New Year, New Threats to the First Amendment—Why We Fought the American Revolution

0:00 As we sit here in 2026, as we reflect on the American founding, I think it's really important to look these ideas squarely in the face and to come in and tell the Europeans to screw off. Come and get us. That's what we should be doing as Americans. We should be getting in our muscle cars and spinning wheelies around the Europeans, telling them where to stick it. Hey there, friends, fans, and foes of Dad Saves America. John Pole here. And of course, happy new year. Welcome to 2026. And I hope you enjoyed the holidays in as an American a way as this guy.

0:52 You know, people sometimes say that we don't really have a single culture in America, but if ever there was a single video in the internet to summarize the American culture, it might be this one. And I celebrate that because this is also America's birthday year. 250 years ago. As of July, [music] America declared independence from Britain to become its own country. And frankly, for good reason, for reasons that these days just seem to be hitting us in the face every time we open the internet. because um well the rights we've come to cherish as American rights, namely freedom of speech, are almost now exclusively American rights, as flawed as they might be here. Here is a video of a street preacher being approached by the cops in the UK for I guess making people anxious and getting a call in. If you preach in here, it also depends of what you say because you might be um uh you might be committing criminal offenses as well.

2:08 >> You have to be careful what you're saying if you're preaching because you might be committing criminal offenses with your speech. >> For example, give us an example. >> Yeah. If you if you make a if if you make >> if if you make a members of the public >> harassment, alarm, distress. Yeah, >> it's a criminal offense. >> I'm aware of that. >> If you have ouchy words, hurty words in public in the UK, well, the cops come after you.

2:35 >> You going to provide me with the details? Yes or no? >> What are you questioning? >> I need your name and your address. >> Okay. So, can you speak to me? Why do you need these details? >> Pardon? >> Can you speak to Cuz I don't understand. >> Okay. Currently, there's allegation. It's an offense. >> So, what allegation was it, sir? >> Hate crime. >> Hate crime. >> Section public order. >> So, what was said to cause a hate crime, sir?

2:52 >> Homophobic behavior. >> Give me a Give me an example. >> I've not heard anything. I'm not saying I've heard anything. Someone's called us. Okay, it might be completely untrue. It might be true. I do not know. If you don't give me your name and address, I have grounds to arrest you. Google it. It's code of practice. Okay? This is actually not new in the United Kingdom. Going back to 2017, 5,000 people plus were arrested under these speech code laws. But as of 2023 and 2022, the numbers have been over 12,000 people per year have been arrested under the various codes of speech conduct in the United Kingdom. With this volume of arrests, some of them get downright crazy. For example, there was one recent story right before the Christmas holiday in which a woman who had actually been assaulted was subsequently arrested for basically calling the man who assaulted her a hurty word and convicted with a sentence for calling her actual um asalent a hurty word. This is the kind of stuff going on. But it is essentially two-tiered justice because while Christian preachers on the street get accosted, other forms of I would say far more broadly nuisanceoriented behavior don't.

4:17 >> No, no, no. Calm down. What is a criminal? >> Listen to what my colleagues have to stand on the st. >> Listen to what my colleagues are. >> There's no law against standing on the stand. I'm not obstructing the highway. If people want to pass by, they can. So, just in case you're missing this, it's an old man trying to preach from his literal soapbox in the public is being accosted by multiple police officers while another gentleman is essentially broadcasting his voice off Tower Bridge for all to hear whether they want to or not. Um, one gets the cops, the other gets celebrated. I guess that's what's going on in the UK right now. So, you might be thinking, why should I care about this as an American, as an American parent?

5:17 Hey, we're independent. We can have free speech. We have the First Amendment. Well, it turns out that what happens over there comes back to hit us. >> Come in, but you better have a damn good reason for being here. I'm a member of the Free Speech Union and I'm an American citizen. I'll have Elon Musk on you so quick your feet won't touch. >> Something that we believe you've written on Facebook [laughter] has upset someone. >> [clears throat] >> You're here because somebody got upset.

