in the words of elon musk,

here we go. i'm michael smerconish in new york city. that was what musk tweeted at 6:44 last night with two popcorn emojis. he alerted his 119 million followers to a long thread called the twitter files posted by substack journalist matt taibbi. taibbi said it was the first series installment based on thousands of documents obtained by sources at twitter. musk promises more is coming today. now, depending on your news outlet of choice this was either a huge bombshell or a nothing burger. on one hand, you got the "new york post" blaring twitter scandal exposed. and roll stone calls it a snooze fest. and even fox news went to elon musk reveals to the less hunter biden story. and writing the twitter files are interesting but contain few

too surprises. a mix of confidence and bipartisanship got the site in trouble. politico predicted the move will ingratiate musk with conservatives and plunge the social media platform deeper into political controversy. axios summarized it this way, musk files shows twitter evidence that twitter operated with bias but no conspiracy to censor. here at cnn, release emails show how employees debated how to hand the 2020 "new york post" hunter biden story. here's some of the reported tee yee taibbi, slowly over time, twitter staff executives began to find more and more uses for these tools. outsiders began petitioning the company to manipulate speech as well. first a little. then more often. and then continue stay. by 2020, requests from connected

actors to delete tweets were routine. one executive would write to another, more to review from the biden team. and the reply would come back handled. celebrities and unnknown alike could be removed at the behest of a political party. both parties had access to these tools. for instance in 2020 requests from both the trump white house and the biden campaign were received and honored. however, this system wasn't balanced. it was based on contacts. because twitter was and is overwhelmingly staffed by people of one political orientation. there were more channels, more ways to complain. open to the left. well, democrats, then to the right. taibbi then discusses the story of hunter biden's laptop and twitter's decision to keep it off the platform in the weeks before the 2020 election. quote, on october 14, 20, the "new york post" published biden's secret emails and expose

based on the contents of hunter biden's abandoned laptop. twitter took extraordinary steps to suppress the story, removing links and posting warnings that it may be, quote, unsafe. they even blocked its transmission via direct message, a tool hitherto reserved for extreme cases, example -- child pornography. the decision was made at the highest levels of the economy but without the knowledge of ceo jack dorsey. with former head of legal policy jadid gab playing the role. as one envisioned, hacking was the excuse within a few hours pretty much everyone realize it that wasn't going to hold but no one had the guts to reverse it. taibbi writes to twitter's gadd

expressing his feeling this seems like a violation of first amendment principles. if there's a hack of classified information or other information that could expose a serious wartime, and "the new york times" were to publish it, i think "the new york times" should have that right. a journalist should not be held accountable unless they aided the hack but so to restrict that especially regarding a presidential candidate, new york versus sullivan, i say that as a total biden n partisan. and it's becoming a bigger deal than it would have. we reached out to congressm man khanna, he provided a statement, i believe our first amendment rights are sacred. i felt twitter's action were a

violation of first amendment principles so i raised those concerns and will only thrive if we're open to a marketplace of ideas and engaging with people with whom we disagree. i want to know what you think this hour. go to smerconish.com and answer this week's poll question. should hunter biden's laptop been more extensively covered in the final days of the 2020 campaign? joining me now to discuss someone who wrote on this very issue back in august, in "the wall street journal" a piece titled "twitter becomes a goal of vecensorship." kicked off the site at the urging calling it a violation of the first amendment. a professor at yale school and first amendment lawyer. so, professor, a lot of folks waking up trying to wrap their heads around a complicated story. what's the big takeaway from your perspective? >> well, as you know, i think

the big takeaway is that the whole thing is very discouraging and damning for a free speech point of view. in a way, you know, it wasn't the blockbuster that some folks hoped to find it's because we already knew what was going on what we're seeing is the censorship machine working. and we're seeing that the political campaign had a direct channel to twitter to get them to suppress information that they didn't want folks to vsee, right before a presidential election. and everybody concerned about prespe free speech and democracy should be worried. i think what representative khanna, the biden team was not yet in power at the time. but, of course, one of the important things about this was, the biden team learned from this experience. and when they were in power,

