Google announcing it's going to reinstate YouTube channels that were permanently banned for political speech, saying it was pressured by the Biden administration.

YouTube just admitted to a massive censorship scandal and suddenly the Democrats, very concerned about free speech, have gone quiet.

We're gonna break this down and so much more in today's episode of the Brad Versus Everyone Podcast, my daily show where we cover the craziest things from across the Internet, our media, and our politics, all from an independent perspective.

Guys, I am on the road right now, back at my house in Michigan, visiting family and doing some other stuff, so not in my usual setup, but of course I still wanted to bring you an episode and chat with you guys, and I did want you to miss out on hearing my lovely voice or seeing my wonderful face because I appreciate you guys so much who make this amazing life possible for me.

But we are going to talk about a big story that just came out from YouTube.

Because the House Oversight in the Congressional Republicans right they have the majority, they have finally gotten YouTube ak, Google, which owns YouTube, to admit to some pretty sweeping censorship that they engaged in over the last couple of years, particularly during the pandemic and after the twenty twenty election.

But and this won't shock anybody who's been paying attention, this censorship was not really of their own accord.

They were under tremendous pressure a dress from the Biden administration.

Let's take a listen to some Fox Business reporting on this breaking development.

Well, there's this Google announcing it's going to reinstate YouTube channels that were permanently banned for political speech, saying it was pressured by the Biden administration to remove content that did not violate YouTube's policies.

And a letter to the House Judiciary Committee, a lawyer for Google said, quote, it is unacceptable and wrong when any government, including the Biden administration, attempts to dictate how the company moderates content, and the company has consistently fought against those efforts on First Amendment grounds.

Now, the company also told House Judiciary Committee, this is Jim Jordan, and this is a litter.

They wrote to him that public debate should never come at the expense of relying authorities, and that the company get this, will never use third party fact checkers.

You know, a year ago Mark Zuckerberg testified he was pressured by the Biden administration.

Now Google's admitting it.

And you know, by the way, he got banned, Dan Bongino, Yeah, he got based right banned.

Trump got banned.

And by the way, we know that this happened when it was happening, Mark Zuckerberg admitted it, and he said, and the Twitter files.

What about Elon Musk and the Twitter files?

Brett Stevens, in a piece in The New York Times, lays it out.

He's got a whole list, a laundry list of times when the Biden administration censored people.

No mention about it.

Now now they're all worried about free speech with Jimmy Kimmel.

So this is a really big deal on a couple levels.

One is that I think YouTube, and I give them credit for this, has been great to me recently, not long, not forever, And it's become more of an open platform over time, and now they really are, I think, a very robust ecosystem where people can have different perspectives.

You've got the big liberal YouTube accounts blowing up, You've got the big Maga accounts, and it really is back to what it should always have been and kind of got big being, which is a wonderful place where you can find all sorts of ideas and arguments and expression.

But there was a time, okay, there was a time where they were very very heavy handed.

They were deleting people's channels left and right, and there were basically entire genres of commentary and questioning that you just weren't really allowed to do on YouTube, and that's not how it was supposed to be.

And I remember being very frustrated with YouTube at the time over the years because of what seemed like a bias that cut in one direction in terms of who they censored.

And now we know there was more happening though, though I will just say, actually the most egregious example that I can remember is Senator Ran Paul, the libertarian leaning Republican from Kentucky.

He posted a video of him on the Senate floor speaking about questioning the efficacy of masks I believe during the pandemic, and they took it down.

They it struggle.

You can't really think of something that more perfectly typifies like newsworthy content that whether it's true, whether it's false, whether it's dumb, whether it's you know, great and brilliant.

People should be able to see and decide for themselves more so than like, literally what's happening in our government, speeches being made on the Senate floor, white House address, other things.

They deleted Trump's YouTube channel.

I believe as well after the twenty twenty election.

All of it was crazy.

It's like, that's the exact kind of thing.

People should be able to see with their own eyes and decide for themselves what they think.

But we now know that they were doing this the under the duress of the Biden administration.

So I've got to be honest YouTube.

I mean, I don't view them as like perfect, they did nothing wrong, but to some extent they're also victims here.

They were subjected to extensive government pressure from the Biden administration to censor and take down americans lawful speech, even speech that didn't even violate YouTube's guidelines.

The Biden administration was harassing them.

Now, Democrats and liberals will often try to reframe this as oh, no, it was just they were just politely requesting.

But no, it's kind of like the sword of Damocles or whatever was hanging over their neck because they have The federal government has massive, massive, massive anti trust powers looming over Google as a threat, and regulatory powers with things like Section two thirty.

