12/28/24: TikTok Ban, Disaster Relief Corruption, Voters Reject Dems

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People, my people, what's up? This is Questlove. Man, I cannot believe we're already wrapping up another season of Questlove Supreme. Man, we've got some amazing guests lined up to close out the season, but, you know, I don't want any of you guys to miss all the incredible conversations we've had so far. I mean, we talked to A. Marie, Johnny Moore,

Look, if you haven't heard these episodes yet, hey, now's your chance. Got to check them out. Listen to Questlove Supreme on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

Hey everyone, I'm Madison Packer, a pro hockey veteran going on my 10th season in New York. And I'm Anya Packer, a former pro hockey player and now a full Madison Packer stand. Anya and I met through hockey and now we're married and mom to two awesome toddlers, ages two and four. And we're excited about our new podcast, Moms Who Puck, which talks about everything from pro hockey to professional women's athletes to raising children and all the messiness in between.

So listen to moms who pog on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey guys, Sagar and Crystal here. Independent media just played a truly massive role in this election, and we are so excited about what that means for the future of the show. This is the only place where you can find honest perspectives from the left and the right that simply does not exist anywhere else. So if that is something that's important to you, please go to breakingpoints.com, become a member today, and you'll get access to our full shows, unedited, ad-free, and all put together for you every morning in your inbox.

We need your help to build the future of independent news media and we hope to see you at breakingpoints.com. All of a sudden these floods just ravaged through all of these neighborhoods in Valencia and left hundreds if not thousands dead as a result. So completely reckless response from the government. What happens when the greatest threat during a natural disaster isn't the storm itself but the response? My name is James Lee and you're watching Beyond the Headlines on Breaking Points.

Here in the United States, Hurricane Helene devastated communities across western North Carolina in late September of this year. While official reports list just over 100 fatalities, survivors and volunteers on the ground believe the true death toll is far higher. Allegations of mismanagement, delayed aid, and a lack of transparency have left many questioning whether the government truly has the public's best interests at heart.

But are these failures unique to America? Because across the Atlantic, Spain faced its own catastrophic disaster just a few weeks later. The floods in Valencia were some of the worst in the country's history. And like Hurricane Helene, they've exposed deep flaws in the government's response.

from ignored warnings to suppress death tolls and widespread mismanagement of aid, the parallels are striking. So today, we're going to explore what we can learn from these disasters and if they reveal a deeper crisis in government corruption in countries around the world. So joining me today is Iera Modarelli. She's an investigative journalist and associate editor at 21st Century Wire, and she was recently on the ground in Valencia.

Her reporting has uncovered shocking details about what really happened during and after the floods, something the mainstream media has failed to do. Ira, thank you so much for joining us today. Thanks so much for having me, James.

What I want to start off saying is I think Americans, we often only focus on domestic stories in our media, but when I came across your reporting, I noticed that there were so many parallels between what happened in Spain and what happened in North Carolina with Hurricane Helene, which we're going to get into, but for our audience who may not know too much about what happened in Spain and Valencia, can you give us a brief recap of that disaster?

Yeah, for sure. This happened over a month ago. So on the 29th of October, there were some really devastating floods over here in Valencia, particularly in flood-prone areas, very urban areas. The government was very aware that these were flood-prone areas. But over the years, they just kept building out in these areas and pushing people towards this region of Valencia

And this was marked as the worst natural disaster that's ever hit Spain before. And one of the things that really compounded the tragedy massively was the fact that the early warning systems failed.

So we have, just like you guys in the US, we have a Spanish meteorological agency called IMAX here, issued a red weather in the morning of the floods, but the Valencia president Carlos Masson kind of dismissed it, ignored it, and told people that there was nothing to be worried about, downplayed it.

People went about their days and all of a sudden these floods just ravaged through all of these neighbourhoods in Valencia and left hundreds if not thousands dead as a result. So completely reckless response from the government, very similar to what happened with Hurricane Helene.

Yeah, when you speak, when you mentioned the failure of the early warnings that kind of brought back memories of what happened in Maui with the wildfires that happened there, many people on the ground saying that they got no warning of that. And then you also just mentioned the death toll being very high into the thousands, which I don't believe is the actual

death count. And I know that when you actually went on the ground and talked to people and recorded exactly what they saw, you know, one of the most shocking parts of your reporting was this discrepancy in death toll. So can you tell us a little bit about what the locals are saying and why they think the number is so much higher and what kind of evidence is there to support those claims? Yeah, 100%.

prefacing this with I will be in Valencia for five days. My first visit there. And then for another two days, I just came back last weekend. I've spoken to about 30 or 40 neighbors, maybe more when I was on the ground, kind of just start conversations and every neighbor wants to tell you what they saw. And every single person I spoke to had told me that they'd seen more than one body

being either pulled out of a garage or people being stuck on the highway on the night of the floods and just hearing how all these cars were being washed away on the highway and you know they were all beeping and the beeping sounds got

more faint and less and less cars were beeping. So in other words, people were literally dying. And these people that were trapped, they were watching this horrifically happening in front of their eyes, unable to do anything about it. And I spoke and saw a bunch of things myself when I was there. So let's start with the government is reporting this as 220 plus deaths right now.

