Twitter reveals plans to censor Trump in the upcoming election
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Summary
Today, I take you through Twitter's bizarre attempt to censor the President of the United States, Donald Trump. I'll show you why I think it's a joke, and why you shouldn't either. I'll also talk about why disputes are a good thing.
Transcript
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Hello, my friends. Today, I take you through Twitter's bizarre attempt to censor the President
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of the United States. They don't yet have the courage to delete his account. That would probably
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hurt their stock, as so many people go on Twitter just to follow Trump, and he would go somewhere
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else and take his viewers and their ad dollars with him. But they're rebutting him. The only
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politician on Twitter I'm aware they do that to, they don't do that to Joe Biden or Justin Trudeau.
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I'll take you through what happened and what Twitter says about it. I'll show you why I think
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it's a joke. That's ahead before I get to it. Please consider supporting Rebel News by becoming
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a subscriber to Rebel News Plus. Just go to rebelnews.com. It's eight bucks a month or 80 bucks
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for a whole year. And you get the video version of the podcast, plus shows from Sheila Gunn-Reed
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and David Menzies. Okay, here's today's podcast.
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Tonight, Twitter drops its mask and reveals its plans to censor Donald Trump in the upcoming
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election. It's May 28th, and this is The Ezra Levant Show.
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Why should others go to jail when you're a biggest carbon consumer I know?
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There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer.
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The only thing I have to say to the government about why I publish it is because it's my bloody
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Do you know who always lies on Twitter? Politicians you don't like. You know who never lies on Twitter?
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Politicians you do like. How is that possible? Because I say your guy's lying, and you say no,
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no, my guy's lying. Or let's take the middleman out of it. I say you're wrong, and you say I'm wrong.
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So what do we do? Well, nothing. That's called life. It's called variety. It's how we live. It's
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how we can cheer for different sports teams and all be right. It's why some people would never drive a
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Ford. Others would never drive a Dodge. It's certainly politics. Other than perhaps the casual use of the
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word lying, which is harsh because it implies knowingly saying something false for the purpose
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maybe of tricking someone, it's completely healthy to disagree on things. You can disagree on facts
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even. You can certainly disagree on opinions or feelings, and all of it, facts, opinions, feelings,
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arguments, whatever, makes up your worldview, makes up politics, makes up an election campaign really.
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My favorite thing about our system is that at the end of the day, ordinary people get to be the
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judge of things. Hillary Clinton had all the celebrities and all the experts and all the
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establishment on her side. She spent about a billion dollars more than Trump did in the election.
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She still lost. I love that for the same reason I love how Michael Bloomberg spent a billion dollars
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for his very brief run for the Democratic Party nomination, and he lost too. Because ordinary
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people get to make the final arbitration in the dispute. But we love disputes. They're an important
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part of democracy. They're the basis for it, really. Imagine a judicial system, a court system,
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without a dispute. You can't really, other than the fake court systems in totalitarian regimes like
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China or the former Soviet Union, where it's just a show trial where the guilt was known in advance.
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There was no dispute about it. And the rest was just a show to teach people what would happen to
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them if they decided to dispute the state. Our legal system, our parliament, we take Canada's biggest
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complainer, give him a free house, a huge staff, a big salary, and we give him a title called Her Majesty's
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Loyal Opposition. As in, we acknowledge that he is opposing, and it's not disloyal by nature,
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and we insist on it, and we give him all sorts of legal protections. Someone proposes, someone opposes.
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It's a back and forth. And through that back and forth, the truth is hopefully found. It's a dispute.
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Dispute. I know you're thinking, okay, Ezra, stop belaboring the point. Well, I'm trying to tell you
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the deep meaning, the deep history of the word dispute. It's not a bad thing by definition. I
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suppose there's a point where disputing for its own sake becomes just being quarrelsome. But in a way,
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all human progress depends on disputing. Being able to challenge things to see if there's a better way.
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Being open yourself to being challenged on the off chance that maybe you're wrong on something,
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and you'd prefer to be right. Here's a woodcut from the year 1483 showing an official disputation,
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an official debate with formalized rules. In this case, it was a theological debate between
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Christians and Jews. It was an attempt to reason through things as opposed to have a violent war over
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it. Historically, violence sometimes did accompany some disputations, unfortunately. But my point is,
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the whole purpose, the whole point of a dispute, a disputation, the ancient roots of that word is
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that we prefer to talk things out than to fight things out. As Churchill is supposed to have said,
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it's better to jaw jaw than to war war. And he would know he fought in five wars. So thank you for
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listening for a five-minute preamble on the word dispute. Here's why I'm so focused on that word
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dispute. Because a couple days ago, Donald Trump made a tweet, as he tends to do, to his 80 million
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Twitter followers. And he said this, he said, there is no way zero that mail-in ballots will be
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anything less than substantially fraudulent. Mailboxes will be robbed. Ballots will be forged
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and even illegally printed out and fraudulently signed. The governor of California is sending
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ballots to millions of people, anyone living in the state, no matter who they are or how they got
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there, will get one that will be followed up with professionals telling all these people, many of
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whom have never even thought of voting before, how and for whom to vote. This will be a rigged
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election. No way. Okay, so that's clearly his point of view. It's an opinion. It's actually not
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even an opinion, which you could say is a comment based on a fact. Because this was actually a
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prediction. He thinks something will happen in the future. He thinks mailboxes will be robbed. I think
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that's fairly reasonable. He says he's worried that politicians will tell people how to vote.
