Who was really running Twitter before Elon Musk bought it？
Episode Stats
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Summary
Who was really running Twitter before Elon Musk bought it? And why can t people leave it? And why does Elton John seem to have a problem with the idea that the internet is designed to bring people together?
Transcript
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Hello, my Rebels. I only heard the name Yul Roth recently. I didn't know who he was until
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just a few weeks ago, really. But he was the de facto CEO of Twitter. So who was he and
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how did he get his important position as really the chief censor over there? Well, I'll go
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through a lot of his own writings, including his PhD dissertation. You're not even going
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to believe me. I won't give it away now. Okay, fine, I will. His PhD dissertation was about
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the gay sex app called Grindr. He got a PhD in Grindr. I'm not making that up. I'll read
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to you from his dissertation. That's ahead. But first, let me invite you to subscribe
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to Rebel News Plus. That's the video version of this podcast. Just go to rebelnewsplus.com,
00:00:42.660
click subscribe, eight bucks a month, get all the video versions. And by the way, we rely
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on that money to pay our bills because we don't take any money from Trudeau. All right, here's
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Tonight, who was really running Twitter until Elon Musk bought it? You'll be shocked but
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not surprised. It's December 12th, and this is the S. Levant Show.
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You're fighting for freedom! Shame on you, you censorious bug!
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Well, Elon Musk, I always thought he was a little bit creative and iconoclastic and a
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little eccentric, but I always thought of him as the boss of Tesla, which in my mind was
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sort of a lefty, cool, progressive company. At least everyone in Silicon Valley loved the
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Teslas. It was green energy, even if it took a lot of rare earth minerals to make the batteries.
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And of course, there were those government subsidies, but only recently have we sort
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of discovered that no, he's actually a libertarian in many important ways. And of course, by buying
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Twitter, he's demonstrated he's a believer in freedom of speech, which of course is the
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most important of the civil liberties. It's the fundamental freedom, a strategic freedom
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upon which other freedoms are based. It doesn't make much sense to be able to have an election,
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say, if you don't have free speech to begin with. So Elon Musk has suddenly upended the
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world. And everyone who thought he was cool now says he wasn't. 140,000 people on Twitter
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said they're going to leave. They're disgusted with what he's doing to the platform. But studies
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suggest that only 1.6% of those people actually did leave because they love it too much. Elton John
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looks like he's one of the ones who left. He says, all my life, I've tried to use music
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to bring people together. Yet it saddens me to see how misinformation is now being used to divide
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our world. I've decided to no longer use Twitter, given the recent change in policy, which will allow
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misinformation to flourish unchecked. Now, Elon Musk immediately wrote back in a very friendly way,
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saying he liked his music and wanted to know what he was talking about, what information,
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what misinformation. Well, we don't know if Elton John answered at all. Looks like he didn't,
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or didn't at least publicly. I don't know if he actually has an answer. I think Elton John is
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just repeating someone else's message track. Mark Ruffalo, one of the most cringe-inducing
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progressives in Hollywood, he said something similar. He said, as Twitter grows more unpredictable
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and harmful to marginalized groups. I'm exploring some other avenues for us to connect. I'm excited
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to continue to foster and be in our great community. If you'd like to come along for the ride,
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here's where to find me. And he has a list of other places. But you know what?
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He couldn't even last a few hours. He's tweeting all the time. Why can't people leave Twitter?
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Well, I think people actually like the conflict and the clash of ideas and the heterogeneity as
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opposed to an echo chamber where everyone's saying the same thing. I mean, if you only wanted to hear
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about Mark Ruffalo or Elton John, you would join their fan clubs. And I guess a lot of people did,
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but some people like to see a clash of ideas. They love the network effect that everyone is there.