So when they're requesting stuff in very aggressive fashion, they're really shaking you down.

They're really bullying you into doing what they say and what they want.

And so a lot of the YouTube censorship that we bristled at during COVID for very understandable and valid reasons, I think we really should have been mad at the Biden administration.

But I do think it's fair to question why, why, why why didn't YouTube fight back harder?

Because the Biden administration engaged in this kind of jaw boning where if they had just tried to use the power of the federal government to center people directly, obviously that's illegal, nonconstitutional.

Instead they would go and work around.

They would harass Facebook, harass Twitter to try to get them to censor people instead, and that is called jaw boning, and it is a form of unconstitutional behavior.

It's kind of a workaround in the First Amendment.

However, it was hard to legally challenge, and ultimately the Supreme Court case about it.

They ruled that the people who Sue didn't have standing.

Well, you know who would have had standing based on what they just told us YouTube if they'd kind of dug their flag in the ground and said, no, President Biden, we will not be taking down this stuff.

It doesn't even violate our policies, and you have no business telling us to take down American speech.

And they could have partnered with my friends over at FIRE, the non partisan foundation Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, where a disclaimer I do a little bit of work, and they could have fought this, but instead they went along I think largely with it, and I do think that is a disgrace and something they should not have done.

But if they had dug in, they could have fought back against it more effectively.

So I will just reado this statement here from Fire.

Google should not have waited to acknowledge it was pressured by the Biden administration to block content on its platforms.

Google contempt condemns job owning now, but it failed to stand up for the rights of its users when it mattered.

Fire will continue to call on private institutions to stand up for their rights no matter who is in office.

Guys, again, lets you forget how bad it was let me play you a clip of former YouTube CEO Susan was Shickey.

Sorry I probably butchered that name.

Anyway, he or she is bragging about how many posts and videos they censored about COVID.

Take a listen to this.

When it comes to vaccines, vaccine hesitancy, videos.

That cause a public health risk.

Where do you want to see YouTube do better?

Well, first of all, we've taken the We've taken responsibility very seriously.

I've it's been one of my top priorities and with regard to COVID and with regard to vaccines, that has been a top priority for us, and we have we have a number of different ways that we address that.

So, first of all, we want to make sure that if there's information that violates our policies.

We came up with ten different policies around COVID, then if that violation of policy is then that's something that will remove.

We removed over a million videos associated with COVID.

Have you talked to the Biden administration at all about vaccine hesitancy or vaccine misinformation?

Well, we did an event actually with the Biden administration, including President Biden himself, with a number of Creators fauci as well.

Now again I don't I'm not just mad at Google.

I don't think they're evil.

I think they were put in a terrible place by the Biden administration acting illegally and unconstitutionally and trying to crack down on American speech, and then they cave to it, and I think they shouldn't have.

But I do understand that, like, it's not exactly easy to step up and stand up against the full force of the federal government.

So I have some I don't know, nuance at which I can look at the actions they took.

I don't think they're just irredeemably cowards and bad, but they did kind of wait till it was safe to come out and admit and that is unfortunate.

So you guys, let me know what you think about that.

But I am very bothered by all of this.

And then the layer to this that is so funny is the total free speech hypocrisy of all these people.

Because listen, I was calling this stuff up out under Biden, I was railing against the Twitter files, the Facebook files, all this stuff.

They did try to clamp down on free speech.

However, Democrats at the time, Democratic elected officials and mainstream media types were cheering for it.

But now that Trump has come into office and engaged in some of the same kind of things like jawboning.

We talked about this with Jimmy Kimmel with the FCC chair threatening Disney and ABC to get Jimmy Kimmel.

I think that's a similar type of thing as the Biden White House threatening Facebook and YouTube take down all these COVID misinformation posts.

By the way, some of it turned out to not be misinformation at all, and that's part of why it should have been allowed to stay up all along.

So funny is now all these Democratic leaders are free speech warriors and are like, yes, the First Amendment, the government should never be telling private companies what they can say or what they can do.

And it's like y'all literally shilled for this under Biden.

And I'm over here one of the only people who consistently team read Team Blue.

I'm a free speech guy, Okay, I don't want the government pressuring private companies to silence people.

Let me play you a clip of Congressman Jim Clyburn, a prominent Democrat, saying, well, of course, this is different from what happened to Kimmel, this was important and good because something something COVID nineteen.

Listen to this.

I don't think they're the same, simply because Biden, if this took place, these weren't jokes, This wasn't a TV show.