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They will try to take over future tense. I think those are all obvious risks. And I bet some or all
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of them come true. But they're not even statements of fact. They're not even really opinions. They're
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predictions about the future. You can agree. You can disagree. You can have a disputation with him.
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You can even do so right there on Twitter. And it's clear that Trump does read Twitter.
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So you might even get his attention. And who knows, he might actually change his mind. It could happen.
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I doubt it. But you could more likely change the minds of other people watching your disputation.
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That's part of the fun of it. But look at the bottom of those tweets. I've never seen anything
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like that before. Get the facts about mail-in ballots. What? And it's a link. And when you click
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it, you take them to this political advocacy page put together by Twitter itself that says,
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Trump makes unsubstantiated claim that mail-in ballots will lead to voter fraud. Well, like I say,
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that's the sort of thing about the future predictions. They cannot be substantiated until
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the future unfolds. If I were to say, I predict that Joe Biden will be replaced by the Democrats
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because he's just too weak and they don't want to lose. That's not an unsubstantiated thing. It's a
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prediction. I predict I will gain another 10 pounds during the quarantine. I predict I will lose 20 pounds.
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It's not true or false. It's not unsubstantiated. It's a guess or a hope.
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Look at what Twitter wrote. What you need to know. Trump claimed that mail-in ballots... Well,
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hang on. Stop right there. Is it correct that I need to know it? Is that substantial? Hey,
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fact check. Twitter says I need to know this. I don't. Okay, let me keep going. Trump claimed that
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mail-in ballots would lead to a rigged election. However, fact checkers say there is no evidence that
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mail-in ballots are linked to voter fraud. Trump falsely claimed that California will send mail-in
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ballots to anyone living in this state, no matter who they are or how they got there. In fact, only
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registered voters will receive ballots. Five states already vote entirely by mail and all states offer
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some form of mail-in absentee voting, according to NBC News. All right, well, who are all these fact
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checkers? Why can't I see their sources and their proof? Why has Twitter put itself in the role of a judge?
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Why can't I judge for myself? And why is it only this one president from this one political party
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who is being corrected and denounced, really, by Twitter? Are there no other lies on all of Twitter?
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Obvious lies. Very senior Chinese diplomats have published kooky conspiracy theories that the United
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States military created the coronavirus. It's laughably false. It's maliciously false.
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Twitter doesn't care, though. No correction or counterweight to them.
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By the way, citizens in China are banned from using Twitter by their own government,
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but Twitter is happy to let the Chinese government propagandists on their site.
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No truth warning under them. Now, Twitter cites the Washington Post, which is owned by Amazon's
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Jeff Bezos, as proof that Trump was wrong. Okay, but what are the Washington Post politics? They're
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liberal, obviously. So like I say, it's a dispute. Two sides to a dispute. Twitter should be hosting the
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debate. Perfect. A forum, a platform. So why do they now suddenly set themselves up as the umpire
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of this debate, the judge of this debate? Look at this. Here's a Washington Post article promoted by
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Twitter that claims Trump is wrong on voter fraud. It's written by a guy named Philip Bump. I love that
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name. What a wonderful name, Philip Bump. I checked him out on LinkedIn, and he has a philosophy degree.
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He worked as a software designer for two years. Pretty good. And then he worked for a series of
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left-wing blogs. I don't know. Maybe he's a genius, Philip Bump. Maybe he knows more than the president
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of the United States and all the president's advisors. Could be. But like I say, it's a dispute.
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I'm actually siding with the president on this one. Common sense tells us there is voter fraud all the
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time, and that mail-in ballots would likely increase that. I'm not sure why anyone's trying to deny that.
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Why not make the more reasonable argument, which I think would be, of course there's going to be
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more voter fraud, but that's an acceptable price to pay, some would say, to increase voter
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participation. Now, I would disagree with that myself. I would say if you can't be bothered to
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walk to the voting station, you really don't care enough to vote. But why are you pretending that
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mail-in ballots won't increase fraud when they obviously will, even a little?
