Corey DeAngelis on School Choice and Christopher Bedford on Free Speech Online
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Welcome to another week of broken news.

Goodness gracious, I almost did it. Welcome to another week of Breaking Battlegrounds with your hosts Sam Stone and Chuck Warren. Program I'm really excited about today because our first guest is Corey DeAngelis. He is the National Director of Research at the American Federation for Children, Executive Director at the Educational Freedom Institute, Adjunct Scholar at the Cato Institute, and Randy Weingarten's personal nightmare, union boss Randy Weingarten.

Corey, thank you so much for joining us on the program today. Really glad to have you. Yeah, totally. Thanks for having me. Yeah, I have really enjoyed following your work the last few years because you have been really, I think, the leading light for school choice and for, frankly, fighting for kids and parents in an educational environment that is tilted badly in favor of the teachers unions, the administration and special interests that have nothing to do with

with the successful development of kids. Tell us a little bit more about your work, and we'll take it from there. Yeah, and at the same time, we've got to thank Randy Weingarten for inadvertently doing more to advance the concept of school choice, homeschooling, and parental rights in education over the past two years than anyone could have ever imagined. The teachers unions have overplayed their hand, showed their true colors, and awakened a sleeping giant. These

these parents who just want more of a say in their kids' education. So she's kind of been doing my job for me over the past couple of years with the school closures and tying political nonsense to the reopening of schools since March of 2020. And it was clear as day right in front of everybody's eyes. I mean, you even had one of the AFT students

local affiliates in Chicago, their board member was vacationing in Puerto Rico in person, obviously, while railing against going back to work in person. So they gave us so many examples of just them just stepping in it over and over again. And now we have...

An all-time support of school choice, an 8 percentage point jump in support of the concept of the money following the child nationwide, according to RealClear Opinion Research polling since April of 2020, with now 72% of Americans supporting school choice. So Randy Weingarten should get an award for the school choice advocate of the year, or the past two years at least.

And so, yeah, I'm Corey DeAngelis, and I advocate for school choice policies, obviously. The way that I like to put it is that we should fund students as opposed to systems, just like we do with just about everything else. With higher education, we have scholarships.

for Pell Grants or the GI Bill for Veterans, for example, where the money goes to the student, and then they can pick the community college or public university if they want, but the money could also follow them to a private religious or non-religious university. We do the same thing with pre-K programs like Head Start. You can pick a private religious pre-K provider if you want. We do the same thing with food stamps, where the money goes to the person instead of a government-run grocery store. And all I'm arguing with school choice

is that we apply the same logic to K-12 education to fund people as opposed to buildings. - Cory, this is Chuck Warren. During COVID, I believe the remote teaching just woke up not only a lot of mothers, but specifically a lot of fathers. I've heard numerous stories, more than I can count, of fathers who are either in the financial industry or doctors or whatever,

They're home, they're working, and they hear their kids' Zoom class, and it's like they got hit beside the head with a bat. Have you found that the remote learning that the schools push when they closed was really something that woke up a lot of these sleepy parents and has really put energy back into this?

Yeah, parents are awake and they're thinking a lot more about their kids' education in a different way than they have for a long time. And I wouldn't even call it remote learning. We should be real. It was remotely learning because of all the learning loss. Right. You know, and...

this kind of thing that they were doing at home was not homeschooling either. It was a failed version of government schooling at home that just did not work out well. It was involuntary. Families weren't happy with, with how things were going one because of, it was a, you know, a horrible way to transmit information and for kids to learn over zoom. Um, so there was learning loss all across the country, especially in places that had the schools closed longer. And, um,

But the other side benefit was that families got to see what was going on in the classroom. So they started hearing curriculum that they didn't find to be aligned with their values. A lot of parents who otherwise would have thought their kids were in great public schools, maybe they were A-rated public schools by the state, or maybe their kids had great standardized test scores,

the same parents started to realize that there's another dimension of school quality that's arguably more important, which is whether the school curriculum is aligned with their values. And that also fueled the fire behind parents to go push back at school board meetings, which...

by the way, led to them being essentially labeled as domestic terrorists by the National School Boards Association and the Biden administration, where the NSBA actually sent a letter to the Biden administration requesting that some parents were implying that some of them should be investigated as domestic terrorists and pushing back about CRT. Corey, you hit on a great point, and I apologize for cutting you off there, but I think a lot of folks don't understand this.

