Justin Bieber has moved to unfollow Usher. TikTok users are fleeing the app and joining Red Dot in anticipation of TikTok's ban on their service. Meghan and Michaela Petersen debate the viral video of Usher at Justin Bieber's wedding.
00:00:00.000All right, guys, happy Tuesday. And I'm so sorry I'm running late. I really should not play with your emotions like that. You guys probably thought that I got assassinated by the French president and his husband. I did not. I was genuinely running late. I had a lot of stuff going on at the home today with the kitties. But OK, I'm here and there's a lot to cover. The Bieber, Justin Bieber, is continuing the purge. He has now moved to unfollow Usher, OK, his original mentor.
00:00:23.440So this is a very big story. And the reason why we should discuss this and we should not diminish what is happening, it's not celebrity drama. This is actually the fall of Babylon that we are witnessing. Hollywood Babylon, that is. Also, TikTok users have me in stitches. They are fleeing the app and joining Red Note, which is a Chinese version of TikTok and Instagram in anticipation of the ban on their speech.
00:00:48.100And later on, I'm going to go over my viral debate with Michaela Petersen, because I saw you guys in the comments saying, are you going to talk about the debate with Michaela Petersen? OK, we'll do it today if that's what you want. Welcome back to Candace.
00:00:58.300All right, guys, so here's what we have going on. Justin Bieber has moved to unfollow Usher. And yes, like I said, this is a very big deal. I'm going to tell you everything that is happening right now.
00:01:23.920Now, we went over the timeline last week. OK, Justin was signed when he was just 13 years old.
00:01:30.080And I should mention he was signed by Usher to a label that was owned jointly by both Scooter Braun and Usher.
00:01:36.020And he was considered Usher's protege. He has been described Usher as his mentor, which is why his adorable premiere music video that I showed you guys last week entitled One Time.
00:01:47.020They had created this storyline in which a young Justin Bieber is playing video games with his friends and Usher calls him and says that he's running late.
00:01:57.240You know, his big bro Usher calls him and then Justin Bieber does the teenager thing and throws a party while Usher is out.
00:02:03.280So take a look at the beginning of that music video now.
00:02:08.760Oh, oh, three. That was not luck. That was skill. Yo, I'm killing you.
00:05:36.660Well, I'll tell you, it isn't unlike Justin Bieber's story in the manner in which he, too, was initiated into the Hollywood industry.
00:05:44.740Usher Raymond was signed by L.A. Reid, none other than L.A. Reid, when he was just 13 years old.
00:05:52.220Kind of oddly, the story goes that Bobby Brown's bodyguard, a guy named A.J. Alexander, discovered Usher at an audition in Atlanta and then started just bringing him around just everywhere, having him tag along.
00:06:06.640And then a rep from L.A. Reid's label saw him perform at Star Search.
00:06:32.860And then he first appeared in a video that was entitled Call Me Mac, a song that was written by Usher himself, which was released in 1993 as the soundtrack, one of the soundtracks, rather, for the film Poetic Justice.
00:06:47.240So I'm going to show you just a little small clip of his Call Me Mac premiere video.
00:07:40.680And so now we are presented with this picture of Justin Bieber unfollowing him.
00:07:48.020We can probably assume that there was some friction, which was established in 2024, which made him not want to perform with him in 2000 at the Super Bowl.
00:07:56.960And we have to ask ourselves, what was that friction about?
00:07:59.500And of course, many people, I believe, are accurately assuming that this has something to do.
00:08:03.980One element has to do with the Diddy lawsuit.
00:08:06.860A lot of revelations were made in the Diddy lawsuit.
00:08:10.280So I'm going to start this by saying allegedly, okay, obviously, he has not yet been convicted of everything, but I knew that he was going to get arrested because after reading through this lawsuit, there were just so many pictures, way too many descriptions.
00:08:24.600He had hours of video footage proving his claims.
00:08:26.780I'm preferring to the person who initially filed this, Rodney Lilrod, a producer who went into great detail, laborious effort to basically describe almost a homosexual ring in which people were being drugged at various Diddy parties.
00:08:44.240But he describes how essentially him, being a young producer, they tried to initiate him into homosexuality.
00:08:51.020And I'm going to read this directly from a lawsuit.
