673: Conservative Journalist Explains How Media Censorship Hurts Conservative Voices

Brian Nichols  0:17  
Meet legacy pack, making the next generation of conservative leaders within America first agenda. Yeah, let's talk about that. Instead of focusing on winning arguments, we're teaching the basic fundamentals of sales and marketing and how we can use them to win in the world of politics, teaching you how to meet people where they're at on the issues they care about. Welcome to The Brian Nichols Show. Well, happy Thursday there, folks run with tear on The Brian Nichols Show. And thank you for joining us on of course, another phone build episode. I am as always your humble host. Joining us live from our Stratus ip Studios here in lovely Eastern Indiana. Don't let cyber attacks or outdated Business Technology put your company at risk. Learn more at Brian Nichols show.com forward slash Stratus I pee? Well, 2022 Did it go the way that Republicans conservatives thought it would we've had that conversation many times during the show, we started out like first couple hours after election day it was threat level midnight, fire everywhere. Everybody's freaking out. Fast forward a month or so. We said hey, it didn't look too bad. We had our good friend Ted Harvey in the show saying hey, maybe Republicans taking control of Congress. And actually it was a smaller majority than we thought maybe that actually ends up being a good thing. So here we are now in 2023. And we are planning for Yes, 2024. It is right around the corner. I know Believe it or not for folks, we're already getting ready to have that conversation. So to have that conversation. Joining us today talking about the legacy pack, which is trying to help bring in America first agenda to conservative candidates here for the GOP. Angie Wong is joining us Angie Waldman, The Brian Nichols Show. Hey, thank

Angie Wong  1:57  
you, Brian, for having me.

Brian Nichols  1:59  
Absolutely. Thank you for joining us and looking forward to learning more about legacy PAC. But first, do us a favor, introduce yourself to the audience in your history here in conservative politics.

Angie Wong  2:10  
Sure, thank you. I'm Angie Wong, I am president of legacy pack, where a brand new pack, we're here to support the next generation of conservative leaders, and also to support and hold the line for Donald J. Trump. And hopefully, we're gonna get him in for 2024. We have already spoken to his team, and we're making all the ducks, you know, lineup for him. So we're going state by state as we did in 2022. For the midterms, we're looking for great conservative leaders, real leaders, not just show horses, but work horses as well, to kind of lead us forward because you know, what, Congress is getting old, we need to kind of upgrade them a little bit. And I think we did that a little bit. In the midterms, we didn't get everyone that we wanted to, but you don't want a lot of them are were first time runners. And you know, the game of campaigning is name face recognition. So I think we're gonna have, you're gonna see second time runners, you're gonna see a new and improved and refined candidates list. The first round was a little messy, but that's how it always is. But I think this round for 24 and even 23, we're gonna have some really incredible candidates, and we're hoping to handhold them into Congress, like we had, you know, for a few of our freshmen, members of Congress today. So, yeah, we know, we look forward to doing it again, and 24 and 26, and 28. And however long we're around.

Brian Nichols  3:38  
Well, and let's talk about the values of legacy pack, which is to the the teaser I mentioned in the intro, the America first agenda, that thought process carrying into candidates, as we're looking here into 2024. And I'm glad you did mention 2023 Because I think, you know, we do forget the local elections, which is why hence I did write an e book, by the way, folks, a free ebook, which is how to win your local election. Learn More over on our website, Brian Nichols. show.com. But that's a different conversation for a different day for legacy pack. Let's talk about the America first agenda that you're focusing on. What does an America First agenda look like it? How would you articulate that to our audience?

