RadixJournal - Fear and Loathing in Odesa

00:00:00.000 It's Sunday, October 18th, 2020, and welcome back to The McSpencer Group.

00:00:06.280 I'm joined today by Edward Dutton.

00:00:09.080 Binge-watching Jeeves and Wooster is his own personal crack.

00:00:13.160 Main topic, fear and loathing in Odessa.

00:00:17.220 The long-awaited October surprise is here.

00:00:20.720 This week brought scandalous revelations involving Joe Biden's son, Hunter.

00:00:24.800 Biden is the living embodiment of the corrupt political crass.

00:00:31.520 Wheeling and dealing on the international scene. 1.00

00:00:34.180 Strippers, sex, and drugs. 1.00

00:00:36.700 And an incomprehensible backstory.

00:00:39.280 Can this material be believed?

00:00:41.420 Is there something more to the story?

00:00:43.720 And does all this make Hunter, well, kind of relatable and maybe cool?

00:00:49.480 We then move to the scandal within the scandal.

00:00:52.180 Twitter's brazen suppression of information related to the story.

00:00:56.440 De-platforming remains the essential issue for any alternative dissident movement.

00:01:01.340 And Ed and I discuss policies that could actually work.

00:01:05.840 So, Ed, how are you?

00:01:08.780 I'm okay, yes.

00:01:10.780 I'm, yes.

00:01:13.600 It's all right for me.

00:01:16.240 Are you late there in Finland?

00:01:18.240 It is.

00:01:18.920 No, it's all right, actually.

00:01:20.080 It's ten past ten.

00:01:21.720 Okay.

00:01:21.980 And I put the children to bed.

00:01:24.840 And the reason why I wanted to do this on, my wife's away, you see.

00:01:28.560 And the reason I wanted to do this on a Sunday.

00:01:31.180 When the cat's away.

00:01:31.840 My God.

00:01:32.300 Yeah, she'll be back by then.

00:01:34.620 But I forgot children are better behaved, in my experience, if there's only one of you.

00:01:39.980 Because they're completely reliant on you.

00:01:42.440 So they're actually more inclined to go to bed at a reasonable time when it's just me.

00:01:46.700 And so, consequently, I decided to move our discussion back to today, because I have managed to get them to go to bed.

00:01:53.340 So there you go.

00:01:54.220 Right.

00:01:55.020 I've noticed that a little bit, too.

00:01:56.860 They're also kind of like different people when you're with them one-on-one than when you're with them together.

00:02:02.760 When they're together, they're a tribe.

00:02:04.440 And they engage in what's the right tribalism, basically.

00:02:10.820 And they're just different.

00:02:11.720 And when you're one-on-one, they're just more subdued.

00:02:15.180 They are.

00:02:15.840 They're less territorial.

00:02:17.180 They're less fighting.

00:02:18.100 There's less arguing.

00:02:19.520 Of course, I'm an only child, so my parents only ever experienced, presumably, the subdued and pleasant me.

00:02:26.120 I don't know what they would do if I'd had a sibling.

00:02:29.600 Yes.

00:02:30.080 No one would ever imagine that you had a lonely and traumatic childhood.

00:02:34.760 No, no, no, no, no.

00:02:35.940 Certainly not.

00:02:38.020 Okay.

00:02:39.840 So let's talk about the Hunter Biden situation and then talk about deplatforming.

00:02:46.020 I've been kind of itching to talk about deplatforming.

00:02:49.540 I have a lot of things to say about it.

00:02:51.600 I have a lot of things that I have said about it, but I have some more things.

00:02:56.280 And I think this whole Hunter Biden situation is a great opportunity to talk about the bigger issue.

00:03:05.040 It's a kind of secondary issue, but it's really the bigger issue, which is what do we do in this day and age as dissident intellectuals?

00:03:14.180 But also, how is the world going to handle the situation?

00:03:18.360 And I think we are kind of at the tail end of that free and open Internet era where anything went.

00:03:26.060 I don't think anything is going to go in the future.

00:03:28.020 But before we talk about that, let's talk about the Hunter Biden situation, because I'm sure you as a reactionary conservative were overjoyed.