5:42 Is it against the law? Am I being arrested? >> You're not being arrested. >> Then what are you doing here? >> My plan was if you were admitting that it was you who wrote the comment, you could just make an apology to the person. >> I'M NOT APOLOGIZING to anybody. I can tell you that >> the internet is global and global regulations end up impacting American platforms and the American public. Today the commission has issued a fine of €120 million euro to X for breaching the digital services act. This is the first ever fine under the DSA. X has indeed breached its transparency obligation under the DSA and X doesn't provide effective data access for researchers. So, this is the first very substantial fine under the EU's Digital Services Act. And recent reporting has laid out really quite a nefarious story. Quite a um I mean downright I I kind of don't want to say treasonous, but [laughter] it sure seems like treason. It sure seems a little treasonous to me what what this report has laid out.

6:56 Basically, um, the Foundation for Freedom Online has just revealed a lot of information highlighting how the US government under the Biden administration had worked very closely with the European Union to essentially institute a global censorship regime to use this digital services act to compel mostly US-based companies, the companies that provide platforms like YouTube and X and Facebook, you know, the big tech firms to force them into compliance. And I want to call out a couple specific aspects of this because this is where sort of the British and the EU and their attacks on free speech are basically trying to surround us here in America.

7:44 Here's what this report summarizes. So X became the first American platform to be fined under the EU's Digital Services Act, receiving $120 million penalty for allegedly refusing to open its data to disinformation researchers. This is essentially forcing companies to open up their information to government sponsored and governmentfunded essentially censorship systems. This is essentially the legal institution of the Twitter files as actual policy. Uh if if you're familiar with the Twitter files, you know, guest of the show, Michael Shelonburgger has talked all about it.

8:25 Him along with Matt Taibbei are the two people that really led the charge. They laid out how Twitter's censorship on its platform had been guided by internet observatories like Stanford. And the EU has created an entire regime of these kinds of so-called researchers to basically guide them on how to control speech online. You can see this sort of civil society swarm as the article puts it. That's one piece of the puzzle. So this is forcing platforms to essentially expose all of our information to these socalled independent organizations that are all funded by the governments. Um the other thing is it's not a one-time fine. If X doesn't comply, it can be charged up to 5% of the company's worldwide turnover per day. So this is an attempt to truly coersse companies into complying with a global censorship regime or essentially exit the European market, which frankly many of these companies should should just do. If if if from my perspective, this is where, you know, our our brutish President Trump should come in and tell the Europeans to screw off. [laughter] Come and get us. That's what we should be doing as Americans. We should be getting in our muscle cars and spinning wheelies around the Europeans, telling them where to stick it. That's that's that's the simple way to do it. That's the that's the American way I'd like to see. But there is I think it's important as we start this year and as we look out over our oceans at the threats that are surrounding us to understand what is going on here and sort of rediscover our American principles. This is a big thing I'm intending to do here on the channel this year. I'm going to be interviewing historians about the American founding.

10:22 I want to really lay a groundwork for what our country is. you know, warts and all, but our country is largely a great story. It is a positive story and it's one that we should understand fully and celebrate, especially this year. And one of the things I think we need to celebrate the most is our first amendment. Our first amendment is really the most important platform for having a free society. a society that doesn't throw old people into prison for Facebook posts.

10:56 >> I'm arresting you on suspicion of improper use of the electronic uh communications network. I'm just watch communications act. Okay. So, you do not have to say anything that may harm your defense. Do not mention one question later in court. Anything you do say may be given evidence. Do you understand that? >> So, I'm actually being arrested. >> Arrested. Okay. Right. >> So, you got to police station. Okay. This is in relation to some comments that you've made on a Facebook page.

11:26 >> Oh, really? Oh, Facebook crime. Is it? >> What is happening over there? Well, what is happening is I guess a new version of what we as Americans escaped. And I want to start first of all with what I think fundamentally America represents. I believe that America has a kind of ism. It is Americanism and it is not like any other place in that what we have at our founding is a tension between two forces as we sit here that are really pulling the west apart. the elite, the people in power and authority, the people with credentials and populism, the feelings and the so-called will of the public, we the people. And there is a kind of populism that is very distinctly American, but it is bounded.