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I just typed in U.S. Postal Service voter fraud into Google, and dozens of stories popped up,
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including this press release from the Justice Department just two days ago.
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Pendleton County mail carrier charged with attempted election fraud. Elkins, West Virginia.
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Thomas Cooper, a mail carrier in Pendleton County, was charged today in a criminal complaint with
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attempted election fraud. U.S. Attorney Bill Powell announced Cooper, age 47, of Dry Fork, West
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Virginia, is charged with attempt to defraud the residents of West Virginia of a fair election.
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According to the affidavit filed with a complaint, Cooper held a U.S. Postal Service contract to
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deliver mail in Pendleton County. In April 2020, that's just last month, the clerk of Pendleton County
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received 2020 primary election COVID-19 mail and absentee request forms from eight voters on which
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the voters' party ballot request appeared to have been altered.
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So who are you going to believe? Twitter and Philip Bump or your lying eyes?
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So who's in charge of these decisions to snipe and snark at Trump? Well, the boss of Twitter's
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trust and safety system is named Yoel Roth. So he's one of the arbiters in this dispute.
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But scroll through his tweets in the months before the 2016 election of Trump and then
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actually all the way up to the inauguration. He despises Trump. He mocks Trump. He hates
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Trump and Trump voters. I think he's toxic. I think he's abusive. I think he's a little bit insane.
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Perfect. Let him join the dispute. Him and Philip Bump versus Trump. Bump versus Trump.
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Except no, no, no. This Yoel Roth and Philip Bump, they're the ones Twitter put in charge of the
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fact check here. I'm not kidding. Well, the internet smoked that out pretty quickly. And so the CEO of
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Twitter joined in defending his extremist Twitter trust and safety officials. Here's what he said
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about that. This is Jack Dorsey. He said, fact check. There is someone ultimately accountable
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for our actions as a company, and that's me. Please leave our employees out of this. We'll continue to
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point out incorrect or disputed information about elections globally, and we will admit to and own
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any mistakes we make. Hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on. Jack, how can we leave your
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employees out of this? They can leave themselves out of it by staying out of it, by letting Trump
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and Biden debate and letting the rest of us be the peanut gallery. We can give our views too. We can
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judge the disputation, but leave your employees out of it. If only we could, Jack. If only they would, Jack.
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He's not a mere employee. He's a hardcore Trump derangement syndrome partisan. Does Joe Biden get a
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hall monitor like that too? If so, it's got to be someone as hardcore on the right as this Yoel Roth guy
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is on the left. So it's got to be like Alex Jones of Infowars, someone that bellicose, because
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that's who Yoel Roth is on the left. But look at that phrase. We will continue to point out incorrect
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or disputed information. Well, it's all disputed information. All information is disputed by someone,
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and an election campaign is the proper place to dispute it. And the rule for disputations in an
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election is pretty simple. Whatever the voters choose. Oh, sure. There are also some criminal
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laws that could theoretically apply to, I don't know, a death threat or something. But that's not
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what we're talking about here. We're talking about who gets to make a political decision about election
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fraud and what team we trust in an election. And the answer is the voters get to decide. But Jack
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Dorsey and Yoel Roth and Twitter want to put their finger on the scale to make sure it ends the right
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way. They want Trump to lose, obviously. Don't take my word for it. Here's a video taken undercover
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by Project Veritas at Twitter headquarters that shows how Twitter staff talk when they let their
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guard down. Listen to this for a minute. We're trying to get the shitty people not go off. It's a product
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thing. Let's say it pulls a pro-Trump thing, and I am anti-Trump. I was like, oh, I abandoned this
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whole account. It'll go to you. And then it's at your discretion. And if you're anti-Trump, you're like,
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oh, you know what? I'm almost right. Let it go. The idea of a shadow ban is that you ban someone,
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but they don't know they've been banned because they keep posting, but no one sees their content.
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So they just think that no one's engaging with their content when in reality, no one's seeing it.
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I don't know if Twitter does this anymore. How do you know if it's a lie and not a normal person?
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Oh, you use machine learning. You look for Trump or America and you have like 5,000 keywords to describe
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a redneck. And then you look and you like parse all the messages, all like the pictures, and then you look
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for like stuff that matches like that stuff. So is it going to like essentially bam certain mindsets
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and or people who could be negative? Yeah. No. It's not going to bend a mindset. It's going to bend like
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the way of talking. Yeah. Yeah. Sounds pretty neutral to me, Jack. Here's Jack Dorsey trying to call
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an apple and orange. He says, this does not make us an arbiter of truth. Oh, really?