The missing toll is in the 1800 to 2000 initially was at that at that count.

But I've spoken to various neighbors who had, and I go through this in my investigation too, who had identified either family members as dead or friends or neighbors or such as dead, effectively steamed the bodies and identified them. And yet family members were marked as missing instead of dead. And one of the reasons I believe why this is happening is because for every deceased person,

The Spanish government needs to allocate around 72,000 euros to the family members. And one of the big clues that I thought when I was on the ground was

I went into a garage that was flooded. The floor below, I later found out, had a bunch of bodies still in it. So I was on the first floor and the floor below that was contaminated still on my first visit. There were three body bags in that one garage that I went into.

I filmed them. I went in and I filmed them and then I talked to the locals about what they saw and they saw people being pulled out of these, this scarash specifically, and I went back two weeks later and the state forces, whether that be, you know, the military or whoever is pulling these bodies out, needs to mark

these areas, garages, mostly your tunnels or so. They need to put a little mark on the garages and S specifically, which means that we remove bodies from here.

And so I asked the neighbor, where is that? Because we can clearly see the body bars, but we can't actually see that they've not. They said they don't do that because then you could obviously kind of go around all these towns, count the numbers and see that massive discrepancy. So neighbors on the ground believe that there are thousands of people that have perished and that most of these bodies are in the sea. At this point, they've been washed into the sea.

And every single neighbor I talk to saw bodies. So it's much, much higher, I believe than what they're saying. Wow. So you're saying that there's actually a financial incentive from the government's perspective to classify people as either missing or just forget about them completely. Because if they are reported as dead, there's some coverage that the government needs to provide for the families. And I think in the US, we witness

complete dysfunction, some would say corruption, kind of like what you're talking about in terms of the federal government's response. You had people like yourself, you know, or volunteers, aid organizations going in and having to step in and help. And we also heard reports here of those organizations being turned away. It was kind of a complete mess. And I think you talked about something similar happening in Spain as well. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? Yeah, for sure. I mean,

when I first heard about FEMA turning away volunteers in Hurricane Anand.

I was completely stunned at that happening. And then I saw it for myself when I went to Valencia, a different organization, this case, the Red Cross. I spoke to an interview also in the investigation, an interview with an independent aid worker that was on the ground at a distribution center that was next to where I was sleeping. So I was in this distribution center quite a lot, gathering things for neighbors and so

And I came across her and she said, I want to tell you what's been going on here because she was really visibly upset. And she said, every day I come here independently. I just want to hand out things to the neighbors. And the Red Cross follows me around and monitors what I'm doing and impedes me from handing these donations out to neighbors. So these items are being thrown away. The Red Cross is

instead asking people for financial donations, what they're most interested in and when I was on the ground, I saw a couple of Red Cross cars kind of just sitting tightly there and not doing much and not once did I actually see the Red Cross

handing something out, and another volunteer that I was there with told me that she saw the Red Cross putting a big camera on their car and filming themselves, handing something out to the neighbours, something that we've never seen on the ground, but they were doing this for their social media channels to show that they're helping, but they weren't.

And the big majority of people that were there on the ground helping were mostly volunteers. And this is also something that a neighbor tells me about in another interview that not neither the state forces nor these human rights organizations or NGOs are actually helping that it's mostly individuals and volunteers and nobody else. And on top of that, we have a massive media blackout around the story too.

Yeah, so I wanted to ask you about the media because I think, at least from our perspective here, in the States, we have a very, very high, I think media distress is probably at an all time high, perhaps warranted, right, in relation to some of these natural disasters that reporting that they've

done, right? All we see, you know, it's funny because we see these fact checks, right? People on the ground are saying, hey, FEMA is blocking aid. And then they would do these short segments or articles saying, well, we fact check that. We've called FEMA. They said that's not happening. And then they would just kind of move on.

I know that you're on the ground there. So, and I read like some of the stuff that you talk about like claims of the media actually misinforming people or even sometimes staging events. Can you or staging certain events to portray a certain narrative? Can you go into that a little bit? And also, what's the general public sentiment that people have towards mainstream media in Europe?