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You know, you might have a superior technological system, but if you're the only one in it,
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it doesn't really work. That's not how the internet works. I think Twitter, like so many apps, feels like
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a game. Gets a little bit addictive, doesn't it? And you love seeing, at least I do, the fancy pants
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getting de-fancied. Because, you know, there's always someone bigger and more important than you. And
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you could say that a celebrity, entrepreneur, richest man in the world is bigger than any
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other celebrity he's bantering with. It's sort of fun to watch and clash. And it's also fun to watch
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Twitter itself figure things out in real time, including making mistakes in real time. That's
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interesting to see, too. Over the weekend, Dave Chappelle, the politically incorrect comedian,
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was in San Francisco, and he invited Elon Musk on the stage. Always risky. There were cheers,
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pretty evenly split i think but think of any other billionaire how would it have been say if
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that were bill gates on the stage well i know one woman who would have been booing his ex-wife you
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know it was also widely reported that bill had a friendship or business or some kind of contact
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with jeffrey epstein and that you were not uh that that was very upsetting to you did that play a
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role in the in the divorce at all in this process yeah as i said it's not one thing it was many
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things but i did not like uh that he'd had meetings with jeffrey epstein no and you made that clear to
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him i made that clear to him i also met jeffrey epstein exactly one time did you yes because i
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wanted to see who this man was and um i regretted it from the second i stepped in the door he was
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abhorrent he was evil personified i had nightmares about it afterwards so you know my heart breaks
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for these young women because that's how i felt and here i'm an older woman my god i feel terrible
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for those young women it's awful you felt that the moment you walked in i didn't realize it yeah
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and you shared that with bill and he still continued to spend time with him any of the questions
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remaining about what bill's relationship there was those are for bill to answer okay but i made it very
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clear how i felt about him yeah so elon musk that's the new ceo of twitter but who was the old ceo of
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twitter well a lot of people know this person named jack dorsey he was the inspirer the creator of twitter
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he always had his head in the clouds a bit i found it quite endearing he was a dreamy sort of founder
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he would occasionally post things like this he said i did my meditation at dhamma mahima in pion
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this is my room basic during the 10 days no devices reading writing physical exercise music intoxicants
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meet talking or even eye contact with others it's free everything is given to meet meditators by
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charity whoa okay then while he was on some vision quest though i don't know where that place was
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um other more ambitious people were busy interfering in the u.s election you might recall that the story
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of the year the hunter biden laptop was banned by twitter was broken by the new york post one of the
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oldest and uh most reputable newspapers in america it's a tabloid but it gets its facts straight it did
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get its facts straight there but twitter banned the story suspended the new york post account and actually
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banned people from even privately sharing the story and direct messages now after the election jack took
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the blame for that decision uh thanks for nothing after the election was already tipped here's what
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jack said in a string of tweets he was in congress he said we were called here today because of an
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enforcement decision we made against the new york post based on a policy we created in 2018 to prevent
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twitter from being used to spread hacked materials this resulted in us blocking people from sharing a new
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york post article publicly or privately he went on to say we made a quick interpretation using no other
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evidence and the materials in the article were obtained through hacking and according to our policy
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blocked them from being spread upon further consideration we admitted this action was wrong
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and corrected it with 24 hours we informed the new york post of our error and policy update and how to unlock
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their account by deleting the original violating tweet which freed them to tweet the exact same
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content and news article again they chose not to instead insisting we reverse our enforcement action
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yeah it was never a believable excuse i mean what's he saying there we were wrong
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but we told them to delete it they wouldn't so it's their fault it stayed down it doesn't make any sense
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it's almost like he was reading an excuse written for him by someone else while he was doing his vision
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quest in a room with no window so who was the real ceo who was really making the decisions while jack was
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finding himself donald trump knew early he always did the new york post knew they knew they had his