So the unions in all their various forms run our local public schools, right? Yeah. I mean they control them and they control the school boards through the school board association. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean they have so much power when it comes to the traditional system, and that's why they're freaking out whenever anybody proposes to have the money follow the child. They want a monopoly on children's minds, and they want to get the family's education dollars regardless of how well they did. Corey, it's worse than that. It doesn't even follow the child. I mean it's not worse than that, but on their point with the teachers' unions is it doesn't only not follow the child. It doesn't even follow the teacher.

So you have these governors, you know, in Arizona. I mean, Sam, how much more extra funding we've given three, four or five billion dollars over the last four years? It's like six or seven billion. They're supposed to get a 20 percent pay increase. They've been at 15, 16, some districts, 11. And they just keep what they keep doing is just hiring different people or broadening various levels of bureaucracy all for a power grab. I mean, the money's not even going to the teachers anymore.

That's right. We've seen this historically as well. We're seeing it with the COVID relief money, but we've seen it over time. We've thrown more and more money at K-12 education than ever before nationwide. Between 1992 to 2014, for example, a report by Ben Scafidi showed that per-people education expenditures jumped by 27% after adjusting for inflation, but teacher salaries in real terms actually dropped by 2%.

And that's because they shovel more money towards putting more people into the buildings, which is great for teachers union bosses like Randy Weingarten who make over $560,000 a year because more people means more dues paying members. But that's not so good for the teachers in the classroom, especially with all the red tape and the bureaucracy in the current system. School choice and competition in the labor market would be good.

Good for teachers, too. And I've found five studies on the topic that I wrote about at the Washington Examiner in a piece called School Choice Benefits Teachers, Too. All five of these studies have found statistically significant positive effects of school choice competition, either charter or private schools, on the teacher salaries in the public schools, too.

So it's a win-win situation. It's good for parents and families, obviously, to get more choices. But it's good for the employees, too, because the problem in the current system is the monopoly doesn't have any particularly strong incentives to put those additional dollars towards things that make outcomes better. And the best way to do that is to funnel the money into the classroom towards the teachers who are doing a good job. Corey, I have posited, and tell me if you disagree, but I have posited that

They deliberately keep teacher salaries low so that they can continue to run them out there in the streets holding signs demanding more money for the school. And then they keep that money from them too. It's a constant shell game where the teachers are frankly being used by their own unions.

Yeah, and over the past two years in particular, just the unions, they don't spend the money wisely in ways that benefit the teachers, but they also make them look bad by including in the demands to reopen schools, Medicare for all, wealth tax,

and other political agendas that had nothing to do with reopening the schools. And then you have Randy Weingarten on Twitter every day just complaining about conservatives and Republicans. It's like, well, you know, a lot of teachers in the system are conservatives. Why are you being so political about things? You're turning off a lot of your members, and you're upsetting a lot of the country, and you shouldn't do that as the leader of a big labor union. And I think...

In general, government labor unions miss the boat on funneling the money from their dues into things that directly benefit their members because they are essentially just political lobbies. They don't view the world in terms of what's best for their members. They view it in what's best for their union and the dues that they can generate. Yeah, and the latest numbers that I've seen in the 2022 election cycle so far, according to Open Secrets,

Get this. Ninety nine point nine nine. I'm not making that up. Ninety nine point nine nine percent of the contributions have gone to Democrats from Randy Weingarten's AFP, for example. And so it's totally one sided. It seems like a money laundering scheme where Democrats funnel money to the teachers unions and then they go and give that money back to the Democratic candidates. And, you know, people should pay more attention to it and follow the money.

Yeah, absolutely. One of the things I want to ask, did you coin the phrase fund students, not systems? Because words matter, and I thought that has been a brilliant rallying cry for the school choice movement. I think some people have said it before me, but I certainly popularized the term. I don't know if I made it up, but –

certainly popularized it. I think the benefit is that it puts the other side on defense. If you say fund students not systems, all of a sudden the other side has to explain why we should fund the buildings and not the kids. It puts them in an explaining position that they've never had to be in before. And it allows you to talk about these analogies where we fund people as opposed to buildings with everything else. And you can point out their logical inconsistencies. Why would you support everything

Every other program, Medicaid, where the money can go to a Catholic religious hospital if you want, Pell Grant, the GI Bill. Why would you support pre-K programs where the family follows the decision – the funding follows the decision of the family? What about food stamps? What about all these other programs? But only when it comes to those in-between years of K-12 education, you get all up in arms about it.

It's all because the only difference there is one of power dynamics. Choice is the norm for everything else and every other level of education, but choice threatens and entrenched special interests. The government school monopoly teachers union only when it comes to K-12 education. So they fight as hard as possible against any change to the status quo. Corey, we have just about one minute before we go to break. We're going to bring you back on for the next segment, but tell folks how they can follow you, how they can keep up with you.