00:03:36.500 Finally, we've outed this scandalous, although Chad-like, I would say, Hunter Biden, child of empire, making millions, buying extremely rare Rolexes, which are visible in his photos, Easter eggs for those who have eyes to see.

00:04:01.300 Were you jealous?

00:04:03.080 I was impressed.

00:04:04.020 I knew that.

00:04:06.620 I knew that.

00:04:07.660 Yeah.

00:04:09.140 And but yeah, so look, this is a rerun of the Hillary email situation, although it's arguably, it's definitely arguably worse.

00:04:25.560 The connection is more personal.

00:04:27.800 There seems to be all I mean, there's at least a hint of a some kind of crime.

00:04:35.180 I don't exactly know what he would be punished for.

00:04:38.720 It's also the president's son and not just someone who is at least one or two steps removed.

00:04:44.780 Um, I don't think I don't know, it might work.

00:04:48.880 I might be proven wrong.

00:04:50.000 I'm not sure it's going to work this time.

00:04:51.520 But I think the whole thing is also just as suspicious, though, in different ways.

00:04:57.260 With Hillary's email, we were dealing with WikiLeaks.

00:05:01.260 And there was at least a very strong suggestion of Seth Rich.

00:05:06.860 I mean, Julian Assange kind of borderline made the suggestion himself.

00:05:12.960 I mean, he denied it, but he was almost nodding when someone mentioned Seth Rich's name.

00:05:17.700 The whole thing was cloaked in intrigue and suspicion and mystery and misdirection.

00:05:26.220 This one is bizarre.

00:05:29.820 I mean, a you someone who lives in Los Angeles drops his computer off and a New York City laptop repairman.

00:05:36.560 The laptop repairman claims to have some medical condition that does not allow him to see people.

00:05:43.360 And thus he can't confirm that it was Joe Biden.

00:05:45.560 And then he goes into the laptop and just looks at everything, which is kind of, you know, the worst nightmare.

00:05:53.880 It does seem a rather implausible story.

00:05:56.920 And then he gives it to the FBI.

00:05:59.520 And then Bannon is talking about it last February, January or this past January, February.

00:06:05.120 And then it ends up with Rudy Giuliani.

00:06:07.440 The FBI don't do anything.

00:06:09.460 I'm not even sure it's in the FBI's purview of its international.

00:06:12.380 But put that aside.

00:06:13.460 It's a it's a it's a domestic person.

00:06:15.780 Put that aside.

00:06:17.080 There's hints that there's strange pornography.

00:06:19.720 There's a lot of very personal photos that does give it legitimacy, authenticity in the sense of this is real.

00:06:28.280 This isn't just, you know, faked emails that someone wrote up.

00:06:31.580 But Rudy Giuliani leaks it to the New York Post, which does give it a again, it adds another layer to it, which is that it's not the New York Times or it's not the Washington Post, to be frank, where all of the liberal media would accept it.

00:06:48.780 But the New York Post gives it this kind of air of partisan Republican hackery, to be honest.

00:06:58.060 And so first off, before we start talking about the deplatforming issue, what are your thoughts on this?

00:07:05.100 Well, yeah, the irony, the irony that they spend the whole of Trump's presidency talking about how he's being influenced by the Russians, how the Russians interfered with the election campaign, how and this idea that the East is nasty, the East is right wing, the East is non woke, the East is all these bad things.

00:07:28.120 And then it turns out that Mr. Biden has been gloating, I mean, boasting about how he instructed the Ukrainian government to sack this this lawyer that the company wanted sacked.

00:07:43.020 And now it turns out that the company obviously, obviously employed his son because because his son had access to the vice president.

00:07:51.560 There's no other possible reason in the emails. They all but say that's the case.

00:07:55.740 Basically, they say that. And we know that he went to the Ukraine for some kind of discursive purposes.

00:08:03.740 So it seems fairly obvious that we have a very Nixonian levels of corruption at the heart of the heart of the heart of the White House.

00:08:14.140 I mean, that's where you've got a person whose son has got the job because he's his son interfering in another country's affairs, Ukraine's affairs, in order to basically kind of assist them and assist his son and whatever.

00:08:29.280 I mean, it's appalling.

00:08:30.140 Yeah, Watergate was kind of a mad caper.

