YouSaid · the spoken record

Brendan Carr

lines on the record: 37
first: 2026-05-21
most recent: 2026-05-21
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, and I just want to call it we do a segment of the Rushcast called Brendan Carr's Dummy every week. We call it America's Favorite Podcast within a podcast. It is now infected this podcast, which is very exciting. And our listeners write us theme songs. And we play different theme songs every week for Brendan Carr's dummy. So this is one we like so much that we actually bought. It's by Viola De Goomba. It is a Gregorian chant. Let's listen to it.”
2026-05-21 · On with Kara Swisher · Why FCC Chair Brendan Carr Is a Dangerous Moron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's going to be what Brendan leaves behind. This is a corrupt agency that operates through bribes and kickbacks and does what the president wants. And Brendan can own that. And I think he's done it so...”
2026-05-21 · On with Kara Swisher · Why FCC Chair Brendan Carr Is a Dangerous Moron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All the Wi-Fi routers. If you don't make them in the United States, you can't be sold anymore. Well, none of the routers from the United States. And then Netgear and Ero, which is owned by Amazon, magically got waivers. And there's some process. I've done some reporting. Some process occurred. statements were made by those companies of government that said they're promised to build the routers in the United States in the future. But that's nothing, right? Like nothing actually occurred. We did not actually protect the safety of Americans from supply chain attacks on the Wi-Fi routers. We just did some stuff to do something that looked like corruption. And that for the FCC, that legacy of corruption, that's going to be the...”
2026-05-21 · On with Kara Swisher · Why FCC Chair Brendan Carr Is a Dangerous Moron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's two things one again, he's such a dummy, there's stuff he's done that we haven't even talked about that has made the FCC appear more capricious and more poorly run and more useless than ever before. He issued an order banning all of the routers that weren't made in the United States.”
2026-05-21 · On with Kara Swisher · Why FCC Chair Brendan Carr Is a Dangerous Moron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That this government is putting pressure on a bunch of big tech companies who are all uniformly turning into defense contractors right now through AI and saying, hey, make sure people like us. And the pushback I give is maybe it's not working. Maybe young people actually still hate AI. I think the time's released to poll as we're speaking that the president's approval rating is lower than it's ever been in his second term. And the idea that social media is actually providing pushback. Think you have to be a little too optimistic to believe it, right? There's still ways for all of that to change, but that's the dynamic that I'm paying a lot of attention to.”
2026-05-21 · On with Kara Swisher · Why FCC Chair Brendan Carr Is a Dangerous Moron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm smiling because the last time Jamil and I talked was five years ago on the Dakota podcast, and we our debate was whether the tech platforms shield themselves in the First Amendment to avoid all regulation and whether that had gone too far. And I'm still of the opinion that all government speech regulations are bad. I'm a journalist. I'm allergic to them. I think that you should have a diversity of viewpoints and voices, and we should all fight it out. And the challenge to that is the tech platforms algorithmically control all the media that people consume. And so, you know, I've always joked that Mark Zuckerberg just has a dial in his office. And he's like, make Instagram more MEGA. And then it's more MAGA. And we all have to hear the song about wanting a guy 6'5 with blue eyes for a month before the election. And maybe you believe that that's a conspiracy or maybe you don't. But there's no transparency into what happened there. And I really think.”
2026-05-21 · On with Kara Swisher · Why FCC Chair Brendan Carr Is a Dangerous Moron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think this is one of those moments where mega populism kind of runs into reality, and it's like, oh, we should use some government power to make sure that we've given sports leagues this antitrust exemption so they can all bargain collectively. All these rich owners can bargain collectively and get the best deal from all these streamers and broadcasters and actually regular Americans have to pay thousands of dollars to watch every game that their local teams and their local communities that they pay usually huge tax incentives to build the stadiums for and then even to watch the games you're priced out and the tickets are getting more expensive There's something to be done there but in the context of how car operates how this DOJ operates I don't think shaking down the NFL is going to work I think you're actually going to run up against a very motivated billionaires who are all pretty Republican in posture and they're just going to call the president and say don't you like Tom Brady and it's gonna go away”
2026-05-21 · On with Kara Swisher · Why FCC Chair Brendan Carr Is a Dangerous Moron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“T Mobile killed all of its DEI policies in order to win merger approval to buy Lumis. Now, these are tiny telecom deals, and I know most people don't care about telecom deals, and they're all the most boring people in the world, but this is just naked corruption, right? These are companies that operate physical plants in the United States, right? They have big networks. They have to hire lots of workers. They got to send people to your house. This is where DEI helps, actually, right? You want a big, diverse workforce to go service your big diverse customer base across the country. And we're getting rid of the programs in order to secure merger approval so we can further financialize our economy and all this like you can just see how bad it is. It's not First Amendment maybe in this context, but it's bad.”
