Thumping the Feds And Other Rascals on Brian Wilson Podcast

Now, for something completely different, here is your host, Brian Wilson.

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, and people of all sexes, especially everyone observing Save Our Endangered Heterosexuals Day, welcome to the Happy Hunter Hunting episode of the Two and Only, a weekly slide on the razor blade of life,

Here on the polluted shores of the D.C.

swamp where common sense is blackballed and logic comes to die.

Brian Wilson’s by given name, although I’ve been called many others, joining me is our celebrity guest, the indolent yet aspirational investigative journalist for the New York Post, best-selling author, including his newly released last rights, The Death of American Liberty, yet

Despite all these accolades, he just lost a lucrative commercial endorsement for Old Spice aftershave.

Co-figure.

Let’s have a catatonic welcome for Jim Bovard.

Welcome, Jim.

Brian, thanks for having me on.

It’s the first time I’ve been called indolent since I was on the high school track team.

Well, you know, just dredging up all this stuff from the past.

I’m just trying to get you ready for those congressional investigative meetings.

You’re going to be called into after they read your book.

You have to be prepared for this stuff.

Have you ever done that by the way?

I seem to have a memory that you did actually, uh, were called in for an appearance.

I’ve testified a few times at Capitol Hill, so I’m not sure it was more productive than staying home and examining old issues of Playboy magazine.

Well, certainly much more enjoyable.

I’ve never had the curse or the pleasure.

The closest I got to that was being called into a Manhattan Grand Jury on a case up there when I was at WABC.

Okay, but there is a great story you have of going to the Capitol building and you had an extra

Yes, extra piece of sporting equipment with me.

I think that’s in the book.

But my first indication that maybe there really is something to this guardian angel business, not to belabor it, but just maybe to entice people to go and read the book or the chapter that I

The woman who became my wife, Cassie, was a reporter at a station in Baltimore and there was a talk radio day at the Capitol and we went down to broadcast and unbeknownst to me, through a, I don’t know, brain fog or just a total screw-up, as we were coming in the inspection point in the basement of the entrance to the Capitol, the x-ray machine revealed in my briefcase

a nice compact .45 caliber pistol that I carried with me.

I’ll leave it at that.

What happened after that was really rather remarkable and obviously I’m here so I didn’t get the sense of the clink but that was a day Jim, I gotta tell you.

Hell of a story, hell of a story.

Oh god, talk about an indelible memory, a trauma thinking that

It’s just good that you’ve got an honest face.

Well, that could be it.

It could be the two guys that were doing the check-in security business.

It could be the incredible attraction of my wife who was there.

Who knows?

It was enough of a distraction.

Maybe that did it.

Anyway, get the book and read about it.

We’ll talk about that later.

I wanted to take a closer look at a couple of your recent articles up on your blog at jimbovard.com.

The one is is free speech relic in America.

The other is stop the Biden big brother better law.

We’ll get to that in a minute.

But just to clarify, other than the obvious difference between a mouth and a piece of paper, is there a meaningful distinction in the First Amendment between freedom of the speech

and freedom of the press.

Is there something tangible and annunciable that can be addressed to that?

Good question.

I don’t think there is.

I think there are some journalists who talk as if they’re entitled to more protection as journalists.

I don’t think that’s true.

It should not be true.

I’m in favor of almost

Unlimited Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Press.

I mean, if someone libels somebody or there’s defamation and there’s a lawsuit, that’s different.

I mean, people have to be responsible for what they say, knock on wood here.

But no, I’m not aware of any

Major Difference.

It may be a legal fine point.

It may be an academic discussion.

I was just getting ready for our get-together today.

I got to thinking about that.

Well, speech is just what you might say out loud written down on a piece of paper.

What you write down on a piece of paper could be read out loud.

I mean, what was the necessity of… I understand the freedom of the press as far as, you know, what the, I think, the founding dads were

had in mind when they were writing that especially considering the state of the fourth estate at that particular time but the uh i just wondered if there was some sort of a distinction in you as a as an eminent author and writer of both books and and newspaper pieces uh might have come in contact with that not to mention the speeches you’ve made around the country so so so basically you could say so if free speech is a relic as you point out in the article that raised the question uh would it be safe to say then that so is freedom of the press

Oh, yeah, well, that’s that’s been taken has taken a whopping for a long time.