they kept doing the very same thing. they had the back channel to twitter. they would communicate with twitter about specific individuals like mr. berenson, the reporter and the factual information they didn't want people to see online. this is the most profound free speech violation. the constitutional does not allow governmental actors to encourage, produce private parties to do what the government can't do itself. it's a straight-up constitutional violation. >> let me ask you about the constitutional violations. in august of this year, i just made reference to this, you wrote about twitter becoming a tool of government. when the town square is controlled by private, private social media platforms, should they, nevertheless, be subject to first amendment? >> yeah, if they're totally private, private companies, private parties are not subject to the first amendment if they're private and acting

privately. but here's what, you know, the constitutional law goes on to provide. that governmental actors can't secretly work with those private parties, cajoling them, working with them in concert to do censorship. and when governmental actors can get social media to serve as their, you know, censorship surrogates or to serve as their censorship wing, that's an actual constitutional violation and everybody should be worried about it. you know 50 years ago, 60, 70 years ago, there was a senator joseph mccarthy and other members of congress got hollywood, hollywood studios to black-list people expected of being leftist, not let them work, not let them provide films. we called that the black-list. i thought we learned our lessons. those were private parties that the government was trying to get censor and we thought that was terrible at the time.

everybody, left and right, should have the same view of this now. >> professor, is the line clearly delineated, there's nothing new for a white house for political campaign trying to work the media for favorable coverage? >> yeah, what's new here, we've got platform gate keepers with historically unprecedented control over public discourse. facebook, youtube and twitter principally. so, what we never had before is these three private companies with such immense control over public discourse. and what you can't have is the government working behind the scenes with them, telling them what particular people they don't want to be able to communicate online. what particular viewpoints. they don't want to be seen online. and to work with those platform gate keepers to achieve that this is profound to the first amendment. >> professor, thank you for your expertise and time. appreciate it. >> thank you. >> checking in on tweets, social media, youtube, facebook?

not you, too? you are facing losing democracy in your country and you're trying to solve the hunter biden laptop mystery? seriously? you have lost your way. what do you want me to do, trevor. ignore the story? the story shouldn't have been ignored in the 11th hour of the campaign. ro khanna in the way he reacted from his leadership from congress. he's not coming from the tea party or the freedom caucus. no, ro khanna said correctly it then game a story about censorship and became much more than it would have been. the hunter biden laptop story to me is a story about addiction at the top of the list. no, i'm not going to ignore it. remember, go to my website @smerconish.com and answer the poll question, should hunter biden's laptop been more

let's extensively covered? let's have that conversation. and finally, is it better for the party, the president or both? and this week, new york city mayor eric adams said the city would start housing the homes population who is in, what he calls a psychiatric crisis. and therere was an immediate backlash. but was he wrong? and borrow up to $100k. sofifi. get your money right. when we started carvana, they told us selling cars 100% online wouldn't work. but we went to work. building an experience that lets you shop over 17,000 cars from home. creating a coast-to-coast netwo to deliver your car as soon as tomorrow. recruiting an army of customer advocates to make your experience incredle. and putting you in control of the whole thing, with powerful technology.

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hi, susan. honey. yeah. i respect that. but that cough looks pretty bad. try this robitussin honey. the real honey you love, plus the powerful cough relief you need. mind if i root through your trash? robitussin. the only brand with real honeyand elderberry. on police dfriday, at the u president biden the dnc voted to tear up the presidential primary cal dear for 2024. instead of kicking off with the

iowa caucus as has been the case since 1972, the plan puts south carolina first on february 3rd. to be followed by new hampshire and if nevada, then georgia and then michigan. the idea is to test candidates earlier in crucial swing states instead of the momentum being decided iowa whose voters are 90% white. in his letter proposing the framework the president emphasized residential diversity. he said voters in particular have been the back bone of the democratic party but have been pushed to the back of the early primary process. it's time to stop taking these voters for granted. south carolina, of course, was also the key to securing president biden's nominee, whereas he placed poorly in iowa and new hampshire so is this helping the country, the party, the president? joining me now cnn political commentator david axelrod who, of course, was senior advisor to president obama. david, so nice to see you. >> great to see you, michael.