00:08:33.940 This, although there was a cover up, obviously, but this strikes me as is also kind of I mean, and I'm not trying to excuse Hunter Biden, but it strikes me as just the inevitable, you know, consequences of empire and that these scandals have been happening since Babylon.

00:08:50.480 These scandals have been happening and these scandals are there and you keep you keep him from if you're if you're a political operator of any good sense, then you will keep all information you possibly can on people and you will release that.

00:09:03.940 But the you know, if they like young boys or whatever, you won't you won't do anything about it.

00:09:09.140 I mean, this is what used to happen in the British, the British whips, the Conservative Party in the 90s talked about this.

00:09:13.900 They knew that they were conservative members of Parliament or I know pederasts or whatever, but you didn't reveal that to the public.

00:09:19.760 You say to them, look, we've got a vote coming up and we might lose the vote and we'd rather like you to vote with the government line or, you know, we might have to release some information.

00:09:28.040 House of cards type stuff.

00:09:28.980 Yeah, House of Cards.

00:09:30.140 So the original House of Cards, the British. 1.00

00:09:32.980 Yeah, I love that show.

00:09:34.060 Yes, good, isn't it?

00:09:35.500 And to play the king.

00:09:36.640 Delightful.

00:09:36.980 And you and you do you do as you're told.

00:09:39.380 And I don't know how long they've had this information.

00:09:42.100 I mean, if Biden is correct and his son is over his drug habit, then presumably it's quite old photographs because you've got the images of him with what looks like a crack pipe or whatever.

00:09:53.080 So whatever.

00:09:54.960 But I mean, I can't see how anyone can interpret this in any other way than the fact that the vice president of America under St. 0.59

00:10:02.680 Obama was extremely corrupt.

00:10:05.560 Oh, and also it gets you. 0.93

00:10:08.260 I mean, remember, this goes back to the 2013 Maidan affair, which was a color revolution.

00:10:13.840 The term color revolution has kind of entered mainstream parlance again.

00:10:18.680 And I know BD, I'm forgetting his first name at the moment, but but someone who was actually employed in the Trump administration for a little while and then was sacked after it was discovered that he spoke at a group called the Minkin Club, which I actually co-founded 15 years ago.

00:10:39.160 But put that aside, he was talking about how they're going to pull a color revolution on Trump, which I think is a bit dubious.

00:10:48.200 But nevertheless, you have this like geopolitical wheeling dealing.

00:10:53.820 You have this attempt to spread democracy and also use utilize right wing elements.

00:11:01.060 And if you look at the email written to Hunter Biden by the Ukrainian guy, he's complaining about the Svoboda party, which is this, I mean, national socialist aligned, you could say, hardcore nationalist anti-Russian group that was basically kind of empowered by this color revolution.

00:11:23.140 And then it's kind of engaging in pushback on the, you know, power, you know, wheeler dealers who actually put them in power.

00:11:31.440 I mean, it's it's all of these just kind of inevitable consequences of this stuff.

00:11:36.500 But this prosecutor that he got fired was looking into this company, which was considered a corrupt company.

00:11:43.140 Which he should have, obviously.

00:11:44.460 Right. And he and he got that prosecutor sacks to aid that company, that company being a company that was paying his son.

00:11:51.380 So, I mean, that seems like to me it's utter nepotism and corruption.

00:11:55.540 And it's absolutely appalling.

00:11:57.400 And you can completely see why this Steve Turley fellow did.

00:12:00.900 Are you familiar with him?

00:12:01.880 Did a quite interesting video on this the other day, which is, well, you know, people are lying if they change their excuse.

00:12:08.620 If they give one excuse and then you undermine that excuse and they give another excuse.

00:12:13.000 And of course, their reason why you couldn't give a link because they were in total panic mode.

00:12:18.740 Their Twitter and Facebook, the reason why you couldn't post that link was, first of all, oh, you might might be might have a virus on it that could damage your computer.

00:12:26.480 And then when it wasn't that, it was something else.

00:12:28.560 And then when it wasn't that, it was something else.

00:12:30.020 Anything to prevent people to prevent presumably young people that will tend to use Twitter for their news source.

