Lemon LIVE at 5 | Good Riddance, Karoline Leavitt

Caroline. So, this is your final day and we wanted to take a moment to reflect and go down memory lane. Uh, here is from the first day of you being at the podium. Let's watch.

We expect you to cover that as you should, Caitlyn. But you and your network know that you take every single thing this administration says and tries to use it to make the president look bad. You're a left-wing hack. You're not a reporter. You're posing in this room as a journalist. And it's so clear by the premise of your question. And so if there were peaceful protests on Saturday for the military parade, President Trump would allow that.

Of course, the president supports peaceful protests. What a stupid question. My first reaction when seeing former President Biden was speaking tonight was, I'm shocked that he is speaking at nighttime. I have thought his bedtime was much earlier.

There is now a member of the European Parliament from France who does not think the US represents the values of the Statue of Liberty anymore. They want the Statue of Liberty back. It's only because of the United States of America that uh the French are not speaking German right now. So, they should be very grateful uh to our great country. I gave a quote to one of the media outlets in this room yesterday that Democrats behaving like children would be the least surprising thing of the night. Um and unfortunately, that quote did turn out to be true. He looks forward to watching the game tonight and we look forward to the United States beating our soon to be 51st state Canada.

What do you think, Caroline?

Oh man, good times, great memories. [laughter] There's there's nothing like stepping before that podium. And I'll just tell you, I'm so grateful to the president for believing in me and giving me the chance to do it. So many people told him when he was considering me for this job after, of course, I worked for him under his historic 2024 campaign that I was too young and he ignored all the doubters and he gave me a chance and I am forever grateful to him for that. He is not only the best president our nation has ever had, but he is the best boss. And I'm just so grateful that he understands my decision to leave this amazing job, but to spend more time with my kids and um just love him. There will never be another like him. That's for sure.

I think you're totally right and honestly good riddance to her. So,

Yeah, I think she was bad. [laughter]

I think all of the, you know, she's a propagandist like most people that work at the Trump administration and uh I you know, she'll probably be replaced with another propagandist because that's the only type of people he will tolerate around him.

Yeah. I mean they could also put restrictions on and not have their children scrolling Instagram at 2 a.m. That's already that's been available to them. So they didn't need this. I mean these these changes are not about protecting children. Let's just be very clear. None of these changes are going to protect children. And in fact we know that they will endanger children and adults alike. Um, none of this is about protecting kids. Just the way that flock cameras are not about protecting kids, you know, like a mass surveillance is never about uh protection. It's about surveillance and control. And especially in this case, as you mentioned, a lot of really bad uh free speech uh restrictions as well.

Not even remotely. I mean, not even remotely. This [clears throat] is a law. I mean, there's I mean, it's a huge loss, you know? I I don't know like I don't know how it's good in any way to be obliterating privacy rights. I mean, we know that this is not even it's not even that it's a neutral thing or that there's good. We know that this is going to cause active harm to people, especially immigrants, LGBTQ people, young women. I mean, all of us abortion information is going to be restricted. This is

Yeah. And and I I also think like the EFF gave a a really great statement that I'd love to just read part of because I think they explain this really well. Um but they said, you know, young users will now have less access to Meta products and but less access sorry less ability to exercise their right to speak, access information and art and culture. Um basically it ensur they are enshrining Meta's harmful surveillance into law and it will all of these changes compromise us users data privacy and these because we're not getting any data privacy um you know this data that is collected can be used for law enforcement purposes. It can be used to hunt down people uh having abortions which Meta has already helped do in other states. It can be used um for criminal investigations. We know that the primary way, Kash Patel came out and said this, the primary way that ICE is able to hunt down immigrants today is by getting access to commercially available data. That is what Meta is about to create the largest trove of that we've never seen. I mean,