I mean, in Europe, as in the entire world, people don't trust the mainstream media anymore. Very rightfully so. I should say, on this particular instance, there were a couple of different instances that we can go into that kind of went viral, and then one that I saw myself. So a couple of things that went viral around this was reports and videos of journalists

or a journalist in this case, and a ducking down, covering himself in mud after being completely clean.

zone full of mud everywhere, completely clean, maybe it just arrived. So covering himself in mud real quick and then grabbing the microphone and saying, you know, I'm ready, let's go. And this was caught on camera. So that was one for a big outlet here called, and then to what I saw, you know, minutes, 20 minutes or so after I had left this garage and see leaf body birds and just, you know,

broken to completely traumatized neighbors. I see another big outlets in the street with their microphone kind of waiting and setting up. And I start asking what's going on here? What are they setting up for? And the neighbors tell me, the police is about to march down the street together with the military kind of in a show of, you know, we're helping so much here and look at us.

And those were the stories that they were covering when we were seeing, you know, not that much military on the ground, very little police to be honest. And when we were seeing them, they were often seen smoking, scrolling on their phones, kind of chilling while volunteers were doing the heavy lifting. Yeah, that's so disturbing to hear all of these stories and

Where my mind goes and when a population deals with something like this, there's almost no other path for them to start going down other than to think, okay, is there some sort of conspiracy going on here, right? When you talk about these certain powerful nefarious figures or institutions taking advantage of these disasters here, we have stories about maybe there's deeper motives at play, real estate interest covering up.

you know, the mismanagement that's going on or facilitating a land grab, something like that. So I'm just curious, what is your overall opinion about these kinds of ideas? And is there anything on the ground that would suggest any truth to these things? So I think, you know, not to get too conspiratorial here, but I think that, of course, there was a lot of money that was made out of this tragedy. And the government's very obviously could care less.

There's massive protests on the ground that are not being covered by the media. Because people want both the Valencia presidents and federal sanctions, who's the president of Spain, to step down. This could have really easily been avoided. And they chose not to. They chose to play party politics. Even the Valencia president was at an awards ceremony on the day of the floods. So, you know, it just gets worse and worse. The more you talk about it,

But I think, of course, in this instance, it's opportunity and money that was available that they made, that's not going to get handed out. So where is that money going to go? Who knows?

Yeah, well, we appreciate you for going on the ground. And I think, you know, between all of us independent media, I think is the future, I think mainstream media has shown that they're going to, they've abdicated their beauty. So it's kind of up to us to pick up the pieces there. So before I let you go, I do want you to tell the audience about the kind of reporting that you do and where they would be able to go to find more of your work.

Yeah, thanks so much. So I've worked for 21st Century YA. You can find all that work on my profile. You can find the investigation living to my Twitter. And yeah, I'm mostly active on Twitter. And as you can see, I have a lot of all my investigations and work on the 1st Century YA. Well, thank you so much, Eara, for joining us today on Breaking Points. And I look forward to talking to you again soon. Thanks for having me.

That's it for me today. If you want more stories that the mainstream media is unwilling to tell, please check out and subscribe to my YouTube channel 5149 with James Lee. The link will be in the description below. As always, thank you so much for your time today and keep on tuning into Breaking Points.

Hey everyone, I'm Madison Packer, a pro hockey veteran going on my 10th season in New York. And I'm Anya Packer, a former pro hockey player and now a full Madison Packer stand. Anya and I met through hockey and now we're married and moms to two awesome toddlers. And on our new podcast, Moms Who Puck, we're opening up about the chaos of our daily lives between the juggle of being athletes, raising children and all the messiness in between.

We're also turning to fellow athletes and beyond to learn about their parenthood journeys and collect valuable advice, like FIFA World Cup winner, Ashlyn Harris. I wish my village would have prepared me for how hard motherhood was gonna be. And Peloton instructor and ratchet mom club founder, Kristen Ferguson. And I remember going in there a hot mess. So listen to moms who puck, a production of iHeart Women's Sports and Deep Blue Sports and Entertainment on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

presented by Capital One, founding partner of iHeartWomen's Sports. Hi, I'm Danny Shapiro, host of the hit podcast, Family Secrets. How would you feel if when you met your biological father for the first time, he didn't even say hello? And how would you feel if your doctor advised you to keep your life-altering medical procedure a secret from everyone?

And what if your past itself was a secret and the time had suddenly come to share that past with your child? These are just a few of the powerful and profound questions we'll be asking on our 11th season of Family Secrets.

Some of you have been with us since season one, and others are just tuning in, whatever the case and wherever you are. Thank you for being part of our family secrets family, where every week we explore the secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves. Listen to season 11 of family secrets on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Good people. What's up? It's Questo. Questlove. And Team Supreme and I have been working hard to bring you some incredible episodes of Questlove Supreme. With gifts, you definitely don't want to miss. Now, one of the things I love about this Questlove Supreme podcast is we got something for everybody, every type of musical ever. We enjoy speaking to the people who are the face of some movement. Some people you've seen on stage or TV or magazine covers, but we also love speaking to the folks

who were making it happen behind the scenes and paid the way for those that followed. You know, keystones to the culture. This season.

