Welcome. Welcome, welcome! Ed Martin here on the Pro America Report. A lot to cover today. In a few moments, we’ll talk with Ryan Girdusky, who is a well known commentator. He’s written a book on national populism. And we’ll talk about that. It came out about a year and a half ago. He’s got a Substack on the subject, natpop.substack.com, but more interesting, and we’ll get to it with him, I hope, is he’s been backing people in races for school board. He set up what I think is the only, maybe it’s not the only anymore, super PAC aimed at helping candidates running for school board. And he’s been winning a bunch of races. I think they won more than ten races in all of Texas last week or the week before. Texas has a huge spring election season for all those non what do you call it? Non state wide or non state level positions, a school board and all. There’s lots and lots of counties. We’ll talk with Ryan in a few moments.
We’ll also talk today with a very interesting man. He and his wife started a business a few years ago. His name is James Staake, and he runs a company called Your American Flag Store. And if you look at the website, it describes it as partly art, that’s his wife mostly and partly carpentry. He makes wooden flags. And so really interesting guy. And he’s been basically blocked on all the social media, shut down because he put up a Trump flag. That’s when all his troubles started. And he’s broken through that now partly by the good luck of having gotten on Fox, I think it was. But then he’s now capitalizing on that by saying he’s going to speak out and make sure everybody knows what is going on. So really interesting guy. We’ll talk with him in a few moments.
But first, let’s talk about what the Narrative Machine is and how the possibility of changing the dynamic is happening. So remember the Narrative Machine, which I talk about so often, it’s my version of my way of describing who I see the key players are in telling us what the truth is. So I call it big tech, big media and big government combined to make the Narrative Machine. So, for example, in this case, you have big government. Let’s do an example. Right now the Narrative Machine is trying desperately to force on the American people the story, the narrative that the reversal of Roe v. Wade is going to be a disaster for women. It’s going to be a disaster for America. It’s just going to be the worst thing ever cause they’re going to be making all kinds of problems. Now what does it look like?
Well, big government in the form of the President, United States and members of Congress are saying things like, if you ban abortion, bad things will happen. Of course, already that’s a lie. There’s no ban of abortion in the reversal of Roe v. Wade. There may be in States. And so the big government point is, oh, my gosh, look at what could happen with people like Joe Biden, Chuck Schumer and others.
Big media is out there covering it. We talked about it yesterday. I think it was on the show. I was watching the Sunday shows with Chuck Todd. And Chuck Todd is covering the idea of criminalizing abortion. That’s not on the table with the decision at Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court. It’s not what’s going on. And then Big Tech, of course, is pushing their message right along with it. Now, it’s not my favorite example, the Narrative Machine, but it’s in the news right now. So I’m happy to have it be there. So where are the signs of hope that there could be a change?
Well, the largest sign is Elon Musk buying Twitter because Elon Musk has bought Twitter. And he said things like they should have never silenced the Hunter Biden laptop. Twitter suspended the New York Post back three weeks before the election in 2020. Now, he said that if he takes over Twitter, when he takes over Twitter, he thinks that Trump being kicked off a Twitter was a mistake. And he even went so far as saying it was a mistake because there was no way you were going to silence the President. It should have been some kind of maybe a temporary ban or something. that said, I’ll put a hold, but not a full ban.
Now, the interesting thing Elon Musk may get he may get the credit even when the credit is not needed. Trump has said he won’t go back on Twitter. He’s going to stay over on his own social media company, Truth Social. And Musk acknowledges that. He said, after all that, we said we’re going to do by silencing his voice. He went and got his own voice. So we’ll see.
But I don’t think Elon Musk is going to please conservatives all the time, because I think he’s going to be about transparency and about wide open. He’s not going to be about silencing the left or trying to manage disinformation from the left. I think he’s going to let it all rip. And I guess the question is going to be how can he balance some of the crazies that will come out and try to say really terrible things and we’ll need to get banned. Right? So it’s going to be interesting. But that’s one sign.
Another sign is actually the growth of some of these alternatives to regular social media and regular media. Dinesh D’Souza launched his movie 2000 Mules on Locals, a subscription platform, and had great success there. He’s also using Rumble. Rumble has gotten very big. It’s a kind of more wide open version of YouTube, not as many rules and not as much throttling back. So there are signs of shoots, as they say, shoots of life bursting through we’ll see.
My own fear is that we’re fighting over Twitter, for example. We’re talking about YouTube.
That’s not the dominant.
The two dominant players in my mind are Amazon and Bezos and what they’re doing to the economy and the other one is Google. Google search dominates our lives. You just cannot tell me. I’ve used DuckDuckGo for a long time recently. Duckduckgo made some dumb mistakes, but I’ve tried to use Duckduckgo. It’s not as good as Google. So Google is controlling search, therefore controlling content that you see. It’s dominant. It’s dominant.
Those two are players like I don’t know how you’re going to manage those and what the details are going to look like. So that’s a little bit on that. That’s what you need to know. Today on the social media, big news is Elon Musk letting Trump back on Twitter and left is going crazy, of course, the right is celebrating and Trump has said he’s not going on to Twitter again. So we’ll see.
All right, we’ll take a break. We’ll come back and talk with James Staake of the youramericanflagstore.com and also touch base with Ryan Girdusky, the commentator and author.
Be right back. Ed Martin here on the Pro America Report. Back in a moment.