2026-05-21 · On with Kara Swisher · Why FCC Chair Brendan Carr Is a Dangerous Moron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Lever to get these important knowledge producing or free speech institutions to change their editorial decisions, editorial decisions in sort of the broadest sense, so that universities stop teaching particular classes or stop hiring particular kinds of people or stop admitting particular kinds of people so that law firms stop representing people who Trump doesn't like and so that media organizations stop platforming Stephen Colbert. That's what all of this is really about. I think that the invocation of discrimination here is transparently protectual. Wait, can I just point out his mention there of Verizon, that's some of the most dangerous stuff that he's talking about. I know we're very focused on media companies and free speech and the actual content regulation, but Verizon killed all of its DEI policies in order to win merger approval to buy Frontier.”
2026-05-21 · On with Kara Swisher · Why FCC Chair Brendan Carr Is a Dangerous Moron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, it's definitely a Trump administration. I mean, I think this is extremely cynical and dishonest. Nobody who has spent any time paying attention to this can possibly think that this is a good faith effort to enforce the civil rights laws. What's really going on is that the administration here and in many other contexts is weaponizing the civil rights laws to achieve the kinds of censorship that we've been talking about. That's what's going on with universities around the country. It's what's going on with the law firms too, you know, the Trump administration imposed these sanctions on law firms that represented people whom Trump sees as political enemies. And in order to impose those sanctions, they weaponize the civil rights laws. And the same thing with the university. They're saying, you know, it's because of universities violations of civil rights laws that we're canceling hundreds of millions of dollars in grants. But really, it's just a lever.”
2026-05-21 · On with Kara Swisher · Why FCC Chair Brendan Carr Is a Dangerous Moron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We've been very consistent across the board about what we view as invidious forms of DEI discrimination. As deals have come before the FCC, we have required people to look at their”
2026-05-21 · On with Kara Swisher · Why FCC Chair Brendan Carr Is a Dangerous Moron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Make them stay. Maybe you should tax Mark Zucker or you're making fun a bunch of local news. Like, there's a lot of other ideas you could have, but the idea that you're going to let these two companies, which have clear allegiance to the president, get bigger to compete with Mark Zuckerberg. Like I said, he's not sophisticated. You roll that up to anyone in America and say, is that going to work? And they say, no, that's stupid.”
2026-05-21 · On with Kara Swisher · Why FCC Chair Brendan Carr Is a Dangerous Moron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, the idea that particularly the operators of your local news stations should be in competition with one another and that will create better local news.”
2026-05-21 · On with Kara Swisher · Why FCC Chair Brendan Carr Is a Dangerous Moron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And maybe you say, well, they have to compete with Meta, but they don't actually have the distribution, right? What they own is a bunch of local news stations. And so what you're going to get in all of these places is your local news, the most impactful news to most Americans, will be under control of one company with one allegiance to the president. And there will be no other competition because as we all well know, there is not a lot of competition or money in local news. All of these local state governments that are corrupt in the mega era, all these local county governments that are signing corrupt deals to build data centers, they will not have the force of local journalism pushing back on them to inform their communities. Instead, we're going to get is a bunch of Facebook groups and a bunch of really weird local journalism that advances the interest of the administration. And I think that is just straightforwardly dangerous. I'm not sure there's a regulatory approach to that. Like, it is true that most people open their phone.”