>> who will do the vetting? >> well, that's the issue. first of all, i think, in the idea of having a more diverse offering of states in the beginning of the process is a wise thing to do. i think the idea of geographic and demographic diversity is a good thing. and it was clear that iowa was going to get the boot after 2020, not -- not simply because they were unkind to joe biden, but because they didn't handle it well and they botched the caucuses. and we didn't know who won for a week and that was problematical. that was going to happen. so there's a huge push to make diversity -- to value diversity more at the beginning of the process. and i think that this does have -- but, as you know, michael, because you're a student of this, iowa and new hampshire, they played unique roles, particularly iowa in this

process in that candidates had to go and make very personal intimate appeals to small groups of voters over a long period of time, barack obama spent 87 days in iowa. in 2007. and had they're not been an iowa, i don't think there would have been a president obama. ironic, of course, because he was the first african american president. so, i will miss that part of the process. i will miss the vetting that the voters do in that state. and i'm not sure, given the nature of the calendar here, and the fact that we'll start with a primary not a caucus, i'm not sure that we're going to get the same effect here. >> so, look into your crystal ball. who does this benefit and for whom is this a problem going forward, beyond president biden. for example, vice president kamala harris, secretary pete buttigieg, how is the fact that

south carolina will vote first affect those two? >> well, you know, buttigieg ran the south carolina primary. didn't do particularly well in the south carolina primary. one of the challenges he's had and has been his ability to break through with the african american community. he may still do that, but he hasn't proven his ability to do that. theoretically, it could help the vice president, as she is a woman of color. but, you know, we would have to wait and see. i think, michael, the thing that we should note is that this was dictated by the white house and the president. and this, to me, was a strong signal that he is indeed intending to run, because he has set a firewall up for himself. i mean, he won the south carolina primary by a huge margin in 2020. he got -- he won the african american voters there who are

56% of the electorate in south carolina. by 44 points. and there are other states, georgia, michigan, in this mix, that were strongholds for him. i think the message here is, if you're an insurgent and thinking of challenging the president, forget about it, because there's not going to be an opportunity here to do that. and generally, i think, better known candidates are going to fare better. insurgencies are going to be harder -- i mean, i should say, dark horse candidates are going to be harder in this process. but we'll see, it may be moot. because as i said, i think this is a strong signal that biden intends to move forward. >> david axelrod, thanks as always for your expertise. happy holidays. >> same to you. always good to see you, michael. >> thank you. >> let's see what you're saying via social media from the world of twitter. what do we have? why select a state that has no bearing on the general election.

pick a toss-up state. hey, tom you know what i like, florida governor bob bram, this goes back 15 years but stands out in my mind, one time presidential candidate, albeit, he didn't get that far. but reflecting on the process said let's look to college athletics. i think he used football as an example and have a regional primary system. i've always liked senator graham's idea. it's the northeast one cycle. and four years later, it's the south. then it's the midwest, so on and so forth. everyone gets a say. the media can go in a particular area and no one state has outsized influence. that's the best proposal as to what i've heard how to do this. reminding you to go to smerconish.com this hour, should hunter biden's laptop been more extensively covered in the final days of the 2020 campaign? i weighed in on that myself at the outset of the program. now, i want to know what you

think. still to come, this is los angeles skid row, back before the pandemic. what has changed in how america handles the population we call homeless? well, new york city mayor, eric c adams, is he right to think that the answer is forced hospitalization in some answers? and netflix dropped the meghan and harry docuseries, in the first week that the prince and princess are making their trip to the united states in years. i'll discuss it dia diana's longtime secretatary. [coughing] hi, susan. honey. yeah. i respect that. but that cough looks pretty bad. try this robitussin honey. plus the powerful cough relief you nd. mind if i root through your trash?