00:12:35.860 But anyway, from spreading this information, ironically, when I say young, when I'm 40 at the end of the month, I mean younger than me.

00:12:47.680 But ironically, the fact that they did this, of course, it's like these in Britain, you have these these these judicial this judicial implement where you could you block all reporting of a particular case.

00:13:03.680 All reporting is blocked. And of course, that is almost almost almost backfires because everybody is absolutely fascinated by what this case is.

00:13:11.220 The Streisand effect. Yeah, I think Barbara Streisand, I think, tried to suppress reporting on her home or something. 0.59

00:13:18.840 And then that became a secondary scandal. And so more people saw her home than ever would have seen it if she just kind of allowed the paper to do its job.

00:13:28.120 So that's it. And that's what this has kind of resulted in. And it's made people, I think, more.

00:13:32.900 I hate this term. It's so cliched, but more kind of red pilled, more more more kind of aware.

00:13:37.520 So if Keith was here, he says more kind of red pilled like more more more kind of red pilled about just how corrupt and how pro leftist and how biased the system is.

00:13:48.860 And how unacceptable the power is that these are these organizations, Twitter and whatever, Google have that they can they can attempt to basically interfere in an election.

00:13:59.520 But before we get to that, I want to talk about deplatforming.

00:14:02.560 But before we get to it, I'm just going to float this perhaps somewhat irresponsibly the now there's an old there's there's almost an adage of, you know, if something's too good to be true, it usually is.

00:14:19.500 But there's also a kind of secondary adage that if someone's story is just so bizarre, it's almost guaranteed to be truthful, because why would they make this up?

00:14:29.640 And I'm almost I kind of tend to say that about this backstory.

00:14:35.440 The backstory is just bizarre and it can't be exactly true.

00:14:40.940 But but the fact that it's just so weird makes me think that this might be the case, that somehow a laptop repairman who's right wing got this hard drive to Giuliani.

00:14:52.080 I mean, I think it's just weird, but maybe that means that it's correct. 1.00

00:14:57.280 Yes, the idea that the idea that you couldn't you just couldn't make it up, but it's right. 1.00

00:15:02.100 Why would you make this up?

00:15:03.580 But I would say this.

00:15:05.140 This is like whereas the Clint or the Podesta email leak, the Clinton emails, as they kind of became called from 2016 was WikiLeaks was at least operating through that.

00:15:19.880 Stone seemed to be Roger Stone seemed to be exaggerating his influence in it all.

00:15:25.000 But anyway, this strikes me as there's a lot of fingerprints of basically Stone himself is Bannon who knew about this and the girl who wrote the article in the New York Post who doesn't have any other bylines.

00:15:44.020 Her name is Emma Joe or Joe Emma Morris.

00:15:47.940 She herself has she's Jewish.

00:15:51.380 She has some kind of Israeli connections.

00:15:53.400 I it's it's just in this world of Breitbart, the alt like the very, very strongly pro pro Bibi Netanyahu type Zionism.

00:16:05.020 I mean, this in a way doesn't change anything, but I just I'm I'm wondering if Bibi has got dirt on literally everyone.

00:16:15.880 And it's that this whole laptop repairman thing is kind of a cover story, to be honest, that they they got this through other means because it's being it's being pushed by these the kind of Breitbart type Breitbart writ large, which is very pro Israeli.

00:16:35.520 Now, Bibi Netanyahu and Israel would do business with most anyone.

00:16:42.340 They would certainly do business with Joe Biden.

00:16:44.300 He would do business with them.

00:16:45.660 But there is a very strong, you know, Zionist element with the Trump people of move the embassy to Israel.

00:16:54.160 That wouldn't have happened if Hillary Clinton had been elected, you know, totally dispense with the Palestinians, do do all this very hard stuff. 1.00

00:17:03.460 And if you're going to go down that conspiracy theory road, it's also worth mentioning that there is a strong anti-Semitic element on the left, clearly.

00:17:11.640 And that's been that's been demonstrated in the in Britain very conspicuously with Jeremy, Jeremy, with Jeremy Corbyn and his group.

00:17:20.020 But similarly, even among the Democrats and these far left, extreme left.

00:17:25.180 The squad, there's a big push in within the Democratic coalition of being anti-Zionist.