You can go to my Twitter. It's at DeAngelisCorey. But you can also help us in the fight for education freedom by going to educationfreedompledge.com. Fantastic. Corey DeAngelis, glad to have you on the program today. We're going to have you right back on here in just a moment. Folks, follow him on Twitter. Go there. Support this guy because he is doing amazing work right now for the school choice movement and really benefiting kids across this country. Breaking Battlegrounds. We'll be right back.

Welcome back to Breaking Battlegrounds with your hosts Chuck Warren and Sam Stone. On the line with us right now, Corey DeAngelis, National Director of Research at the American Federation for Children and the leading, frankly, I think the leading warrior for school choice and for improving school outcomes in this country. Absolutely. Corey, I'm going to ask you a question.

Tell us how you got involved and made this a passion for a career. I'm always interested how people, Sam and I always, you know, how did you end up saying, I'm going to be this advocate and this expert on school choice? What brought you to it?

Yeah, so I actually grew up in San Antonio, Texas. I attended government-run schools all through K-12, but in high school, I had access to something called a magnet school, which is still run by the district, but it's a school of choice in that you're not residentially assigned to it.

so they have strong incentives to cater to the needs of families because they have to attract their customers. And I felt like that school had a positive impact on my life trajectory, and I think more families should have access to educational opportunities. But it shouldn't be limited to schools that are run by the district. The education funding should follow the child to whatever type of school works best for them, whether it's

if that's a district school, a charter school, a private school, or even if that's a home-based educational option. And then after high school, I actually went to the University of Texas at San Antonio, where I studied economics and did my bachelor's and master's out there, where I really started to see the problems with monopoly power, which applies to the K-12 education system in California.

for the most part of the country. And then after that, I did a PhD in education policy at the University of Arkansas, where I really started to study the details of these programs and how they can have effects on testing outcomes and academics, but even more importantly, things like reducing crime and reports of teenage pregnancies and other holistic benefits of getting access to a school that works for your kids. So that really...

had me interested in the topic. And I've started to see, you know, over the past several years in particular, that there just isn't any good argument against funding the student directly. I mean, we do it with everything else. And the only argument against it always comes from a position of one side wanting to keep its monopoly on the education dollars that are supposed to be meant for children.

Corey, I think I tweeted out in fall of 2020 that you and Randy Weingarten were neck and neck for school choice person of the year. And I apologize. I think she actually won that race. But you've had a ton of victories since then. And the school choice movement is really taking off across this country. What are some of the kind of key wins that have been happening and benefiting kids?

Yeah, the way that I put it before is that COVID didn't break the government school system. In a lot of ways, it was already broken. In the past two years, it's simply shined a spotlight on the main problem with K-12 education all across the country, which happens to be a massive, long-existing power imbalance between the status quo and individual families. But thankfully, families are fighting back, and we're dubbing 2021

2021, the year of school choice, because 19 states expanded or enacted programs to fund students as opposed to systems. And the victories were actually pretty substantial. In Florida, for example, they had their biggest one-year expansion of school choice in state history. Arizona had a minor expansion, but they also had the Senate pass what would have been the biggest expansion of school choice in Arizona history, and they're trying it again this year with triple expansion.

or quadruple the size of their education savings account program, which is the gold standard of school choice. And then we had the number of states with these education savings account programs double from five states to 10 states in 2021. And then polling from several different sources is just through the roof. Families are finally figuring out there isn't any good reason to fund the buildings when you can fund the student directly instead. So it's a good time to be a school choice advocate. And a lot of people have said, you know, have pointed out that you haven't really seen

me and Randy Weingarten together in the same room before. So it could be that, that I'm her in a mask. I think Spike Cohen had pointed out on Fox business with, with Ken. Well, she probably makes, she probably makes a lot more money than you. So, you know, I think we can just go through the tax records. She gets the extort funding from, from exactly. Exactly. Corey, um,

Is it a simple statement to say that Florida and Arizona have been a leader eight years on school choice? Yeah. It's amazing to be on this show where a lot of the audience is from Arizona and Florida, and they are the leading states on school choice. Florida has more people enrolled in school choice programs than Arizona just because it's a bigger state. But Arizona, in some metrics, have a slightly higher percentage of students using school choice. But

It's a smaller boat to move Arizona than Florida. But they are the two leading states. And the governors, Ducey and DeSantis, have just been phenomenal at leading the way and showing other states how it's done when it comes to funding students as opposed to institutions. So more people to try to emulate these two states.

