The Secret Trump Civil War You Didn’t Know About & The Trump ICE Discord Problem is Really Bad
The Philip DeFranco Show
philip defranco
4.7 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 16 February 2026
⏱️ 24 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | This episode is brought to you by Vanta. |
| 0:03.0 | Security and compliance done wrong is a headache. |
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| 0:29.8 | So you beautiful bastards. |
| 0:31.8 | Welcome back to the Philip DeFranco show. |
| 0:33.4 | You daily dive into the news. |
| 0:35.2 | It is Monday. |
| 0:35.9 | I hope you're having a fantastic president's day. |
| 0:37.8 | Actually, if you are a president who happens to be watching the show and you're not in the Epstein Files, I hope you're having a fantastic one. I know that sounds like a pretty low bar, not being in the Epstein files, but it is 2026 and the bar is not just low. It is not just underground. The bar is in hell. But on that cheery note, I do have some good news for you. While other, dare I say, lesser daily news shows are taking the holiday off, the Philip DeFranco show, it's doubling down. You can get filled in twice today. I think your mom calls it D.P. And that's because right after he finished this full, Philip DeFranco show, you can watch or listen to my brand new podcast and interview with Adam Friedland. Some know him as one of the most interesting interviewers of the past few years. Others know him as a bug. And even if you don't know him, |
| 1:11.1 | I think you're gonna love it. |
| 1:12.0 | So I got a link in the description down below. |
| 1:13.7 | With all that said, we've got a lot to talk about today starting with this. The Department of Homeland Security is subpoena in Google, meta, Reddit, and Discord to docs people who criticized ICE online and the tech companies are complying. According to the New York Times, DHS has been quietly issuing subpoenas to tech platforms demanding names, emails, phone numbers, and other personal user data for accounts at either pointed to ICE agent locations or just criticized ICE online. And again, the platforms targeted were Google, Reddit, Discord, and Meta, which is Facebook and Instagram. In every platform, except Discord has complied with at least some of the requests. And this is happening while ICE is using facial recognition technology on protesters in Minneapolis and Chicago, using a Pallentier-built database to identify real-time locations for people that they're pursuing and using tools that potentially allow them to hack into phones. You even had Borders R. Tom Homan telling Fox News last month what the end game is. We're going to create a database. Those people that are arrested for interference and pavement and pina assault, we're going to make them famous. We're going to put their face on TV. We're going to let their employers in their neighborhoods and their schools know who these people are. Now with this, you've got the Times reporting that some companies notified targeted users and gave them 10 to 14 days to fight the subpoenas in court. And you have DHS saying that it's only doing this to keep agents safe. And while you have many calling BS on that, we also need to talk about the type of subpoena being used here because historically, it's been deployed very rarely. Mainly for cases like catching child traffickers. Because these are administrative subpoenas. Unlike arrest warrants, they don't require a judge's signature and DHS can just issue them directly. Trump's DHS, they love using them. They always have. Back in 2017, DHS tried to expose anonymous Twitter users critical of Trump's first administration. And then in Trump 2.0 last year, they used them against meta accounts posting updates about ice raids in California and accounts documenting ice sightings outside of Philadelphia. Now, each case eventually made it to court, but DHS withdrew all of them before any rulings were made. And while that might sound confusing, you had the ACLU explaining why, right? A judge's order stopping the practice could end the tactic entirely. Right, but if DHS pulls a subpoena before that happens, they can just keep going. And as one ACLU lawyer explained, not everyone who gets subpoenaed will sue, saying the pressure is on the end user, the private |
| 3:07.8 | individual, to go to court. Obviously with this whole situation, there's been pushback, and one of the ways we've seen that play out is you had Representative Roecona who represents Silicon Valley saying, Tech must not bend the knee to a surveillance state, Google, meta, and other companies should refuse to comply with administrative subpoenas that target anonymous speech critical of ICE as a blatant violation of the First Amendment. But the problem with that is, as we've seen, |
| 3:26.9 | tech now loves bending the knee to MAGA. One of the big examples we've seen is Meta's CEO Mark Zuckerberg. He's been cozying up to Trump. He killed fact checking on his platforms and he justified it by echoing Trump's talking points, saying that Meta's content moderation resulted in censorship. He also famously donated to Trump's second inauguration. Amazon and Google did as well. And combined, they donated more than double what they donated during Biden and Trump's first inauguration. Then of course, you've got TikTok, which is owned by Oracle, run by Larry Ellison, a Trump ally. And then Twitter, you know, Trump and Elon, they might fight here and there, but Elon is still very much aligned with the MAGA camp. Also, with this whole situation, we need to go back to Discord because you have people connecting these anti-isopinas to Discord's announcement last week that it's rolling out new age verification features beginning in March. Because those features include using a government-issued ID. Now, Discord, they try to assure users that uploading IDs is actually optional and that they only look at age and then immediately delete the information. |
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