This is the Tom Hartman program.

Welcome back, Tom Hartman here with you on the line with us is Patrick Hedger.

Patrick is a vice, currently the vice president of policy at the taxpayer protection alliance.

Prior to that, he was a research fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute Center for Technology and Innovation and also served as the Director of Policy at the Koch Brothers Freedom Works and protecting taxpayers.org is his current website, Pat Hedger18, P-A-T, H-E-D-G-E-R-1-8, is his Twitter handle.

Patrick, welcome back to the program. It's been a while since we've talked. You've published this piece in the dispatch titled J-D-Vance. This is the guy who wrote Hillbilly Elegy and has now become a political guy.

Show us how the populist right adopted the logic of you didn't build that. Give me a summary of the position that you're taking in this, Patrick.

Yeah, absolutely. It's sort of pointing out that there is a creeping authoritarianism that's occurring on the right. I find it very concerning.

It was in response to comments that J-D-Vance made on Tucker Carlson's program and he was asked, what do you say to the arguments that Google is a private company and Google is a stand-in for Silicon Valley and other major firms broadly?

And J-D-Vance said, well, I just don't care. And that just shows just such a flagrant disregard for the Constitution and how our government works. And for somebody that is all but declared candidate for the US Senate as a Republican from Ohio to say that you don't care about how the Bill of Rights works.

I don't see how you can swear an oath upon the Constitution and serve an office with that kind of mindset.

What am I missing here, Patrick? My understanding is that the First Amendment says that the government may not inhibit freedom of speech, except under obvious conditions like you can't yell fired or crack out at the hitter.

I mean, it doesn't say that in the First Amendment, but that's how it's been interpreted by the courts over the years.

But it doesn't say that you or I have an absolute right that if you or I own a corporation, like if you own to Google or you have some little Google equivalent and you start censoring people or not displaying their posts, you haven't violated the Constitution.

You're a private business. Google is a private business. Why should we worry?

Yeah, exactly right. I mean, it's nice to agree with you on some things here. That's the issue. They are trying to claim that Google or Facebook or any other media company has to host this kind of speech and really the laws that we have on the books right now, something like Section 230.

The First Amendment is what protects the ability of Google through YouTube to make sure they don't have any pornography on their platform to make sure it's for the most part of family friendly place.

Same with Facebook. I mean, and it allows that sort of experimentation between platforms to compete, right? You can find in decent content on Twitter, but you're going to have a harder time finding it on Facebook or a harder time finding it on YouTube.

And again, that's the platforms exercising their First Amendment rights. If you have a, if you're putting up Nazi propaganda on YouTube, they're well within their rights to take it down.

And those are their rights, not just of speech, but of freedom of association. If they don't want to be associated with your content, they shouldn't have to be. And if you don't want to have me on your show, you don't have to have me on your show. I think if we if we erode the rights of the big corporations to have freedom of association, that weakens the right that protect journalists and all of us and all of our freedom of speech.

So we're talking about Patrick Hedger, Vice President, Policy Attack Affairs Protection Alliance. If you're concerned about right wingers being essentially censored, you know, Trump was censored off Twitter, others being censored off YouTube.

And I get that. Then what's your solution to this? I mean, I'll tell you right up front. Mine is I think that all of these companies should be basically no longer operating as monopolies.

They should be broken up, particularly those companies that have acquired other parts, you know, Facebook acquiring Instagram, for example, YouTube being acquired by Google, that each one of these operations at the very least should be a standalone company that just does what they do. And I've got over 100 years of antitrust legislation and enforcement to back me up on that.

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