Are we coming to the point where you'll – in the near decade or future where you'll see most red states have some school choice substantive programs to it and blue states still fighting tooth and nail against it?

Yeah, I think we're – most of these victories in the past couple years have been in red states. And it's becoming politically damaging to oppose parental rights and educational freedom. I think more politicians are seeing that. We saw that with Terry McAuliffe in Virginia when he said in the final debate –

in the state that i don't think there should be told what they should teach any quadrupled down the anti parent rhetoric in that deeply unpopular just the other day you had show biden at the teacher copy teacher of the year thing at the very end if they don't like a bit all the time but you know they're all our children uh... you know in the classroom they're like your kid

you know, it's this whole, it takes the village mentality that may sound good to them when they're talking to their deeply progressive friends, but it's not a very popular position, and it's backfiring on them. And hopefully the Democrats learn from this as well. The thing is, Democrats are in a sticky situation in some places because they've become, they've been over-reliant on the power of the teachers' unions who, you know,

who don't support parental rights in education. But at the end of the day, hopefully parents will win this. And politicians will be wise to listen to these parents because parents outnumber employees in the system. And parents are going to fight for the right to educate their kids as they see fit harder than anyone will ever fight to take that right away from them. Parents care about their kids more than anybody else. Corey, one thing the Democrats like to say on that front is that

that school choice leaves behind poor kids. But the fact is, and correct me again if I'm wrong here, that every demographic group benefits from school choice.

Yeah, absolutely. And if you look at – there's 11 studies in Florida, for example. Ten of the 11 studies have found statistically significant positive effects of private school choice competition on the kids' outcomes in the public schools, too. The latest study was actually from Florida in 2021. Finding the expansion of their tax credit scholarship led to better testing outcomes and behavioral outcomes in the public schools. So school choice is a rising tide that lifts all boats. Competition –

is a win-win solution no one wants to destroy public schools on the contrary the evidence shows that it makes them better they up their game in response to competition and just looking to use of the programs all across the country disproportionately at the lower income families that benefit from these programs the most advantage already have school choice in a sense that they can already afford to live in the neighborhood that the at that are assigned to the best quote-unquote public schools are already more likely at least built out a pocket for private school tuition and fees

Funding students directly, school choice is an equalizer because it allows more families to access educational options. Corey DeAngelis, thank you for joining us on the program. We have only about 30 seconds left. Real quick again, give people the info on how they keep up with you.

Yeah, totally. You can follow me on Twitter. It's at DeAngelisCorey. And if you want to help us in the fight for education freedom, you can take the Education Freedom Pledge, which is EducationFreedomPledge.com. Awesome. Folks, EducationFreedomPledge.com. Breaking Battlegrounds will be right back. Thank you.

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Welcome back to Breaking Battlegrounds with your host, Chuck Warren. I'm Sam Stone. Our second guest today, timely on the topic, Christopher Bedford, Senior Editor at The Federalist, Chief Communications Officer at RightForge, Vice Chairman, Young Americans for Freedom, board member at the National Journalism Center, and author of Art of the Donald. Christopher, thank you so much for joining us today. And we are excited to have you on the program to talk about

Everything going on in the world of free speech and journalism at the moment, which is pretty astounding. Thanks for having me. It's great to be here. And it's been one heck of a month for free speech and journalism and social media. Well, obviously, the biggest news is Elon Musk making what appears to be at this point a successful purchase of Twitter. But not only that, his Twitter game in the last since he announced that purchase has been obscenely great.

He's been phenomenal. It's been extremely entertaining. I put my notifications – I hate phone notifications. They drive me nuts. But I get a ping every time he tweets something now because it's been so interesting to see him, the person he is, the battles he's fighting, and how he's been answering to his enemies. He's kind of an interesting character. He's certainly not –

Right. I have a question. Do you think he's actually writing all these tweets? I know he doesn't have a PR agency or communication staff. Do you think he has a friend that's helping him? Because they're pretty darn creative.

All right. He is supposedly one of the smartest people in the world. So maybe he's just that creative. He's got a rocket company, a flamethrower company, a brain microchip company, now Twitter, electric cars. He's obviously got something going on up there. And it's certainly not a PR agency because I don't think any PR agency would ever let him tweet most of the things. Yeah, probably. Well, maybe if he hired you, Christopher, he would have those type of things. But it's pretty it's pretty hilarious. Yeah.