00:17:31.740 I don't want to take this too far.

00:17:33.960 I'm just saying that if this was if this kind of information was gathered through governments and passed through certain imbissaries, it wouldn't surprise me.

00:17:45.420 It's just something to think about.

00:17:47.160 These connections are there.

00:17:49.320 And how did you get this information?

00:17:51.160 You just downloaded someone's computer.

00:17:53.140 I mean, this either the story, the bizarre story is absolutely true.

00:17:56.820 And it's just so bizarre.

00:17:58.200 I guess we should believe it.

00:17:59.760 Or this was acquired through very high level espionage tactics.

00:18:06.720 And so I'm not making any accusations.

00:18:09.140 I'm just saying that there's a motive to this.

00:18:14.200 It does fit, though.

00:18:15.860 Yeah, you're right.

00:18:17.200 If it's one or the other, I'd be more inclined towards the view that with a lot of these broad conspiracies and things, they have a tendency of leaking.

00:18:27.080 And so consequently, it's not that unreasonable if you have some kind of extraordinary story like this, that these kinds of things do happen.

00:18:34.600 I mean, for example, T.E. Lawrence, not Lawrence of Arabia, wrote his memoirs and then just left them on a train.

00:18:43.640 And in those days, no computers or anything.

00:18:46.940 So you just had to retype them from scratch.

00:18:50.220 They're just normal people, these people get into positions of power.

00:18:53.500 OK, on average, they're slightly more intelligent and they have slightly higher general factor of personality.

00:18:57.700 And at extreme levels, they are much more intelligent and have slightly higher sort of psychopathic traits.

00:19:01.860 But to a great extent, they're normal people.

00:19:05.900 And with that, with his son, you're dealing with somebody, a person who is a drug addict, who has all kinds of psychological problems.

00:19:13.700 And so one can imagine that he's quite lackadaisical.

00:19:16.240 He's quite erratic and disorganized, that he was going to have a computer.

00:19:19.940 Why wouldn't he?

00:19:20.520 We all do with lots of photographs of his family and himself and lots of lots of stuff you wouldn't want other people to see.

00:19:25.840 He's going to forget about it because he goes through loads of laptops because he drops them when he's on drugs and things and they get broken.

00:19:32.560 This one had water damage.

00:19:34.580 So he was on drugs or pissed.

00:19:36.280 He dropped it in the loo.

00:19:37.160 I mean, I don't know what he would have done.

00:19:39.400 And then he just sort of thinks, sorry, I can't bother to pick it up.

00:19:42.660 I'll get a new laptop.

00:19:43.380 And he just sort of forgets the significance of the stuff that could be accessible on there.

00:19:49.220 I had a university lecturer, a very good university lecturer when I was at Durham.

00:19:54.200 And he was a pederast.

00:19:57.980 You know, I mean, I've done a book on this.

00:20:00.080 Churchill said, master, these kinds of people go into these kinds of things.

00:20:03.420 He took his laptop in to get fixed and it had photographs on it that resulted in him getting a criminal record for downloading underage porn.

00:20:09.780 And these kinds of things occur, I'm afraid.

00:20:14.520 So I think it's not unreasonable.

00:20:18.440 I find it believable.

00:20:19.960 And I think that it fits with the kind of person we know he is.

00:20:23.880 It's terribly appalling what happened, of course, to Biden in the early 70s when he was elected to the Senate.

00:20:30.040 Not long afterwards, his wife and all three kids were in a massive car crash.

00:20:35.180 The wife was killed.

00:20:36.380 The daughter, I think it was, was killed.

00:20:37.920 And the two sons survived.

00:20:39.780 And both of those sons have had serious problems.

00:20:42.800 Yeah.

00:20:42.940 One of them, I think, has died while he was right present.

00:20:46.100 Right.

00:20:46.600 The one that seemed to have his life together was Beau Biden.

00:20:50.380 And he died of, you know, non-suspicious circumstances.

00:20:55.560 But, yes, Hunter does just, he does strike you as the kind of maladjusted playboy type who wants to get rich and have fun and knows, look, he knows who's buttering his bread.

00:21:09.860 It's dad.

00:21:11.160 We just created this revolution in Ukraine.

