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ICE just bought a massively powerful new surveillance system that can monitor every single phone in your neighborhood, track the movements of those devices and their owners over time, and follow you home from work and to other locations.

Joe Cox at 404 Media broke the story of these new ICE systems called Tangles and Webloc. He joined me to break down how this new ICE tech works, what these systems do, why the online advertising market is secretly dangerous, and how we can fight back.

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Until recently, Ashley St Clair was a star in the conservative influencer world. She built a large and powerful following by leaning into culture-war rhetoric and boosting MAGA policies. She worked for Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA and gained national attention by publishing an anti trans Children’s book. She was welcomed into the upper echelons of right-wing media and activism, and her proximity to power on the right deepened when she began a relationship with Elon Musk, who she later had a child with.

But lately, Ashley’s public posture has begun to shift. After Grok, Elon Musk’s AI chatbot, began to flood the internet with nonconsensual deepfake content undressing Ashley and countless other women (and children), she became increasingly outspoken in her criticisms of Musk and unchecked AI development.

In her posts, Ashley has also suggested that some of her other earlier views on things like trans rights, have changed.

I sat down with Ashley to talk about how she got her start in conservative influencing, Maga 1.0 vs MAGA 2.0, the right wing internet pipeline, Elon Musk, and how her positions on issues like LGBTQ rights, healthcare, and immigration have changed.

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Every week it feels like Congress cooks up a new bad internet law. This week we're diving deep into the SCREEN Act. Framed as a child safety bill, this law is an insidious trojan horse for mass censorship and surveillance.

It's been getting a lot of traction thanks to its backing from extreme far right groups and the religious right, and Democrats are now signing on board claiming the law will protect kids online.

In reality, this law could end up forcing you to scan your face to access websites, ban VPNs, and more. To break it all down Michael Stabile, director of public policy at the Free Speech Coalition, joined me. Mike has been fighting these censorship laws on the state level and has been in the rooms in state legislatures where a lot of these debates are taking place.

We get nitty gritty into how the SCREEN Act works, what it does, how it came to fruition, what sets it apart from some of these other child safety laws, and why we need to band together to kill it!

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Since Trump took office, ICE has rapidly transformed itself from an under the radar agency into an influencer-style media machine, churning out non-stop viral videos of tactical operations and immigration raids.

ICE's ability to dominate the internet has come to serve as a blueprint for other Trump administration agencies, and their relentless focus on virality is already reshaping public opinion on immigrants.

Drew Harwell is a reporter at The Washington Post and he recently published an investigation into ICE's social media blitz. He joins me to:

• Reveal the inside information he uncovered about how ICE's internet meme team operates

• Expose what ICE's internal chat logs reveal about their approach to the internet

• The Gen Z clip farming operation ICE is employing

• Break down how a previously under the radar federal law enforcement group became an “influencer-style media machine”

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<<< Free Speech Friday!!! >>>

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A few months ago, the UK's Online Safety Act went into effect, causing chaos across the internet. The UK government has censored information about police violence, silenced protesters, banned the subreddit for War Crimes, and effectively removed dozens of forums for everything from new motherhood advice to alcoholic anonymous treatment communities.

While the big tech companies have rolled over and complied with the law, a small, unlikely group of platforms is fighting back. These platforms include Kiwi Farms, Gab, and 4Chan, and they're waging a legal battle that could reshape the entire global internet.

Preston Byrne is the lawyer representing these platforms in their fight against the UK government and the EU's Digital Services Act, a similar "online safety" law that's led to significant censorship. A fierce free speech defender, Byrne is making the legal case that UK and EU regulators do not have the right to censor American's speech in America.

He joined me to discuss the global battle he's undertaken and how some of the worst websites online might just save the internet for all of us.

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Over the past few months, a 19 year old Looksmaxxing livestreamer called Clavicular has become inescapable online, collaborating with an ever growing cadre of massive influencers and conservative online figures. Just last week, he made headlines for running a man over with his Cybertruck on Christmas eve.

It's rare to see someone blow up so quickly near overnight, but I think Clavicular's rise reveals a lot about the current state of online culture and the growing influence of a Nick Fuentes-adjacent black-pilled nihilistic zoomer ideology that seems to be spreading across the internet.

Jarvis Johnson is a YouTuber and friend of mine, and we have been texting about Clavicular's rise for months. So I brought him on to go deep on who exactly Clavicular is, where he came from, how he blew up, and what his rise reveals about the state of the internet and Zoomer politics.

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Why has everyone become so obsessed with game shows where the losers die!? Over the past decade, “The Hunger Games” became a multibillion-dollar media franchise. Netflix’s “Squid Game” took off, and MrBeast's challenges are growing increasingly deadly.

Teddy Brown is a freelance writer for the New Yorker. He wrote a fantastic review of The Running Man, a movie starring Glen Powell where game show contestants must survive 30 days while being hunted down by professional assassins.

He has been studying our obsession with deadly game shows. He joined me to chart the rise of deadly entertainment and discuss what the shifting stakes of game shows reveals about the current state of culture, the national mood, and where entertainment is heading.

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>>> Free Speech Friday <<<

Across the U.S. parents and lawmakers are calling for tech companies to verify users' ages online. They frame these efforts as a smart, reasonable, and harmless way to keep kids safe. But that's not what age verification does!!!

Age verification efforts are a massive threat to privacy, freedom, and the very idea of an open web. No one knows this better than Eric Goldman. He is the associate dean for research at Santa Clara University School of Law and co-Director of the High Tech Law Institute.

He recently wrote a fantastic paper on age verification, soon to be published in the Stanford Technology Law Review. Today he's joining me for Free Speech Friday to talk about how age verification works online and how it's all ultimately a trojan horse for government control, surveillance, and censorship.

(This episode originally ran in June)

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