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Our intention is to connect the dots of conflicting statements and show the information in dispute so
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people can judge for themselves. More transparency from us is critical so folks can clearly see
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the why behind our actions. Nah, mate. No, no, no. You said Trump's claims were unsubstantiated.
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It's what you said. That's another way of saying what he said wasn't true, even though what he said
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was a prediction for the future. And by the way, it certainly is substantiated. Just two days ago,
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a postman was charged with tampering with ballots. And we can see you. We can see that you're only
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doing this to Trump, not to Biden, not to Nancy Pelosi, not to Justin Trudeau up here in Canada,
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not to the corrupt World Health Organization, which has pumped out lie after lie about the virus.
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You're not doing this to foreign dictators who you let use Twitter for propaganda and they won't let
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their own people use it for information. It is no coincidence that this is happening in 2020,
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the year of the election. Silicon Valley billionaires think they can choose the next president.
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Do you think they're right? Stay with us for more.
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Well, Donald Trump is perhaps the most riveting man in politics in our age, no doubt about it.
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But it has been a joy and a horror to watch the circus of the Democratic Party's presidential
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primary. What a cast of characters. My favorite was mini Mike Bloomberg, who blew a billion dollars
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trying to get Americans to like him. He couldn't. But, you know, that's just a that's like a few
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nickels to you and me. As you know, over the last six months, as we've been following the
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Democratic presidential primaries, we have relied primarily, if I can use that word, on our friend
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Joel Pollack, the senior editor at large at Breitbart dot com, who has covered the Democratic race
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intently and not just from his base in L.A. But as you know, sometimes he's joined us from the road,
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literally the road or other venues across America. And I didn't know this until now.
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Besides giving us his updates along the way, he was writing a new book and you can get it now or
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you can preorder it now. It'll be released in July. The title is Red November. That's a great title,
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isn't it? Will the country vote red for Trump or red for socialism? And joining us now via Skype is
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our friend Joel Pollack. Joel, that's a great name. It makes me think of the hunt for Red October.
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Of course, Red October being the Soviet phrase. Red November, I guess that's how it would come to
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America, wouldn't it? Well, then we chose the title. Well, my initial proposal was to call it
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the hunt for Red November. It was indeed a play on that movie and novel. And yes, it's a reference to
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the Soviet Revolution. But my publisher pointed out that red states are also what we use to refer
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to Republican states as well. So it's a hunt for Red November in two senses, both Red in socialism and
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Red for Republican. And we don't know yet which one of the American people are going to choose.
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The book tells the story of the Democratic primary, which has been the most left-wing primary in American
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political history and has emerged with a nominee who, even though he is described as a moderate,
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is the most left-wing nominee in the history of American presidential elections.
00:19:24.480
Yeah, I mean, Joe Biden is funny because I don't think people paid very close attention to him
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when he was Barack Obama's sidekick, because Obama was so much more interesting and so much more
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fluent. I wonder if he was properly vetted, because he certainly comes across as reasonable and a
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friendly neighbor next door. And because he looks like a stereotypical white senior citizen,
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well-dressed, like he looks like a moderate would look. A radical might look like Ilhan Omar,
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might be young and a little bit alternative looking. Joe Biden looks central casting,
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boring guy, vice president. But you're saying he's the most radical nominee ever chosen?
00:20:07.440
Well, I don't know if he's radical. He's left-wing. There's a difference, I think,
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between radical and left-wing. Radical can imply also a kind of audacity in tactics. I think Obama
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was a radical. I think Biden is left-wing. And Biden is left-wing because he's had to shift his
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positions from somewhere left of center, maybe what we used to call liberal, over to the left. And you
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look at everything he's now advocating. He used to oppose federal funding for abortions. Now he
00:20:41.280
wants the Hyde Amendment repealed so that federal taxpayers would fund abortions. He used to say we
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need a middle-of-the-road approach to climate change. Now he says he wants to eliminate the
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fossil fuel industry and the coal industry. And by the way, when he campaigned for Obama, he campaigned
00:20:55.980
for clean coal. That's out the window. He used to talk about Medicare for All as a kind of pie in the
00:21:03.320
sky when Bernie Sanders proposed it. But now he's adopting pieces of that proposal, like lowering
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the Medicare eligibility age to 60 and so forth. So he is inching over to the left. And he's almost
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unrecognizable from the Joe Biden of 10 years ago, 15 years ago. And he's had to do that to capture some
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of Bernie Sanders' base, but also to appeal to a party in general that has shifted to the left.