00:21:14.920 Might as well profit from it.

00:21:16.280 I mean, it's, it's again, I'm not defending him.

00:21:18.340 It's just, it's a story as old as time.

00:21:21.800 But, yeah, I'm, again, I'm just kind of suspicious about this in terms of the people involved and people who knew about it early on.

00:21:30.560 But, again, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and a wild story just is what it is.

00:21:38.540 But, let's move on to the secondary scandal, but I think it's the real scandal.

00:21:46.560 So, I woke up the day before yesterday and, you know, this, I was seeing a lot of chatter about this on Twitter and I was kind of curious what it was.

00:21:58.680 But I, of course, couldn't find the link.

00:22:01.100 The New York Post Twitter account was not accessible for a little while.

00:22:05.860 Some major figures, I think the president's press secretary, her private account was suspended.

00:22:12.020 I, you know, I'm, I'm maybe missing some details here, but you get the point.

00:22:16.820 It was just total madness.

00:22:18.880 It was clearly a newsworthy story.

00:22:22.240 Look, I get, and we'll talk about this later, I kind of get the idea of someone literally fabricating news.

00:22:31.360 You saw this in 2016, you know, the Pope endorses Donald Trump was a kind of notorious one.

00:22:37.140 I kind of get that you want to take this down.

00:22:39.560 But when something is this big, you just can't do it.

00:22:42.580 You, you, you, it was the absolute wrong move, created a Streisand effect, created extreme suspicion.

00:22:48.100 And all, it just, it blew up.

00:22:51.440 I actually have looked at these stories now, looked at, looked at them on their own.

00:22:55.760 And then yesterday, I was busy with family stuff, but I, I just was, you know, casually checking Twitter and my Twitter was not working.

00:23:04.940 There was a Twitter outage.

00:23:06.060 Of all the worst times, just to fuel a conspiracy theory that they're stopping Twitter.

00:23:10.840 They don't want to stop it from spreading.

00:23:12.220 Exactly.

00:23:12.560 The Babylon Bee, which is a historical website.

00:23:16.740 And then Trump tweeted it, of course.

00:23:19.180 Yeah.

00:23:19.580 All the times to have an outage.

00:23:21.340 I found, I had, it was out, mine was out as well.

00:23:23.800 All the times.

00:23:25.440 Yeah.

00:23:25.660 And again, you know, if, if someone is going to accuse me of floating conspiracy, or it's not really, well, it kind of is a conspiracy theory, but it's just floating.

00:23:35.160 You know, there might be more of a backstory to this thing.

00:23:37.840 Okay.

00:23:39.080 In terms of there's a massive Twitter outage that affects us all the day after there was this scandal of suppressing news.

00:23:47.680 I mean, it might be a coincidence, of course, but just everyone thinks this, that they, they were either doing some massive update, changing all the stuff.

00:23:57.660 They were just shutting things down because things were out of control.

00:24:00.400 I mean, who knows?

00:24:01.900 But it, yeah, it was very bad.

00:24:05.580 It's the end of the Soviet Union, kind of 1980s East Germany, levels of incompetence in terms of attempting to manipulate people. 0.81

00:24:17.360 That's what it reminded me of.

00:24:18.460 It reminded me of documentaries I've seen about the fag end of the Soviet Union in places like Romania, where then everybody, they're not even reporting that the Berlin Wall has come down. 0.73

00:24:29.100 And it doesn't, it's never happened.

00:24:31.980 And everybody knows it.

00:24:33.580 Everybody's talking about it.

00:24:34.900 Everybody knows it.

00:24:36.340 And they're insisting, oh, no, it's never happened.

00:24:39.860 Or everybody knows, again.

00:24:41.660 Well, actually, in East Germany, someone at a press, I haven't looked into this in like a decade.

00:24:47.000 Someone at a press conference asked a bureaucrat, so can we cross over to West Germany?

00:24:51.460 And he was like, well, I guess so.

00:24:53.020 He said he didn't know because they were so confused.

00:24:56.780 That's the thing.

00:24:57.260 They were trying.

00:24:58.120 But then it just created a disaster.

00:25:00.560 You had this effect, this effect that had occurred because of what was happening in the Soviet Union.