Have you? I have been. Well, I would like to pretend I'm surprised, but I am surprised at the vigor in which the blue checkmark journalists have just melted down about this. I mean, it's amazing. They have lost their minds. And it's been so revealing to the point that even if the sale hadn't been successful, it would have been a worthwhile endeavor for how revealing it was. Big

They claimed that Twitter was not censoring. Now they claim that they're not going to be able to censor properly or that he's going to censor using Twitter. One journalist literally called Twitter a weapon that's going to be wielded by him. They're calling it all the things that it's been accused of being. And the reason that they're doing that is not because he says, I want to weaponize this or I want to ban liberals or I want to control this speech. It's

It's because he said we're going to use the Bill of Rights as a basic fundamental building block over what's allowed to be said. A document I think has worked pretty well in the United States for a long time. And because he said he's going to crack down on the bots, he's going to expose the algorithms they've used to censor willy-nilly and arbitrarily over the past years.

And he's not going to be answering to the rogue mob anymore. He's going to tolerate criticism. That alone apparently has really exposed the rage of the regime. And I get it. They've used Twitter very effectively over the last couple of years to punish opponents, to hone the messages for the corporate media, to promote their friends, and to essentially kind of control that media narrative. Well, their reaction to this has been so extreme that literally just yesterday, Joe

Joe Biden announced the formation of what can only be described as a new ministry of truth headed by someone who's been deeply untruthful.

It's completely wild to see even the government reaction to this. And this is why I'm actually surprised that the sale has gotten as far as it so far has, because Twitter is extremely important to the ruling regime for how they craft their messages, what they suppress and what they support. And this is really showing it to be so, that the government coming out and saying, we're going to have a ministry of truth led by someone who calls things disinformation, who's been a frequent peddler of actual disinformation, actual...

actual lives, the Russia dossier, etc. Who's got some ridiculous clips of her up there singing about how she's going to censor people.

uh... but i think the government entering a shady place uh... legally speaking because they have been able to hide these last couple years the our wave and shy away from first amendment litigation because private corporations have been the ones who've been making these decisions government's been saying out of it strictly unconstitutional for the government to restrict speech president brock obama's press secretary had to remind reporters that multiple times in one of the last press conferences they had before he left office

See the government now stepping in. They're going to try and hide it as part of the intelligence community, try to hide it as something that they say is foreign disinformation, which is completely, totally bogus, as we saw with the Hunter laptop thing. But in the end, they may actually put themselves in a legally difficult position regarding the First Amendment when they try to actually have their own. Yeah, I think I think they are stepping on two very, very dangerous ground. But the fact that they're hiding it.

within the intelligence services is also should be very, very concerning to Americans out there that we are stepping into territory that has never been seen in this country before. And I want to explore that a little more when we come back with Christopher Bedford, senior editor at The Federalist, Breaking Battlegrounds. We'll be back in just a moment. ♪

Welcome back to Breaking Battlegrounds with your hosts Sam Stone and Chuck Warren. On the line with us right now, Christopher Bedford, senior editor at The Federalist, one of the best commentators in the country, frankly, on tech and free speech issues. Christopher, one of the things that I think you brought up is that there is sort of a complication for Elon Musk in this –

theoretical Twitter takeover is that Twitter is hosted on Amazon servers and Amazon has not been exactly a leader in the free speech movement lately either.

They've not at all been a leader in the free speech movement. One of the whole reasons I write for is this, because Amazon Web Services decided that the social media upstart Parler didn't deserve to exist anymore. They justified that by claiming Parler was an organizing place for the January 6th riot, when in fact that turned out to not be true at all and no evidence was ever provided. Later it turned out that it was actually...

Facebook, that was more of a place where people organized. In response to that, they took down Parler. They ripped it off their servers. And the thing about Amazon Web Services, too, is they provide their own code system. So when you use them as a host, you build the website, your website using their tools. So if somebody turns you off, it's not like you can just switch electric companies. You're going to switch servers. You have to completely rebuild your site. And it's extremely devastating. They've shown themselves to be an enemy of free speech. And then more recently...

when Elon Musk bought Twitter, when they had the most obscene anti-free speech people resigning, the head of community outreach for Amazon Web Services tweeted out to them that they would have a home with their company. Anyone who was resigning Twitter over this would have a place. And then you had Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon Web Services, trying to claim that Elon Musk would have a threat from China, which in part is true, but it's extremely hypocritical for Jeff Bezos to say at all. So when these things come together,

and Twitter is entirely hosted by Amazon Web Services, I don't foresee them being canceled just over the purchase. But if he brings back President Trump and some of the prominent scientists who pushed back against the COVID regime, if he brings back, let's say, some of the shock hosts like Alex Jones, these sort of people that are hated, then I could foresee them being canceled or at least held over a barrel by Amazon Web Services.