We've had some amazing one-on-one conversation, like on PayPal, chatting up with hip-maker Sam Holland, who took a Steve Chaz with the legend, Nick Lowe, and I've had pleasures that don't one-on-one conversations with Willow, Sonata Materia, Kathleen Hannah, and the RZA. These are conversations you won't hear anywhere else, so make sure you go back and you check those episodes out, all right? Listen to Questlove Supreme on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

On November 5th, 2024, right after voting for Donald Trump, millions of people turned their ballots over and voted for things on ballot measures that Trump will almost certainly never give them. Abortion as a constitutional right or a higher minimum wage paid leave, these are all promises of the Democrats and clearly people want them. Yet when it came time to vote for the candidate who supports those things, millions of people chose the other person. So why is that?

Alaska, Missouri, and Nebraska all had ballot measures having to do with paid sick leave. If you are, for example, a part-time worker in Nebraska, you probably don't get sick leave since as of 2020, only 11.6% of part-time workers there have any kind of paid sick time.

So if you're not in that group, you will probably at some point have to choose between staying homesick and earning rent money. And hopefully you don't have a job handling people's food. Let's look at Trump's position on paid sick leave. There is nothing from his campaign website, and there is nothing in the official GOP platform.

Conversely, Tim Walz recently signed a bill establishing a statewide paid sick leave program. During Harris's campaign, she listed paid medical leave as priority and medical leave would generally include sick days. So if you're one of the 34 million workers who lack paid sick leave and that was your concern, Harris gives you a lot more to work with. These states obviously went for Trump. They also voted for Republican governors, senators, and Alaska gave their one congressional district to a Republican.

Yet after 60% of Nebraska voted for Trump, 74% voted for paid sick leave, as did Alaska and Missouri. When we think about politics through a two-party lens, there's this sort of assumption that you can categorize all the issues in one or the other. And then there's this assumption that goes along with that, that if people are voting for candidates from one party, they necessarily would vote

the way that you would assume on all those issues. And that's just not true. I think that's never been true, but I think that's increasingly, you know, the sort of affiliation of the parties with what they stand for is becoming destabilized. So I grew up, for example, in Northern New Jersey, just outside New York City, all Democrat in local politics. And so functionally, you have a one party system there. So ballot initiatives present an opportunity to vote on a policy directly apart from the party politics of wherever you live.

So let's take minimum wage. Since 2002, there have been 26 measures for statewide wage races. Democrats have talked a lot about raising the minimum wage. And if you want a higher minimum wage, Harris, again, made the most sense because she supported raising the minimum wage. Though on her campaign website, it only said that she'll fight for a higher minimum wage. She eventually committed to a $15 minimum wage on October 22nd, which is still lower than the living wage in most places. And it was probably too late for enough people to notice.

But Trump is decidedly worse on minimum wage. His website, and not to mention the official RNC platform, does not mention minimum wage at all. Despite this, people went to the polls and voted for both minimum wage and Trump, such is the case with Missouri and Alaska, which both voted to raise the minimum wage after first voting for Trump. In fact, out of the 26 minimum wage measures so far this century, all have passed, except for California this last election.

California, I think, is an outlier that does bear some consideration. For a long time, California has been kind of like the ballot initiative dystopia. The minimum wage increase was a very small minimum wage increase. It was one to $2. And they already have a minimum wage that's tacked to inflation. So they're going to see a raise in January anyway. So the specifics around that, I think, have more to do with the broader political culture and what's going on in California than a specific vote against wage increases.

But generally, this is a winner. Because most people work for a living, and lots of people make low wages. So if you ask people, should we make more money, most people are going to say yes. But no issue exemplifies this more than the issue the Democrats drive the hardest. In the fight for reproductive rights. You mentioned reproductive rights. Abortion. Abortion. Reproductive rights. Reproductive rights and freedom. What do you want to say? Madam Vice President.

I'm just so sorry. Why is it that in the state of Missouri, 53% of voters voted to put abortion in the state constitution, but 40% of those voters voted for Kamala? That means over 1.5 million people voted in favor of protecting reproductive rights.

but against the party which is most passionate about it. And just to recap, Trump has said abortion should be left to the states. Every Trump Supreme Court justice voted to overturn Roe v. Wade and his VP, Vance stated in 2022, I certainly would like abortion to be illegal nationally. The Vance has walked back that claim recently to fall in line with Trump's position and the official party position is to protect and defend a vote of the people from within the states. Essentially,

They're shifting their attack on reproductive rights to focus on action at the state level where ballot measures play a critical role in codifying those rights. So to be clear, it's not that conservatives feel so strongly about states' rights, rather it's their way of rolling back reproductive rights in their entirety. Out of 10 states that had abortion on the ballot, seven of the measures passed. New York, Colorado, Missouri, Arizona, Nevada, Maryland, and Montana, only three. South Dakota, Nebraska, and Florida did not.