00:25:06.180 There was chaos over Estonia and Latvia and all this chaos that was happening.

00:25:11.420 The awareness that Gorbachev was not going to send in the tanks.

00:25:15.680 And you had this pressure in Poland and all these other things that had occurred.

00:25:19.560 And then suddenly, well, can we?

00:25:22.940 And he hadn't been told.

00:25:24.140 And he misunderstood the instruction.

00:25:25.940 And he just said, well, immediately, I think.

00:25:28.000 Yeah.

00:25:30.460 Immediately.

00:25:31.100 Yeah.

00:25:31.180 And then it just changed geopolitics.

00:25:33.220 And then that was it.

00:25:33.860 They all go there.

00:25:35.060 Permanently, yeah.

00:25:36.020 The pressure of the group was so strong, the soldiers just mutinished, just gave it.

00:25:40.580 So, I mean, it reminded me, I don't know if I'm being overly optimistic, 0.99

00:25:43.300 but it reminded me of the faggot of the Soviet Union where no one takes the authority seriously anymore. 1.00

00:25:48.540 And the new authority, in some respects, in our lives, because if our lives are increasingly online, 0.97

00:25:54.380 which they are a big part of everyone's lives is online, we're online now,

00:25:59.140 is, this would be impossible not many years ago, is people that run the world of online.

00:26:05.540 They're the government of an aspect of our lives.

00:26:08.960 Okay, a big aspect of our lives is not online.

00:26:11.080 And we have the governments that we elect on that.

00:26:14.020 But we have these governments that are unelected, that have taken over, that are in control,

00:26:18.080 and that are run by the left.

00:26:19.660 It's gone from being a Wild West sort of chaos 10 years ago or something where there was no government online

00:26:26.780 to the government online of the basically sort of Marxism, sort of Marxism, cultural Marxism plus capitalism.

00:26:33.100 And they had a bit of a loss of control last night because they won't do it.

00:26:39.640 But it's weird, I mean, and I don't want to push this analogy too far,

00:26:43.740 but I mean, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was a legitimacy crisis

00:26:48.100 where you could just start to do things that you couldn't do previously.

00:26:52.100 And it actually started as a kind of, at least in the German scenario,

00:26:56.140 started as kind of a left-wing critique.

00:26:58.020 We want communism with a human face.

00:27:00.300 You know, we are the people kind of thing.

00:27:02.080 And then it metastasized into reunification and German nationalism, I guess, ironically.

00:27:07.580 But in this case, it's kind of like, it's different because there's nowhere to go.

00:27:14.540 There's, we're just kind of, it's just obvious that they can't handle this,

00:27:19.160 that they don't know how to handle this.

00:27:20.680 And there was a kind of Gorbachev or this random bureaucrat moment with Jack Dorsey

00:27:26.160 where he basically admitted that this was wrong.

00:27:29.140 He said, this is unacceptable.

00:27:30.900 This is the wrong thing to do.

00:27:32.300 We're changing our policies.

00:27:33.860 There's just no legitimacy to these things.

00:27:37.100 And I guess the big question is, you know, with this fall of the Soviet Union,

00:27:42.120 there was at least a kind of push towards reunification with Germany

00:27:46.520 and breaking down the Iron Curtain and all that kind of stuff.

00:27:49.280 But what do we do?

00:27:51.420 We're just kind of watching this thing.

00:27:53.420 And it's now more obviously fraudulent and more obviously controlled by people

00:27:59.000 with partisan interests.

00:28:00.160 But we just don't, what do we even do?

00:28:04.080 You know, we're just kind of watching it.

00:28:05.860 We don't go anywhere.

00:28:07.300 Yeah, and you're, I mean, you're getting it increasingly.

00:28:10.080 I mean, it's just a realization.

00:28:12.920 It's slow.

00:28:13.980 It's gradual.

00:28:14.500 People that I know, obviously, myself and you, we're on these online things a lot.

00:28:21.480 People that aren't into this, people that don't have YouTube channels or channels

00:28:24.760 are now talking to me about BitChute in a way that they weren't doing six months ago. 0.89

00:28:30.720 Oh, look, Ed, this is interesting.

00:28:31.960 I found it on BitChute. 1.00

00:28:33.020 And they're realizing that BitChute is what YouTube was in 2006.