12:23 And I I want to revisit that because the First Amendment is maybe the best example of what a kind of I think truly American populism is and should be. And it reads, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof or abridging the freedom of speech or of the press or the right of the people peaceibly to assemble and to petition the government for a redress of grievances." Now that is in one short pack of words actually five distinct rights for we as Americans. It is freedom of religion. So the the government cannot establish a state religion or prevent any American from peacefully exercising their own religious liberty. Now in each and every case these rights do butt up against each other. So if you say that your religion allows you to, I don't know, kill other people that don't agree with you, well that is not going to fly in America. That is not acceptable. These are universally applied rights. They are applied universally because of what is fundamentally a Christian belief that every single human being has universal dignity and value unto themselves. So if your religion happens to say no, sorry, get out, no America for you, no America for you, or at least you're not being American if you think you can do that. So that's it.

14:04 Now, it's important to remember that the the origins of America are rooted in the desire to express religion freely. the the pilgrims, the Puritans, the Quakers, these were all people fleeing to basically pursue expression of their own unique and sometimes strange religious sex apart from that of the homeland of the Anglican church of the Catholic Church. So freedom of religion is really really central and the fact that it is often religious expression under the most assault at least if it's Christian that is in the UK and Europe just puts a big red underline under how important freedom of religion is to living in a free society. Freedom of speech. Now notice the way the words get used here.

14:52 The government cannot abridge freedom of speech. The the concept behind our first amendment is that the government cannot touch your rights to speak with very very narrow exceptions. And those narrow exceptions are basically direct incitement to immediate violence against someone basically right in front of you. So you can say all kinds of stuff. There's no such thing as hate speech in the United States. You can say hateful things although again proving that they're hateful requires you to understand what's in a person's heart.

15:27 So the entire concept of hate speech is predicated on a kind of mind readading that no one is capable of doing. But more importantly uh there is just no designation for that. It is not a concept in law in the US and it's not a viable concept anywhere frankly. It is just feelings. I call your speech hateful if I don't like it. And if I do like it, even if it is actually driven by hate, well then it's fine. This all reminds me of Voltater's famous quote in great enlightenment writer. I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it. It appears that it's almost only the United States of America that enshrines this in law and seems to have embedded it mostly in our culture. Although that is the thing maybe I'm most worried about.

16:18 Freedom of the press, which is buried in there in a single phrase, is really interesting because why wouldn't freedom of speech also cover the press? The press are just people. The press have the same rights as everybody else. It doesn't really make sense that it should be called out distinctly. But as I've revisited this, I think the right way to understand what the founders were going after here was freedom of the press mechanism of the actual ability to print and distribute your speech, not just scream it from the rooftops or from your soap box on the corner, which again even those are being under assault in the UK and Europe and beyond. Of course, of course, you know, the whole of the Middle East doesn't have free speech.

17:05 You know, Russia doesn't have free speech, China doesn't have free speech. Europe is still better than those places, but not good enough. Not good enough to even live up to the NATO charter, for example. But freedom of the press cuts to the digital services act, to our technology. They were essentially enshrining protection from government control of distribution technologies. This is really important because if you aren't free to print your words and distribute them broadly or broadcast them over other modern forms of publication like the internet, like YouTube, well then your freedom of speech is really just your freedom to shout from the rooftops. That's it. The founders understood this and in fact our founding moment itself and the debates around it and around the constitution relied on this. the federalist papers, the pamphleteers.