So yeah, there’s a boatload of problems with both those.

So and it’s something which I’ve I’ve experienced as a journalist.

I mean, just the fear of official disfavor.

It’s a huge factor.

Yeah.

Also, not to get off a beaten path is where I was originally going, but it raises questions in my head about it as a writer.

uh and I mean your major league I’m down here with t-ball but I’m just saying that your stories you’ve told about issues with the subject matter not being a matter of free press or speech or whatever but the fact that you run into uh you run into political problems with the philosophy or the tastes of editors and that raises an issue that I have never had I’ve had to deal with well except once with a column

But you’ve had issues with titles, chapters, paragraphs, subject matter, because the editor had a problem with it, not whether or not it was correct or incorrect, factual or historical or anything else.

Is that right?

No, sure.

I’ve had lots of problems over the years with some editors, usually ones I didn’t deal with very often.

You know, it’s a question of one pass and haul last when you have that kind of editor.

But there have been plenty of times where editors, I think, have made judgments because of fear of government disfavor or government pressure or government pushback.

Government pushback is a big factor.

It’s become a lot bigger factor in recent decades compared to what the experience of writing in the 1980s and the early 1990s.

But to clarify, I mean, simply because some editor doesn’t like a sentence or a paragraph or an article of mine doesn’t mean I’ve been censored.

It’s just this is what editors do and make decisions.

But if there is an official thumb on the scale, then that’s different.

Yeah, I was just trying, I was more interested in the standpoint of illustrating how someone who writes what you write about and how you write about it has more to be concerned about than just the fact that maybe somebody in Washington is going to get pissed off.

Well, tough.

That’s what the First Amendment’s all about.

But there are also other hurdles that maybe the average listener or reader doesn’t take into consideration, that you are poking the dragon with a big stick here, and there are other hurdles that then come about as a result of that, whether it’s an editor’s fear of government pressure or kickback or whatever.

Brian Wilson Speaks

Anyway, to get back to essentially the same part about the freedom of the press and all the rest, you wrote about the Biden administration leaning on Facebook to censor COVID comments.

And earlier in the year, the federal judge Terry Dowdy hitting back with 155 pages of condemnation of the Biden gang’s coercion of social media companies.

Other than being ratified by a federal appeals court,

Where’s that gone?

What’s the result of all that decision?

The Supreme Court is going to hear the case.

So there’s good and bad in that.

The Judge Dally issued an injunction to prohibit federal agencies in the White House from directly browbeating

Social Media Companies.

The appeals court preserved some of that injunction, but the Supreme Court has put a stay on that entire injunction, which means that the federal agencies can go back to their arm twisting.

Though it might be a little more dangerous because, you know, it’s a hot trail at this point.

But it was unfortunate that the injunctions have been frozen.

Yeah yeah especially from the standpoint of the everyone knows the uh the speed which with the Supreme Court uh works its magic.

I’m just wondering in light of next year election year and how some of so much of this is all tied together

Are we going to be looking at one of these things at the end of June or whenever when the Supreme Robes get hung up for another season before they come out with their decision?

Or is the timing of this so obvious that they might actually pop with the decision within a short period of time?

Based on my lunch I had last week with Clarence Thomas, that’s how it’s going to work out.

I don’t know.

I don’t know.

I mean, this is the kind of case that might get postponed until the end of June next year.

And it also might be postponed and then they decide not to do anything on it for the entire year.

So I don’t know.

I don’t know.

It could be a real mess.

I don’t know.

I don’t know.

Well, I understand it’s all sheer speculation.

I just, I always play and catch up with the history of things like Supreme Court decisions and actions and, and what they do and don’t do and whether or not they’re aware of what the calendar says, what the political landscape is.

I mean, the idea that they sit up in an ivory tower and they’re above all this is, that’s ludicrous.

That’s naive thinking, but I don’t know how far they allow themselves to

Delve into some of this business, but nevertheless, it was just a curiosity.

You wrote with regard to this whole business of the federal government leaning on the social media, specifically Facebook.

Facebook decided that the word liberty, quoting you now, Facebook decided that the word liberty was too hazardous in the Biden era to placate the White House.

The company suppressed posts discussing the choice to vaccinate in terms of personal or civil liberties, unquote.