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On every single policy, Joe Biden today is further to the left than Joe Biden was a year ago and further
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to the left than any Democratic Party presidential nominee has ever been. And you don't have to take
00:21:41.280
my word for it. You can take his own word for it and Barack Obama's word for it. Obama said in endorsing
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Joe Biden that he would be the most progressive president running on the most progressive platform
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in history. And he included himself in that. And he almost apologetically said, well, I couldn't run on
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all this stuff when I was running for president, but Joe Biden is going to carry it through. So by
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their own admission, they're running the most left-wing campaign, the most left-wing nominee,
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not a radical by temperament, but certainly by policy, he is the most left-wing candidate the
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Democratic Party has ever run. And I guess, I mean, there's been a lot of speculation about just how
00:22:20.200
with it Biden is, how attentive he is, how sharp he is. I suppose if he publicly says, well, I'm going to
00:22:26.360
have this suite of left-wing policies. And if he appoints a cabinet and a staff and a chief of
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staff and a White House team that is in line with that, it doesn't matter if he's goofy and forgetful
00:22:38.520
and has seniors moments. Because if he says, yeah, this suite of left-wing policies that could have
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been written by Ilhan Omar and Alexander Corsesio-Contez, other people will take that and run with it,
00:22:50.120
won't they? So is, I guess that's my second question, is his team as left-wing as his agenda?
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Because, you know, they say for Democrats, run to the left, for the primary, run more to the center
00:23:01.120
in the election. I think, I think that's the way. You're saying that's not the way. He's going to,
00:23:06.620
he's staying to the left. That's correct. So in my book, Red November, first of all, I talk about
00:23:12.500
this issue of Joe Biden's mental capacity. He has declined. He never came to the spin room
00:23:19.240
in all of the debates that I attended, that anyone attended really, because I was at most of them. I
00:23:24.980
missed one or two, but he was never in the spin room, not once. And I speculated that might have
00:23:30.260
been because the spin room tends to happen very late at night. So it might have been simply too late
00:23:34.800
for Joe Biden. He also wanted to avoid committing gaffes. And he's always been gaffe prone his entire
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career, but more so lately when he says things that simply don't make sense or that the campaign
00:23:44.860
has had to explain or undo later. So Julian Castro, one of his opponents, brought this up,
00:23:52.680
I believe it was in the Houston debate. And I talk about this in the book, that Joe Biden can't
00:23:57.520
remember what he said two minutes ago. That's what Castro said. And the audience murmured and booed a
00:24:04.140
little bit. But Cory Booker then in the spin room endorsed that claim. He said that Castro was
00:24:10.900
correct to bring up Joe Biden's mental faculties and his aging, and that it was a legitimate issue.
00:24:17.560
Now, of course, Cory Booker is talking about how wonderful Joe Biden is, and he's a light bringer,
00:24:22.660
I think is what he called him, or a light worker, which was something that was used also to describe
00:24:26.960
Obama. But of course, back in the fall of 2019, when Cory Booker was still in the race, he was worrying
00:24:31.620
about whether Joe Biden could do the job at all. So the vice presidential pick becomes very important.
00:24:38.760
The campaign has tried to portray Biden as bringing a team along with him. So you're not just voting
00:24:44.440
for this guy, you're voting for all of these people around him. And many of them are more left wing
00:24:50.000
than Biden has been. He brought Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez into his team of advisors, for example. He set up all
00:24:55.480
these policy councils. And she now, who complained about his climate policy, is advising him on climate.
00:25:00.880
It doesn't mean he's going to go all the way toward the Green New Deal as she has proposed it.
00:25:05.440
But he is certainly starting to embrace some of her ideas. He never talks about nuclear power,
00:25:09.820
and he's not going to. I think he may have mentioned it once earlier on, but that's not
00:25:13.240
happened since. He talks about getting rid of coal, as we said. And he said during the debates that
00:25:17.760
if working class Americans had to lose their jobs to satisfy the climate change agenda, well,
00:25:24.780
so be it. You know, we'll find them other jobs somehow. So that's the message he's selling.
00:25:29.200
He opposes the Keystone Pipeline, which, as you know, was a very important arrangement with Canada
00:25:35.760
and a Canadian company. Under the Obama administration, the Obama State Department
00:25:39.880
certified that there was no environmental risk from the pipeline. Obama simply blocked it because of the
00:25:45.760
left wing environmental lobby that didn't want to see fossil fuels developed at all. Never mind that
00:25:51.760
Canada was simply and logically going to sell the oil to someone else if they didn't send it down
00:25:56.840
through the United States. I mean, that oil is not going to sit there in the ground. Canadians
00:26:00.380
have to work as well. So the idea that this was going to be anything that had an impact on climate
00:26:06.640
change was ridiculous. It was always ridiculous. And Trump, in his first week in office, reversed that
00:26:12.560
and pushed ahead of the Keystone Pipeline. Joe Biden says he'll cancel it when he gets into office.
