresy, right? 

And we are at a moment where – and it’s going to be very difficult for these next four years – where we have to brace ourselves. There might be some good things as well as all the list of horribles that you mentioned coming out of Trump.

And the expectation that the Democrats are our savior in any way, I think it’s been shot to hell. 

Lauria: Well, I’m working on a piece about Eisenhower right now, funny enough, in which I’m comparing his farewell to Biden’s. I don’t think Eisenhower is coming out looking all that great. But I have to say this to wrap this up. We’re in a huge crisis in this country. Neither party is delivering for the American people. 

Both of them are way out there supporting the interests of very powerful people who have really little to do with what the United States population is worried about, concerned about and needs attention. 

And I don’t know where this is going to lead to, but no one can have faith anymore in this system. It’s delegitimated in my view. It’s not a legitimate political system anymore. And that’s why fewer and fewer people vote. At least because Trump sees himself as a victim, he’s standing up now against this absolutely outrageous attempt to suppress free speech. 

It should be –  have annoyed and upset so many people given the entire history of the First Amendment, what this country is supposed to stand for. And we see now that in fact, the First Amendment is unimportant to many people in charge, particularly in the Democratic Party, as we’ve been saying. Let’s hope that there’s an end to this, but I’m not very, let’s say optimistic.

We’ll see what happens. At least he stood out with this document trying to defend people’s rights to say what they want, particularly online.

Scheer: And he’s also dared challenge this idea of going to war without any kind of justification that of course George W. Bush embraced that wholeheartedly. But it’s very difficult. I mean, when we’re baited, like for instance, Chris Hedges, whom we both publish, he’s attacked. 

He was one of the mainstream media, talk about coming out of mainstream media, New York Times bureau chief, you know, decades at The New York Times covering these wars, wrote the most important books on war, and he’s baited all the time, attacked all the time.

Yes, by Republicans, I’m not going to give you the voters any need free ride here, but Democrats viciously for just telling us, you know, that that’s called misinformation. They would like to ban Chris Hedges. 

In fact, I ran a piece that got eliminated by the people who carry us saying that David and Goliath is reversed and Israel is not David. That was a Chris Hedges column. He had covered Israel, covered Palestine. And that was the headline that got this thing banned.

You know, I tried advertising it. That’s what happened. I tried buying some ads to advertise his column. You know, I don’t have a lot of money, but I thought, well, this would be a good one. And I think the headline was “Israel’s not David, It’s Goliath” or something. 

Lauria: Yeah. 

Scheer: OK. Now, if you can’t make that argument when they’ve got this powerful military, they’re backed by the United States and you can’t argue, as Chris Hedges was arguing, that you can’t give this automatic pass for Israel on the grounds that they’ve beleaguered David and that the Palestinians are somehow a representative of a Goliath of Arab states, which was the rationalization for Israel’s aggressiveness all these years. 

And if that can’t be promoted on the internet, then you’ve got a worse situation than we’ve ever had with media rather than the promise of the internet that it could open up.

Lauria: Bob, we didn’t talk very much about Israel and Gaza, but this is central to this First Amendment issue. In Britain, for example. 

Scheer: By the way, I don’t know if you have to go, but the good thing about doing these things, we can go longer, five minutes or so if you want. 

Lauria: Yeah, yeah, no, I’m here. I’m fine. I just want to make… 

Scheer: I’ve interrupted you too many times. My wife will tell me I blew it. So please take as much time as you want to do this.

Lauria: I just want to make the point that the Terrorism Act in Britain makes it illegal, actually an act of terrorism, to express opinions that support a proscribed organization. Hamas is a proscribed organization in Britain. So if you write criticizing Israel’s genocide, they are construing that as support for a proscribed organization. And we’ve had a whole series of journalists like Richard Medhurst, like Craig Murray, who’s on our board at Consortium News, whose articles we also publish.

They have been stopped and questioned at the airport. Richard Medhurst  was in prison for 24 hours. Why? Because of articles they’d written! [Or comments on video that they made.] An absolute free speech issue. Now, this bill that I referred to earlier in the House that would remove nonprofit status from organizations, publications, because they criticized Israel, is very similar to that. 

And that’s what we’re faced with. Also, the TikTok issue, the ADL, I believe it was ADL, was certainly there was a lot of opposition from Zionist groups that TikTok was being used to promote the Palestinian viewpoint. So Israel’s tentacles are reaching deep into Western countries like the U.S. and Britain, and it’s also threatening free speech. 

And Gaza is an issue that we don’t, even though Trump sent his guy in there, [Steve] Witkoff, and finally, you know, just he was a thug that was able to put down a bigger thug, which is [Benjamin] Netanyahu, to get this ceasefire. 

So what Biden refused to do in 15 months, which he could easily have done. Trump did in a few minutes, in a few days, get the ceasefire, but will he follow it up? I’m very worried about Trump’s position on Gaza.

I’m very worried that he’s going to allow the annexation of the West Bank or a war with Iran. He’s saying ridiculous things about Russia, that there’s a million Russian dead Russians, that the economy is collapsing.