Based on what we have subsequently learned,

about the political proclivities of one Mr. Zuckerberg and his fact-chuckers.

Do you think that caving into the feds was that great a sacrifice to their love of liberty or just a swell smokescreen to delete posts the Facebook folks found objectionable anyway?

Well you know I turned the clock back six years here and that was when I did a piece for USA Today

on how Facebook censored a post, which I did and canceled it because it had a photo of the the fire at the Waco Branch Davidian home.

Brian Wilson Speaks featuring Brian Wilson Speaks featuring Brian Wilson Speaks featuring Brian Wilson Speaks featuring

And they finally backed down on that case.

But it turns out there were a lot of photos of government atrocities, which Facebook banned, not because they were inaccurate, but because they made the government look bad.

Yeah, and that certainly is a violation of their community standards since they have a rather unusual community, apparently, but I Yeah, it’s called the FTC and the Justice Department and the White House and we, you know, they got to keep them happy or else they’ll, there are all kinds of liability clauses, which, which they could face.

So

You’ll lose your pool privileges in that community or something along that order.

I, I get it.

But I think the average person is of the opinion that, well, you know, these people are in the publishing business as far as social media is concerned, and they would stand fast on the first amendment as opposed to just caving.

I know, I know, I know.

Oh, it’s still you know, it’s illusions.

It is.

Well, I mean, I think that, you know, there are people who believe such that, you know, have their own date with woke coming, you know, the, you know, sleeping, you know, with a lullaby of these types of fairy tales dancing through their heads.

And, you know, government is good and does good things.

And they’re here to stand up for the Constitution, Bill of Rights that, and it’s, it’s hoopla.

It’s all, like I say, fairy tales.

It’s right up there with Santa Claus.

Like a one-handed magazine.

I mean the feds seem to have perfected the art of revealing what they’re going to do and what they’re going to try first by accusing everybody else of being guilty of whatever whatever is therefore requiring them to do the same thing to prevent it.

It seems to be the way things are working out.

I want to move over to the big brother, Biden big brother better piece is the Biden big brother better piece in that you quote Senator Mike Lee saying don’t trust any bill so large it has to be delivered by hand cart.

The 3,000 Pages of the National Defense Authorization Act.

Section 702, you write about referring to FISA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, expiring coming up here in just a few weeks, December 31st.

Since it’s only a matter of days before another vacation for our elected rulers,

What do you think?

Do you think that actually they’re going to let it expire this time?

Or is this this extension that invariably comes up in discussions when hard negotiating is necessary?

Do you think that opposition is going to cave and do that give another four months?

I don’t think the opposition is going to cave, but I think there are

uh that they may be outvoted by the folks who want to go along by the uh be outvoted by the deep state caucus on capitol hill ah that’s a lot of members so hold on a second i gotta write that one down i hadn’t i hadn’t even heard or thought of that one before the deep state caucus that’s that’s that’s right up there with the uh impunity democracy yeah so i was on the edge of my chair i was hoping you would say it was almost on par with the wagon load of wet goats but

No, it’s not quite that good.

It’s up there.

It’s up there.

But you know, that that’s such a potent, a potent statement.

I’ve got to I’ve got to hold that back for the you know, for the biggest, bestest, most important application that could come along like your book, you know, like I say, it’s got a wagon load stronger than a wagon load of wet goats.

It’s also I put this up there with stronger than an acre of garlic.

I mean, that’s that’s pretty good.

An acre of garlic.

Yeah.

I haven’t heard that one before.

Is that from your family’s farming days?

Yeah, just but I don’t I don’t know.

I’ve had that one as long as you know, the wet goats.

It’s just that I don’t know how what experience the average person has in driving down the highway.

But I mean, you get behind a wagon load of wet goats.

I mean, you’ve that’s a real old factory experience right there.

Whereas not a whole lot of people have passed by an acre of garlic, which really doesn’t

doesn’t rise to its level of potential until somebody starts mashing on it, so there’s that.

But either way, they’re worthy.

But you point out that the Feds revealed that fewer than 3,394,053 Americans’ privacy

And it’s tough to read that without laughing, I’m sorry.

The Feds revealed that 3,394,053 Americans’ privacy had been zapped by FBI warrantless searches using Section 702.

Was that just for this year or the last fiscal year or since the FISE Act has been in place?