00:26:17.360
That's the influence of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. So these advisors really are steering him in that
00:26:22.800
direction. I've described the Biden presidency, if it ever were to happen, as a kind of regency.
00:26:28.720
You know, in the old history books, when a king or queen was too young to serve, you know, they
00:26:35.440
ascended to the throne at age four. They'd have some minder, some elder member of the family or the
00:26:41.180
church ruling effectively for them in a kind of regency. That's what would be happening with Biden.
00:26:47.000
He'd be too old to govern himself. And so the country would be essentially steered by a public
00:26:51.400
group by a committee. Let me not use Soviet terminology for everything, but it'd be steered
00:26:56.580
by a committee run by a combination of old Obama and Clinton hands on the one hand and young Bernie
00:27:03.920
Sanders socialists on the other. It would be a combination between the democratic establishment
00:27:10.300
staffers and the young upstart ideologues. And actually, the establishment staffers, some of them
00:27:15.840
are not so far away from the ideologues in terms of what they believe. They've just done things
00:27:19.300
differently. But that's who would be running the country.
00:27:22.300
We're talking with Joe Pollack, our old friend from Breitbart. His new book is called Red
00:27:26.140
November. Will the country vote red for Trump or red for socialism? Hey, I want to play for
00:27:31.540
you a quick clip. And I'm sure you've seen this clip. If not this particular one, many like
00:27:36.700
it. It's a Bernie Sanders supporter, very woke, very radical, very college activist. And
00:27:44.740
she sort of got this chant, please don't make me vote for Joe Biden. And I don't know why it's sort
00:27:49.600
of catchy. I've seen this a gazillion times. It's sort of pathetic, but also quite honest. Here,
00:27:56.660
take a quick look at that. Democrats, please don't make me vote for Joe Biden. Please don't make me vote
00:28:02.860
for Joe Biden. Please don't make me vote for Joe Biden. I don't want to vote for Joe Biden.
00:28:09.520
It's not very profound, but maybe it is. It's very simple. It's please, Democrats, don't make me
00:28:14.920
vote for Joe Biden. Like what she means, obviously, is I want to get rid of Trump. I don't like Trump.
00:28:20.240
I don't like the Republicans. But please don't make me vote for this guy. There's a lot of Bernie
00:28:25.860
supporters who twice now have been spurned. And even though, as you correctly say, Biden is more
00:28:31.620
left wing than any of his predecessors. He still feels like the man. He feels like what Bernie
00:28:37.820
Sanders was rebelling against. And I have trouble imagining that young woman. Please don't make me
00:28:43.800
vote for Joe Biden. Voting for Joe Biden. What's going to happen? You hung out with these people.
00:28:49.000
You saw you might have even met that young woman. What are they going to do? Are they going to fall
00:28:53.220
in the line and support Joe Biden? It's not clear. So there's a huge degree of unity among Democrats
00:29:00.180
when it comes to what's motivating them. Even the Sanders supporters are strongly motivated now
00:29:07.260
by the desire to get rid of Donald Trump. And I think it was easier for many not to vote for Hillary
00:29:15.040
Clinton because they assumed she would win anyway. And so that wasn't an issue. They prefer Hillary's
00:29:21.880
policies to Trump's policies, let's say. Although on trade, Trump has done better for Sanders supporters
00:29:28.500
than Hillary would have done. Trump canceled the Trans-Pacific Partnership in his first week in
00:29:33.060
office, for example. So I think it's hard to say. I don't think that Sanders supporters are excited
00:29:40.660
about voting for Biden. I would compare it roughly to how Tea Party supporters felt about Mitt Romney.
00:29:48.460
And nobody in the Tea Party really felt particularly close to Mitt Romney. He was a bad candidate because he
00:29:53.480
had embarked on this adventure called Romneycare in Massachusetts, which made him a very poor
00:29:59.960
candidate to oppose Obamacare. And the Tea Party was motivated by opposition to Obamacare, among other
00:30:05.860
things. Nevertheless, the Tea Party members held their nose and voted for Mitt Romney. Now, interestingly,
00:30:13.980
I saw a number after the 2012 election that suggested the Tea Party had voted disproportionately for Mitt Romney.