So is that war going to end? We don’t know. We have to give him credit for this order on free speech.

Scheer: The point of our discussion here is not to tell you who’s the lesser evil or who whatever.  It’s to have the freedom to call it how you see it.

Lauria: Exactly.

Scheer: And not be thrown in the slammer or if you get documents, that’s what I did at Ramparts — or we did at Ramparts — got a lot of government documents that revealed the crimes of government. And I really want to stick to that. It really… I don’t want to make light of it, “First they came for the Jews and then they came for us,” I forget the minister who said that…

But, you know, if people attack the freedom of right-wing Republicans, it’s no less alarming than if they attack the freedom of people who call themselves progressive Democrats or left-wing Democrats or what have you, or centrists for that matter. The fact is power will always crush anything that disturbs it. Even, and so if there’s a centrist that exposes that tobacco causes cancer, that centrists will be suppressed. 

I think, let me just conclude, with asking you this. I think this question of freedom, free press, free speech, you can’t go halfway. You can’t even go 90 percent or 99 percent and leave that 1 percent. 

I remember Larry Flint, God, I’ll get in real trouble for quoting Larry Flint. But he said, “You can’t have, you know, a committee of five, wolves and one sheep deciding what to eat for dinner. The sheep is going to lose every time.”

And you either, you know, believe in freedom and you think it’s an absolutely essential ingredient for rational behavior, for sound human behavior and so forth, or you don’t. 

And the sad thing is, in your publishing experience, in my editing, now publishing experience, we find that even people who talk a great game, a great game… Congressman Raskin, who I don’t know him, but I knew him as a kid. I knew, respected his father very well, Mark Raskin.

And to go into this Russiagate in this way of “Gotcha, we’re gonna show him, we’re gonna destroy him and so forth,” when the thing was — talk about fake news, fake news from beginning to end.

I think there’s a real lesson here: how fragile the very idea of intellectual freedom of free press is when it’s doing what it’s supposed to do, afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted, right? 

Lauria: Yes. Well, as long as the establishment doesn’t feel threatened, they’ll let you say whatever you want, but they obviously feel threatened now. And social media has been a huge part of that, independent media like our publications are big part of that as well.

And they will behave. Look at Kent State. I always like to bring up the example of Kent State because it was only when the government felt threatened by the protests that they went and did what totalitarian societies do, shoot down their protesters in the street, or in this case on a campus. But normally the U.S. government can get away with allowing people to say whatever they want because they’re so powerful and they don’t feel threatened and it doesn’t matter. But it’s starting to matter to them now. That’s the problem.

Trump’s election broke the whole mold of the situation. They got freaked out by it. A lot of people are freaked out by this. Social media has given voice to so many people that never had a voice before.

The legacy media is losing, hemorrhaging viewers, CNN and all of them except Fox seems like, are losing viewers. And alternative media, people are watching more Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson interviews than anything that’s on any television station right now. That’s freaking them out as well.

So the entire established order is under threat and they will resort to the same kind of measures that any government throughout history, any ruling circle throughout history will use to suppress their opposition, to stay in power. And that’s what we’re dealing with here. 

Scheer: All right. On that note, let me thank one of the few remaining public NPR stations, KCRW Santa Monica, for having the guts to post these shows.

And I want to thank Christopher Ho and Laura Kondourajian at the station for doing this week after week. I want to thank Joshua Scheer, our executive producer, for lining up our guests and pushing me in the right direction, sometimes when I’m getting a little weak. Diego Ramos, who writes the introduction and is also the managing editor of Scheer Post, Max Jones who does the video. The JKW Foundation in honor of Jean Stein, the late Jean Stein, who was one of the gutsier independent writers, particularly on the question of Israel and Palestine coming from a major Jewish family, Jean Stein, nonetheless insisted that Palestinians were full human beings and that their future and their independence and their death mattered.

And Integrity Media, again, a gutsy lawyer in Chicago, Len Goodman, a group that he has helped found, for giving support for our being able to do this. When doing this gets more difficult, as no one knows better than Joe Lauria who has been doing it longer than any of us.

And I do want to recommend Consortium News. It’s consistently one of the best things about the internet. And it’s great journalism. These are journalists and don’t let anybody take that categorization away from them. That is the most vicious thing is to say people doing independent journalism as best as they could do it should be condemned as a great threat. And that’s what’s happened to Consortium. It’s what’s happened to the internet. So that’s my two cents. See you next week with another edition of Scheer Intelligence.

Robert Scheer, publisher of ScheerPost and award-winning journalist and author of a dozen books, has a reputation for strong social and political writing over his nearly 60 years as a journalist. His award-winning journalism has appeared in publications nationwide — he was Vietnam correspondent and editor of Ramparts magazine, national correspondent and columnist for The Los Angeles Times — and his in-depth interviews with Jimmy Carter, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Mikhail Gorbachev and others made headlines. He co-hosted KCRW’s political program Left, Right and Center and now hosts Scheer Intelligence, a KCRW podcast with people who discuss the day’s most important issues.