This was a pandemic, and we didn't need to have misinformation going out about this pandemic.

There was enough coming from the president at the time.

This is the kind of gaslighting and inconsistency in politics that threatens to turn me into a supervillain, Like I literally might become the joker because these people drive me insane.

Well, that misinformation was different than this misinformation, which we think should be allowed and is fine because when Jimmy Kimmel falsely implies that the shooter of Charlie Kirk was Mega, well that's just a joke, that's just TV.

But when Ran Paul questions masks, of course that has to be censored because something pandemic.

It's like, you cannot do this.

You cannot have two entirely different sets of rules, Like that's not how this works.

You either have free speech or you don't.

You either empower the government to coerce private platforms into taking down what they deem as misinformation, which of course assumes the government always knows the truth and knows what's really going on, when in fact, the biggest purveyor of misinformation during the pandemic, well not maybe not the biggest, but a big purveyor was public health experts themselves, CDC, doctor Fauci.

They said so many things that they ended up doing a one ad on or realizing weren't true.

And so the idea that they are in any kind of place to be deciding what's misinformation don't I don't really believe so.

So regardless, I just think the hypocrisy hypocrisy here is astounding.

Though that does go in both directions.

I mean, in the same way that the Democrats who cheered Biden are now decrying everything Trump does to try to punish the press or coerce companies.

Well, now, a lot of Republicans who are outraged about that don't really care.

And it's not just the Jimmie Kimbell situation, because I understand you can you can look at it and try to see how, well, maybe the FCC didn't caused this, maybe it's just a private business decision, but you look at the other things Trump has done, like retaliating against the Associated Press and other media outlets and arresting and deporting people for their op aid's just like opinions criticizing the Israel.

He definitely has gone against free speech in some meaningful ways that some people see who were big free speech warriors suddenly don't care about or actively cheer.

And I also find that inconsistent.

But you guys, let me know what you think.

I have to be honest with you.

Nothing YouTube has revealed here is remotely surprising to me.

It's kind of like, yeah, we knew, but I guess better late than never, And I'm glad they're speaking out about it now, even though it's like a little bit too little, too late.

What do you guys think?

Let me know in the comments.

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Up next, we're going to talk about what I honestly have to say is a positive development.

The mainstream media seems to be waking up to the thread of and acknowledging the existence of left wing violence, political violence, and terrorism, which we've covered on this show for some time now, especially with the Internet and the cult of people supporting an alleged murderer in Luigi Minngioni, the huge swass of democrat just everyday respondents who are suddenly okay with or think it's partially justified to assassinate Trump or Elon Musk, the viral memes about somebody just do it, referring to killing the president of the United States.

I've been telling y'all that, of course there's extremism across the board, but there is a rising tide of violent left wing extremism, particularly with young people.

And now finally some of the mainstream media is starting to acknowled So a big bombshell article was just published in the Atlantic, which is a liberal magazine that's kind of honestly like the elite discourse centers around the Atlantic, like very you know, smart and posh democrat elites looked to the Atlantic for guidance, so the fact that it's published there is kind of a big deal.

We're going to take a look at that article, left Wing terrorism is on the rise.

The headline reads, for the first time in more than thirty years, attacks by the far left outnumber those on the far right.

This was posted on x and they tag the authors and say that they report on their newly compiled data set of seven hundred and fifty terror attacks and plots in the United States from January nineteen ninety four to July twenty twenty five.

And what did they find.

Well, we found that left wing terrorism has increased since President Donald Trump's rise to political prominence in twenty sixteen.

Indeed, twenty twenty five marks the first time in more than thirty years that left wing attacks outnumber those from the far right.

Despite its recent increase, however, left wing terrorism is not nearly as common today as it was in the nineteen sixties and early seventies.

That's an interesting statistic, And note that I hadn't actually thought about.

But I think that's like generally true as bleak as we think things are in American politics.

And trust me, I'm constantly thinking how bleak it is when you zoom out a little and you look at American history.

Things have been rougher before, and we've come out the other side.

Okay, So a little bit of hope core for you there.

Anyway.

Following that trend, according to our analysis, violence on the left accounted for four plots and attacks from nineteen ninety four to two thousand, compared with one hundred and forty four on the right.

That difference narrowed in the following decade, but the right continued to account for significantly more attacks and killings than did the left.

However, the year of twenty sixteen was a turning point for left wing terrorism.

Even as right wing incidents remained much more common, Trump's political assent and the expansion of the Meca movement seems to have re energized left wing violent extremism, which accounted for thirty seven incidents from twenty sixteen to twenty twenty four, most of them motivated by either anti government or partisan sentiment.