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number in may of 2020 yoel roth was the ceo take a look at this uh here's one this is our this is the
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arbiter this guy is the arbiter of what's supposed to go on twitter he's the one he thought that uh
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he thought and if you cnn as a guide cnn which is fake news he uses cnn as a guide his name is
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yoel roth and he's the one that said that uh mail-in balloting you look mail-in no fraud
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no fraud really why don't you take a look all over the country there's cases all over the country
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if we went to mail-in balloting our election all over the world would look as a total joke
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it would be a total joke there's such fraud and abuse and you know about harvesting where they
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harvest the ballots and they go and grab them and they go to people's houses and they say sign here
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no it doesn't work out now an absentee ballot you can't be there or you're sick and you go in your
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register and you do all sorts of things to get that ballot and there's good security measures but
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where they send out like in california millions and millions of ballots to anybody that's breathing
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anybody in california that's breathing gets a ballot but mr president that's not true so here
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here excuse me wait a minute i'm not finished so here's your uh here's your man and that's on twitter
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yeah that was from may 2020 and look at that front page look at those nutty tweets that this head
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of censorship twitter head of trust and safety was writing yes that let me let me read one of his
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tweets yes that person in the pink hat is clearly a bigger threat to your brand of feminism than actual
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nazis in the white house oh were the were there actual nazis in the white house like who ivanka trump
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or jared kushner so who is this yowel roth who donald trump knew was the problem back in may of
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2020 he's the head of trust and safety i love that that's straight out of orwell's 1984
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so to become the boss of censorship at twitter what's your background are you an expert in the
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american first amendment that's what they call their guarantee or freedom of speech is he a legal expert
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well he does have a phd and i'll tell you a little bit more about that in a moment but
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here he is explaining why he made the decision to de-platform the sitting president of the united
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states not the head of iran or russia or venezuela they've never been de-platformed but why he took down
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the president of the united states here's yowel roth saying how terrified he was how it was about his
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trauma his own trauma um but what are you worried about these twitter files coming out and what was
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that experience like having kellyanne who's always in control of herself sticking this mega trolls on
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you it's terrifying i thought i was going to be a college professor for a living i like i got a phd
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and was doing research that nobody cared about and uh and then i was like oh you know like this
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platform thing is cool like i can go and do research there and and then you know one thing
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led to another and all of a sudden we apply a misinformation label to donald trump's account
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and i'm on the cover of the new york post and that is a deeply terrifying experience and i say this from
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a position of unquestioned privilege as a cis white male like the internet is much scarier and much worse
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for lots of other people who aren't me but it was pretty fucking scary for a long time
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what was as a result of that you know when you get targeted in some of these ways it's hard to
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differentiate between what is somebody just online trying to rattle you and what's a real threat
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you see in things like pizzagate that online conspiracies can mobilize very real and very direct
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offline violence and i worry about that i had been doxed years before by teenagers actually they're
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they're always behind it but you know um i saw those harms i experienced those harms and now it was
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those harms through a mainstream news outlet being held up in in the oval office by the former president
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of the united states and that is deeply terrifying he's the kind of guy who talks about trauma
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online experienced those harms um i found the new york post and donald trump deeply
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terrifying he's the kind of guy who talks about microaggression so obviously he had to use twitter
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and his powers for his own therapy take a look at this video donald trump that one i don't think was
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a mistake january 6th so it it starts on the 6th but it also starts prior to that that's correct in
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the weeks leading up in the weeks between election day and january 6th twitter moderated hundreds i think
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the the final number ended up was like 140 separate tweets from just at real donald trump that violated
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various policies yes he was good at that integrity policy every morning it was a new tweet much of it
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was recirculating some of the same narratives and all of it was focused on the ultimately false claim
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that the 2020 election had been stolen and so we're going into the events of the 6th and there's that
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context there's the centrality of his account and so you let him get away with it for a long time
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in other words well we'd been enforcing on it right so we restricted the tweets we put warnings on them
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you couldn't like them you couldn't retweet them um but we didn't ban him because it was a relevant
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part of a moment in american politics right the events of the 6th happen and um if you talk to
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content moderators who worked on january 6th myself included the word that nearly everybody uses is
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trauma we we experienced those events not some of us as americans but not just as americans or as
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citizens but as people working on sort of how to prevent harm on the internet we saw the clearest
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possible example of what it looked like for things to move from online to off we saw what was we saw
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the way that rhetoric about a stolen election was being mobilized on sites like the donald.win sure we
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saw the trafficking of this content in the fringe parts of the internet and we saw people dead in the
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capital well hang on just one second why can't you dispute whether an election was fair i mean are
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venezuelans or russians or iranians or cubans allowed to dispute of course they are they should
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are we not allowed to talk about that isn't that part of freedom of speech you can talk about whatever
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you want to talk about i mean democrats dispute elections by republicans all the time they they never
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in fact accepted george w bush saying he stole the election from al gore why can't you talk about
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whether or not the 2020 election was was uh was rigged i mean is it because twitter had a role in
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rigging it as we just showed you he talked about the january 6th trauma of course that was the
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um i guess you could say riot at the capitol buildings uh you heard yul roth say that people died
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at the capitol it's true two people did die much less than died in the antifa and black lives matter
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riots that were going on in america for a year before the elections now yul roth is almost certainly
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talking about brian sicknick who was a capitol police officer who did die that day but here is a press
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release from the u.s capitol police following uh a coroner's report on why brian sicknick died
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let me read to you from their own website the u.s capitol police accepts the findings from the
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district of columbia's office of the chief medical examiner that officer brian sicknick died of natural
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causes this does not change the fact officer sicknick died in the line of duty courageously defending
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congress in the capitol so the person who yul roth was talking about who was dead on january 6th did in
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fact die he died of natural causes now there was someone who was shot dead that same day
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her name was ashley babbitt and here's how the washington post describes her
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two previously unreported video clips obtained by the washington post shed new light on the fatal
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shooting by police of trump supporter and air force veteran ashley babbitt as she and other
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rioters stormed the u.s capitol i'm not sure if she was storming anything the officer just slowly aimed
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at her and shot her shot her dead he has not been charged with anything so there were two deaths that
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day a death of natural causes of a policeman and the homicide whether or not it was in self-defense or in
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the line of duty we don't know because no one's ever been tried for it so yes there was two people
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killed on that fateful day i'm not saying i support people breaking windows or barging into the capitol
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buildings i'm certainly not supporting undercover fbi agents provocateurs mobilizing and revving up a
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crowd i'm not supporting officers opening doors and welcoming protesters in i don't think you should
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trespass like that i don't think you should break windows or push your way into property like that i just
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don't think you should but i don't think it was the insurrection that americans thought it was or at
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least the american democrats or at least the democrat named yul roth thought it was can can we even talk
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about all these things well now we can on twitter because yul roth is gone but a number of the things i was
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just talking about you could not discuss for the last few years on twitter because of yul roth so who was he
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well he's a guy who talks about trauma and fear and being a privileged cisgender male that's sort of a
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tip-off to who he is isn't it as in you know ideologically he thinks speech is violence he's
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one of those kind of guys he thinks seeing and hearing rough and tumble politics is trauma except
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if it's antifa and black lives matter riots then it's only mildly violent but back to his job chief
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sensor chief of trust and safety at twitter so what's his expertise like how to get the job well
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this is his phd from the prestigious university of pennsylvania great school now let me read to you