If we looked at polls going back years, we would see that a majority of Americans supported some measure of abortion rights. What ballot initiatives do is they sort of bring that reality to the fore. So in 2022, when the Supreme Court issued their DAB's decision, when they overturned the Roe v. Wade abortion protections, the Republican legislators in Kansas rushed a vote onto the ballot to allow them to ban abortion. And they got crushed. They lost by something like 60%.

And actually, a majority of Florida voters also chose to put abortion in the state constitution, but didn't meet the 60% threshold. And so even Florida is mostly in favor of protecting abortion rights, even though Trump won that state by a large margin. And wait.

Why does Florida require 60%? So in 2006, Florida passed an amendment to the Constitution that would require a super majority or at least 60% of the vote to pass all future ballot measures. And that amendment passed with, ironically, only 57% of the vote, the same amount of people who voted in favor of protecting abortion rights in Florida.

Ten other states also have some sort of super-majority rule on the books. For instance, New Hampshire requires two-thirds of the vote to pass an amendment, and Arizona currently requires a super-majority only to pass tax-related measures. But in addition to the issues I've already talked about here, with increasing frequency ballot measures have been used to take up causes like marijuana legalization, redistricting, expanding Medicaid. And so what would seem to be a direct response to the success of these ballot measures are

amendments requiring a super majority to pass ballot measures in the first place. They've been popping up all over the country. Ironically, these amendments are being voted on through the same ballot measures legislators are trying to make harder to pass. So we see an increase in the past few years of legislative moves to try to limit the direct vote by raising the threshold to win, raising the threshold to qualify, making it harder to gather signatures, making you gather the memoir places. All these ballot measures have something important in common.

They're all dealing with material issues. And in particular, ones that voters might find it hard to have a say in through other means. So minimum wage hikes and paid sick leave are pretty obvious material issues. But reproductive rights are as well. Because unfettered access to abortion is often framed as a right to autonomy over one's body, my body, my choice. Being denied necessary emergency care, especially in red states where providers may be reluctant until or unless the life of the mother is actually in jeopardy,

That is a critical issue, but one of the most common reasons people and pregnancies wanted or otherwise are financial. Think about the couple, for example, who are barely scraping by with one kid and they know a second child would just be a financial burden they can't do.

So having the right to self-determination over one's body is obviously human right, but you can't separate that from one's material conditions. So my takeaway from this is that people want material change and will vote to affirm this when it's presented with clear and predictable outcomes. Voters are less interested though in campaign promises that may or may not come to fruition if the candidate wins or in declarations of theoretical support, neither of which help working people pay their rent or feed their kids.

And ballot measures are one of the few ways for people to engage with direct democracy. So if the Democrats ever want to see the inside of the White House again, they would do well to embrace more than paltry messages of general support and start committing to the concrete material things that voters keep saying they will show up for.

And that will do it for me. My name is Spencer Snyder. If you found this video interesting, make sure you are subscribed to breaking points. You can find me on Twitter or at my own channel. Like and sharing always helps. Thank you to breaking points. Thank you so much for watching and I will see you in the next one.

Hey everyone, I'm Madison Packer, a pro hockey veteran going on my 10th season in New York. And I'm Anya Packer, a former pro hockey player and now a full Madison Packer stand. Anya and I met through hockey and now we're married and moms to two awesome toddlers. And on our new podcast, Moms Who Puck, we're opening up about the chaos of our daily lives between the juggle of being athletes, raising children and all the messiness in between.

We're also turning to fellow athletes and beyond to learn about their parenthood journeys and collect valuable advice, like FIFA World Cup winner Ashlyn Harris. I wish my village would have prepared me for how hard motherhood was going to be. And Peloton instructor and a ratchet mom club founder, Kristen Ferguson. And I remember going in there a hot mess. So listen to moms who puck, a production of iHeart Women's Sports and Deep Blue Sports and Entertainment on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

presented by Capital One, founding partner of iHeartWomen's Sports. Hi, I'm Danny Shapiro, host of the hit podcast, Family Secrets. How would you feel if when you met your biological father for the first time, he didn't even say hello? And how would you feel if your doctor advised you to keep your life-altering medical procedure a secret from everyone?