2026-05-21 · On with Kara Swisher · Why FCC Chair Brendan Carr Is a Dangerous Moron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, there's this longstanding rule. I'm sure Commissioner Gomez can explain it in more detail that no company should own more than 39% of the broadcasters in a given region. So if you're just a regular person 30 years ago and you get all of your content from broadcast television radio, the same person shouldn't own all of it. And this, in terms of government regulation, is pretty good, right? Like you can say, okay, not one person shouldn't own all the media that you're being fed. There should be competition for viewpoint, for entertainment, whatever. And so we're going to make sure that there's diversity in what you're getting over the airways. This is a pretty good rule. The argument here is that what doesn't matter because Mark Zuckerberg owns everything that you watch anyway, and you should allow these companies to get even bigger so they can compete. This is Brendan's argument, where I think this fails, that was Brendan's argument. And so he's allowing Tegna and Nextor to merge, and they're going to own significantly more than 39% in almost every region that counts, like in some cases almost all of it.”
2026-05-21 · On with Kara Swisher · Why FCC Chair Brendan Carr Is a Dangerous Moron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Decision to push back, but Disney's decision is actually an outlier, right? There's so many of these media organizations that have not pushed back. And you can blame a lot of this on Brendan Carr and on the Trump administration, and you should blame a lot of it on Brendan Carr and the Trump administration. But the other side of it is media organizations have First Amendment rights that to a large extent they are failing to assert. And Disney is an exception. I would say the Associated Press is another exception, but those exceptions are few and far between.”
2026-05-21 · On with Kara Swisher · Why FCC Chair Brendan Carr Is a Dangerous Moron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, so I mean, I think we're seeing exactly why these kinds of agencies should be independent. The alternative is the agencies are partisan and are suppressing the kind of speech that the president wants them to suppress and answerable in this very political, immediate political sense to the president. But the Supreme Court is very quickly making it clear that they don't believe in independent agencies. They believe in a unitary executive in which the president is essentially the decider for any agency in the executive branch and that the leaders of those agencies are removable at the whim of the president. That's the Supreme Court's current view. And I think that you can trace some of what's going on now in the FCC to that particular vision. But one thing that I think is really important, and we've focused a little bit, I think, justifiably on Disney.”
2026-05-21 · On with Kara Swisher · Why FCC Chair Brendan Carr Is a Dangerous Moron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Can run at boy, we're gonna ban TikTok. It would be horrible if we took TikTok away from the American people unless Larry Ellison showed up to buy it and run the algorithm his way. And we're going to force the Chinese government into some kind of deal, which to my knowledge, no one quite understands yet that turns TikTok over to some entity that has some connection in the Trump administration. And you can just see, oh, we're running this playbook. We're running an all-of-government speech control playbook. And Brendan Carr, his personality is whatever Donald Trump to some extent, but whatever Russ Vote wants him to do, because that is actually the architect”
2026-05-21 · On with Kara Swisher · Why FCC Chair Brendan Carr Is a Dangerous Moron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Running test balloons using the power that's there to regulate content on broadcast networks, which is a very loose power. Again, I think they'll lose if they take these to court. But you at least have this notion that the FCC has some authority over broadcast stations, right? And you can go point at them and poke at them really hard. There's not any statutory equivalent to social media. There's not any statutory equivalent to Google search. But there's lots of power the government can exert over.”
2026-05-21 · On with Kara Swisher · Why FCC Chair Brendan Carr Is a Dangerous Moron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Many places. But the one through line was we will exert power over this nation, and we will make sure people say what we want them to say and punish them when they say what we don't want them to say.”
2026-05-21 · On with Kara Swisher · Why FCC Chair Brendan Carr Is a Dangerous Moron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The thing I'd point out is I've known a lot of various commissioners of the FCC over the past 15 years running the verge. And they're mostly, sorry, Commissioner Gomez, pretty technocratic, right? Like we're doing spectrum policy. We want to make sure Americans have cheaper, faster broadband, especially in rural places. That's what they all talk about. And you have them on your podcast and no one listens because it's pretty boring, which is why I think you didn't have Brendan on your podcast in the past. The shift here into content regulation, into saying we're going to go after the platforms who do content moderation ways who don't like, and we're going to go after broadcasters for speech they don't like is all encompassing in the Trump administration. It is direct from Project 2025. Brennan Carr wrote the FCC chapter in Project 2025. Project 2025, taken as a whole, I don't know if anyone wants to rewind their brain, was not a coherent document. It was self-contradictory.”
2026-05-21 · On with Kara Swisher · Why FCC Chair Brendan Carr Is a Dangerous Moron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A deregulatory Republican Trump won. And now he's a MAGA Warrior. And I think he's just like a political animal. I think he sees his lucrative podcast paid for by illegal supplements in the future. And that's going to be a great exit ramp for him if he can be one of these characters in whatever comes next.”