Angie Wong  4:14  
Oh, well, I mean, it's, you know, President Trump really did lay the line for everything that is America for us. I mean, it should be self explanatory. But again, it always is putting American values first, putting in the church first, and putting in our kids first, we've forgotten about so many of those things. And now because we've kind of fell out of line for the last two years, you see where we are in America. So we need to bring it back. We cannot focus necessarily just we can't allocate all of our money to the Ukraine, or to China or to anywhere else. We really have to kind of look at look after our own citizens, because we're all hurting a lot and not just with inflation, but I think every single aspect that I used to know growing up here in the US So it's kind of been messed around with. So we're here to put all the parts back together. I've got kids, my colleagues have kids, we want our kids to kind of benefit from the way we grew up in the 80s, and 90s, and have those same opportunities. And unfortunately, so much of that has gone away. I mean, I'm not trying to be like romantic and like romanticizing the 80s and 90s. But look, we had a pretty good, right, we had decades without war, we had almost like, too much money, we have a lot of money, you know, spreading around the US. And there was a lot of people buying stuff. And those are good times, right. And now we're kind of everyone's cutting back eggs are $1 apiece, you know, and it's sad that we fell so fast, so hard.

Brian Nichols  5:47  
That I guess what's the future look like for America, if we keep down the current path, right, let's not look towards a positive future, yet. We'll paint that picture later in the episode. But let's talk about what road we're currently going down. That's two years now into a Biden administration. And it's been rocky to say the least. And with that now, we finally do see a little bit of a split in Congress. But I'm just gonna be honest with you, Angie, back when President Trump was in office in 2018, we had Republican controlled President Republican controlled Senate and a book and controlled Congress, you didn't get too much done. So I guess that does speak to your point of also the importance of your pack. But currently, if we're going down this path, where a lot of Republicans just seem to be kind of, we're truly rhinos, Republicans in name only just getting there are next to other names, we can get reelected. And then we have more Democrats just continuing to push the spending, push the social policies continuously, further to the left. Where do we end up?

Angie Wong  6:45  
I know, well, so that's what happened, right? We just experienced two, three years of almost full democratic control. And what we've seen is I would never balance my checkbook this way. But we've seen Americans just give out money. Like everywhere, everything is a handout. And unfortunately, it's gotten to be to the point where not even my children, but my grandchildren will be paying for today's bill. And you know, now we're talking about raising the debt ceiling. You know, I saw Rick Scott the other day, and I said, Please vote no on that. Please rally up your guys do not vote yes. On this one. Because we can't, can't keep raising it. I mean, I know, I know why he may want to but at the same time, I think they're kind of shorter term mitigations to not raise the debt ceiling. We, we have the pendulum swinging the other way right now, which is a little bit more to the right. And I have to imagine because it's been on the left so far, it's gonna go really right. And now I think in the next two years, you're gonna see kind of something happening in the middle. Right. There's been a lot of infighting, there's been a lot of like, just big personalities and name callings and whatnot. I think everyone is moving on. I think people are growing up from this. You felt the exhaustion? I don't know if you did, Brian, but I felt the exhaustion when the House Speaker vote was dragging on until like day four, day five, you know, at some point, you know, both sides has, they have to give a little bit. And I think now you're seeing Okay, so we went from left now we're going to the right. And if history repeats itself, it's going to go somewhere in the middle. And, you know, again, maybe there might be a time instability. But, you know, what we're going to be seeing with this new Congress with this new Republican House, is you're gonna be seeing a ton of investigations. Right. So that's what we have to look forward to. And 23. We've already seen from the left all the witch all the ways they're going to massage the narrative and say, Well, you didn't see that that didn't happen, or, you know, or push a certain narrative before, you know, conclusions can even be made before investigations can even be started. So we're, we're monitoring that. But I think that is the pressure point that we have to hit whether or not we're going to have full investigations on all the items that the America first agenda has on January 6, on big tech corruption on all those things. I'm not sure I'd love to see you know, Hunter Biden's laptop fully be exposed. And also, you know, the the cover up behind that. But I think now, the pressure points are being pushed and I you know, we may be able to backchannels some of the things that we want from the American first agenda that way versus a full blown investigation that I think we're all hoping for. I