00:08:52.900It says, quote, Mr. Combs, that's Diddy, used access to Stevie J and his knowledge that the producer, Mr. Jones, admired Stevie J to groom and entice Mr. Jones to engage in homosexuality.
00:09:08.000Mr. Combs went so far as to share a video of Stevie J.
00:09:11.940I am now redacting this so that we stay YouTube safe.
00:09:55.000Watch this footage that I have everybody else doing.
00:09:57.420This is just what we do in the industry.
00:10:00.440But then there's a footnote in the filing, right, because the names are redacted.
00:10:03.260In the footnote, it reads that regarding the R&B singer that Diddy allegedly slept with, he performed at the Super Bowl and had a successful Vegas residency.
00:10:14.760So this let people know that very clearly the name that was redacted had to have been Usher because it was Usher who recently performed at the Super Bowl.
00:10:22.720And it was Usher at the time of the filing who had just had a very successful Vegas residency.
00:10:27.320And we also knew that Usher and Diddy themselves had a relationship, a long relationship.
00:20:15.600Then, of course, October 7th happened.
00:20:18.920And TikTok was incredibly pro-Palestine.
00:20:22.740To the point that they began censoring the word Palestine and the ADL, the Anti-Defamation League, which is really just the Anti-Free Speech League and the Smear and Mislander League, decided that they needed to now step in.
00:20:36.300Forget you thinking your president has power.
00:20:38.340We, the ADL, our lobby, AIPAC, we're going to get this done now because we don't like that Gen Z is anti-Israel.
00:20:45.640They're not allowed to have those thoughts.
00:20:47.460So, incredibly, if you don't remember this, Jonathan Greenblatt, who is the head of the ADL, got caught on audio discussing how Gen Z was problematic and they needed to do something immediately.
00:21:30.580And the numbers of young people who think that Hamas' massacre was justified is shockingly and terrifyingly high.
00:21:39.360And so, we really have a TikTok problem, a Gen Z problem, that our community needs to put the same brains that gave us Tag Lee, the same brains that gave us all these other amazing innovations, need to put our energy toward this, like, fast.
00:21:57.120Because, again, like we've been chasing this left-right divide, it's the wrong game.
00:22:25.400Israel counted its win and said, you know, we have gotten a handle on—I showed you on a prior episode.
00:22:30.600So, we've gotten a handle now on TikTok and on Instagram, and then the kids got smart and started using watermelons, instead of—because they couldn't say Palestine or get any views and things were getting banned, they started using watermelon signs, okay?
00:22:43.200But then, very quickly, Congress passed an act.
00:22:45.560Forget—like I said, forget the president in 2020.
00:22:47.360They were like, oh, yes, no, TikTok must immediately be banned now.
00:22:49.940We got to get rid of this, or it must sell.
00:22:54.280And so, the TikTokers are going, we are not with this.
00:22:57.320You are not going to censor our speech.
00:22:59.380We are not okay with you selling it to somebody that's going to censor our speech.
00:23:03.400And so, what they have started doing is downloading RedNotes.
00:23:06.700And basically, this is just China's TikTok.
00:23:09.300And it's really funny to just look through what they are saying here, because there is something—and speaking to this generational divide, which is—he's correct.
00:23:17.140The younger kids don't really care when you tell them that their data is being stolen, because basically, they assume that their data is being stolen one way or the other.
00:23:32.000So, yeah, whether or not China is stealing their data isn't a priority in their lives.
00:23:38.600And so, I'm going to show you just a couple of these TikToks of them pretty much just mocking, signing up for this app, and laughing at the government, thinking that it's going to stop them.
00:27:35.400OK, they want to they want to enjoy TikToks of people speaking about various issues, people gardening, whatever it is that helps them ease their minds off of the fact that everything seems to be falling apart around them.
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00:29:47.720Michaela tweeted something that I was not happy about.
00:29:51.040She had tweeted this about the visas of people saying that we needed to put a limit and completely get rid of this program because it's been corrupted.
00:29:59.340She wrote, why did the woke right pretend that it was illegal immigration that they were against when it turned out it was immigration in general?
00:30:07.620If there's assimilation into the culture and legal immigration, what is the problem other than skin color?
00:30:12.720And she went on to say that the issue was that people didn't want brown people.
00:30:18.400She actually wrote brown people in the country.