00:30:20.820
That is to say, there were more Tea Party Republicans who showed up for Mitt Romney than a typical
00:30:26.540
Republican. We may see more people on the left showing up for Joe Biden. Joe Biden's big problem
00:30:32.400
is that he's not motivating anybody. He's in his basement in Wilmington, Delaware. He is being
00:30:37.980
handled by a bunch of people who are just trying to keep the live streams going and get him from
00:30:43.040
wandering off camera. He doesn't control his own Twitter account. Some people say Trump shouldn't
00:30:47.980
control his own Twitter account. But with Trump, at least, you know, he's in charge. You know, he's
00:30:51.480
doing things, whether they're good or bad or controversial. He's doing things. Donald Trump
00:30:55.840
is managing the country. He's running his own campaign, essentially. And Joe Biden is not. I just
00:31:02.700
think that it's going to be difficult for Biden to motivate ordinary voters, never mind politically
00:31:07.740
engaged left wing activists. I think the left wing activists might be motivated to come to the polls
00:31:12.520
anyway. I think that ordinary Americans do not feel particularly motivated by Joe Biden.
00:31:19.020
You're seeing national opinion polls where he's winning by 11 percent over Donald Trump. That's
00:31:24.240
all very premature. We don't know what's going to happen when voters actually start comparing Trump
00:31:29.760
to Biden. Right now they're comparing Trump to the ideal. But Red November explains just how off the
00:31:37.700
rails the Democratic Party has been and has become. And people remember that after the first debate in
00:31:43.180
Miami, when every single candidate, including Joe Biden, raised their hands in answer to the question
00:31:48.400
who wants to provide free health care to illegal aliens. The headline in the New York Post the next
00:31:53.260
day with a picture of them all raising their hands was who wants to lose the election? And even the New
00:31:59.640
York Times had to admit that this was a completely different Democratic Party, that the candidates were
00:32:04.680
further left than Bill Clinton, than Barack Obama. This was something that had not been seen since
00:32:10.920
FDR and maybe ever. You know, I think you're right. I think actually that the kind of woman who would
00:32:18.860
say, please don't make me vote for Joe Biden, she's telegraphing, I am going to vote no matter what.
00:32:24.120
Just do me a favor and don't make me vote for Biden. Other people wouldn't say, please don't make me vote
00:32:28.600
because they just won't show up and vote. They won't get off their chairs to vote. This will be a very
00:32:33.540
interesting test because I think if your source of information about the Democrats and about politics
00:32:38.460
in general is Twitter, is CNN or MSNBC, maybe this radical left politics is normal because it's being
00:32:46.360
normalized by the media party. But will it work in Western Pennsylvania, fracking country? Will it
00:32:53.860
work in Wisconsin? Will it work in the steel parts of the country, Indiana, Ohio? I wonder. It's very
00:33:01.200
interesting. When does your book come out? Again, tell us when it'll be available. We can pre-order
00:33:05.860
now and we'll put a link under this video to the amazon.ca link for our Canadians. And I would, I
00:33:12.160
mean, there's no one I trust more on this election than you, Joel. And I know for a fact that you have
00:33:16.900
gone to every Democrat thing imaginable. That was what half the fun of interviewing you. So folks can
00:33:22.600
pre-order now and then as soon as it's ready, it'll be either shipped in hard copy or by ebook. Is that
00:33:27.900
right? Right. We're doing it in hard copy, audio book, and also in electronic book for Kindle.
00:33:35.240
It is a lot of fun. The first half of the book all takes place on the campaign trail
00:33:38.960
before impeachment, before coronavirus. It's almost nostalgic because you go back to an age
00:33:44.160
where politicians were still shaking hands and kissing babies. You know, that was before we had
00:33:48.440
to wear masks in public and all that. So campaigning was traditional and then suddenly it wasn't anymore.
00:33:53.520
And I go through the impeachment. I talk about that whole saga and how it kept the Democrats off
00:33:58.800
the campaign trail. They sabotaged their own election. The only people who were able to
00:34:02.760
campaign in Iowa were Joe Biden, Andrew Yang, and Pete Buttigieg. And the other 17 or whatever
00:34:07.940
were stuck in the Senate. And I talk about coronavirus and how it crept into the election
00:34:12.980
slowly. And really the only thing that was said by anybody, I can find two comments on coronavirus
00:34:18.480
in the early stages. One was an op-ed written by Joe Biden, where he was essentially taking apart
00:34:25.300
Donald Trump's general response to the pandemic, but he didn't really advocate for anything
00:34:31.640
substantial. I mean, Biden said that if he were president, he would have the CDC, our Centers for
00:34:37.680
Disease Control, over in China right away. Well, Trump had been trying to send the CDC to China. The
00:34:43.540
Chinese had refused. And Joe Biden has a very poor record on China. He's been very accommodating.
00:34:48.560
That's putting it nicely. The other comment was Pete Buttigieg vaguely mentioned it in a debate.