Aside from the blatantly unconstitutional like speech restrictions and the way that this is just going to impact our ability to get content because Meta doesn't want to uh basically they don't want to get in trouble with these the government anymore by by potentially showing quote unquote harmful content to children. So, they're just going to censor more and more content for all users. Um, and by the way, I just want people to understand what what harmful content is defined as by the people that are the architects of of this political effort and and this these policies is LGBTQ people. Jonathan Haidt um you know was on Rand who's one of the again one of the architects of of this whole movement um who wrote The Anxious Generation was talking about how you know young liberal women are online too much and effectively conflating you know young liberal women's internet use with social media addiction. When these people talk about social media addiction and they talk about, you know, harmful content for children, they are talking about, frankly, journalism. They're talking about things like this show. They're talking about news content. They're talking about progressive political content. They're talking about uh, you know, kids learning about the world.

There are so many parental restrictions you can put on your account. You don't have to buy your kid a cell phone, by the way. You could also buy them not a smartphone. You could buy them a light phone. You could buy them all these different types of phones. Um, you could also put a million different restrictions on your children's account. You have access as a parent today to enterprise level spyware that you can install on your kids' phone if you want to. I think that's a bad form of parenting. But we're not doing any of that. We're setting these dangerous uh legal precedents that that and and sort of policy precedents that are being used to obliterate our rights. And please control-F the word privacy in that whole statement. You won't find it anywhere. You won't find us the word privacy in the settlement anywhere because none of this is about challenging Meta's core business model. Mandating that they collect more user data. This is the type of stuff that we used to haul Zuckerberg in front of Congress for. Does anyone remember Cambridge Analytica? We're mandating that times a billion every single day. And we're mandating that they collect highly invasive user data on children, which is something they [clears throat] previously weren't even able to do.

Can I can I just can I just interrupt? Go for it. Go ahead. I just guys, Jonathan Haidt is a is a political actor. He has collaborated with the Heritage Foundation. He is on the board of Bari Weiss's fake right-wing anti-woke university. Jonathan Haidt has promoted a horrible and you can Google this. There's a great story on Assigned Media about Jonathan Haidt's uh commentary on trans people. It is appalling. He is a right-wing fanatic who has led a movement to censor and surveil the internet because he doesn't like that it's turning kids woke and gay. That is literally that entire ideology that him and the far-right MAGA people support. That is corrosive. It is bad. Okay, don't listen to his like nonsense sort of like washing. Like he's able to sort of like use this like language of cracking down on big tech but I have to just say it again use your brain what is not you of course Don but the public what is Meta's business model? Meta Meta Meta doesn't run their business on free speech. Meta operates in Turkey. Meta operates in Meta operates in all and just the way that you know X and all these companies will happily censor speech in order to operate in countries like India and Turkey and other countries with absolutely absolutely zero press freedom, right? Malaysia. So, they're happy to censor speech. Censoring speech is actually not an impediment to their business model. Their business model is predicated on harvesting as much user data as possible, monetizing that user data through advertising ecosystems and using it to train AI. We are now mandating that they harvest even more data. So like how is this like again if you wanted to crack down on big tech you would be doing the opposite of this. You would be passing comprehensive data privacy reform. You would be forcing these platforms to federate. You would be reforming the computer fraud and abuse act which Meta weaponizes to shut down competition. We're not doing any of that. And none of that's even in the conversation because you have these grifters, you know, just sort of like I don't know, just feeding people slop and they're eating it up and it's infuriating.

It really grinds my gears.