18:02 Uh this was all part of utilizing the technology of the press to get the word out to make to make your case to be persuasive to the public and that protection is enshrined. So the digital services act and its efforts to try to re in technology platforms that enable people's speech in the name of censoring the public. That is what's going on here. This is not about billionaires or tech oligarchs. It's about us. It's about censoring us. That's what the Twitter files revealed. That's what all of these efforts across the globe to censor speech are all about. It's about controlling the public. And I'm going to get to the philosophy underneath that in a minute. Freedom of assembly is especially important because if you can't come together as groups, your freedom of speech ends up only being the freedom to to talk to yourself. Freedom of assembly is also the freedom to not assemble, the freedom to associate and to disassociate. And that does mean that it protects the rights of platforms like Twitter or YouTube if they are truly acting as independent private actors without say the FBI and the CIA putting their fingers on the scale to kick people off to moderate content to restrict access. Freedom of assembly and association does make that possible and in fact it is a necessary freedom as well. So the first amendment is incredibly robust. And the last one really speaks to the end goal of what a lot of this censorship is and that is the right to petition the government for the redress of grievances. This is the idea that we can lobby the government because we are a republic but we are indeed democratically regulated. We are a democratic republic. Our politicians, our political class, our government is only given legitimacy by the consent of the governed. And you cannot have consent unless you have free speech, freedom of association, freedom of the press, and the right to petition the government for the redress of grievances. If you don't like the Federal Reserve printing money, you have to have the right to say, "Please stop inflating the currency.

20:28 please. [laughter] And sometimes when please doesn't cut it, uh things get a little hairier. You know, I can't help but be reminded of Thomas Jefferson talking about how the tree of liberty must sometimes be replenished with the blood of tyrants. This is the American creed. It is a cornerstone. And of course, the first amendment, freedom of speech, expression, religion, the press, and and petition is supported by the second amendment, which is the right to bear arms.

20:59 That is the way it works. And it is very very telling that across Europe and the broader western Anglosphere, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, etc. the places where they don't have guns, their free speech rights are waning very rapidly. Those two things are deeply related. And as an American, it's really important to understand these rights. and understand the relationships they have with each other because this is who we are. This is a big part of what it means to be an American, to buy in to these ideas and the culture that they bring about. That is a culture that can be pretty contentious. It's a culture that can be loud and obnoxious, that can drive our muscle cars around. That's what it is.

21:52 And and that's what it means in part to be an American. And if you're not up for that, especially if you're thinking about coming here, well, maybe you shouldn't come. As we think about our culture, it's very easy to look abroad. It's very easy to look at the newcomers and say, "What's going on here? What are you doing to our culture?" But I think some of the greatest threats to American culture don't come from without. They come from within. And they come from deep in our past. Because this ideology of control, of control of the public, of control of public information isn't new. And it isn't even just from the likes of Orwell.

22:36 In so many ways, the moment we're in right now here in 2026 is a mirror of the 1920s and and before. It is a mirror of the radical period of technological transformation that represents the industrial revolution. We are going through with AI and and all this technology, automation, robotics etc. the internet a kind of second industrial revolution. But the first industrial revolution caused just as much upheaval and it also gave rise to the first wave of essentially utopian progressives. This is the birth of the progressive era. And I think it's important to briefly revisit this so we can understand the roots of where forces like the digital services act and this desire for speech control and suppression comes from. Woodro Wilson is the guy to start with. He is the president who most I think perfectly represents this ideology. He is the He's the one that Hillary Clinton called her favorite American president, which says a lot considering that she has also called on the Europeans to censor Americans. Uh, and she is not alone. She is in good company with this particular strand of progressive thought. It goes all the way back to Woodro Wilson. I've talked about him before, but he was in a way the first technocrat president. He wrote a paper called the study of administration which lays out a vision for this and a belief that essentially the complexities of the 1910s made it such that it was time for government to shed all these freedoms and and freedoms from all of this Congress shall pass no law stuff. That's got to go. It's time to have a new elite, a new sort of technocratic elite of people like him, people with fancy degrees who claim that they're scientists to manage the public. One quote from that work that I find striking today is this he wrote of the Europeans.

24:50 Even if our government is not to follow the lead of the governments of Europe in buying or building both the telegraph and railroad lines, no one can doubt that in some ways it must make itself master of masterful corporations. So right here you have essentially protofascism. You have Woodro Wilson bemoning the fact that the American government doesn't seem like it will end up owning the telegraphs, owning the means of communication.

25:21 But he wants that. [laughter] He wanted it bad. And it's important to remember that out of the out of World War I came the full revelation of what this ideology represents. Woodro Wilson took the United States into war with some of the European allies against the Germans and the Ottomans. And when he did, he began to construct what we still have today, sort of the progressive state. And for those of you that sort of get into alt history and people questioning who were the real good guys and bad guys in say World War II, I would suggest you look further back. It's clear who the good guys and bad guys were in World War II. We were the good guys. Hitler was the bad guys.