And what if your past itself was a secret and the time had suddenly come to share that past with your child? These are just a few of the powerful and profound questions we'll be asking on our 11th season of Family Secrets.

Some of you have been with us since season one, and others are just tuning in, whatever the case and wherever you are. Thank you for being part of our family secrets family, where every week we explore the secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves. Listen to season 11 of family secrets on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Good people. What's up? It's Questo, Questlove. And Team Supreme and I have been working hard to bring you some incredible episodes of Questlove Supreme with guests you definitely don't want to miss. Now, one of the things I love about this Questlove Supreme podcast is we got something for everybody, every type of musical. We enjoy speaking to the people who are the face of some movement, some people you've seen on stage or TV or magazine covers, but we also love speaking to the folks

who were making it happen behind the scenes and they paid the way for those that followed. You know, keystones to the culture. This season.

We've had some amazing one-on-one conversation. Like I'm Pete Bill, chatting up with hip-maker Sam Holland, who took a Steve Chadman with the legend Nick Lowe, and I've had pleasures that don't one-on-one conversations with Willow, Sonata Materia, Kathleen Hannah, and the RZA. These are conversations you won't hear anywhere else. So make sure you go back and you check those episodes out, all right? Listen to Questlove Supreme on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

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Not obvious why this case would be limited to TikTok or limited to China. Once you accept the idea that the government can protect us from foreign manipulation by preventing us from accessing foreign media, there are lots of other platforms the government might become concerned about. Do national security interests outweigh your constitutional right to free speech? My name is James Lee, and you're watching Beyond the Headlines on Breaking Points.

In April of 2024, Congress passed a law that would ban TikTok if their Chinese parent company ByteDance refused to sell the app to an American buyer. And just a few weeks ago, a federal court of appeals upheld that law. The government claims that it's protecting Americans from foreign manipulation and data theft.

But critics warned the decision weakens the First Amendment and sets a dangerous precedent for free expression. So to help us understand what's at stake, I'm joined today by Jamil Jaffar. He is the executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. Jamil, thank you so much for joining us today on Breaking Points. Sure. Thanks for the invitation.

Absolutely. I guess just to catch people up, can you summarize for us what the recent ruling was from the D.C. Circuit Court specifically? Why did the judges decide that banning TikTok does not violate the First Amendment of the Constitution? A term that I've heard being used is something called strict scrutiny. That's tough to say. Strict scrutiny. So can you break that down for us in layman's term so we can all understand what is going on here?

The first thing you have to recognize is that this is sometimes characterized as a ban on a foreign company operating in the United States, and that is not actually an accurate characterization of what's going on here. The effect of the ban is to

prevent 170 million or so Americans from accessing a media platform that they would like to access. So it's a restriction on the rights of US citizens and US residents who want to consume particular expressive products, but also participate in the conversation that takes place on TikTok, share their own videos,

watch other people's videos, engage with the various communities that have been built on that, you know, on that platform. The DC Circuit understood that the law restricts Americans' First Amendment rights. And so, you know, started with basically the premise that, you know, this law is subject to scrutiny under the First Amendment. Now,

in some ways that's unremarkable, but worth noting that the Biden administration did argue that the law shouldn't even be subject to First Amendment scrutiny, that basically the First Amendment was not implicated here at all, which is kind of a crazy argument, but the court rejected that argument. Then the question became, well, what kind of scrutiny, like how closely should the court examine the government's

motivations here and examine the law itself. And that's the debate that you referenced. There's debate about strict scrutiny versus intermediate scrutiny. There were two judges on the court who believe that strict scrutiny was the right standard. Another judge thought that intermediate scrutiny was the right standard. But ultimately, all the judges concluded that the ban satisfies First Amendment requirements. So the dispute over the level of scrutiny didn't turn out to be

consequential. The ban was upheld by all three judges. Basically the arguments, so there were really two arguments for the ban. One has to do with data collection. The theory is that TikTok collects a lot of data about its users. It obviously does collect a lot of data about its users, just like other social media platforms do. And so one justification for the ban as well. This is a way of limiting data collection by TikTok.

The other justification of the government offered was that TikTok is controlled by a Chinese corporation. That Chinese corporation by dance is under the influence of the Chinese government. And at one point or another, the Chinese government might decide, well, we want to use by dance and TikTok as a means of propagandizing or manipulating Americans.

And there's a kind of degree of speculation here. I mean, some people would say a large degree of speculation. Even the government conceded there's no evidence. They have no evidence that TikTok is actually being used in this way. But this was the fear that motivated, or at least the government said in court, this is the fear that motivated the bank.

Yeah, I know that you co-wrote an op-ed in the New York Times recently where you talked about this a little bit. You argued that the court gave, quote, near categorical deference to the government's national security claims. Like you said, we haven't been shown evidence of these claims that DOJ did release that report.