No, I think it was in 2020 and 2021.

It’s a little fuzzy as far as when these violations actually occurred and when they were reported, because they were quite a bit later when they were reported.

And for a long time, the feds did not report any violations, because they didn’t have to.

Right.

Whereas now, whereas now they, you know, the feds say, you know,

Fewer than XX million and people say oh good now the government’s transparent and it’s just there are so many different ways that the Washington protocols make a mockery of transparency.

This is one of my favorites Fewer than three million so on so forth.

It’s like, you know, give us a number.

Could uh, can we get any names?

No, no, you can’t have the names but just but just take our word for it’s fewer than three million whatever so it’s like, yeah

I’m so impressed.

Yeah, I think maybe a thing would be to attach

The Renewal of FISA to the same stalemate they’re having on funding and changes in border procedure.

Well, see, yeah, that’s actually a story I’m racing on today.

There’s a fight in the Senate today, maybe a fight in the House tomorrow on this.

And so Congress has paid attention to this issue of doing these warrantless FBI searches of Americans’ records that were unjustified, all these cases, and they have come up with a solution.

And that is to have a special provision to notify members of Congress if they’re personally involved in one of these unjustified searches.

So the hell with the constituency and the rest of the citizens of the country, as long as you know that your ass is under the microfiber glass, then it’ll be okay.

We’ll go ahead and vote for it.

535 people and everybody else can go jump.

That’s it.

Well, it’s like you point out betting on the triumph of constitutional rights on Capitol Hill remains a fool’s errand.

And there’s certainly no greater testimony to that reality than right there.

By the way, I forgot I meant to apologize to you at the start of the show that our date to get together here for our two and only get together may have

may have prevented or otherwise inhibited you from being able to get to the Hunter Biden capital step.

Yeah, I was I was I was just reading about that.

And I was thinking, you know, there again, it kind of brings to mind, you know, the old back issues of Playboy magazine.

Yeah.

Well, you know, I tell you what, if I ever have to be deposed on something again, I’m going to try that.

I’m going to say, you know, I don’t want to go to any deposition.

I’m going to set up a podium out here on the steps of the Capitol or Macy’s or, you know, Bank of America or something like that.

I’m just going to say what I want to say and be done with it.

Oh, I will say, I understand from that speech came the quote of the year from Hunter Biden.

I did not have financial relations with that father.

But I think that’ll be going down as something worth pursuing.

I don’t know if that’s an actual quote or not, but it sure seems to be the context of what I’m saying.

See, part of my reaction here is, it’s an excellent line.

I wonder how many listeners have a vivid recall of 1999, or 1998, I guess, to put it in context.

But it’s a great line.

Well, you know, as long as somebody gets it, that’s all that counts.

And as someone else pointed out, you know, press conference words are meaningless.

Deposition under oath and on the record is all that really matters.

Of course, how much clout that has when it actually comes to pass is almost like getting a subpoena or being charged with congressional middle fingering.

It’s just kind of kind of dumb.

Well look I see the uh the meter range I have uh once again uh waving their government supplied Mattel stopwatch warning me it’s time to bring down the festively decorated Bovard curtain of mercy and get up and get out while your holiday shopping time is running out just as well remember you can get it all done in one place punch up jimbovard.com for a link to the Amazon order page you get a case full of last rites the death of America and liberty you’ll not be happy to know there are no age appropriate warning labels

Although throwing in a bottle of aspirin or Pepto-Bismol for your liberal friends might be a good idea.

For the dynamic duo of Christmas cheer get Jim’s Last Rites and add my 50 stories 50 years in radio and a free subscription to Brian Wilson Writes and Substack and you’ll have enough reading entertainment and information to distract you from the repeated playings of the Little Drummer Boy, 12 Days of Christmas, Alvin and the Chipmunks, all the way through tax season.

Assuming we survive the tsunami of holiday sales advertising and a possible flock of political black swans, we’ll be back with another high-colonic episode of The Two and Only next week with our first annual review of 2023 and maybe some courageous speculation on the dreaded arrival of 2024.

For James Bovar, I’m Brian Wilson doing my part patronizing the old Barstool Liquor Store, sponsors of the SEM’s Nostalgic Dwarf Tossing Championships this year.

Thanks for joining us.