It's just an amazing level of power that has been aggregated in certain tech companies. The East India Company would be in shock over how much power companies like Google and Amazon Web Services have. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Chris, is this an opportunity for those –

those who just want free speech or those who want bipartisan, nonpartisan news coverage or center right to start buying some newspapers as well. I mean, I think always a mistake a Koch organization made is all the money they spent, how much more different the world would have been if they bought like the LA Times, Dallas Morning Star, and Miami Herald. It'd just be a different world. Yeah.

It would be. I think this is a really big opportunity for entrepreneurs and for those people who want to do this. I mean, if you were selling, for example, conservative wrenches, maybe they put the 1776 on them, you'd have no market, maybe outside of a couple of Fox News infomercials. But if tomorrow somebody bans you from using wrenches if you're a conservative, then suddenly you'd have a massive market for that. And that's the equivalent of what we've seen with some aspects of finance, banking, e-mailing,

email listservs, credit card processors, payroll organizers, social media companies, internet servers. All of these things are breaking down. We're in what Tom Klingenstein from Claremont Institute has called a cold civil war where there's no violence yet, thank God, but there's disagreements that are not being bridged and will not be bridged. And because of that, there's a separation of businesses, a creation of a second internet, a creation of a second economy.

None of these things, whether it's banking or finance or servers, most of these things, they're not copyrighted information. They're not protected. It takes a lot of capital. It takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of connections and being very careful and smart.

But these things can be done. You don't have to reinvent the wheel. You just have to make it. So there's a lot of opportunities out there for people. And while there have been certainly political grifters out there, it's been frustrating to see, at the same time, there are some really intelligent folks, especially on the libertarian side, who can wake up and say, here's an opportunity, and I'm going to pursue it.

Chris, do you get worried about the bubble either sides puts themselves in? I'll give you an example. I posted today on Facebook that I subscribe to everything. Yes, Sam. I literally have 30 newspaper subscriptions. I get the Federalist Newsletter. You send me paywall stuff every day.

Yeah, I mean Sam's too cheap to join me on my crusade to subscribe to everything. But today I posted – I get the New Yorker and Atlantic too just because I like to see different perspectives. I think it's important. And so the New Yorker did the most liberal thing in the world. They sent me a tote bag.

Right. And so I posted the I posted the picture on Facebook. I cannot believe the DMs I got from people in D.C. saying, why would you read that trash? I mean, they're like scolding me. And I shot back and said, don't you want to know what people who don't have your same opinions think? And it was and I think I'm just and I'm alarmed by it. I mean, two of them were PhDs and I'm just literally alarmed that.

It's not just – their side is definitely in a bubble. I mean if it doesn't come out of Capitol Hill or New York or L.A., they don't seem to know what's going on in the rest of the world. Probably put Seattle in there too. But I just think this bubble culture is not good, and it's not good for conservatives.

No, it's not good for anyone. The Atlantic actually has a really great article out this month on the subject, because why have we gotten some stupid from the last year from both sides? And the reason is some of the worst aspects of human nature and mob mentality and faction that are fed by this rapid adrenaline rush and releases that you get from social media or from agreeing with people and from moving people.

Now, these are problems that are intrinsically human. That's just part of our fallen nature that we do this, these sort of things. But technology has made it a lot easier to find your group and to exclude others. And so it's worthwhile reading these topics. It's not ideal.

There are some publications I've stopped reading because I could guess what CNN is saying about something. It's basically the opposite of the truth that I turn it on. All right, I got it. But places like The New Yorker or The Atlantic, while they've been declining in some of their standards for a long time now, still have some really interesting thinkers. If you don't understand what the other side is thinking, then how the heck are you ever going to combat it?

Amen. Amen. And hopefully Sam will pony up and start getting some subscriptions. Look, I pay for the New York Times. That's all the liberalism I can afford. The New York Times is worth subscribing to at least for the cooking section. I get recipe ideas from them all the time. That is a very valid point. Absolutely true. Very valid.

Chris, what do you see going forward happens with Twitter? What is your guess? If you were a betting man and we took you to Vegas today or you did the Fan Duels app, we have no equity in that, by the way. If you did that, what do you see is going to happen here next six, 12 months?