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just look around. this digital age we're living in, it's pretty unbelievable. problem is, not everyone's fully living in it. nobody should have to take a class or fill out a medical form on public wifi with a screen the size of your hand. home internet shouldn't be a luxury. everyone should have it and now a lot more people can. so let's go. the digital age is waiting. you remember phil collins singing about "another day in paradise"? well, here in manhattan, mayor eric adams under attack for his

approach to what we call homelessness. this week, the mayor will begin hospitalizing more of the population that is, quote, in psychiatric crisis. in reading the new directive i was surprised by how little of a policy shift it should represent. section 9.41 authorizes a peace officer or a police officer, to take into custody, for the purpose of a psychiatric evaluation an individual who appears to be mentally ill and is conducting themselves in a manner likely to result in serious harm to self or others. similarly, the written policy maps out a role for designated clinicians who may remove or direct the removement of any person to a hospital for the purpose of evaluation or for admission, if such person appears to be mentally ill and is conducting themselves in a manner likely to result in serious harm to the person or to others. that's pretty much the law of the land. borne of both progressive and

libertarian thinking that didn't condone containing an individual against their wishes which certainly makes sense when the person is mentally healthy. and this has been our approach in the decades since a shift towards deinstitutionalization that has coincided with the rise of mass incarceration which leads police in the untenable position of having little choice but to often lock up those who are more in need of trimeatment. i get that the causes are many, that it's complicated, and that the problem is widespread, most common to big cities. i've witnessed homelessness here in new york city. in washington, d.c., in los angeles. the in tenderloin second of calif second of california. you might remember my interview with a mom from san francisco that went to rescue her homeless grown daughter. governor newsom has pledged to make it a priority last month,

he paused $1 million for state programs saying plans submitted were simply unacceptable. about a month ago early on a saturday morning, i stopped at a wawa en route to do this show to get coffee. getting back in my car, i spied a man nearby in a vent, prone in an awkward position but nonetheless sleeping. any other day i would have kept moving but i stopped and watched. transfixed by the situation. what is it about me, what is it about us that has so easily enabled the decent thatization of human beings. a tolerance that would never apply to a pet in distress. i haven't figured it out. i know the status quo is not working. we're doing these people no favorite with continuing with failed policy which is why i credit eric adams for trying. just after sworn in last january, a woman was pushed to

her death on a subway by a mentally ill man who had been in hospitals, jails and on the streets for decades. that and other incidents have caused him to act. the policy for which adams is now being criticized exists in countries all over. it's not just being enforced. the standard is to not intervene unless a porp poses a risk to themselves or someone else. we know what it's like to be in danger to another. that's an act or threat of violence. the new york city policy says this, case law does not provide extensive guidance regarding removals for mental health evaluations based on short interactions in the field. but it does suggest that the following circumstances could be reasonable ininitialia of the inability to support basic needs to due to mental illness that poses harm to the individual. serious, untreated physical injury. unawareness or delusional miss

apprehension of surrounding, or unaware or delusional miss apprehension of health. that's the hard part. defining harm to themselves. the guy that i watched on the vent didn't appear to have physical injury. there's no way to know the dliegsal vision of his surrenderings without engaging or assessing but he's clearly not thinking rationally, probably, due to mental illness and/or substance abuse. at its root, that's what this is, underlying conditions that lead to the loss of shelter. the lack of a roof is the manifestation, it's not that itself. homelessness is probably the wrong descriptor. housing alone won't fix the addiction and illness that are the drivers. that is not to say they don't need shelter, they do. mayor adams is going to be fairly judged by how well he cares for those he removes from

