Jim Jordan Threatens Legal Action Against Fact Checkers

Jim Jordan is leading the charge in the House of Representatives to get to the bottom of fact checkers that call out misinformation, with Republicans claiming that this unfairly targets conservatives (no surprise there.) But several of the researchers that are being targeted have now said that they and their universities are being threatened with legal action by Jordan's Committee for not responding quickly enough to subpoenas. This is beyond insane, and it shows you who the real censorship pushers are, as Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins explains.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

It turns out that Jim Jordan, as we talked about a couple, uh, uh, weeks ago, maybe even a couple months ago, Jim Jordan of the House Judiciary Committee, uh, some time ago, sent letters to fact checkers and misinformation identifiers at colleges, universities, and think tanks all across the country. And what he told these people was, Hey, you better send me. And he actually subpoenaed some of them. Send me all of your material. Let me know who is working for you, identify these humans, tell me who's paying you to do this, and show me your methods for identifying what is and is not misinformation. Well, this week, two journalists who of course have been subjected to these requests from Jim Jordan, uh, these unconstitutional requests from Jim Jordan, I must add, uh, because they're a clear violation of the First Amendment of the United States. But anyway, two of these journalists, uh, Stephen Lee Meyers and Shira Frankl wrote in the New York Times that some of these individuals and institutions that are engaging in the fact checking in the looking for misinformation, they have now been threatened with legal action by Jim Jordan and his committee.

Let me read you what they wrote. The House Judiciary Committee, which in January came under Republican Majority Control, has sent scores of letters and subpoenas to the researchers, only some of which have been made public. So we don't even know the extent of what they've sent. It has threatened legal action against those who have not responded quickly or fully enough. So it being the House Judiciary Committee under the control of Jim Jordan is now threatening legal action against these journalists, against these institutions, because they're not turning over the names of the people involved. They're not turning over information about funding.

And why does Jim Jordan want all this? Well, because he says that identifying misinformation is actually silencing conservative voices. And he says it as so many other Republicans do without a hint of irony. Like, how dare you call out misinformation? You have any idea what that does to conservative media? Yeah. Do, do you have any idea what you're admitting to? Because you're admitting that all of conservative media's misinformation. You're not wrong. You're totally not wrong. But I don't know, it seems like it's, it's a very dumb thing that a dumb person would do to admit it out loud. But luckily, your base is even dumber than you are. So they don't pay attention to crap like this, and they're just gonna go along their happy little lives reading misinformation because they're too stupid to know any better. And they are like, let's not pussyfoot around it. They're

Stupid. These people are stupid. But anyway, they continue. In the New York Times piece targets include Stanford, Clemson, and New York universities, and the University of Washington, the Atlantic Council, the German Marshall Fund, and the National Conference on Citizenship, all nonpartisan, non-governmental organizations in Washington, the Wikimedia Foundation in San Francisco. And Graphica a company that researches disinformation online. Now republicans also tell us they're doing this not just to protect conservative media, but because you know, the censorship regime is outta control.