I think it's going to be slower than people expect, but there's a couple moves that he has forecast that I think would be excellent. One of them is very difficult to do. It's getting rid of the bots, and that's difficult to do because the formulas that you need to create, the machines you need to create to go after these fake accounts will scoop up normal people in them as well. It's going to cause a backlash, so it's a difficult...

problem to solve, but it'll do a lot to get rid of the mob mentality that's helped chase American CEOs around and chase politicians and sports teams around by making people think that everything is just super political and super running that, and that the mob is actually a lot bigger than it is. And the second thing I think it's going to do is the algorithms. If he can expose the algorithms, then that will put a stake in the heart of the censorship regime, let people know how they're actually being controlled, and it will expose the people who have

been pushing for these censorships and getting away with it by just blaming the algorithms. Those two things will be huge, but he's going to get a lot of pushback, and it makes a big difference over who he puts in charge of that company for how they do next. Christopher, if you were the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, I've thought about this before. I would be tempted to tell my employees that a condition of the employment is not to have a Twitter account.

I think that'd be wonderful. The employees having a Twitter account has exposed so much. They've admitted how pro-censorship they are. They've claimed that they were right to ban the Hunter Biden story from one of the oldest papers in the Steve papers. The thing I do love about social media accounts is people don't really hide anymore. They put their stupid opinions out there very quickly.

No, not not at all. Matter of fact, what's interesting is watching the last 72 hours, the various conservative conservatives on Twitter, how their followings increased 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 70 thousand people all of a sudden.

And I am sure there's a bunch of people at Twitter just trying to hide and not want to have an audit done when Musk actually takes it over. And it's amazing because they just didn't pick up 70,000 people overnight. I mean something's happening, right? They're being unblocked, whatever the case may be. It's been quite incredible to watch. They're under legal control right now, legal obligation to not change, to not touch the knobs. Yeah, I don't believe that at all.

I think that they're going to try to cover their tracks. That was put in initially to try and stop them from creating sabotage of the incoming buyer. So one possibility of this, because all these things will leave a trace, one possibility is that they've just taken their fingers off the knobs. They're no longer allowed to control what's trending. They're no longer able to shadow ban. They're no longer able to suppress things and promote other things because

Because of that, you've seen a great reorganizing of who's getting more followers, who's getting more likes, who's getting more retweets, etc. But so far, it's a mystery exactly what that is. But given the suddenness of it and combined with that legal order, I wonder if that's it. Well, I mean, perfect example, Donald Trump Jr. posted today that he said, quote,

Tell his father's son, while I'm awesome and totally deserving of the 87,000 new followers a day, it seems that someone took the shackles off my account. Yeah, I mean, that just didn't happen. Not 87,000 people didn't wake up the last two days and say, you know what? I'm going to follow Don Jr.,

I think that's totally true. And there have been shackles put on these accounts. And now they're being released. I mean, I noticed when I put out something that I think is funny and witty. Maybe it's not. But I get retweeted by Molly Hemingway and Sean Davis and other people, Jack Posobiec, Benny Johnson. And it only gets like 15 retweets, and it's all people I know. Well, I know that someone gave me that system because all those people have millions of followers. Mm-hmm.

Right. Absolutely. Beyond just the Twitter fight, I think one of the things that's being missed is everything. And you kind of gave a list of it. Elon Musk really is the visionary of this time.

Right? I mean, this guy's doing things that in conceiving and executing things that nobody else in the world is coming close to. I was always, I used to be very skeptical of Elon Musk because of how well he gained the subsidy system when the taxes system, where he's getting people who are paid by the taxpayer to buy his cars while his company's subsidized. SolarCity really creeped me out. But then one day when I watched in the

In the background, during a meeting, I was supposed to be paying attention to the speaker, and I suddenly saw a rocket ship landing on the planet like it was Star Wars or Star Trek. I thought, what the heck is that? And I realized that was SpaceX. After that, I completely reevaluated the man of, sure, he's gaming the system. Sure, he's outsmarting it. But he's doing things that are absolutely visionary, things that are wild. This is another example. He's going with the battle as he's chasing after it.

And it's still yet to be seen because he's someone who has no masters. He's someone who's difficult to control. He's difficult to figure out. He also, by the way, like one of his major passion projects is creating microchips to put in humans' brains with Neuralink. So you have that. I'm very skeptical of that.

But everything else he does is pretty cool. Yeah, they're not opening my head to stick one of those in it. Well, look, I think Elon Musk goes by the old wise, you know, the old saying, there are no bad ideas of brainstorming. He just puts money behind all his brainstorming and figures it out from there.

I think that's true, and I kind of wonder how much of this massive $44 billion purchase he just made came out of stone conversations with him and Jack Dorsey, who's one of his close friends. I'm looking at this thing going, you guys have been talking about this for a while? Have you thought about it more than that? I think he has. Yeah, Dorsey's been quite complimentary of the purchase. That's been an interesting twist to this, I think, for a lot of people. Absolutely.