Brian Nichols  9:45  
made the cringe face towards Hunter Biden's laptop because do we really want to see more on there who got more of those just lovely pictures? But no, I hear your point. I'm just being silly. So let's talk about now too, I guess and this has been and something that we've been talking about here in the show, and this is how do we, in this is, from your perspective, address the top of mind issues that folks are currently dealing with day to day, you mentioned a few of them, but beyond just saying, Hey, I hear you, how do we now bring solutions to the table and make the problem actually go away? Or at least go towards the right direction? What's the best way to communicate that because sometimes these processes can take weeks, months, years, so it's not as simple of just just waving a magic wand and making everything better. It's gonna take time. So how do we do that?

Angie Wong  10:36  
Well, I think it's a lot of is happening organically, you have people who are apolitical, for a very long time, if not their entire lives, having to wake up and do something, you have moms, all of a sudden going to PTA meetings and school board meetings and raising their voices. Right. And you have parents now becoming, you know, elected officials running for public office. So people are waking up, because guess what, a lot of us we depend on the public schools, we depend on our police, we depend on all those things, those wonderful things that the government does give us. And we didn't appreciate it until it was taken away from us this past year. And we didn't understand how much we needed it in our bedrock to really kind of grow within our own legacy and our own families. And so I think that's what's motivated a lot of and woken up a lot of apolitical people. You know, last year was all about the political fight about winning the midterms, I think this year, although there are still very important races, both state and federal, there are still some congressional seats up for grabs in places like Mississippi. I think what legacy pack will be focusing on is the media and culture wars that are happening, because what I'm seeing now, with at&t Taking down Newsmax, as well as OA N, two channels that I love, and I'm on from time to time, you know, I see that being a real issue. And I think the media war and cultural Wars is something that we've always kind of shied away from, we knew it was a problem. We just didn't know how to deal with it. But I'm here to tell you, we're going to deal with it. Because if all those channels and all your ways of communications are censored, well, this is a real problem. This is something that I educate candidates that I work with on is right now you have the government, all the government systems being run through an AI learning system, right. So Google and other vendors are now providing AI learning. And if conservative voices are taken down now, it means that we are being written out of the future language. And that is something near and dear to my heart, because I do understand this i 20 years ago fought for AI engineers, to or AI companies to hire more women engineers, because there's a sensitivity as you're doing AI learning. And there's also coding that, you know, again, a lot of this is an it's an art. But I see AI applying almost the same kind of advocacy for conservatives now. Because look what's happening on YouTube, you can't say certain keywords without being taken down. You are now self censoring yourself on Twitter, on Facebook, and everywhere else, because you're afraid they're going to take down your entire account. And so whether it's self censoring, or the big tech censoring for you, the conservative voice has well lessened. Maybe not more not quiet. Clearly, you're not, I'm not. But is that enough to really echo throughout, you know, all the AI learning that's being taking place right now. And I can go on and on about this, but I think that's why we're you know, there was such a big push for pronouns, and all these like special words and other words that you can't use. I mean, I went to the PTA meeting, which stands for Parent Teacher Association. I couldn't use the word parent, because I don't know that's a trigger word. I don't know it was a bad word. So you know, all of this has been rewritten on purpose because big tech understands that in the future these words will have different meanings and that's that's the goal here and I want more and more people to understand that

Brian Nichols  14:26  
can you do us a favor and just go back to the Newsmax and O N story with at&t Just fill the viewers in who aren't aware?

Angie Wong  14:34  
Yes, so this week, at&t Who owns Direct TV took down Newsmax overnight. Newsmax was in a renewal negotiation with a TNT and direct TV. From what I understand from people I've spoken to on the inside, it wasn't much of a negotiation. Their their essentially their contract was coming up, and both sides just didn't reach out to each other to renew it. And so now they've completely just let it lapse. That was about 35 million viewers who woke up this week and could not watch a rather last week and could not watch Newsmax. And that is the problem, right. Because if that is your go to channel for your information for your news for the way you live your life and you know how you make decisions during the day, based on headlines in the news, you're not going to get that anymore. Now we saw the same thing happening with one America News Network, which is o n a few months ago, maybe about a year ago, they were also taken down by direct TV, followed by Verizon, which you know, shrunk their viewership from millions to 1000s, within a few weeks. And now, you know, you would have to essentially go to fringe platforms were really you know, or subscribe to them to get that content. And that was, you know, a growing conservative news network.