2026-05-21 · On with Kara Swisher · Why FCC Chair Brendan Carr Is a Dangerous Moron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“MAGA types, or let me just say the Trump administration, at least there's a sense that we are being silenced. Our people are being silenced. And when they say silenced, what they really mean is, you know, other people are criticizing us. Other people are disagreeing with us. And they are trying to shut all of that speech down. And that's what you see with the FCC and the broadcasters, but you also see it with the Trump administration and legacy news media, you know, the associated press being expelled from the White House press pool or all of the newspapers.”
2026-05-21 · On with Kara Swisher · Why FCC Chair Brendan Carr Is a Dangerous Moron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I guess part of what's happened is that the second Trump administration is very different from the first Trump administration. It's not just about Brendan Carr, right? Now we have this sort of all government assault on free speech, again, in the name of free speech. And at the Night Institute, we have this case where we're representing technology researchers who have been threatened with deportation because they are criticizing the major social media platforms content moderation policies. And this is crazy, crazy policy that the Trump administration has put in place. Again, in the name of free speech, they want to deport these tech researchers for what they're saying in their research. But I think that that's kind of that reflects the sort of larger philosophy that the Trump administration is trying to put in place across the board. It's not just the FCC. There's this effort, I think, among...”
2026-05-21 · On with Kara Swisher · Why FCC Chair Brendan Carr Is a Dangerous Moron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you recall a hundred years ago, people were warriors for net neutrality because that was the biggest threat to free speech on the internet, that the carriers would pick and choose. So here we are. You have an FCC threatening media distribution platforms, broadcast television and radio stations with the power they have in a capricious way that may not survive legal challenge, but will certainly cost a lot of money. And the best choice might just to cave. And Kara, you know this better than anyone. Our tech titans do not have spines. If they have to pick between lucrative defense contracts and throttling content on their platform, What do you think they're going to pick?”
2026-05-21 · On with Kara Swisher · Why FCC Chair Brendan Carr Is a Dangerous Moron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Brendan Carr is not using magic word like statutory interpretation to regulate broadcast because he really cares about broadcast. He's using this bad lawyering dummy approach to law to threaten Google, to threaten Verizon. These are the actual distribution points of the content people actually watch. And Google is a defense contractor. There's a lot of ways a unified Trump administration can threaten Google into changing the YouTube algorithm. And this stuff, which seems removed for most Americans, which is about television most people aren't watching, which is about radio stations most people aren't listening to, it is just a test balloon for, hey, how can we pressure Verizon or AT&T into throttling content we don't like on their networks, into picking networks we do like, into making sure video and X loads more crisply and clearly than video on TikTok or whatever, which is”
2026-05-21 · On with Kara Swisher · Why FCC Chair Brendan Carr Is a Dangerous Moron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I've been saying all along that it's the threats that are the point. Nobody wants to get dragged before the FCC in an investigation over the content of their broadcast. You know, I started a tour of the country where I go to local communities and I talk about the threats to the First Amendment from this administration.”
2026-05-21 · On with Kara Swisher · Why FCC Chair Brendan Carr Is a Dangerous Moron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They have a license granted by us at the FCC, and that comes with it an obligation to operate in the public interest. And we can get into some ways that we've been trying to reinvigorate the public interest and some changes that we've seen. But frankly, when you see stuff like this, I mean, look, we can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel or there's going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”
2026-05-21 · On with Kara Swisher · Why FCC Chair Brendan Carr Is a Dangerous Moron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They're not important to everyone. So he's using the power he has over the broadcast stations to pressure Disney into adjusting the content that it distributes over channels where the FCC has no authority, like Disney+, like YouTube, like the internet. And you can see the connection very clearly. This all started with NBC back during the election when Kamala Harris was on Saturday Night Live. Saturday Night Live is maybe the only program in America that actually understands the equal time rule because they do have political figures on that show all the time. They have for years and there's no chance they're going to get the news exception, right? They can't even pretend. So Kamala Harris showed up on Saturday Night Live that right-wing went crazy. Brendan started fulminating about it. But of course NBC had filed the paperwork. And I think he's been looking for an excuse to do this ever since so that the rest of the content, which he cannot regulate, somehow comes under his control. He will threaten your business, which is even in decline, which honestly most young Americans do.”