Oh, yeah. And they're going to make a lot of a lot more than $18 billion. That is nothing to them. That is nothing. And they're not going to have to pay all of that. My favorite my favorite part of this is that like they only have to pay 70% of it and then the extra 30% they only have to pay if TikTok and Google enact similar policies. So obviously they're not going to want TikTok and Google to enact those policies. They could just get out of they can just they're just going to be like oh we'll write an open letter. We'll tell TikTok and Google they should really adopt these policies. Oh well they didn't. I guess we don't have to pay the remaining 30%. Like it's just the whole thing is just a farce. Like this is just a way for the government to force through a bunch of policies that they've been trying to pass for a decade. A decade since FOSTA-SESTA. They've been trying to dismantle Section 230 and and basically pass all these really hardcore speech restrictions on online content. That these state attorney generals know that it's unconstitutional. We've seen time and time again these types of laws like the Social Media Regulation Act in Utah get overturned because none of it is constitutional. And now there's a great story in Politico uh actually about how basically these these political actors have realized that the best because all of this is unconstitutional the best thing we can do is actually sort of litigate this and put all this pressure on the court so that the so that the company settles and we have no transparency. You know if this was a law that was passed at least we'd have transparency. At least we could appeal the law. We could fight the law in court. This settlement there's no way to appeal it.

Two follow-up questions on that. Do you know what percentage of the 45% that were trying to get around were successful? And have you seen any change?

Over 5 million young people in Australia that have lost access to their social media accounts. Now, that's a big number in the context of a nationwide population of 27 million people. So, it's definitely working. But it's also true to say, Lindsay, that a lot of kids, you know, they're pretty intuitive. They find ways around it. So there was a comprehensive nationwide survey done only last month and it found around about 45% of kids who had access and now lost it were trying to find ways around it and some of them successfully. But it's also true there's been an uplift in kids participating in sport. We've seen a dramatically up uplift in young people reading more which is a good thing. But most importantly, parents having conversations with their kids about what healthy social media use looks like, which which simply wasn't happening earlier.

So, we're just lying. So, we're just making things up. I guess you know politicians just go online and make things up. None of that is true. None of that is backed like the what's true is the amount of people like the first part of what he was talking about. But no, children are not playing sports more. Like this is just this is nonsense. And we know actually from a there's a great story in The Guardian. We know from actual studies that what's happening is exactly what's happening in all these other authoritarian countries that have enacted laws like this years and years and years before is that young people actually are less informed and they're specifically less informed about news and politics. And you know Jonathan Haidt again has said that he went on Bill Maher and said that he wants to effectively raise the age of of using the internet to 18. These young and this is the the goal of the Heritage Foundation and a lot of Christian fundamentalists. They've been trying to do this since the 90s. This is how we got the Communications Decency Act back then. Their goal is to keep young people ignorant. The whole reason that they are against social media [snorts] is because people are learning about racial justice, social justice, um exploring their gender identities, you know, learning information about reproductive healthcare.

Don, that is the perfect analogy. That's exactly what we're seeing here. Exactly what we're seeing. Because these people in these movements, the conservative movement and this far-right movement, they know it's a they know that if given the opportunity, people will not choose to live this way. Young women want freedom. Young people want freedom. We want our rights. We want people are happier when they're able to express their gender identity and sexuality, right? So, the only way that they can sort of maintain power is control and to not allow people to to to know about this stuff. And you know, similar laws to what they're seeking to pass now, um, passed here in the US under the guise of child safety. Similar child safety laws passed in Russia, right, in the early 2010s. All of those laws were also passed under the guise of child safety. What did it result in? Mass restriction of LGBTQ content. It's obviously Russia is not a very uh, it's a very authoritarian country. So, it's not We know how these laws play out. We know how they're utilized by authoritarian governments. It's not good. We know how the Trump administration specifically wants to weaponize data against us to hunt down immigrants to uh you know to allow these tech overlords to to do surveillance pricing on all of us and we're all going to pay more for healthcare etc. Right? This is a dystopian world that none of us want to live in and we need to think a little bit smarter and beyond these headlines and realize that like this type of settlement is not like again just control-F the word privacy in any of these Meta things and if you don't see it it's not bad for Meta.