26:08 World War I is a more complicated matter. And I would argue that we wouldn't have even had World War II if we didn't engage in World War I as Americans. Woodro Wilson, the first true globalist, took us into World War I, despite, of course, claiming that he wouldn't do that before he was elected because, you know, of course, hypocrisy is always on the table with these people. He proceeded to try to construct a world order that looks an awful lot like what the Europeans are trying to do today and what American progressives seem to want to do. In his tradition, he erected the prototype for the UN called the League of Nations. And in the aftermath of the war, in the run-up to the conclusion, he assembled a group of experts to plan the piece, to lay out what the postworld war I world would look like.

27:05 It was called the inquiry. And at the head of this enterprise of technocratic experts was a man named Walter Litman. Litman in so many ways is the Rosetta Stone for the modern censorship industrial complex. His book Public Opinion was published in 1922. And what he laid out sounds an awful lot like the regime of social media under the 2020s and Europe today. and he was a profoundly influential figure in the progressive movement. He was one of the architects of the postwar rules-based international order.

27:47 He loved things like the European Union. He championed them and he fundamentally believed that we need to be ruled. that we need to be ruled not by the rules, not by our constitution, but by a set of credentialed experts, a specialized class of elites who would know what the truth is and would construct intelligence bureaus, literal ministries of truth to essentially deliver the acceptable narratives that we, the public, this sort of psychologically fragile herd of imbeciles, could rally around. One of his proteges, Edward Bernay, wrote the book propaganda and essentially was the father of modern PR.

28:36 But this cluster of people, Wilson, Litman, Bernay, they built the ideology that we see taking place in Europe and in our academic circles and on the most progressive elements of the American left. It is a deeply unamerican from a constitutional perspective approach to the public and to the future of thought because it turns out that none of these experts really know anything. They don't have a monopoly on truth. No one does.

29:15 And to construct permanent architecture around that idea is to usher in tyranny. And as we sit here in 2026, as we reflect on the American founding, I think it's really important to look these ideas squarely in the face and to understand what they are and and and to see how they are animating a lot of the moves taking place all around us today. In some respects, almost by accident and just because of temperament, President Trump slowed this march towards the Litman universe, towards the permanent Litman consensus that the Europeans are essentially carrying on in waiting for the next US administration that's friendly to them. But that is actually how fragile things are for us. It is why it's so important for all of us as Americans to understand what this is to understand the heritage that we have to protect our rights first and foremost to speak and therefore to think to work things out for ourselves. Yes. To do our own research. All of that is the precursor to remaining a free society.

30:32 And I think one of the things that has been the most challenging thing for me over the past 5 years, one of the things that's motivated this channel as I look back on the year behind me is what does it take to have this be felt in our heart? What does it take to have that American spirit of freedom, of risk-taking, of free speech, of not letting your feelings get the best of you, of of sticks and stones can break your bones, but names will never hurt you? For that to be actually truly broadly felt and shared as a culture, how do you protect that? How do you make it a real thing? And one of the most fundamental places I think that this starts is with our schools. That is why so much of what we do here at Dad Saves America focuses on schools. It's why for the past 6 weeks we've been focused on what's happened with high school debate with our death of debate series. Because these are muscles we have to start exercising early and understand down to our bones. They have to become habits that then become our character and who we are. And so long as our schools are captured by the opposite view, by this progressive technocrat elite view that thinks we the people can't engage in debate, that we need to be kept safe, that we need safe spaces, or that or that we need to be treated like ideas can be pathogens, that we need to be inoculated from by by being isolated, by being locked down. If we don't reject that and if we don't get practice with free speech early and often, we will lose it. That is what is happening in Europe and it is a threat here as well.