00:30:20.320And I took issue that because I just find it offensive.
00:30:22.460I found it offensive that somebody who's not even a U.S. citizen who is here on a visa would accuse Americans of being racist rather than listening to Americans as to why this program and how this program has impacted their lives.
00:30:34.320So we have a debate and I will show you what Michaela had to say on the topic on Piers Morgan.
00:30:41.240So I don't know, Candace, if you're seeing what I'm seeing on X, but when I saw the H-1B debate going around, mostly what I saw was racism against Indians specifically.
00:30:50.760And I'm not saying there isn't a problem with the visa issue in the states in general.
00:30:55.740Getting top talent here is very difficult.
00:30:57.560Like I had a very difficult time getting in and I'm married to an American.
00:31:00.120And it was long and annoying and they don't have a proper way to test people.
00:31:04.700So there's plenty of flaws to talk about.
00:31:07.000But I think right before the inauguration, having conservatives argue amongst ourselves about an H-1B visa issue when we have an open border is silly, especially when it does kind of dredge up what I called the woke right on X.
00:31:21.680And I know you've scoffed at the term the woke right, but it encompasses these people that are focused on anti-Semitism, Jews, and are very, they're pro-America, but their idea of America is this white America, similar to, I guess, what everyone's been arguing about for the last 200 years whenever anybody new comes into the country.
00:31:45.200And I do think it has to do with race and I can see, I think you can see that from comments on Twitter.
00:31:50.700So I essentially answered her back and said that one of the ways in which I hate that people debate is rather than debating what you are saying, they basically look for a commenter on Twitter, an anonymous account that says something racist.
00:32:04.880And they go, see, see, everyone who has this perspective is racist.
00:32:07.980This is like the Seth Dillon way of arguing on X where he just like will find a random griper account.
00:32:11.980And he's like, well, look, these people don't like Jews.
00:32:15.060And so that means that if you don't think Palestinians should be bombed, you don't like Jews like, okay, guys, can we argue as people?
00:32:43.460Like, so, and obviously I don't have an issue with Vivek Ramaswamy because I stumped for him when he was running.
00:32:48.460I went down, went up to Iowa and got on the ground with him because I think he's remarkably talented.
00:32:52.660I just think him and Elon have it wrong on H1B1 visas.
00:32:56.100And so we had that dialogue and it was a respectful dialogue.
00:33:00.060And then the conversation completely turned because she brought up her father.
00:33:05.580And I think people found this to be very interesting.
00:33:07.680And I'm very curious to see what you guys thought about it.
00:33:11.660Essentially, I'll just give you the background here.
00:33:13.060So Michaela, it was very obvious that she had some bad feelings towards me because I had covered her father on one episode, one episode of this podcast because he was troll and he was trolling.
00:33:25.520He was trending because of some tweets that he had written, which seemed out of character for Jordan Peterson.
00:33:35.640But I wanted to cover this because this is Dr. Jordan Peterson.
00:33:38.380And truly, I would say in 2018, there had never been a person that had so much influence in American politics that I had never seen someone get bigger than Dr.
00:33:49.860Jordan Peterson was in 2018 across the world.
00:33:52.440By the way, I shouldn't say American politics across the world.
00:33:54.380This guy was selling out stadiums from here to like Korea based off of his book.
00:34:04.460Anyways, the point is, is that something seemed to have changed post October 7th and people weren't able to pick up what it was because first, you'll remember on October 7th, he tweeted like bomb.
00:34:16.160All of them are going to get to those tweets.
00:34:17.420But these were some of the tweets that created the trend.
00:34:22.740Hey, and it's also written in sonnet form.
00:34:25.400Hey, new Nazi troll rats anonymously trumpeting your anti-Semitism doesn't rescue you from your mother's basement or from the demon of resentment or make you attractive to the women who take one look at you and shudder and rightly bloody so.
00:34:36.100You are despicable bottom-rung cowards using Gaza, Gaza, Gaza, Hamas as camouflage for your testable cluster B psychopathy, narcissism, Machiavellianism, and of course, sadism.
00:34:47.300I've got your number, you pathetic tantrum toddlers, you don't even have the courage of genuine bullies, you Cheeto dust, I didn't expect that, you Cheeto dust covered sweat stained white t-shirt.