Brian Nichols  16:06  
So the future right of America of the world, I guess, depending on now let's look at the positive outlook. Right, we did the negative we keep down this path, what things might look like, now let's look at what things could look like if we were to take a a pivot right towards the the positive. What do you envision that looking like? And obviously, how could folks get involved? Let's say they want to learn more and take part in a legacy pack.

Angie Wong  16:35  
Right? Well, thank you for that. And like we I can, we can talk about all the problems we have all day long, but you know the truth. The truth is the future is red. And I really feel that because I've traveled to 17 Different states, I've talked to candidates, I'm seeing what's going around, I'm seeing random people come up to me and where you know where I am, whether it's a convention, or a bus tour, or some sort of election rally, and they are just like lit up. And I know they're motivated, they don't have direction. And I don't know if I'm the right person to give direction I'm hoping our elected officials will be I'm happy to be a voice. I want multiple voices out there. Because everyone's looking for an answer. But here's the good news, we discovered where the problems are. And I have to thank Elon Musk for buying Twitter, because that really opened up all those things that were feeling like well, I know I didn't write something wrong on Twitter, why am I a Russian bot all of a sudden, and, you know, we're now understanding what the mechanics of that censorship look like. And we got a taste of it. And I think that was a very valuable two, three years that we've had, where we had to stay home, where we were censored, where things that didn't sound right, were kind of being told to us like you didn't see that with your eyes. But that's, you know, what we're telling you to believe we got to taste what that would look like. And that's the future that certain Democrats would want us to have. I think people rejected that because they know themselves. And they're like, No, the sky is blue, I'm pretty sure because I'm looking at it with my own eyes. Please don't tell me it's like, you know, all these other things. And I think people woke up to it. So I think what we can do is understand what this is that we're in, and then push it forward, whether you know, you're you're motivated by what's happening in your schools, or what's happening in your local county, or what's happening federally or for me, my background has been journalism, and a little bit about myself is that I went overseas, I was a foreign correspondent, and also a an assistant editor, news editor for South China Morning Post. And when I had started there, and this is a newspaper, a very big newspaper in Hong Kong, and China. It was owned by Rupert Murdoch. And a little bit after I started, it was sold to a Chinese family and then to Jack Ma, who owns Alibaba. Now, when Jack Ma took over that newspaper. It was clear it was a propaganda paper. Luckily, I had left long before, but I had many colleagues who stayed on. And essentially they were their bosses were the CCP. So I saw a perfectly fine respectable newspaper. go from that to something that you know, you can you can write op eds, and you can write, you know, the real news with into a propaganda paper. And that was in the early 2000s. When I moved back to the US. I saw the same thing happening to the New York Times, The Washington Post, and LA Times, USA, all of those and it broke my heart because these were the news publications that I idolized growing up and to see them I'm no longer practice journalism but activism and still have a large audience really believing like this is clear. Well reported multisource news. It, I couldn't figure it out. I just couldn't figure it out. Because I would never allow for most of the stories and headlines to come out the way I saw in 2015 2016. I haven't even looked at these papers anytime, like, in the recent years, but it was clear that you know, these trusted sources, were well lying to you. And I'll say that because they took very vague, I guess, Twitter posts. Now we're finding out right with Hamilton 68. I don't know if you're following that story. They'll take a fake Twitter source and put it as a headline, and then sell it to you like, Yeah, this is what's happening. And now we see the whole chain of command in that. And I love this story, because it's the best kind of gotcha journalism that I've seen in a long time. So thank you, Elon Musk, for doing all of this. Thank you, Matt, to leap for exposing all of this. I mean, you guys deserve Nobel Peace Prizes.