the streets. it would not be lawful for him to remove them unless he can care for them. eric adams says we have a mobile obligation to try and help them. i'm hoping others will follow his lead. this initiative is reminiscent of what pleddial candidate roosevelt said in 1932. roosevelt called for bold persistent experimentation. eric adams is doing that. let's give him a chance and save our criticism for maryors who ae not. joining us now, you've studied the issue far more than i have. what do you make of what eric adams is trying to do? >> it's good to be with you, michael. it's wonderful that the mayor is doing this. i think his approach is very they're pointing to the fact that what's happening people

with mental illness, or substance abuse, drug addiction, basically going into emergency rooms, stabilizing, being let out and then they often end up in jails. we have ten times more people in jails and prisons with mental illness than in hospitals. so the basic picture that you're describing where we underfunded our hospitals in world war ii let to this overreaction to basically let everybody out. community-based care is better for most people, dbut it does need to be mandatory. people become delusional, they figure out they're get off living in the park often in their own waste. that's obviously immoral. there's a small percentage of americans that defend that sort of thing. the vast majority of americans understand that part of the mental illness is the delusion that you're fine living on the street. so, i think what mayor adams is

pursuing is really great. i think that california's governor wants to pursue a similar direction. but i also think that the federal government needs to step in here. we need to basically start protecting the mentally ill in the same way that we protect the health care rights of the elderly. of the very poor and the disabled. i think it's time for something like a medicare for psychiatric, people with psychiatric disorders, something like a medepsych. when there's failure at the federal level, we're going to provide world class for people with mental illness. they're also going to establish what the right standards are for when that care needs to be involuntary or mandated. >> michael, what of my observation when my actually pulled the four or five-page director that the city is now operating under. i said to myself, this is the standard nationwide,

theoretically, this is the law of the land, the only difference here is that adam is going to do something about it. >> you hope so, the problem is when you understand the long history, 150 years of attempting to deal with this problem in a scientific way, in a medical way, rather than leaving mentally ill people chained up in their basements or in barns, we start getting that emin the hosp them in the hospitals and then brought them into the community. the problem is basically you've got the civil liberties unions in different cities and states and across the country that litigate to get people with mental illness out of mandatory care. so, my concern is while i totally applaud what the mayor is doing and what the governors want to do, i do think that it's going to require an act of congress to clarify the circumstances in which care must be mandated for people. >> i get it. >> when they're a threat to themselves or others. >> well, and i made clear i

support what he's trying to do. he will be judged, and he should be judged, based on how he cares for the folks that he's now going to remove from the street. michael, thank you for being here. i appreciate it very much. a lot of this data is laid out in your book which i enjoyed. >> thank you, michael. good to be with you. >> checking in on your social media reaction. what do we have, from the world of twitter. we need to do the hard and expensive work of treating the root causes instead of the symptoms like being proposed in new york city. we need to do the work of treating the causes. crutchfield, i'm not sure what you're saying. i think that, again, i'm not expert, but it seems it's not an issue of shelter. how about if i say it's not an issue of shelter alone. do these folks need to be housed? absolutely. and cared for? certainly. have you had any intersection, i have in philly, in new york, in washington, in the tenderloin in

san fran and skid row. it's so heartbreaking, the mental illness is pervasive and so is the drug addiction. my two cents, we need a better descriptor. these are folks in crisis. and they're human beings, and we can't so quickly move beyond them. step over them literally and go about our business. i hope eric adams is successful. i want to remind you, answer this week's poll question at smerconish.com. interestingly, many of you don't like the fact that i'm even asking the question. should hunter biden's laptop been more extensively covered in the final days of the 2020 campaign? "the crown" depicts princess diana and charles. her longtime secretary patrick jephson joins me. and then there's that

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america just can't quit the royals. the prince and princess of wales are in america for the first time in eight years yesterday. william met president joe biden during their trip in timing that many see as not coincidental. netflix traumaed the trailer for the six-episode docuseries of prince harry and his wife meghan duke and duchess of sussex. ♪ >> no one sees what's happened behind closed doors. ♪ >> i had to do everything i could to protect my family.

>> when the stakes are this high, doesn't it make more sense to hear our story from us? >> with the netflix series "the crown" which drills down on the fractious end of the marriage of the boy's father of current king charles and their mother princess diana. played by domenic west. i was impressed when diana is separated and martin bashir woos and lies his way into the infamous 1995 interview with her. >> do you think mrs. parker bowles was a factor in the breakdown of this marriage. >> well, there were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded. >> that was 1995, but it wasn't until last year that an independent inquiry of the circumstances of the interview commissioned by the bbc, revealed in pursuit of his

exclusive, bashir acted in a deceitful way and faked documents. the bbc apologized and his deceit had no effect on the interview. and then diana herself, her long time private second and chief of staff patrick jephson was on the take as a spy for the royals. >> since we've lost, i've called in a few favors. phone lines of the palace, turns out at least three of them have been tapped for sure. i'm afraid you've been followed twice this week, not by the paparazzi but by members posing as such, as your private secretary. patrick. >> the real patrick jephson joins me now his books include "shadows of a princess" and "the meghan factor."

patrick, did she go to her grave believing that you had sold her out? >> michael, i'm very sorry to say that i believe she did. nobody knew the true extent of bashir's unethical journalism until last year, as you said. therefore, since diana and i parted company in 1996, when i resigned, as a result of bashir's underhand work, then she will have died thinking that i who had served her faithfully to the very best of my ability for eight years, did go to her death thinking that i had betrayed her. it's a chilling thought. >> how would history have been different without the panoramic interview? >> it's certainly great to speculate to find out what might have happened if bashir's passions had not worked or if diana had seen through him or

advised her not to go through that interview certainly not in that format. the fact that she wanted to say something on tv is fine by me. but it's one of those opportunities that only comes through once. she had probably a better message to give than the one she eventually gave to bashir. really, the outcome should have been very different. but the interview brought to an end what tenuous links there were still with the royal establishment. and apart from forcing e ing resignation also deprived diana of support. and since the separation of prince charles became less and less organized and she eventually found herself trusting people with her safety, who were not really competent to look after her, with tragic results. >> patrick, so you and i are speaking as both boys are on this side of the pond.

what do you see in that netflix trailer? we just ran off 40 or so seconds of it. i didn't see a bombshell. does that mean they don't have a bombshell? or that they're saving it? >> well, if you look at it as a communications story, as a pr story, it's a big coup. princes and princesses generally don't make document documentari their own lives which promise secrets. i think the reason it's being made is an example that the organization isn't working as it should. what we're looking at, the house divided against itself. we have one prince in boston pursuing what you might call traditional royal duty, and after all, the royal family's job is to serve the british people, british interests. and another prince in montecito

pursuing his personal interest, and that's the crucial difference. the coming back of harry are just fractures of that. >> visits to boston of the royals don't happen overnight. obviously, that's been on the calendar for a while. i don't believe in coincidence in terms of when netflix dropped the trailer coinciding with kate and william being in the united states. what do you see if that, if anything? >> well, netflix have put a lost money into this project. and understandably, they want to see a return on that. it's just plain presentational common sense, to see that every opportunity you can, to promote your product. this opportunity is too tempting a target, i think. but what it has also pointed out is the difference between the two brothers in their approach, to their duties, to their own lives. and i think some of prince william's advisers will be thinking well at least the opposition is out in plain view

now. people can see the enormous contrast between their philosophy and ours. we have confidence in what we've been doing. we believe the boston visit has been positive. and you're free to draw your own conclusions about what harry and meghan's priorities are. in the one case, prince william is giving rewards for environmental projects on the other hand, we have harry receiving awards. the contrast couldn't be clearer. >> no, it couldn't. patrick, i watched that episode 7 and i to the program and the final result of this week's poll question at smerconish.com. have you voted yet on this question? should hunter biden's laptop have been more extensively covered in the final days of the 2020 campaign?

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