Speaking on “The Culture War” podcast with host Tim Pool, Alliance Defending Freedom Senior Counsel, Senior Vice President of Corporate Engagement Jeremy Tedesco identified what he called “the free speech issue of our age.”

Tedesco, who leads the Viewpoint Diversity Score initiative, pointed to the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision in NRA v. Vullo as a prime example of a growing trend of government collusion with major corporations to censor everyday Americans.

“This is, from our perspective, the free speech issue of our age,” Tedesco said. “It’s that government is using these concentrations of power in the private sectors—especially related to the digital public square—and trying to censor speech they don’t like.”

As Tedesco also pointed out at Townhall.com over the weekend, the Court’s unanimous decision rebuked the state of New York’s attempt to side-step the First Amendment by enlisting corporations to censor speech the government didn’t like. A similar question is pending a Supreme Court ruling in Murthy v. State of Missouri, which challenges the Biden administration’s collusion with social media companies like Twitter and Facebook to censor speech on COVID-19, gender identity, the Hunter Biden laptop, and more.

During the interview, Tedesco also shed light on the results of the 2024 Business Index, which scored 85 major tech and financial corporations that effectively wield gatekeeping authority over everyday Americans.

Overall, 76% of scored companies, including all 21 digital service providers from Amazon to Zoom have vague or subjective terms of service that threaten their customers with cancelation or punishment.

A growing list of de-banking instances—where customers are denied service or see their accounts canceled with little explanation—stem from these vague policies. Big Tech provided the most recent example, however, when Google briefly removed the PragerU app from its Play store, citing the tech company’s vague “hate speech” policy.

Responding on X, Tedesco dismissed Google’s claim that it had made an honest mistake by punishing PragerU, going on to reiterate that “[t]his kind of censorship is inevitable under policies that ban ‘hate speech,’ ‘hate groups,’ or ‘hateful conduct.’”

On the podcast, Tedesco was joined by Claremont Institute Senior Fellow Jeremy Carl, author of the recently released “The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism is Tearing America Apart.” The book takes aim at the influence of highly divisive ideologies like Critical Race Theory, which, in the words of high-profile proponent Ibram X Kendi, prescribes “present discrimination” in order to correct “past discrimination.”

According to the 2024 Business Index, 91 percent of scored companies rely on CRT for workforce training programs—although many companies are starting to rethink CRT-prescribed racial hiring quotas and so-called “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” programs in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling striking down race-based quotas in college admissions in Students for Fair Admission v. Harvard.

“I just think our message should be, ‘We shouldn’t put up with racist discrimination at all,’” Tedesco said “If you look back in American history, the advances for equality and justice have always been ultimately about people like Frederick Douglass or Martin Luther King, Jr., calling for accountability to America’s founding principles—to its promise of equal protection before the law.

“I think we’re in a battle of ideas, and I think people in the conservative ecosystem feel like they’re on the losing side of it, and I think that, to some extent, that’s true. But I think the ideas that formed the country and that we believe in are the ideas that can save us from this trajectory of DEI and racializing society in this way.”

Watch the entire podcast below.