2026-05-21 · On with Kara Swisher · Why FCC Chair Brendan Carr Is a Dangerous Moron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think he's attempting to impose speech controls on the rest of Disney's content One of the reasons that I think this is so dumb is that it kind of doesn't matter if a broadcast stations go away, that people aren't watching them. They're watching TikTok. They're watching Disney+. Brendan is using the statutory power he has, or broadcast stations, which are important and matter to quite a few people”
2026-05-21 · On with Kara Swisher · Why FCC Chair Brendan Carr Is a Dangerous Moron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They have to fill. Yeah, if that's true, to me that's a setup, it's a form of entrapment. And that is also part of this outrageous actions that the FCC is taking against Disney.”
2026-05-21 · On with Kara Swisher · Why FCC Chair Brendan Carr Is a Dangerous Moron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Disney has a program called The View, and they've been asserting the position that the view is what's known as bona fide news in the statue. And if you're bona fide news, you don't have to give candidates equal airtime. But Disney and the view have not established that that program is in fact bona fide news. We've started an enforcement proceeding taken a look at that. And again, we're going to hold broadcasters accountable. The days that these legacy media broadcasters get to decide what we can say, what we can think, who we can vote for are over. And I think President Trump played a key role in just smashing the facade that they still get to decide the narrative.”
2026-05-21 · On with Kara Swisher · Why FCC Chair Brendan Carr Is a Dangerous Moron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A Democrat could do it. At this point, I sort of hope some Democrats start doing it so everybody understands how dangerous it is, right? A Democrat wielding the power of what's called unitary executive theory might be good for our country, right? If we get to that point, because I think everyone would understand, oh, our system is meant to have checks and balances. And Brendan in particular is an example of what happens when there are no checks and balances.”
2026-05-21 · On with Kara Swisher · Why FCC Chair Brendan Carr Is a Dangerous Moron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Tagged in S star are the owners of most of the local TV stations in the United States, and now they're merging. And in fact, they pushed their merger ahead, assuming they would get regulatory approval that they had begun merging even before they were told to stop by the courts because they haven't actually gotten all the approvals. That is the level of quid pro quo we see in the Trump administration. So you just see Brendan is using the language that's meant to protect speech. He's using the language from a statutory perspective is meant to slow down regulatory processes and make sure they're rigorous and correct. And instead, like a dummy, he's just pulling words and saying, oh, I can use these words and I can redefine them in order to attack speech the president doesn't like. And I don't think it matters what your political persuasion is. If you just care how it works, you look at that. You say, that's horrible. That means.”
2026-05-21 · On with Kara Swisher · Why FCC Chair Brendan Carr Is a Dangerous Moron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He's doing and trying to wrap it in the language of statutory interpretation or saying that the airwaves are meant for the public interest or pretending that Tegna and Nextar, just small local broadcasters who just need some help against the big bads.”
2026-05-21 · On with Kara Swisher · Why FCC Chair Brendan Carr Is a Dangerous Moron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I certainly agree with Commissioner Gomez that going after Disney in the particular way he's going after it, that company calling in the licenses early, which just hasn't been done in forever, that's by far the most egregious. But we do a segment on our show, The Broadcast every week called Brendan Carr's Dummy, because every week there's something and we can just pull it out of the ether. And what I would say and what I'm trying to communicate to our audience is he's not a sophisticated actor. This is a blonde instrument. And actually, maybe it's because I'm not a member of the DC bar and I don't have to be polite. He's also a bad lawyer. Like the way he's going about imposing chilling effects by pulling random words out of statutes, by inverting the idea of free speech, it's so stupid. Like maybe that bothers me the most. Like you don't have to figure it out. You can just say, oh, the president doesn't like Jimmy Kimmel. The broadcast licenses have been pulled up for renewal. It's obvious what he...”
2026-05-21 · On with Kara Swisher · Why FCC Chair Brendan Carr Is a Dangerous Moron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He's a Maga Warrior, and I think he's just like a political animal I think he sees his lucrative podcast. For by illegal supplements in the future, and that's going to be a great exit ramp for him.”
2026-05-21 · On with Kara Swisher · Why FCC Chair Brendan Carr Is a Dangerous Moron · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT