Elon Musk took over the company on Thursday, and since then, there have been a lot of developments. There are some reasons to be optimistic, and some reason to be worried about the future direction of the company, and we discuss them in this special episode of America First! hosted by Nicholas J. Fuentes ( ) and Alex Blumberg ( ), covering the latest developments at the company. Topics covered include: - Elon's new role as CEO - What's going to happen with the company - Is this a good or bad thing? - Will he be able to get things back on track? - Is he a good CEO or a bad CEO? - Does this mean the company is headed for trouble? - Will this be a disaster or a success? - How will the company grow under Elon Musk? - What are the chances that the company will survive under him? - Should we be concerned about the company's future under a CEO who is not on the board? - Who will be the next CEO? And who will be on the next board? ? - What will the new CEO bring to the table? -- Is he going to be good? or will he be bad? - And what s the future of this company look like under him, and what will happen next? What s the likelihood that he s going to do to the company? in the long-term, and how will the future look like after this? and what s happening under him in the short term and much more! - Is there a chance for the company in the future under Elon's leadership at this company under this new CEO and the new leadership? & much, much more? We'll talk about it all in this week's show on America First on the America First? on this episode of the show! Subscribe to our new podcast! on the new show, America First on Monday, November 1st, coming soon! Welcome back to America First with Alex and the crew at the podcast, coming back next Monday, Nov. 2nd, November 4th, 2019! . . . . . , November 1, 2020, 2020? . . , , November 4, 2019, 2020! , 2020, 2019? , , and so much more. , 2019, & so on. . ? Thank you for listening?
Transcript
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00:03:37.000And there are some reasons to be optimistic.
00:03:39.000There are some reasons to be pessimistic.
00:03:42.000Either way, no changes have actually even been made.
00:03:45.000So we can't judge what the new trajectory of the company will be until we start to see the changes, which will not happen for some time.
00:03:55.000I would say I'll give it until the end of this year.
00:03:59.000Before I'll say we have a good idea of Where things are gonna go and even then I think that's early, but I would give it a couple months To to let it without judgment.
00:04:12.000I'll give it a couple months to with to withhold judgment reserve judgment and if it's still bad by January then we're in trouble and
00:04:22.000So a few of those developments include he dismissed the entire board today We covered on I think it was Thursday that he fired all of the top brass he fired the CEO the CFO the head of the trust and safety team and I think one additional person as well his name I forget and Then today he fired everybody on the board.
00:04:44.000So now he remains the sole board member and Parag is
00:05:09.000The other development is he froze all the moderation tools of all of the people that manually suspend users.
00:05:19.000They're still AI, they still have their contractors, but the moderation team in San Francisco, I think it is, all their tools have been taken from them.
00:05:32.000On the contrary, there was the largest ban wave since January 6th on Twitter over the weekend which they banned almost everybody, like every Groyper remaining.
00:06:47.000And he said that he's not going to reverse any permanent suspensions until that board is convened.
00:06:56.000So we're not getting our accounts back anytime soon and it depends on what the hell this board is gonna be.
00:07:03.000Because if it looks like all the other boards and all the other companies in all the world, you know, fat chance it's gonna be freaking World Jewish Congress times a billion, you know, times six million.
00:07:15.000The six millionth World Jewish Congress convening at Twitter headquarters.
00:07:20.000We'll also be talking tonight about a really big important report from The Intercept.
00:07:26.000Which shows new leaked documents from the Department of Homeland Security, which show that the government is intimately involved in censorship.
00:07:36.000And we talked about this, I want to say, one or two months ago.
00:07:39.000It was the Missouri Attorney General who uncovered some documents in a lawsuit, and that showed this very big exposure between social media and various factions within the administration.
00:07:56.000You had Facebook having weekly meetings with the press office, with the Department of Defense, with the Department of Homeland Security, with the Pentagon, with all the national security brass, the FBI.
00:08:13.000And we knew about that a couple months ago.
00:08:15.000Well, it's even broader than we previously thought.
00:08:18.000This particular report is about the DHS, Department of Homeland Security.
00:08:23.000They shut off your Facebook, they shut off your Tesla, whatever.
00:08:28.000They just start shutting stuff off, pulling plugs, like Ant-Man or Grey Matter from Ben 10.
00:08:33.000You know, they jump in the robot, they just start pulling plugs.
00:08:37.000And I think a lot of people on the left thought that that was fantastical, that that doesn't happen.
00:08:44.000Well, according to this report, that is literally what they do.
00:08:49.000DHS goes to facebook.com slash something something something, it's in here, and they log in, and then they delete content.
00:08:56.000The government deletes content on Facebook.
00:13:38.000I lost my account and then the news media reported on it.
00:13:43.000It was in Apple News, so everybody saw it.
00:13:46.000I'm sure all my friends and fa- well, I don't really have any friends, but all my family, I'm sure, and people that used to be my friends saw it.
00:14:43.000You know, UX said that we were gonna stream Phasmophobia on Sunday, and so I got all excited, and I got all ready to go, and he texts us at 8 o'clock and says, hey, is everybody ready?
00:21:50.000That was his beef with me, not my beef with him.
00:21:53.000And so he put out this article to Kanye, addressed to Ye, and said something like, um, what was the usual, I'm a secular Jew, I'm an atheist Jew, we're there, or no, no, I'm sorry, the opposite, I'm a religious Jew, I'm a Zionist Jew out there, there are Jews that are on our side, but the ones that are,
00:22:17.000are not tripping over themselves, telling you, no, no, no, I'm one of the good ones.
00:24:59.000About Saul it says and straightaway he preached Christ in the synagogues that he Jesus is the Son of God But all that heard him were amazed and said is not this he that destroyed them which called on this name in Jerusalem and came hither for that intent that might bring them bound unto the chief priests
00:25:16.000But Saul increased the Moor in strength and confounded the Jews which dwelt in Damascus, proving that this is very Christ.
00:25:25.000And after that many days were fulfilled, the Jews took counsel to kill him.
00:25:30.000But their laying await was known of Saul, and they watched the gates day and night to kill him.
00:26:06.000And we complain about censorship, and we say that that's killing free speech, and that's...
00:26:11.000against the first amendment and they say well technically because they're so smart they're see they're really well read and they know what they're talking about they say well technically the first amendment only applies to the government not to private enterprise which can do whatever it likes and there's about a million problems with that argument first and foremost being that almost all the big tech companies were started by the government
00:26:36.000The internet was created by the government and entities like Google were created by the government.
00:26:44.000Almost all the big tech companies and all the people that work at the big tech companies have their origin with the national security apparatus.
00:26:58.000But if you look closely enough, the idea that there's some kind of free enterprise thing going on with Big Tech, it just flies in the face of what Big Tech is and always was.
00:27:12.000And so it's the origin of the internet and the origin of the tech, the giant tech of the government, specifically the national security apparatus, is very broad and it's very alarming.
00:27:50.000Anybody see the movie Social Ration on these platforms has worked in the era of censorship starting in 2016.
00:27:56.000And this new report sheds some light on that and I'll read the report to you.
00:28:01.000It says, quote, the Department of Homeland Security is quietly broadening its efforts to curb speech that it considers dangerous, according to an investigation by The Intercept.
00:28:11.000Years of internal DHS memos, emails, and documents obtained via leaks and that ongoing lawsuit in Missouri, as well as public documents, illustrate an expansive effort by the agency to influence tech platforms.
00:28:26.000Behind closed doors, requests for false or intentionally misleading information.
00:28:32.000Microsoft executive Matt Masterson, who is also a former DHS official, texted Jen Easter... ...network.
00:28:42.000You were running the Department of Homeland Security and the National Security Apparatus for the government.
00:28:48.000Now you're an executive at Microsoft, one of the big five.
00:28:52.000And he's texting a director of the DHS that these companies have just got to get more comfortable with government.
00:30:53.000But they're coming out there and saying, we're gonna control all the information about all the news, which was in vogue before the Trump presidency, after January 6th turned into misinformation creates terrorists.
00:31:07.000Therefore, anyone promulgating alternative narratives about Mustemeyer.
00:31:13.000And then, around the time of the pandemic, around the time of COVID, they said that it was vaccine misinformation and election misinformation.
00:31:23.000Which were undermining the government and causing violence.
00:31:26.000The Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping plot, which they attribute as violence, caused lone wolf, high casualty, antisocial violence.
00:31:33.000So now the government's got to be in the business of the veracity of the news.
00:31:40.000Whether it's about George Floyd, or it's about Ukraine, or the election, or the vaccine, or the pandemic, or inflation, or whatever.
00:31:48.000As long as there are issues, and as long as people care about them, DHS says that if people are free to create and form their own opinions and promulgate them, it will cause terrorism.
00:32:01.000It will cause people to go out there and blow shit up and communication between people.
00:32:08.000Totally nightmare stuff, and we all said that in 2021.
00:32:15.000They said DVE, domestic violent extremism, was caused by misinformation, emerging narratives that could cause violence, and they sent people into the telegram group chats and so on.
00:32:27.000They contracted it out with private firms to get around the Constitution.
00:32:31.000And they turned the war on terror apparatus inwardly.
00:32:35.000Afghanistan ended and then they declared war on the enemy within.
00:32:40.000Using Patriot Act, Operation Echelon, the NSA, all of that.
00:32:48.000The article goes on it says the extent to which the DHS initiatives affect Americans daily social feeds is unclear.
00:32:56.000During the 2020 election the government flagged numerous posts as suspicious many of which government is flagging lots of content and Big Tech is taking a lot of it down.
00:33:06.000Not all of it and not most of it but they're 35% is not an insignificant amount.
00:33:11.000If the government is flagging thousands of posts
00:33:16.000Presumably they're not policing the guy that gets one like or one share, but presumably that's 5,000 big posts in a short time period.
00:33:25.000And Big Tech takes action on a third of them in a year.
00:33:30.000The research was done in consultation with CISA, the cybersecurity infrastructure security agency.
00:33:38.000Prior to the 2020 election, tech companies including Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Discord, Wikipedia, Microsoft, LinkedIn, and Verizon Media met on a monthly basis with the FBI, the CISA, and other government representatives.
00:33:51.000According to NBC News, the meetings were part of an initiative still ongoing between the private sector and government to discuss how firms would handle misinformation during the election.
00:34:47.000Obviously, they all do different things, and the point is that all of them are affected by this.
00:34:53.000It's not just a strict, narrow, select few number of platforms with billions of users and where content can go viral, but it's also these other ones you don't think of very much.
00:35:05.000What is the implication there about information?
00:35:09.000If Google gets its bios and profile about information from Wikipedia, you know, what does that say about all this collusion between the tech companies and between the tech companies and the government?
00:35:25.000The telecom company's search engine, the search engine and YouTube, the search engine and the ad platform, the search engine and the encyclopedia, the social platforms and the service providers.
00:35:42.000The service providers and, you know, they're all connected.
00:35:45.000And they all are, quite literally, meeting on a weekly or monthly basis with the White House Press Office, with the FBI, with the Department of Homeland Security, with the intention of collaborating, including on disinformation.
00:37:39.000They're plucked from the universities by the private sector, by the public sector, by the government, by the IC, the intelligence community, or by big tech.
00:39:22.000And who's really running the corporations?
00:39:24.000If there is guidance being handed down to the corporations about the composition of the board, who's really in control?
00:39:30.000And if they answer to regulators, and if they answer to the financial institutions to give them the equity, or the big institutions that control the shares, who are they liable to?
00:40:40.000When Twitter censors people it seems to be coming from the censors of Twitter.
00:40:46.000And I'm the guy over here saying it's a little bit more complicated than that.
00:40:51.000That there is such a thing as complex interdependence.
00:40:56.000And you cannot look at the chair, you can't look at the building, or the name on the chair, the name at the desk, or the name on the building.
00:41:14.000Working at Microsoft as an executive at the weekly meeting with DHS talking about how big tech needs to accept government is not surprising.
00:41:23.000And the leaders of Wikipedia and Discord and Reddit and Facebook and Twitter and Verizon getting on a call with the FBI every month to discuss disinformation?
00:41:34.000And the White House Press Office calling up Facebook and getting a reply in 30 seconds that they're going to take down a particular post about COVID?
00:42:13.000So, for example, when I went to high school and I got into politics, I was reading Milton Friedman.
00:42:18.000And he wrote books called Free to Choose and Capitalism and Freedom.
00:42:21.000And he talked about these very vague, abstract, nebulous concepts about the free market and taxes and an individual's economic rights and their political rights.
00:42:33.000And it was really about a lot of things that aren't real.
00:42:37.000And that's what all of these institutions are about.
00:42:40.000It's about inculcating people with these big ideas, not details.
00:42:55.000And what it sells, what it exports, and what it imports.
00:43:00.000Don't think about the Teslas and how they're built and how you build the batteries and where you get the lithium and who produces the lithium and where it's produced.
00:43:38.000Which institutions have the spending power?
00:43:40.000The billionaires or the institutions they control or the states?
00:43:43.000Who controls the spending power of the state?
00:43:46.000Politicians are the donors that put up the money for the politicians to benefit from the spending power of the state.
00:43:53.000And really all that's required is just a little bit of critical thinking.
00:43:56.000But there's no fancy infographic, there's no cartoon that explains this.
00:44:02.000There's a handy cartoon that explains how freedom to buy and sell goods makes the GDP go up and makes efficiency go up.
00:44:11.000Okay, well that really doesn't mean anything.
00:44:14.000There's a whole lot of money being poured into these fancy infographics to teach you that a, you know, a particular bill which you haven't read and you know the details of is like free market because of this, because of economic liberty.
00:44:27.000That's a bunch of crap that doesn't mean anything.
00:44:42.000How does a nation have wealth and how is it distributed?
00:44:45.000These are the important questions and the same is true of power too.
00:44:50.000So, that's what I would say the difference is people go on and on about and by the way that only just that only just goes to show how facile and stupid it is to write 30,000 words about trannies.
00:45:06.000You know, and I'm not trying to be venomous here, but that is really the crux of the disagreement.
00:45:12.000If Stephen Bunnell sees it fit to write a 30,000 word essay about trans discourse and girls that identify as boys, or vice versa, and things like 9-11 and like debanking and the no-fly list and
00:45:30.000Shel Nadelson and the revolving door and the iron triangle is just sort of like hand waved away.
00:45:39.000Anyway, let's get into the weeds on who's really a girl or not.
00:45:45.000Let's write 30,000 words and attach 10,000 footnotes about, you know, these trannies that like being trannies and these trannies that really do believe they're the other.
00:46:13.000And I want to know who wrote the Clean Break Memo and I want to know who working at Big Tech was working in the National Security State and who working in the National Security State was working at Big Tech.
00:46:30.000I want to create a giant cork board and map it all out with yarn.
00:46:34.000And you're over there writing 30,000 words about... Well, I think that boys who become girls shouldn't play water polo with the girls because they're still technically men and they're strong.
00:48:31.000Elon Musk has dissolved Twitter's board of directors, cementing his control over the social media platform.
00:48:38.000The reforms he is contemplating include changes for how Twitter verifies accounts as well as job cuts.
00:48:43.000The Washington Post has reported that a first round of cuts is under discussion that could affect 25% of Twitter staff.
00:48:51.000He is now the sole director of Twitter.
00:48:55.000The nine ousted directors include former chairman of the board Brett Taylor and the former chief executive Parag Agrawal.
00:49:04.000Mr. Musk's takeover has drawn widespread scrutiny as he signals plans to overhaul how Twitter has moderated the spread of information on its platform, including from sources such as state media, politicians, and celebrities.
00:49:15.000Mr. Musk said the company would create a new council to govern those decisions, and that no changes would occur until the council is convened.
00:49:23.000On Monday, Senator Chris Murphy, a Democrat, said that he had asked the government to review the national security implications of the deal, given the large stake of the company held by firms tied to Saudi Arabia.
00:49:37.000Mr. Murphy wrote on Twitter, we should be concerned that the Saudis, who have a clear interest in repressing political speech and impacting politics, are now the second largest owner of a major social platform.
00:50:25.000But now that Elon Musk has taken over the company and is the CEO and the sole director and by far and away the biggest shareholder, he took a private, owns a majority of the shares, now they're really concerned about the ties to Saudi Arabia.
00:51:17.000We hate to interrupt your regularly scheduled programming of being dominated by foreign governments, transnational corporations, Jewish billionaires, now a rogue class traitor like Donald Trump, Elon Musk, or Yale become your boss.
00:53:20.000has frozen employee access to internal tools used for content moderation and other policy enforcement, curbing the staff's ability to clamp down on misinformation ahead of a major U.S.
00:53:41.000Penalized accounts that break rules around misleading information.
00:53:45.000Offensive posts and hate speech except for the most high-impact violations that would involve real-world harm.
00:53:52.000Those posts were prioritized for manual enforcement, they said.
00:53:55.000People who were on call to enforce Twitter's policies during Brazil's election did access internal tools on Sunday, but in a limited capacity.
00:54:05.000The company is still utilizing automated enforcement and third-party contractors, although the highest profile violations are typically reviewed by Twitter employees.
00:54:14.000On Friday and Saturday, Bloomberg reported a surge in hate speech on Twitter.
00:54:19.000That included a 1,700% spike in the use of a racist slur, and that slur is nigger.
00:54:28.000On the platform, which at its peak appeared 215 times every five minutes, which is a lot of times, apparently.
00:54:38.000According to data from Dataminr, an official Twitter partner that has access to the entire platform, the trust and safety team did not have access to enforce Twitter's moderation policies during this time.
00:54:49.000Yoel Roth, Yoel Roth, a Jew, Twitter's head of safety and integrity, posted a series of tweets on Monday addressing the increase in offensive posts, saying that every few people see the content in question,
00:55:02.000Since Saturday we've focused on addressing the surge in hateful conduct on Twitter.
00:55:06.000We've made measurable progress removing 1,500 accounts and reducing impressions on this content to nearly zero.
00:55:15.000We're primarily dealing with a focused short-term trolling campaign.
00:55:21.000That's the other development and the moderation tools being frozen is good but this report is not good and it's playing out exactly like I said.
00:55:33.000They generate a report about a billion percent increase in hate speech.
00:55:36.000A billion percent increase in anti-Semitism or racism.
00:55:42.000And that creates the impetus for an advertiser boycott or for some high-pressure campaign.
01:01:05.000Then I tried to fly home and I was banned from American Airlines.
01:01:09.000Then I tried, then, so I flew to Tampa.
01:01:13.000And I was like, wow, I flew, I win, I got a first-class flight, I'm hanging with Baked Alaska, I got to the airport to fly back home, and they said, you can't fly.
01:01:41.000And I think there are still a few that are not banned from Anyway, so the point is it's not it's not over until it's over.
01:01:51.000I don't believe it until it happens Because you know you they always pull the rug out from under.
01:01:57.000I don't remember the last time it ever just happened So that's that but I want to move on I want to get on into our super chats and we'll see what you guys have to say about all this Let me get my