I think he was one of the people who was crucial to the purchase going from, no, we're not doing it, to suddenly, yes, we're doing it. I think he was able to make a deal with Elon Musk. Now, my fear is that in response to that, Elon said, I'll put you in charge, because he certainly doesn't have the time to oversee all these different companies. And while Jack Dorsey is someone who's definitely got some more interesting and good ideas on free speech than a lot of the people who have taken over since then,

He has not so far shown to have the management skill to have to fire all the people he's going to have to fire in order to actually write that ship. Christopher, we have just a little bit under a minute left. Tell people how they follow you and how they stay up with your work.

Well, they can check us out. I write at TheFederalist.com, and you can follow me on Twitter at CBedfordDC or on Truth, President Trump's media platform, at Bedford. And then we also work at RightForge.com, where we're right now working on building automated services. It'll be out in the next few months so people can move their websites over to a place that will never cancel them and goes by the Bill of Rights.

Fantastic. Christopher Bedford, thank you so much for joining us today. Folks, if you stay tuned, we do have one more podcast-only segment coming up. Otherwise, we will see you next week.

All right. Welcome back to the podcast only segment of Breaking Battlegrounds. If you're listening to this, please subscribe, download. Make sure you get every one of our episodes because I think we're doing some really fun stuff these days. How many episodes have we done? How many episodes have we done? I was thinking about that this morning.

I was listening to a podcast. Kylie, do we have a number? I don't know the number off the top of my head, but we could do the math because it's every single week since the first week of January 2021. Okay, that wasn't a very good answer, Kylie.

And not only that, but there's no sunshine here either. I don't know. We may have to fire you. I think we're going to hit 100 this summer. That's your nerd there. I loved our guests. I loved our guests today. COVID and Twitter have really unmasked a lot in our nation. Sam, I have told you this before. I think you agree. If I had one wish that I think would make this country significantly better,

It would be that we just got rid of teachers unions. I think they are an impediment to everything. I mean, that'd be my one wish. It's more so than labor unions, public employee unions. They are just really – they're a propaganda machine that aren't really concerned about educating kids. It's a talking point for them, but there's no proof they really care about it. And I know these –

We watch these governors put money into the schools or spend more of the legislatures, and then you find out that the 20 percent increase is only really 15 percent or 16. It's a joke. Well, not only that, but the educational outcomes for children continue to get worse despite pouring more money into the system. And it's exceptionally clear at this point that teachers unions are not interested in kids or parents except as teachers.

captives in their system to generate more revenue for themselves. I agree. And then regarding Twitter, we have talked about this many times. Twitter was the greatest unmasking of the ideology of 90% of the reporters in this country than we could have ever done with investigative research or whatever. It's been amazing. This meltdown, frankly, has been embarrassing to watch with them.

Look, most – I don't believe most journalists have a right to call themselves any such thing at this point. I mean these are really totalitarian activists with a worldview that is diametrically opposed to – I believe diametrically opposed even to your average everyday democrat.

Well, they are the group. They are the group most likely to be living in the bubble we discussed earlier with Chris. Right. I, you know, and I was struck this morning with the comments from friends who are well educated people to our PhDs. And it's just like, are you kidding? That's not how I go about my life. I want to know both sides. I want to see things. Right.

And I do think that is something conservatives have to – we have to be the more enlightened group. We have to be the more educated. And we have to understand not only what our beliefs are and reinforce them with study and actual experience, but we need to understand what our fellow Americans who don't agree with us are thinking. And if you don't do that, we're never going to reach a modicum of respect for one another. Well, one of the things that Musk has talked about doing with Twitter that I would endorse in a heartbeat –

is requiring people to unmask themselves. No more hiding behind Twitter handles. But you have to put your name on there. Yeah, I hate these bland anonymous accounts because they are usually the nastiest human beings in the world. Yeah, and I really think that those things would tone down significantly if people had to put their name on there. I know, look, you and I are both on there. We have our name on there.

You put stuff out, it's ours. We own it. Yeah, and people don't. Well, great show today. Jamie and Kylie, as always, great job. It's been fantastic. Yeah, although Kylie, count them up. 72. Okay, there we go. We need to do a 100th anniversary. We got to start planning 100th. We got to start planning 100th. We only have 30. We'll go from there.

Oh, God, I'm bad at math. Never do that. Never. Anyway, folks, we hope you have a great weekend. While Kylie figures out math, hopefully she'll have it figured out next week. This is Breaking Battlegrounds. Have a great weekend.

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