By July four of this year, our left extremists had already been responsible for five terroristic attacks and plots, putting twenty twenty five on pace to be the left's most violent year in more than three decades.

So this is a really important realization and data point for mainstream center left kind of commentariat or establishment to be acknowledging, because they have been insisting, especially since Charlie Kirk's killing, and they there are a couple of data sets, although they're highly suspect that they can cite to make this point.

Well, political violence in America is mostly a right wing problem, and like that just doesn't pass the sniff test in terms of recent stuff.

I can't speak to all of American history fifty years ago.

It just never passed the sniff test for the life decade, for example, And now we know that that's because it's not the case.

And this is an interesting one because it also counts plots, so like foiled attacks or things where the law enforcement stops it before it happens.

And I think that's important to gauge the sentiment and the frequency, because otherwise your data would be skewed kind of just by the chance of which ones are stopped and which ones aren't.

But I'm glad they're kind of waking up and acknowledging that because if they just insist that, well, this isn't a left wing problem, then it's not going to stop right or they're not going to have to reckon with it or call it out or condemn it, because they can just say, well, really, oh, it's mostly just maga that does that anyway.

It's kind of a denial strategy, and the fact that even mainstream liberal publications are now reckoning with this means maybe it's breaking through.

It often happens like this, right like conservatives or Republicans or conservative media will say something and at first Libs are in denial about it, or mainstre stream presses and denial about it, and then it kind of breaks through at some point and then they started admitting it.

And this is what happened with, for example, Biden's obvious, obvious cognitive decline.

People in right wing media were saying this a year into his presidency.

Heck, some of us were saying in the twenty twenty presidential primary that he was cooked in the brain.

It was obvious to us then, and we were like dismissed as misinformation people and fake news and all this stuff.

And then like after a couple of years it became so undeniable that CNN started admitting it, and once that happens, then it breaks through to their side and change actually happens, and he had to drop out.

And I'm hoping we're witnessing something similar now with this threat of far leftist violence that I do believe is very real in American politics, that now maybe the center left or mainstream Democratic Party will acknowledge it because it's starting to break through.

I want to play you a clip that aired on NBC News highlighting a lot of the points I have made to y'all and have been highlighting for you guys for years now, finally breaking through the mainstream.

Watch this we turn out of the rise of political violence in this country.

Among young people who spend a lot of time online, support for violent acts is now growing.

Stephanie Gosk with our in Death Look.

Soon after Luigi Mangioni was accused of killing United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, the meme started celebrating the cold blood and murder.

Treating the alleged killer like a hero.

Seems become a symbol for this really enormous and radical and maybe unprecedented change in American culture.

Anthropologist Max Horder works with the network Contagion Research Institute studying online threats.

We no longer so shamed of this violence, but actually there's a large percentage of people that actually applaud it.

In a survey of about twelve hundred people conducted with Rutgers University, Horder found growing support for political violence among the younger, highly online, and ideologically left aligned.

According to their results, fifty six percent of people who identify as left of center believe there could be some justification for killing President Donald Trump.

Hauntingly, a few months before he was assassinated, Charlie Kirk posted about the survey results on x.

Now, that doesn't necessarily mean that it's the left only which is supporting increased forms of political violence.

It seems to be more that they're sort of catching up that we're seeing a broader change in America where both sides are now radicalized.

Online networks across the political spectrum, fueling the growth of what he calls an assassination culture.

So there's a couple of ways you can respond to this.

When your side of an issue starts to win, some people get better and are like I told you so, and you attacked me, Or where were you years ago when I was saying this, and I absolutely understand the emotional temptation there.

I feel that way sometimes with like the fact that I stuck my neck out there years ago against kids medically transitioning, and I was attacked for it, kicked off a freaking gay men soccer league for making trans people unsafe and all that, and now everyone agrees with me about that.

It's like welcome to the club.

I can understand the desire or the feeling somewhat of resentment about that, but you got to get over it, and you have to just welcome people aboard.

Right, That's that's how you win.

And I think maybe with this very real issue of fringe left violence in America, the general population, even the center left, is started to wake up and we should applaud them for it, not shame them for being late to the party.

At least that's my take.

You guys, let me know what you think in the comments below.

Make sure subscribe if you aren't.

Ye hit the leg button yet yet.

Yeah, And with that, guys, that'll be it for this episode of the Bread Versus Everyone podcast.

Thanks so much for tuning in, and we'll talk again real soon.