00:34:53.880
But the first time coronavirus really ever came up on the campaign trail was February 25th in the
00:35:00.160
presidential debate in South Carolina, the last of the four early primaries. It did not come up in
00:35:06.020
any serious way before that. And then all of a sudden it was upon us. And in a sense, Joe Biden got
00:35:12.880
lucky because had Donald Trump closed the country down earlier, the way Biden now says Trump should
00:35:17.920
have, Super Tuesday might never have happened. South Carolina might never have happened. Joe Biden
00:35:22.420
might never have had a chance to snatch the nomination away from Bernie Sanders, who had gone
00:35:27.840
one, two, three in the early primary states. No candidate before had ever won the popular vote in the first
00:35:33.920
three primary states. Bernie Sanders did it. He was coasting to the nomination until Joe Biden won South
00:35:39.620
Carolina and then a couple of days later won Super Tuesday. So it's quite a dramatic story. And you
00:35:45.820
see it become almost a thriller as the virus stalks the candidates toward the end. And I don't make any
00:35:53.800
predictions, but I say this choice that American voters face is really a stark one. You have a choice
00:36:01.260
on the one hand between the most conservative president we've probably ever had, with the possible
00:36:05.840
exceptions of Calvin Coolidge and Ronald Reagan. That's on the one hand. And on the other hand,
00:36:11.040
you have the most left wing candidate ever to run from either party. You know, he's essentially running
00:36:18.000
for the first term of Eugene Debs, never mind the third term of Barack Obama. Eugene Debs was the
00:36:23.320
socialist party nominee in the early 20th century. That's where we are right now. And Biden wouldn't
00:36:28.040
call himself a socialist and he attacked Bernie Sanders as a socialist. But the number of issues on
00:36:33.100
which Biden differs with Sanders is vanishingly small. And I think that's going to be a very
00:36:39.220
interesting choice to watch. Well, I have so much enjoyed our conversation and I'm very excited about
00:36:44.760
your new book. Folks, I recommend it based on our conversation today with Joel and our conversations
00:36:50.800
with him as he was traveling America writing it. It's called Red November. Will the country vote
00:36:57.960
red for Trump or red for socialism? You can see a cover of it on the screen right now.
00:37:03.100
And you can click the Amazon link below this video. Good luck out there, Joel. We'll talk
00:37:06.920
to you again. Thanks so much. All right. Thank you. Stay with us. More ahead on The Rebel.
00:37:20.140
Hey, welcome back on my monologue yesterday about the trial of Huawei's CFO, Meng Wanzhou. Rob writes,
00:37:26.940
what a relief to see justice was upheld. Trudeau somehow didn't get his claws into this one
00:37:31.060
and buy off the judge. Thank you for enlightening us on Huawei's corruption.
00:37:34.880
Yeah, well, I think justice was done. I mean, it is possible that she is legally not to be
00:37:42.180
extradited. Like, even if she would have won, that isn't necessarily proof of corruption.
00:37:47.880
But the fact that she lost her dismissal is, I think, proof of the absence of corruption,
00:37:55.340
Well, that's the thing. The reason I read out that extended passage from the ruling about how
00:38:07.640
they met in some back room in a Hong Kong restaurant, I just love that touch, shows that
00:38:12.160
Huawei is operating just like the dictatorship that it is symbiotic with. So they were a great
00:38:21.220
success in China because they have no real problems. They just crush anything because
00:38:27.020
they're joined with the government. They're taking that same style, that same corporate culture and
00:38:32.440
exporting it around the world. And they're finding luck in corrupt parts of the world,
00:38:36.560
luck in extremely poor parts of the world that will take a payoff. But maybe in America and hopefully
00:38:42.800
in Canada, perhaps in Australia and the UK, maybe even in Germany, China's style of doing corrupt
00:38:49.440
business will be stopped. We'll find out in the months ahead, I think.
00:38:54.080
Revelation replies, or writes, Free press isn't just for journalists, it's for us citizens too.
00:38:59.560
I have a right to a free press. That's in reaction to Kim Bexley being ejected from Rideau
00:39:07.120
Cottage yesterday by RCMP at the direct instruction of the PMO. That's a great point. Freedom of the
00:39:13.200
press is not just for the press, it's for those of us who choose to read a press.
00:39:17.220
Dave writes, Enjoyed tonight's show as always, but what caught my attention was your hair! I think
00:39:23.080
you've taken several years off with a new look! Who says Wuhan's impact on the hair industry isn't
00:39:28.880
good for some of us? Skip the haircut when this is over. Well, I think you, maybe you need to check
00:39:36.260
your eyesight because I mean, I've just embraced the ugly. What are you going to do? I mean, I got bigger
00:39:42.620
problems than my hair, but I think you have very unusual taste, sir. That's the show for today.
00:39:48.760
Until tomorrow, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, to you at home, good night,
00:39:53.780
here at Rebel World Headquarters, to you, who hasn't hit up for this show for today's show?