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the abstract of it this is a fancy way of saying a summary of the whole phd dissertation so i'm going
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to read it for about a full minute you're going to go crazy before i'm actually i'm not even going
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read the whole thing let me read what i can since its launch in 2009 the geo social networking service
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grinder that's a gay sex app in case you don't know has become an increasingly mainstream and
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prominent part of gay culture both in the united states and globally mobile applications like grinder
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give users the ability to quickly and easily share information about themselves in the form of text
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numbers and pictures and connect with each other in real time on the basis of geographic proximity
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i argue that these services constitute an important site for examining how bodies identities and
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communities are translated into data as well as how data becomes a tool for forming understanding
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and managing personal relationships throughout this work i articulate a model of networked interactivity
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that conceptualizes self-expression as an act determined by three sometimes overlapping
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sometimes conflicting sets of affordances and constraints one techno commercial and structures
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of software and business two cultural and subcultural norms mores histories and standards of acceptable and
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expected conduct and three socio-political tendencies that appear to be but in fact are not fixed techno
00:22:47.140
commercial structures in these discussions grinder serves both as a model of processes that apply to social
00:22:53.140
networking more generally as well as particular study into how networked interactivity
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is complicated by the histories and particularities of western gay culture i'm going to stop there i'm going to stop there
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so he got a phd in the gay sex app grinder that's what he got his phd in i didn't know you could do that
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here's a section of the dissertation that elon musk tweeted just the other day i think elon musk was sort of
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startled who his trust and safety boss was looks like yoel is arguing in favor of children being
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able to access adult internet services in his phd pieces it's worth considering how if at all the
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current generation of sorry i'm just going to i'm just going to read from that the current generation of
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popular sites of gay network social ability might fit into an overall queer social landscape that
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increasingly includes individuals under the age of 18 even with the services extensive content
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management grinder may well be too lewd or too hookup oriented to be a safe and age appropriate
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resource for teenagers but the fact that people under 18 are on these services already indicates that we
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can't readily dismiss these platforms out of hand as loci for queer youth culture rather than merely trying
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to absolve themselves of legal responsibility or worse trying to drive out teenagers entirely
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service providers should instead focus on crafting safety strategies that can accommodate a wide variety
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of use cases for platforms like grinder including possibly their role in safely connecting queer young
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adults really uh yeah he talks a lot about children and sex um here's another tweet that he just did on
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his work account he said can high school students ever meaningfully consent to sex with their teachers
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uh no brother that's called statutory rape um just like we have that old phrase taking candy from a baby
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that's because the baby is not strong and does not have capacity and doesn't have the ability to deal
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with someone more powerful that's why we call it statutory rape if you are having sex with an adult and
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you're a child you cannot consent because you were just a child it may look like consent but it is rape
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that's yole roth the head of trust and safety here here's another crazy tweet he did he said
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i enjoy having the kinds of meetings where googling gay bareback porn is considered academic work
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i'm just going to read another one here he says um that awkward moment when you can't tell
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whether your neighbor has a really loud infant or it's just watching really loud porn
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what the hell he talks a lot about listening to his neighbors having sex like repeatedly
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he talks about having a secret dirty twitter account as in what i've just been reading to you is
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from his clean account here's another one he says twitter will live to porn another day this
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is the head of trust and safety at twitter he's saying thing i just yelled loudly at work so he's
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trust and safety boss at twitter fighting to keep pornography in twitter he's got a hundred of these
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he hasn't taken them down which i find baffling and like i say these are from his public twitter
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account his work account they're not from his dirty account now i'm not anti-sex i'm not anti-gay
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i would be just as grossed out if someone in a professional setting literally would never stop
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talking about sex and pornography gay or straight if they did their phd on gay dating in the place of
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teens using gay sex apps i might say you know that's not just a fake academic discipline it's sort of