I believe a couple months ago, almost the whole thing was redacted. So we didn't really actually see any of the evidence that they were talking about. So is that normal or can the government just use national security if they want to pass laws that basically push up against what's permitted by the Constitution?

Yeah, well, I mean, unfortunately, there is a long history in this country of the courts deferring to the government in national security cases. Now, there is a kind of counter history, or at least a thread of

Of case law that is inconsistent with that. That sort of larger body of national security case law and that thread of case law involves the First Amendment. So when, you know, while it's true, the courts generally defer to the government in national security cases.

they have tended to be less deferential in First Amendment cases because the courts understand that free speech is so important toward democracy and the integrity of public discourse is part of what gives legitimacy to the government's national security policies. In other words, the only reason we have faith to the extent we do have faith that the government's national security policies

have democratic legitimacy is because we believe people can debate those policies openly and that the debate is informed. And so when the government invokes national security as a means of constraining that debate, the courts have been less deferential.

In this particular case, the judges were very deferential to the government. They basically accepted at face value that the government was motivated by those two concerns I mentioned data collection and form manipulation.

even though the legislative record makes it very, very clear that many legislators were motivated by disagreement with particular categories of content. There were lots of legislators who said this quite candidly. They said, look, I don't like the videos I see on TikTok, like they are encouraging our kids to do terrible things. They are calling into question our government's policies. They are

pro-Russia, pro-Palestine, or pro-Hamas, is the way that they put it. And the justification, the actual justification for the law, which legislators were quite open about, was let's suppress stuff that we disagree with. And the court

dismissed all of that in one phrase. The court said, oh, there were some, it's true, there were some stray comments in the legislative record. It wasn't a stray comment. The whole legislative record is replete with those kinds of comments. So that's one sense in which the court was extremely deferential to the government's factual assertions here, even though the evidence was inconsistent with those assertions. And another sense is when it came to

So both under strict scrutiny and intermediate scrutiny, the court has to look to what other ways the government would have had to achieve its stated goals. And here, there are lots of obvious ways the government could achieve its stated goals without banning Americans from accessing this app. So for example, when it comes to foreign manipulation, the government says that the concern is that Americans are being covertly manipulating, in other words,

The Chinese Communist Party is, or may at one point, manipulate them covertly by fixing the algorithm or screwing with the algorithm so that Americans see only what the Chinese government wants them to see.

Now, again, it's highly speculative, but if that is the concern, it's not obvious why transparency doesn't address it. Why can't the government just tell Americans we think this is propaganda? Yeah, if we were to steal man that argument a little bit in terms of the TikTok ban, even if the government hasn't provided this concrete evidence for us,

And we say, okay, let's go with a more precautionary approach to this. And let's say TikTok is controlled by China. They're using it exactly how we say they're using it for manipulating us to collect our data, this and that. And there are other apps that us Americans can use to voice our opinion. Just do that. How do you respond to that kind of argument?

Well, I mean, I think it's a fine argument for the government to make two Americans. Like if the government wants to say to Americans, use those other apps rather than this one. There's no reason the government can't do that. But I think that sort of core to the First Amendment, like at the very center of the First Amendment is this idea that individuals get to decide for themselves which ideas are worth listening to, which media to consume,

I mean, this is the center of the First Amendment. And the government can participate in public discourse about the platforms or about media. The government can say, don't watch MSNBC. It's propaganda. The government can say, don't watch Fox News. It's propaganda. That's fine. But what it can't do is say, we're going to shut down MSNBC because we think you're being manipulated.

I mean, this is just First Amendment 101. And I think the government's arguments are inconsistent with it. But I just wanted to say something about the data collection argument too, because here, you know, the court was also extremely deferential to to the Justice Department.

The Justice Department was saying, well, this is about preventing TikTok from collecting data. But every other social media platform is collecting the same data or even more data about Americans. And this law doesn't do anything about those other actors. And to the extent that concern is, well, those other actors aren't controlled by China and they're not effectively puppets for the Chinese Communist Party. Well,

The government itself, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, has observed in formal reports that China doesn't need TikTok in order to collect this kind of information than Americans. You can buy this kind of information on the open market. You can buy it from data brokers. And we've seen very recently that China can also collect information, much more sensitive information, just by hacking into American databases.

And so it's not clear that this law really makes even a dent in the ability of the Chinese Communist Party to collect information about Americans. The much more direct way of restricting data collection is by restricting what data corporations can collect.