00:35:03.000I'm sorry, I didn't, I didn't pre-read this and I'm rereading it again and forgetting, but it was funny.
00:35:09.680OK, it's, but it's out of character for Jordan Peterson is what I'm saying here.
00:35:13.700Here's another one, he got into a spat with one of these people that I presumably, he was tweeting about and he referred to Nick Fuentes as a rat.
00:35:20.640You, Nick Fuentes, really are a psychopathic rat.
00:35:22.820OK, you could say, by the way, this is opinion, like I don't, this doesn't bother me on X.
00:35:25.840There's so much, like I said, worse stuff on X that I, people say to me all the time.
00:35:30.520It's not a big deal, but he said this, it was just out of character for a doctor who preaches calm in chaotic environments.
00:35:37.700And here's another tweet, by the way, pulling it out of the Gaza debate.
00:35:40.320It was happening quite often. This was, I think, to a reporter. Here it is.
00:35:45.560Tell them to go F themselves. Tell them to go F themselves. Tell them to go F themselves.
00:35:50.220Tell them to go F themselves. Repeat until paragraph length or lose and lose science along with it.
00:35:54.600There's another one of the tweets. F you seriously. Never, never again.
00:35:59.700You bloody, pathetic, fear-mongering, pharma-fascist sills. The faster you disappear at CNN, the better.
00:36:04.660So that's just tweeted at CNN. By the way, I don't disagree with the sentiment.
00:36:07.200I don't like CNN, but I also wouldn't tweet at them like this. And I especially wouldn't tweet at them like this when, again, your brand is calm.
00:36:13.380So a trend had been established. I did a video speaking about this and speaking about how a lot of people who followed him, and this is just a reality, a lot of people who followed him and hung on his every word kind of fell away from that.
00:36:25.340And he definitely, definitively, and objectively is not as big today as he was in 2018. That's fine. Time changes. People change. Season changes. Conflicts change.
00:36:34.120But you can understand that Michaela took personal offense because as a part of that piece, I spoke about how people began to wonder about him.
00:36:42.220Like if the trust, I guess, if you want to say, the public trust was sort of fractured a bit when we learned that he had suffered with addiction.
00:36:49.120I said this on my show, my previous show. And when he came back, it didn't seem like he had fully owned that.
00:36:54.640And she took great offense to this, as you would imagine, because she's his daughter.
00:36:58.940So it's silly to expect her to be objective on the matter when it's her daughter.
00:37:03.680When it's his daughter, I would not be objective if somebody was speaking about my father, my husband, my son, whatever it is.
00:37:10.040So I grant her that. And she then said this on Piers Morgan. Take a listen.
00:37:16.220You do know that one fifth of Americans are on psych meds, right? Are you aware of the statistics?
00:37:21.140Are those all people with addictions? Is that your view of people on psych meds just in general?
00:37:30.300No, your father spoke out about his benzo addiction. So I don't understand why you're asking the question.
00:37:37.180Yeah, no, benzo dependence. Benzo dependence. Maybe you don't know anything about this.
00:37:42.720If you're on a psych med long term, you form a dependence on it and it's very difficult to get off of.
00:37:50.100They're starting to teach this in medical school. It's a disaster because so many Americans are on psych meds.
00:37:56.540So, yeah, he suffered from psych med withdrawal because they like they make you form a dependence on it, especially long term.
00:38:03.120Now, calling it an addiction as if he was on heroin or something is manipulative, you know.
00:38:09.980So when we talked about it and we were very honest about what was going on, part of it was to spread awareness that one fifth of Americans are on medications that cause dependence and don't know it.
00:38:20.040It's horrible. People die because of it.
00:38:30.580I certainly don't think I laughed at it.
00:38:32.880I think benzo dependence is pretty much a euphemism for an addiction.
00:38:37.020And if you know anything about my work, that's the problem, crunchy and speaking about why I think medicines are bad because they do create dependencies, which then yield people going onto the streets for something stronger.
00:38:49.620I mean, the benzo addiction becomes a heroin addiction because the doctor won't write you the prescription anymore.
00:38:54.280So you turn to the streets for something stronger because your body is dependent on it.
00:38:57.700But I'm sorry that, again, you are offended by this conversation simply because it is your father.
00:39:04.300I don't think I've been offensive in my language.
00:39:06.260And if you find it to be manipulative, that I think that it impacted the way that men saw him when they publicly were saying that on Twitter.
00:39:14.780We covered the tweets that people were writing on that day about how, you know, they used to idolize him.
00:39:19.440They're so grateful for his book, but this is not the person that they knew.
00:39:22.240Again, I'm sorry you're offended by that, but it's just the reality of what happened.
00:39:25.660And I can tell this is a sensitive topic for you, but it is what it is.
00:39:32.180I don't think anybody's laughed at it.
00:39:34.140I think it's a good conversation to be had.
00:39:36.440And no one is more anti-Big Pharma than me.
00:39:39.240I mean, I have an entire series against Big Pharma, so.
00:39:44.320I don't even know where to start with that.
00:39:47.040You know, benzo addicts will go to the street for heroin.
00:39:51.200There's just, we were trying to spread awareness about psych med withdrawal, and we were very honest about what everybody was going through.
00:39:59.720I went through psych med withdrawal myself.
00:40:01.880It was one of the worst experiences in my life.
00:40:04.260It kills people, causes akathisia, which makes people suicidal.
00:40:11.740Now, if you want to twist that a little bit and be like, he's losing his audience because he's an addict, you know, I don't really know what to say.
00:40:20.760So I watched this back, and when it was happening, I had the exact same thing.
00:40:25.660I just thought in my head, like, I'm not rich enough for this, I think.
00:40:29.640I just, I grew up with addicts, and I know now everyone's got fancy terms for everything.
00:40:33.380And there's, you can, I guess there's a certain amount of money you can have in your savings where suddenly addiction is now called a dependency.
00:40:40.500I literally went, what are we even talking, what are you saying?
00:41:23.340It feels like you have to have enough money to never admit a fault, and then you can kind of go, okay, this is a doctor versus a psychologist.
00:41:32.000So, this wasn't, and literally, the entire opioid epidemic that we have of people going to the streets and getting these drugs, the people that we call addicts, was created by Big Pharma, right?
00:41:42.500The classy people who get the prescriptions.
00:41:45.940I just don't like it because it feels like we're too classy or we're too, you know, whatever the correct word would be.
00:41:52.440Like, it's just, it's very high-flying.
00:41:54.080Like, we're too high-flying to lower ourselves and to admit that this is, and it should have been, a compelling story because it's not ever funny for people to have.
00:42:02.780And by the way, I think Jordan Peterson used a different term in her.
00:42:06.780Okay, all of it is something that we can all relate to no matter what your walk of life is, okay?
00:42:11.940Like I said, I just had a regular old addict, still have regular old addicts in my family, but I don't want to give them an excuse, I guess, of thinking that, well, this is a little bit different because I think if two people were talking on the street and one of the person was a good old-fashioned addict, crackhead, and one said, well, I'm not an addict.
00:42:37.720I don't know how the conversation would go, but I think the braver thing to do is to, I don't know, not create a hierarchy of substance use disorder and to say everybody, everybody's family, my own included, have been touched with this, you know?
00:42:53.560And Big Pharma is the reason for it in many ways.
00:42:56.700They have created these drugs that are creating this sort of an epidemic, and instead we get, like, medical segregation, I guess.
00:43:02.480So that was how I felt, and I'd be interested to hear what you guys think.
00:43:05.880I feel like, oh, it's a slight difference, and now it's different because they're teaching this, you know, new science, and they're realizing that, you know, the person on the street that's addicted to alcohol, I guess now you could say since it's a physical dependency because they would literally die at a certain point.
00:43:18.760They don't have that drink in the morning, and you have to be very careful.
00:43:22.020Now they don't, you don't call them addicts anymore.
00:43:24.480We call them people that have substance use disorder.
00:43:34.560We just disagree on certain points, and I actually appreciated that we were able to do so civilly, and I, like I said then, and like I've said before, I understand when it's your family, it's different.
00:43:45.100No one should ask her to be subjective, I mean, to be objective on the matter.
00:43:49.080You should always be ride or die for your family members, so I totally get the sentiment, and I'm glad we were able to have a discussion, and I'm grateful that so many people enjoyed the discussion.
00:43:57.120But, yeah, I'm going to enjoy your comments on that.
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