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gross and time for you to grow up and do something real with your life instead of just go on dates and
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calling it scholarship but that would be a microaggression aggression against them but back to my
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main point what is this guy's qualification for being the chief censor twitter i remember when i was
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young in canada uh there were a lot of free speech battles over gay pornography i don't know if you
00:27:10.580
remember the case the litter's little sisters bookshop was a lesbian bookstore and they would bring in
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lesbian pornography you've just written works and they were always stopped at customs and it was a huge
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civil liberties case back then sexual obscenity was the front line of free speech as in there was
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general agreement that we had freedom of speech about politics and all other matters it was just did
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obscene gay sex count as free speech that was the battle back then so he was an oversharer of porn
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and talked a lot about teens and even kids and even babies but he had no patience for actual free
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speech he felt traumatized by donald trump criticizing him so so the libertarians in the 80s who fought for
00:28:03.700
lesbian porn they were saying we're going to fight the battle for lesbian porn that shows how dedicated
00:28:10.100
for free speech we are of course we're for every other kind of speech too look at how far we're willing
00:28:15.060
to go for gay sex joel roth was the opposite he valued gay sex as free speech he didn't value free
00:28:24.980
speech as free speech no wonder child pornography and child sexual exploitation was never eradicated on
00:28:33.380
twitter despite countless victims begging for that to be done no no wonder misgendering
00:28:39.860
someone would get you banned no wonder calling drag queen story time grooming would get you banned
00:28:47.780
that was yoel roth's hobby talking about kids and sex and he hated anyone to the right of him he felt
00:28:55.380
traumatized by them but that's 90 percent of america he was so out there he was the real ceo of twitter
00:29:05.620
you know he met weekly with the fbi he gave government agencies direct access to twitter their own portal
00:29:13.060
right into the system the u.s government but what other governments too who are these masters of the
00:29:21.780
universe these tech bro millionaires not the billionaires the billionaires are the builders
00:29:28.420
they're usually math guys who built the thing the millionaires those are the liberals who came in and
00:29:33.940
colonized what the math geniuses build yoel roth is gone but we still haven't rooted out all the yoel
00:29:41.780
roths from twitter i hope that elon musk continues to do so and more importantly that he shows us what
00:29:48.580
they've been doing all these years stay with us for more
00:30:04.020
well elon musk has everyone's attention he's one of the world's most interesting man he's a man he's a
00:30:08.660
troublemaker he's obviously smart a builder and of course he's rich and he has been using the platform
00:30:14.580
that he bought uh to sow his bald oats and say what he wants to say he criticized dr anthony fauci
00:30:21.860
in a tough way suggesting not only that he's a critic of fauci but that he might have information
00:30:27.540
as the new owner of twitter and every message sent uh therein about dr fauci that who knows may lead to
00:30:34.100
his prosecution but in reaction to that john brennan who i think is really the poster boy for the deep
00:30:40.180
state i think he's a former cia director if i'm not mistaken wrote back dr fauci is a national hero
00:30:46.660
who will be remembered for generations to come for his innate goodness and many contributions to public
00:30:52.020
health despite your business success you will be remembered most for fueling public hate and divisions
00:30:58.420
you may have money but you have no class snap ah well the fun thing about twitter is that everyone gets to
00:31:06.820
weigh in on everything at any time i think that's the fun of it i think it's why it's more fun than if
00:31:12.740
we had a conservatives only twitter or a liberals only twitter which some camps on both sides try to
00:31:18.980
do conservatives have gab let's say liberals are trying to make mastodon their hangout but our friend
00:31:25.140
gordon g chang a close china watcher said this in reply to john brennan yes fauci is a national hero
00:31:34.180
he's a national hero in china boom and joining us now is the author that tweet who's really mastered
00:31:41.140
the forum is our friend gordon g chang who i follow on twitter and i think that might even have been
00:31:46.900
how i discovered him it really is a wonderful platform which may be one reason why it's banned
00:31:52.260
in china right if you don't have a vpn a kind of way to get around the great firewall of china you can't
00:31:58.260
access twitter in that country can you no twitter is unavailable in china except of course for a
00:32:05.220
virtual private network as you point out but that's actually violating china's laws so yes it's available
00:32:12.580
only if you make yourself a pirate of course the chinese government uses twitter to broadcast
00:32:18.500
its message outside the country there are many chinese diplomats who i think marshal uh the internet
00:32:24.900
fairly effectively i i note that none of them to my knowledge have been deplatformed in the way that
00:32:30.740
donald trump was deplatformed but let's get back to your tweet because i think it was a good quip
00:32:35.460
i mean it it was a great zinger but in a way it's true isn't it having forcible lockdowns having the power
00:32:44.580
to override any opposition there's no supreme court in china that's going to strike down xi jinping there's no
00:32:52.020
opposition party there's no you know new york times that's going to be skeptical of a president
00:32:57.300
it really is a one party state all the way through so it really is the kind of i mean look justin trudeau
00:33:03.940
said he would love to have that kind of power he most admires it that is the kind of world that anthony
00:33:08.900
fauci seemed to suggest he would like to i mean i i think that's a fair comment to say what you said
00:33:15.460
yes um to put some context on this ezra in 2014 the obama administration put a moratorium on federal
00:33:25.220
funding of gain of function research because it was so dangerous so what did fauci do well he went
00:33:31.780
around the moratorium by funding gain of function in china and that's why the wuhan institute of
00:33:38.260
virology was actually engaged in dangerous gain of function research and we know that fauci was
00:33:45.140
responsible for it because there are two published papers 2016 2017 which were by wuhan researchers
00:33:55.700
which clearly described gain of function experimentation and both of those published papers