32:18 And one of the ironic things is last Thanksgiving I actually spent the better part of a week over Thanksgiving in London visiting this incredible school. As some of you may have seen, Katherine Burbiling, guest of the show, considered the strictest head mistress in London, runs a school that she founded called the Michaela Community School. And I first saw her at the art conference in 2023. She came on the show as a guest. And we struck up a friendship. Even though pretty much every school I've sent my son to is the exact opposite of Michaela, is more is more self-directed, more more student driven, but she has what you could just call a very traditional, very strict school that holds her kids to incredibly high standards. And so I went to visit the school firsthand. I spent a full 3 days there sitting in the classes talking to the students, talking to the teachers, spending hours interviewing the teachers. And what I saw there was remarkable. It first of all, the school is in an urban area. It is essentially a an urban public school and its student body is about 50% immigrant and Muslim which is super interesting because I have my own reservations about Islam and Islamic immigration. But let me tell you, these kids at this school were more civilized than the average graduate from an American university. They were courteous and smart and quick on their feet. As as they'd run through the hallways, they'd say, you know, "Good afternoon, sir.

34:05 Good afternoon, miss." They were engaged in the classrooms, which were incredibly fast-paced in ways that would kind of boggle your mind. And it gave me an enormous amount of hope for what's possible, for what's possible to integrate diverse people that come into our societies. Because that's one of the things we need to do. If you're if we're going to have immigration, they need to immigrate into our culture. This idea of multiculturalism is a failure. But a diverse pluralistic society can and has succeeded. It's called the United States. Anybody from any background can get in that muscle car and go flying around a parking lot on Christmas. [laughter] That is our birthright.

34:47 But [clears throat] Michaela charts a course forward that's positive. Those kids learn grit, they learn resilience, and as a result, the school is the number one school in the United Kingdom. And so one of the things that's coming this year is that Katherine and I have teamed up and we are going to be launching a new YouTube channel later this year to get her message out into the world, to share her insights and to share the way that school works so that more teachers and students and potential school entrepreneurs can embrace and adopt what she is doing for those kids because it is incredible. She is literally fighting to save Western civilization. And when you spend a week at that school, you get the sense that it's possible. And I think there is nowhere in this world as ready for that kind of transformation as the United States of America. We are the number one most philanthropic country in the world.

35:51 We have more choice in education than anywhere in the world. We have what it takes to keep the American experiment going. And I think it all starts in the classroom. It all starts with our kids. And it also starts with us as parents, as the people in charge of their future. So I think as always I believe that this is the role that we can play in the American story to help our kids understand our past to celebrate it to be champions for it and to be truly educated so that we can leave this country better than we found it. I am proud to be an American. I believe in America. I believe it is possible that our best days lie ahead. for all the darkness, for all the challenges, for all of the concern of decline. I think we still have what it takes to have an American dream. And I will not give up on that. I will fight for that until my last breath. And you know, I know that so many of you are up for that fight as well. It is because you've shown up that we have grown this community and Dad Saves America in a really big way over the past year. We've added over 200,000 subscribers in the past year alone. And so we're approaching a half million, which is really exciting as we head into the completion of our fourth year as a channel. And it is all thanks to you. It is thanks to you engaging, giving us good feedback.

37:25 I I don't mind the criticism. I welcome it. I I love the spicy comments. Keep them coming. That's part of free speech after all. Right. And but but seriously, it it I am incredibly humbled and grateful that so many of you get something out of this, that it's it's meaningful to you, that it's helpful. We get an incredible number of really encouraging comments from all of you that let me and my whole team here working together know that we're actually doing the thing that we set out to do, which is help you understand the world and how to navigate it and and frankly keep it free. And I'm not going to stop trying to be that for you.

38:04 There's a lot of noise out there. All I care about is our kids and the future of our country. And whatever can advance our understanding of that, that's what I'm going to be talking about here at Dad Saves America. So, there's a lot more of that to come. Thank you for being on the journey with me. But let me know what you think as you enter the new year. Do you have some optimism? Are you feeling like you've got a fresh start?

38:27 Let me know in the comments down below. Of course, as always, don't forget to hit that like button, subscribe to the channel, head over to dadsavesamea.com, where we've got a lot more resources and links to the things I talk about on these videos. And if you want to debate me in a slightly spicier format, you can head over to x.com, which is still very much legal in the United States. I'm John Pipola. So, let's keep the conversation going there. And of course, have a great weekend.

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