You know what I would say is like I've covered again I've covered the anti-trans, anti-LGBTQ movement for a long time and a lot of there's a lot of overlap actually. A lot of these young uh children that end up taking their own lives, they feel like they cannot be accepted for who they are in the environment that they're raised in. I don't know the specific instance of this mother, but this is a common there's a lot of overlap between these movements. And the thing that the thing is, is it horrible that this woman lost her child? It's unfathomably tragic. But we know that social media use does not is not does has zero causal relationship with suicide. We know that we know that actually moderate social media use is actually correlated with better mental health outcomes because young people are more connected. They're the primary way that young people use social media is just direct messaging. It's contact. It's being in touch with friends. So I don't know why the you know this girl took her own life but there suicide is is a complicated topic right and there are always going to be parents whose grief will be weaponized by bad organizations. There are tons of parents that will tell you that you know the LGBTQ cult in America is the reason that little you know their their son Sam uh killed themselves because he was 15 because he got got crazy ideas in his head that he was nonb or that they were non-binary right or something like that. Parents when a grieving parent will cling to anything any explanation and the these parents desperately want a villain that they can point to that they can feel like they got some sort of accountability. It's it's a farce. And I I don't blame the parents. I blame these special interest groups that are paying for the the the multi-million dollar PR contracts that they have with these big PR companies to tour these parents around the country and put their you know make them cry at every TV stop and put them and basically to further their own reactionary political agenda which we know will lead to young people taking their own life. We know that the internet is a direct lifeline for marginalized children. We know that and we know that taking it away will result in suicide. But but that's never up for discussion, right? We don't care about that because they [clears throat] it's help and it's always a white woman. I just want to point that out as well. It is a grieving white woman and they they care they they it's the same sort of group of 10 of them and they they parade them around and it's it's horrible because these are grieving parents. Their grief should not be exploited. And we see this again just time and time again. And it's horrible. What these what these parents deserve is healing. And if these parents want real accountability against big tech, which I think we all do because again, I'm not saying that Instagram can't exacerbate bullying, right? Or that kids don't bully online just the way that kids bully kids will always kids bully over the telephone. They'll bully over instant messenger. They'll bully over anything, you know? Um I'm not saying that there shouldn't be ways to mitigate that or anything like that, but that's not what any of that's not what that's not what that reactionary political movement that they're aligned with is doing. And and that's not what these changes are doing. And I just would say again, the Heritage Foundation, look at the groups that are pushing these laws. They don't care about children. They're

trying to force 14-year-olds to give birth, you know, when they've been sexually assaulted. They don't care about children. They care about censorship and mass surveillance and enacting their authoritarian policies. And it's very sad to me that these poor, poor parents who have lost their children are being used by this cynical movement.

I just wanted to say a couple of things. One, there's a phenomenal organization called Fight for the Future that is a digital human rights organization. It's LGBTQ, it is a progressive organization that does work with progressive political candidates and stuff. Their whole movement is to hold big tech accountable and actually hold big tech accountable. So that means fighting for privacy laws, fighting against censorship laws, helping create a safer internet because that, you know, I don't want people to think, 'Oh well, what can we even do then?' You know, it's all like Meta just wins no matter what. Fight for the Future is doing phenomenal. I have no affiliation with them other than I report on them and they are always at the front lines of this and they have a lot of really great information on their website and their Instagram account where they explain why the, like, they really break down the settlement, why it's bad, and what we can do to get more accountability from big tech.

The lemon heads. I love the lemon heads.

Hello to all the legends. Oh my gosh. Hi, guys.

Well, my head's swimming right now because I called in this morning about the Meta stuff earlier, and now after listening to Taylor talk, I guess I didn't think, I didn't know much of the language of the lawsuit. I really didn't. But I still think that parents need to be accountable. The only thing that we can control at the end of the day is how we raise our children. And in this tech-based world that we live in, this society that we live in, you know, how we monitor that and what the conversations that we have with our children, you know, what are they seeing online and the discussions they're having online and that sort of thing. So I think now more than ever it's imperative that parents get front and center, don't rely on the internet to raise your kids. I mean, you know, I see that so many times. I go to the grocery store and the kid's sitting in the cart and on the phone and mom's doing whatever. Yeah, it might be a good distraction so you can handle your business or go to an appointment or whatever, but we have to steer away from that. And so, yeah, no, she had a lot of good information. I felt I didn't agree with all the stuff, but then again, you know, I didn't know all the language to the settlement that happened. So, but I believe her. I believe her. We're moving into a world where they're wanting to put up data centers in every city and across the nation, and they want to spy on us and collect as much data as they can.

