 Welcome back to Free Media TV. Robby, what's up next on the docket? Well, Amber, President Trump is facing fire from the American press after he said Vladimir Putin probably killed famed dissenter Alexei Navalny. Here is that clip. Do you believe Vladimir Putin has some responsibility for the death of Alexei Navalny? I don't know, but perhaps. I mean, possibly I could say probably. I don't know. He's a young man, so statistically he'd be alive for a long time, right? If you'd go by the insurance numbers, he'd be alive for another 40 years. Now CNN's Jim Shudeau railed against Trump for those remarks in a tweet, writing, quote, not a word of criticism for Putin. Hmm. The Washington Post Aaron Blank also joined in, tweeting that Trump still won't blame Putin for Navalny's death. According to Insider, quote, Trump couldn't bring himself to condemn Putin for Alexei Navalny's death while according to Mediaite, Trump delivered a head-spinningly awkward answer to new question about Putin. So you did hear it there where I think Trump clearly said he can't make a definitive evaluation, but possibly or even probably Putin was involved. That wasn't full-throated enough, I guess, for the media. That's actually one of the most responsible things that Trump has probably ever said, which is, you know, I haven't seen the intelligence. We can't say for sure. I think some people were claiming that he had some kind of heart problem. Yeah, that sounds convenient for Putin. Of course. And, you know, general consensus is that, again, Putin probably did it, which is exactly what Trump said. Like, I don't know what these people want. Yeah. I totally believe in being, you know, cautious. We haven't seen the intelligence either. Now, he was wrongly imprisoned. Navalny was. He's a dissenter. Putin is an authoritarian who has jailed political dissenters who has a history of assassinating or causing to have died people who are inconvenienced. So it doesn't take an enormous leap to imagine that this is what happened here. And, you know, he was, even if for some reason it actually was like an underlying health problem, he's being held unlawfully in bad conditions. Like, you know, Julian Assange's health right now is really bad. And if he were to die in prison just because of the bad situation, it would still be like attributable in some sense to the bad and unfair and unjust circumstances he's been put in. So, you know, I totally think that's a fair claim. You know, I've heard some denial on the Putin involvement front from, you know, alternative or contrarian media voices, which sometimes I agree with on foreign policy. But, like, people who think, you know, the CIA killed JFK, who think Jeffrey Epstein definitely didn't kill himself. But, like, there's no way Putin could have had this guy killed. Okay, you're a contrarian up until a point. That's a good point. What we really want to talk about was the media reaction. So here they are. Like, what does he want to say? And we want a more restrained foreign policy, or I do at least, and I think a lot of Americans do. And, you know, in the context of the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war, bringing down the temperature would be a good thing so that there can actually be peace. And, you know, people act like Trump is just this puppet of Putin because what he won't call him a dictator to his face, he won't have this antagonistic relationship with him, but, like, his greater antagonism with not just Putin, but Xi Jinping as well, who I think is absolutely a dictator, not questioning that. But we want our leaders to, like, get along with them enough to achieve world, like, better global peace and security for the country is the goal, not just, like, knee-jerk antagonism. So if you want to play this a little bit diplomatically for the sake of having a better relationship with the country, that is actually what the American people want. Yeah, and the Biden administration, I think, put it correctly, when they said that regardless of how exactly Navalny was killed that regardless, Putin is responsible because of the fall of Putin. Yeah, I think so, which I think is exactly right. That's probably the only time you'll catch me on this show praising President Joe Biden. But you're right about the foreign policy aspect of this. And I think a lot of people misunderstand Trump's approach to foreign policy because, I mean, frankly, they don't want to understand it and they view a lot of these conflicts in, like, good versus bad, black and white, good versus evil, which is kind of how Nikki Haley views the world, which is why we don't like her. And so Trump, when he approaches these dictators, that's what they are, he is generally quite amenable to having good relations with them on a personal level. But then when you see the way that he talks about foreign policy either on his social account or ex-account or the way that he actually crafts policy, he's actually quite tough on these countries, whether it's starting a trade war with China or putting massive sanctions on Russian officials. The whole point is that you don't deliberately antagonize when you're meeting a guy face to face or trying to conduct diplomacy because that's not good for fostering peace. I frankly wish Donald Trump's foreign policy had been as restrained as he had advertised it to be and as restrained. I mean, the media acts like restraint is a bad thing in this context and I actually wish it were true. I think, unfortunately, he's gotten, when he was in office, he got rolled sometimes by advisors who are much more hawkish. But we shouldn't skip over the basic point of like, okay, where are the fact-checkers jumping? Where are the misinformation cops and czars? We just read from people in the media who said, who just denied what Trump literally said, saying it was possibly probably Putin and they said he wouldn't condemn Putin, he wouldn't attribute Navalny's death to Putin. That's just not true. So where are the correctors? But those people who do corrections, you never have them fact-checking the media for this reason. Well, and let's throw in the fact that there's a massive, basically, funding scheme for these misinformation fact-checkers coming from the big tech companies. I mean, minus X, I guess, at this point, but Facebook has this massive fact-checking program where they basically pay outlets to attach labels to news stories that they find inconvenient. And it's conveniently that the only media outlets who get most of that funding are ones who are in bed with the sort of establishment narratives that are trying to push out alternative candidates and so I don't think it's surprising at all that you don't see fact-checkers on this, both for ideological and monetary reasons. Facebook's fact-checkers are uniquely pernicious, I have to admit. We have tangled with them here at Reason. On an article I wrote about a mass mandate in schools not showing much difference in terms of preventing COVID outcomes. It wasn't unique to me, it was just a summary of an Atlantic article. It got suppressed on Facebook, they attached a label over it by this third-party fact-checking organization and I contacted the organization and said, you've caused the post to be false because they said the claim mass don't work is false. Well, I didn't make that claim. I said, this study shows a mass mandate did not produce a better effect. They're like, oh, you're right, and they changed their mind. These are the people who are supposed to be better than us, the people who can be trusted with the facts, are really just hideous, activist, ideologue-optical organizations. Yeah, it's really disturbing. And then there was a fact-checking organization that I believe it was when the Washington Post, Taylor Lorenz, was going after Libs of TikTok that a lot of her claims about Libs of TikTok came from this disinformation organization that was funded by the German government and so you literally have foreign election interference producing media companies to docks private citizens. Well, and that goes on to show that some of it, and not the situation I was saying with Facebook, but for some of the social media companies, even Twitter under the previous management, I mean, this is being litigated at the Supreme Court right now, were under threat, sort of, to do this at the behest of the government and these independent organizations that have government funding. So sometimes, I've actually changed my mind some, I feel like a lot of the content moderators, they had a gun to their head to a much greater degree than I appreciated a couple of years ago before all this information came to light. Yeah, it's an important point and I was watching some of the arguments and talking about it with some of my legal friends who, you know, actually understand the legal context here, but, you know, we're talking about the fact that the defense maybe didn't do, or the plaintiffs rather didn't do a great job of demonstrating that there was an explicit threat by the government, but I mean, my sort of posture on this is that there's always an implicit threat, right? Because, I mean, first of all, the Libertarian Outs is gonna love me for this. The government has a monopoly on legal force, right, against people. Correct. And they also are in charge of regulating all of these companies. They just advanced a bill to divest TikTok from its parent company. They have had Mark Zuckerberg and all of these other big tech guys come in to testify to Congress. You have senators like Josh Hawley advancing bills to limit the ability of minors to access apps as well as trying to protect data or prevent the sale of data. With all of this going on, if a government then comes to you and says, hey, I don't really like this post that you have on there, guys, any sane person is gonna say, oh, crap, if I don't take this down, they might regulate me. Yeah, I was really hoping the Supreme Court was gonna decide that any government person threatening or just suggesting they might do any regulation violates our free speech rights, but maybe the court isn't ready to go that far, sadly, for this Libertarian. All right, stick around. We'll have more free media TV right after this.