And I'm not sure how much interest Congress has in doing that, in particular, given some of the lobbying around big tech and things like that. But let's say, OK, so let's try to chart a path forward here. At this point, I know Trump has talked verbally about

doing something he says he's going to take a look at. I'm not sure exactly what that means. But I guess one avenue that is clear going forward is that if this case does get picked up by the Supreme Court, how do you think the justices are likely to rule, given on historical precedent, some of the past cases, and given some of the comments that you referenced before about members of Congress explicitly stating that we're banning this app because of the content,

on it, we don't like. So how damaging are those statements to the government? Yeah. I mean, I guess I'm not ready to make predictions, but I accept that I will say that I think the TikTok will get a more sympathetic hearing in the Supreme Court than it did in the DC Circuit. I mean, there is case law in the Supreme Court. There's a 1964 case called Lamont versus Postmaster General, which involved

a law that restricted Americans from receiving foreign propaganda in the mail. It basically required them to register with a post office if they wanted to receive communist propaganda from abroad.

And the Supreme Court struck down that law in 1964 is actually the first time the Supreme Court struck down a federal statute under the First Amendment. Struck down that law because the court said it imposed a burden on Americans' right to receive information from abroad. And that was the case in which there was no dispute that what Americans were receiving from abroad was foreign propaganda. And even then, and even though it wasn't a ban, it was just a burden.

The court struck that statute count. So I think that's a really strong precedent for TikTok here and for TikTok's users. And if the court departs from it, it'll be a pretty big deal. I guess I'll just say one more thing, just getting away from doctrine, even apart from doctrine.

These kinds of bans, there's no precedent for the US government banning Americans from accessing a media organization like this. There's no precedent. There are cases in which the government tries to ban people from accessing certain information. The Pentagon Papers case was one of those cases where the government tried to get

the court to restrict the New York Times and the Washington Post from publishing this classified history of the Vietnam War or stories about this classified history. And even then the court struck it down, right? But here we're going a step further and saying, that's essentially the government saying, well, don't just prevent the time from publishing that story. Shut down the times because they might publish that story.

These kinds of bans, I think for good reason, have historically been associated with autocratic and rights abusing regimes. When we think of these kinds of bans on foreign media, those are the regimes that come to mind. And I think that the Supreme Court is going to be very wary of going down this road because we don't want to be in that company. And the First Amendment is supposed to keep us out of that company.

Yeah, well, we'll see what happens there. Oftentimes there's no precedent unless, until there is a precedent. Oh, there is, though. You know what I mean? And I think, you know, the last question I want to ask is around this more broader context of, you know, we're kind of living in an age of information warfare, right? Because it used to be that publishing used to be controlled by just a few people, a few institutions, and now it's much more democratized. So it's hard for me not to think of a slippery slope where today, maybe they get rid of TikTok,

And those users, let's say they migrate to other platforms. Let's say one of them is X. Now, let's say they start saying stuff on there they don't like. And X I know has a significant foreign ownership in this case Saudi Arabia. So let's say one day they decide, OK, well, we don't like Saudi Arabia anymore. That's a foreign adversary when we get rid of X. So reading the tea leaves a little bit. What do you see as the future of the First Amendment in the United States, the attacks on it? And what kind of effect does that have on democracy overall?

Well, I mean, at first, I think that you're absolutely right that not obvious why this case would be limited to TikTok or limited to China. Like once you accept the idea that the government can protect us from foreign manipulation by preventing us from accessing foreign media, there are lots of other platforms the government might become concerned about.

you know, as you mentioned, like Musk has business interests all over the world. I mean, that's true of Zuckerberg too. Like any of these, you know, the people who own Bezos has business interests all over the world. And if your concern is, well, domestic Americans might be consuming media that has been influenced by foreign pressure, you know, why, why stop at TikTok?

You know, why not give the government the ability to restrict our access to the Washington Post or to to X or I really do think that, you know, once you once you open this door, not obvious how you have you close it, how you close it again. And then your, you know, your broader question, I mean, you're right, you know, for a variety of reasons, including

the rise of sort of autocracy around the world, but also technological change and these new communications platforms that have emerged over the last 20 years. We're really in a totally new world. And you can't take for granted that the First Amendment precedents that the courts set in the 1960s and 70s will be adhered to today.

you know, to be fair, you can't take for granted that those precedents are the right ones for this new world we're living in today. And I suppose that, you know, in some ways it's kind of exciting because we're kind of building, you know, we have to build this kind of new system to account for all of these changes, but it does feel like some of the freedoms that we've taken for granted are suddenly, you know,

fragile and, you know, these cases like the TikTok case will have a huge effect on what the free speech landscape looks like in five, 10 years. Yeah, we'll have to see how that all plays out. Thank you so much today for your insights, Jamil. Is there anywhere you want to point the audience to if they want to learn more? Yeah, the night institute. So at nightcolumbia.org.

All right. Awesome. Well, thank you so much again for coming on the show and we'll see how all this plays out. Thank you.

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