Brian Nichols  21:13  
$44 billion, very well spent. Well, that being said, too, and as we go towards final thoughts for today, I'll kick things off. This is exactly why we've been having folks in the show like you Angie, like Ben Swan, from sovereign for like Tony personas, formerly of Huffington Post, because we want to hear the behind the scenes what has happened, where has media gone? Where are we? Where was it? And to your point, it used to be, quote, trusted, right? There were standards that were maintained. Ben Swann talked about this, there were standards. And then all of a sudden, much like you, he just looked around. And he realized that the standards that he had been holding to what he was holding himself to were no longer being held by his his co workers. And that speaks, I think, to exactly why we have to do what we're doing not just here in the greater conservative, libertarian liberty, movement, whatever you want to call, whatever it is, we find ourselves in here today in 2023. But also, we're doing here in The Brian Nichols Show. And in alternative forms of media starting things like Liberty pack in our legacy pack, excuse me, it is important for us to start to find ways to make things better to be the change that we wish to see in the world because frankly, I'm tired of it. I don't want to constantly have this back and forth where it's to your point, you know, one side versus the other, who's trying to misinform the other side like this, the truth is what will win and it's on us to be the truth tellers and to like lead people to solutions that once they see it, they can't unsee it. So that's my final thoughts. What do you have for us for your final thoughts today? And of course, Angie, where can folks go ahead find you to continue the conversation today?

Angie Wong  22:54  
Well, I love your final thought, I'm gonna echo on that. I will say that probably one of the best things to happen the last few days is that a TNT and direct TV kicked off Newsmax because now I'm thinking, we need to own this space, your space Brian podcast space, we should move all of the conservative Republican economy over to this type of platforming. And to get our content and news that way you wish to say you know what, they're just going to keep doing this to us or keep censoring all the channels that we enjoy all our new sources and revenue streams, right? Let's just not play their game. Let's play a brand new game that's smarter. So I am so thankful for your programming. And I know it's a big time commitment for you to continue doing these shows. And I want to keep supporting more and more podcasts like yours. For me, you know, we would love to invite you if you're in CPAC. This year, we're going to be Washington DC, we're going to have a great congressional event, where we have lots of freshmen congressmen that we help get in and during midterms are going to come back and speak at our event at the University Club on March 2. And that's the second night of CPAC we would love to invite you and all your viewers there, please reach out to me at Legacy hyphen PAC pac.org. That's legacy hyphen. pac.org. Thank you so so much for letting me get all that out.

Brian Nichols  24:21  
No, absolutely. And we'll make it easy for folks to all the links in the show notes. So like I do click the artwork and your podcast catcher if you're one of the 99% of folks who are joining us on the podcast version of the show we'll bring you right over to Brian Nichols show.com where you can find yesterday's episode you can also find all 673 other episodes I know right? No wonder I've been getting so tired. But also with that being said folks if you enjoy today's episode please do me a favor do Angie a favor go ahead and give today's episode a share. Tell your surely at Bean Nichols Liberty All links will be included in the show notes you can go ahead and find Angie plus you can find the video version of this show available on YouTube Odyssey and on rumble wherever it is you want consume your video content we are there just do me a favor hit that subscribe button and little notification bell so you don't miss a single time we go alive and otherwise folks who want to get in touch with me email me Brian at Brian Nichols show.com And by the way, you want to get some awesome at Liberty swag where we have awesome stuff like our good ideas don't require for snapback we have backpacks, garden signs, T shirts and mark over at our shop go to Brian Nichols show.com link for the shop there on the homepage. That's all we have for you. Oh beyond that use CO T BNS to get 10% off. Brian Nichols signing off here on The Brian Nichols Show for Angie Huang. We'll see you tomorrow. Thank you

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