00:34:01.620
explicitly acknowledged funding from the national institutes of allergy and infectious diseases
00:34:07.060
which fauci headed the reason why this is important is because last year twice in direct responses
00:34:14.740
to uh senator ran paul fauci under oath said that he did not fund gain of function in the wuhan institute
00:34:22.820
of virology so that leads to a conclusion either fauci did not know what his institute was doing which
00:34:31.380
is really unlikely because these papers were high profile or he committed perjury but the department of
00:34:38.740
justice is not investigating him and uh you know we have john brennan saying he's a national hero and the
00:34:45.620
reason why i said he was a national hero in china is because fauci funded china's biological weapons
00:34:52.100
research in the wuhan institute of virology on gain of function yeah i can't think of anything more
00:34:58.260
dangerous i mean doing gain of function research and of course that's that's just like what it sounds like
00:35:04.020
it's giving viruses more functions give it's altering viruses to to weaponize them that's a terrifying
00:35:11.940
almost dystopian fantasy that you might have a horror movie about it's a terrifying thing but the
00:35:18.100
only thing to make it more terrifying is to do it in china you know under the power and authority of
00:35:25.700
of the chinese government it would be terrible enough to do it in america but to do it in china is nuts
00:35:29.700
hey i got a question for you do we know if anthony fauci ever visited physically visited the wuhan
00:35:37.620
institute of virology i don't know of any such instance um and um i suspect he hasn't um but
00:35:47.540
that's not really the issue here for right i just want that would be quite something if he actually had
00:35:52.180
been i mean the key is the money and the direction oh well his money went there and echo health alliance which
00:35:59.140
he directly funded they sent their people to the wuhan institute of virology and they were all over
00:36:04.820
china on bat coronaviruses so that's the relevant thing in this is that um he actually funded americans
00:36:12.500
to go to the wuhan institute of virology just just nutty i think you're right and that may be i mean
00:36:18.580
elon musk sometimes speaks in riddles and puns he's a clever fella and that may be what when he says
00:36:24.420
his pronouns are fauci prosecute that may be what he was talking about but let's get back to um fauci's
00:36:33.060
prescription i mean the thing about public health is it's different than a doctor seeing one patient
00:36:40.260
where your interest is the patient what's best for the patient the patient has to consent the patient can
00:36:45.300
get a second opinion and it's very much particular you may have five patients and each one of them has a
00:36:51.380
a particularly different solution that's a fit for them public health is different public health is
00:36:57.460
by nature socialistic it's uh community oriented and you can look at that in a positive way but at
00:37:04.580
the end of the day you're compelling the community to do certain things as opposed to convincing them
00:37:09.940
it's like if a doctor says look you really got to cut back on the sweets that's a doctor's advice
00:37:15.380
putting a tax on you know uh sweet drinks is a community health enforcement approach my point is
00:37:23.780
i think dr fauci really liked the power of making orders that millions of people had to obey and that
00:37:31.300
really is the chinese communist party way it is the vast public health laboratory because there's no
00:37:38.740
dissent there's no court that's going to stop it that really was fauci's playground in a way
00:37:43.140
in terms of public health did they follow the fauci model in fighting covid well yes everyone's been
00:37:50.500
locking down um you know and and to your broader comment ezra which is really on point you know if
00:37:56.580
a doctor commits malpractice or just makes a mistake or whatever you know on a on a patient that's one
00:38:03.860
death but what fauci did has resulted in according to the johns hopkins coronavirus resource center
00:38:10.820
six million six hundred and fifty three thousand deaths as of today and the number is actually
00:38:17.060
larger because china has been underreporting deaths so you know this is a decision that has had
00:38:23.460
far-reaching global consequences and of course it's not just the deaths it's others um that other
00:38:29.940
medical problems people couldn't go to hospitals um and also all the social disorders that have resulted
00:38:36.740
from the lockdowns which fauci has has ordered so um the the disadvantage disadvantageous effects
00:38:43.860
across the world have have just been incalculable yeah i was thinking more of the public health response
00:38:50.100
to the virus rather than its creation and i and i think you know it's funny how in the early days you
00:38:56.100
were not allowed to speculate that the that the virus was man-made and they they came up with alternative
00:39:01.940
explanations and that was one of the issues that many tech companies would de-platform you if you
00:39:07.860
even mused about its origin it's funny how that worked now let me ask you about zero covid and which
00:39:13.620
is the idea that you don't allow a single case you lock down so hard you stop that thing at first i
00:39:20.740
thought that was just a western overreaction but actually china really embraced that deeply zero
00:39:27.860
killed covid they locked down millions of people actually longer than we ever did tell me a little
00:39:32.660
bit about how zero covid um went to the limit in china and how i think maybe it finally broke the
00:39:39.380
patience of the chinese people who started fighting back in the streets which is something i thought i'd
00:39:43.940
never live to see tell me a little bit about zero covid and how if at all the people rose up to meet it
00:39:50.260
zero covid is um was developed by xi jinping the chinese ruler and he did it for a number of reasons
00:39:58.580
and one of them was he wanted to weaponize the disease in a propaganda sense so from the very very
00:40:05.300
first months of this um the communist party made the case that chinese communism was superior to
00:40:10.500
democracy and american democracy in particular because the chinese communist party had been better able to
00:40:16.660
control the disease and had been better able to control the disease the argument went because of
00:40:22.580
this xi jinping's zero covid policy which as you said is meant to design is designed to prevent any
00:40:28.420
transmission of the disease at all so you would have for instance entire districts of cities locked down
00:40:35.220
if there was one positive case in one building or you had you know you had uh excessive contact tracing
00:40:43.460
you had uh multiple testing of people every day um this really was something that the chinese people
00:40:50.260
just could not stand and we saw this starting at the end of october at those extraordinary worker
00:40:57.060
protests in jungzhou at the foxconn factory the apple iphone place which makes more which makes more than
00:41:04.180
one half the world's iphones and then um following the november 24th fire in urumchi protests broke out
00:41:11.940