Good evening, Don. I'm going to start by saying good riddance to Caroline. I have to say that. Yay. Let's get rid of some more. Wow. Yeah. Meta, the internet. I have a seven-year-old nephew. I'll just bring him up. And I know his parents. The mother is in education. And he's sort of interesting when he's with his grandparents, which is my brother. He tries to get more time with the laptop or on the internet, and they control it. The parents and the grandparents need to control it. They allow him to do it, but you know, there's obviously a lot of scary things out, and kids are, they're so savvy with all of that information. So it is scary, but I do think the parents' duty to be responsible, and we do need to keep our freedom, that's for sure. And I know this is what we were talking about today, but I'm really concerned about health care. I won't get in depth about that, but I hear more and more young people losing their insurance benefits, moms and dads and children, and that's scary. I mean, what are you going to do? You don't go to the doctor, you don't get yourself taken care of. So, I just wanted to throw that out there also.

I don't know all things medical. I know a lot of medical things, let's put it that way.

Yeah. But I would like to, on health care, again, I've mentioned before that the only way that we can achieve anything close to health equity is to have nationalized health care. They can't come back and use this communism, socialism they've been saying for 50 years because Trump has bought into companies, and that is communism. So he's already brought us into communism. These people don't understand what the difference between communism and socialism is. They say they don't want socialism, but yet they want the police, they want the fire department, they want the libraries. So they don't understand what socialism is. Okay. So that's my first thing. But what I'm really upset about is the misinformation and disinformation that's pervading our country. And this woman contributed enormously to the amount of disinformation that's in the atmosphere. And it started with Sean Spicer. You know, 'You didn't really see that crowd for Obama. You know, Trump's was really bigger.' You know, that is gaslighting, and it's the stuff that cults do. Cults will tell you that your eyes are wrong. You know, that what you're seeing is not what you're really seeing. And this is cult-like behavior if you submit to this type of disinformation.

But what I'm saying is in general, the whole idea of disinformation and misinformation is pretty much what has gotten us to this point. You know, you can go back to Fox News, the inception of Fox News, and you have a whole generation of white people who are just totally, totally brainwashed by Fox News. So, until that changes, we're going to be in the same spot.

What's up, brother? Hey. I really quickly wanted to shout out to everyone who's reached out. I haven't been in the chat because I'm having some vision problems. I need to have eye surgery in both eyes. So I can't, I'm seeing it all through a haze right now, but it'll hopefully be corrected in the next month. But I'm not ignoring people. I'm just trying to deal with a lot. That being said, I don't even know where to start. Some days I feel like I'm drowning in all of the craziness. Like, it's just too dystopian. And I've had to step away because I find myself getting really angry at things that have nothing to do with, like I'm angry because I'm angry. And it's been hard to juggle it all between the health care issues, between I'm always getting banned and censored and everything on Meta. I don't even care anymore. It's like, you want to look, I'll give you a show, and that's how I treat it, you know. There's a certain freedom when you don't feel like you have a lot to lose. I will be honest. It comes with a lot of freedom. And I take that seriously. So I've been trying to stay in my lane, spread love where I can, support where I can, love where I can, and only take in what I can because I'm drowning in it. I won't lie.

For me, honestly, the one thing that's given me joy in all of this is I became part of something a lot bigger than me. And this guy who's carving hearts, he carves hearts out of stone, and I leave them everywhere. At gas pumps, on my steps of my place, just so people find them and see that they matter. A random heart costs nothing and means everything. So I just, I've had to refocus.

I'm good. I love you, Don.

Oh, yeah. They've been great.

You hear me now?