across china and this was north south east west there was no coordination no leadership no organization
00:41:19.860
just people had enough of it now zero covid was the uh the motivating factor because there were all
00:41:26.020
sorts of videos that showed that the fire trucks couldn't get to the burning building because of
00:41:30.420
covid barricades on the streets and also people were locked into their apartments from the outside to
00:41:35.540
prevent them from leaving quarantine and that just sparked outrage but soon that outrage was more
00:41:41.460
than just covet it was down with xi jinping people were chanting people were chanting down with the
00:41:47.060
communist party and so the party for the protests they had to relent but also because the zero covid
00:41:53.540
rules were just so expensive to administer local governments were running out of money and it was
00:41:58.660
destroying the chinese economy so for a lot of reasons beijing last wednesday national health commission
00:42:05.140
issued its 10-point plan which was essentially the repeal of zero covid wow so i i hate
00:42:11.380
to give the government any credit over there because they're they're authoritarian and they're abusive
00:42:15.700
and and and and i think they're they're immoral to their towards their own people but it looks like
00:42:22.020
the democratic democratic the the people's uprising which was unarmed i mean uh worked
00:42:31.540
they made the tyrant blink that that's incredible to me um
00:42:36.420
um what what do you take from that i mean if they managed to get xi jinping to blink on something that
00:42:43.780
was sort of a signature policy of his what what does that uh portend for the future well a couple
00:42:50.500
things first of all xi jinping is not as strong as he appears um you know xi jinping is sort of a
00:42:56.420
malice and and malice believe that humans can do anything they want they can conquer nature and in this case
00:43:03.220
can conquer a pathogen which um is not true in either case but that's that's the way xi jinping
00:43:09.700
views the world um but we've seen the chinese people have had enough um and now the real problem
00:43:16.100
for china and and this is apart from xi jinping you know once you remove the zero covet rules right away
00:43:23.300
the disease is ripping through the chinese population across the country but especially in beijing and the
00:43:29.940
government which has spent two more than two years uh on isolation um has now hasn't built icu beds
00:43:38.260
they haven't done all the work that is necessary to deal with an outbreak and now they've got an
00:43:43.140
outbreak um pharmacies have run out of ibuprofen um they don't have drugs the hospitals are overcrowded
00:43:50.580
and this just shows you the failure of zero covet um and it shows you communism doesn't work you know
00:43:57.060
ezra we may not have gotten it right here or any place else but at least in democratic societies you
00:44:03.460
have changed faster because people can actually protest people can say things people can write
00:44:09.140
things um twitter notwithstanding yeah but the point here is that uh in a totalitarian society which xi
00:44:16.420
jinping is putting together in china because he's moving back to full totalitarianism the government held
00:44:22.660
on for the very last moment it capitulated and now the country is a complete mess um and we should be
00:44:29.540
praying for the chinese people because they're suffering from the policies of the communist party
00:44:34.980
wow well i hope this is the beginning of a further liberation of them it sounds like they managed to
00:44:40.340
get the zero covet off of them i hope this is the first of many uh i don't want to call it a democratic
00:44:46.500
success because it wasn't really through the mechanisms of democracy but it's incredible that an unarmed
00:44:51.780
uh disorganized censored uh uprising managed to achieve change i i'm very excited by gordon it's
00:44:59.780
great to catch up with you i follow you on twitter at gordon g chang i love it i love your banter
00:45:05.060
there and i learned so much we're always grateful when you stop by thanks for being here today
00:45:09.460
oh well thank you so much ezra because we're going to see some really consequential change in china
00:45:14.260
as the chinese people feel emboldened and i think the word that i would use for these protests
00:45:19.460
is popular popular popular protests right that's the word for sure all right well we'll keep our
00:45:25.060
hopefully 2023 will be the year where popular protests can peacefully move china towards more
00:45:31.140
freedom that would be the most important uh event of the year if that massive country with so much promise
00:45:39.460
and move towards liberty it's had a form of economic liberty but to have personal liberty follow it
00:45:45.860
would be the greatest uh event of our of our generation i think so let's hope for the best
00:45:51.380
amen to that thank you so much ezra thanks gordon there you have it stay with us more ahead
00:45:59.860
hey welcome back your letters to me annalisa vida says well i live on vancouver island and media is
00:46:14.740
isolated here lots of protesters regarding fairy creek get arrested and assaulted by police here even
00:46:21.060
after an injunction was lifted and the protest was legal and they are vilified and called violent when
00:46:26.740
they are not well i'm i'm not familiar with that story but uh you know what it's funny the police
00:46:34.260
can have an extremely light touch and sometimes it can be absolutely brutal sometimes it depends on
00:46:42.340
the facts on the ground but i think so often it depends on the political ideology of the criminals
00:46:49.060
and the government i i have to say i never saw riot horses deployed against greenpeace protesters but i saw
00:46:55.860
them deployed against the peaceful protesters the trucker convoy and if you remember even adamson's
00:47:01.860
barbecue adam skelly's barbecue in toronto just for selling barbecue brisket miss it tom says
00:47:10.660
of course they were treated differently talking about the protesters the anti-pipeline protest was
00:47:16.420
something to fit with trudeau's no energy policies so only government approved protests will be allowed
00:47:22.580
yeah you know what there are uh fake protests in dictatorships around the world if you read 1984
00:47:32.420
by george orwell they had political protests against this enemy emmanuel goldstein this enemy who was to
00:47:41.060
blame for everything they had something called two minutes of hate where you would all scream at the
00:47:46.580
external enemy and then go back to your drudgery and if there was anything wrong it was that goldstein
00:47:52.260
i think that there are some approved protesters in canada where people blow off some steam and
00:47:58.020
pretend that they have some opposition in this country but it's nothing that truly challenges
00:48:02.500
trudeau we saw during the trucker commission of inquiry that what really scared trudeau is that
00:48:06.820
he was losing face including overseas that's our show for today until tomorrow on behalf of all
00:48:12.980
of us here at rebel world headquarters to you at home good night and keep fighting for freedom
00:48:25.460
will try to action sulan-wide and of systems at home good night and do with that