00:28:39.740 So you're getting a slow movement towards that and towards other platforms, DLive or whatever.

00:28:47.420 The problem is that with Google, the monopoly, I remember when I first started using the internet,

00:28:52.480 really, which was in about 1999.

00:28:54.160 And it's amazing to think that between then and leaving university in 2005,

00:28:57.660 I only really used it to check my emails.

00:29:00.000 That was about it.

00:29:01.460 But I wouldn't use Google.

00:29:03.340 It was something else with a sort of space invader sounding sort of name.

00:29:07.580 That was the search engine I used.

00:29:08.900 I never used Google.

00:29:10.180 That's good.

00:29:11.160 Well, eh?

00:29:11.660 That was the browser.

00:29:13.360 That's good.

00:29:14.580 Yeah, I can't remember.

00:29:15.220 I wasn't even cool.

00:29:15.980 Anyway, and I didn't cover Google when I came.

00:29:18.540 I really wasn't.

00:29:19.740 But that's the monopoly that needs to really be broken.

00:29:22.240 And, of course, they should go, I personally think, what America did with the oil.

00:29:28.020 They had these oil monopolies and they broke them up because they said that it's not in

00:29:33.000 the interest of democracy for organizations to have monopolies.

00:29:36.720 Break it up.

00:29:38.400 Here's where I really disagree.

00:29:40.920 So hopefully this will spark a discussion.

00:29:43.960 Yeah.

00:29:44.060 Okay, so I actually, okay, in the digital, unlike the physical age, oil is a physical

00:29:53.420 commodity.

00:29:54.280 You have to tear it out of the ground and all that kind of stuff.

00:29:57.260 In the digital age, there is just a natural tendency towards total domination and monopolization

00:30:06.640 for a couple of reasons.

00:30:08.660 First off, just the infinite reproducibility of the web.

00:30:12.240 So, yes, the web is physical on some level.

00:30:15.520 It is a server in a room at some level.

00:30:18.400 But effectively, it is infinite.

00:30:20.920 You don't need to drill another thousand barrels of oil.

00:30:26.080 You need to generate another thousand web pages.

00:30:29.120 The cost of that is infinitesimal and certainly infinitesimal in comparison to physical commodities.

00:30:35.700 So the just ability for the digital product to expand almost ad infinitum is there.

00:30:44.020 The other thing is that we're dealing with something different.

00:30:47.760 We are dealing with the public square and the kind of reimagined version of the public square

00:30:53.860 where I think that a monopoly is better.

00:30:58.680 Well, if that's the case, if I may, if that's the case, if we're going to talk about it being

00:31:02.700 literally a public square, then we have to, in a democracy, we have to have it accountable

00:31:07.580 and we have to have it under the control of democratic institutions.

00:31:11.940 I completely agree.

00:31:13.580 Essentially, it has to be nationalized and we have to have an American president who will

00:31:18.940 say, this is the American constitution and any website that is accessible within the United

00:31:24.580 States must abide by that constitution.

00:31:28.040 Yes.

00:31:29.200 Look, I am in full agreement.

00:31:31.520 I just think it's worth putting this out there because I do hear a lot of people on the right.

00:31:37.120 I mean, you know, the Laura Loomer kind of quixotic campaign in Florida saying, I'm going

00:31:40.880 to break up big tech.

00:31:41.860 Well, will that actually, will that really help us actually?

00:31:45.060 Because let's, first off, breaking up Twitter, Twitter is one company.

00:31:49.540 You're going to have three Twitters, three social micro blogs.

00:31:53.780 How is this helping us?

00:31:55.180 This is just more stuff.

00:31:57.040 I'm not interested in Twitter itself.

00:31:59.340 I don't think the UI is that great.

00:32:01.720 What I am interested in is getting my thoughts out to the world.

00:32:05.780 Twitter won this battle 10 or 15 years ago as being kind of the publishing platform

00:32:11.780 for micro blogging.

00:32:13.500 I don't care about products.

00:32:15.940 In terms of breaking up Facebook, what are you going to do?

00:32:17.800 You're going to have Facebook and Instagram again or Facebook and WhatsApp again.

00:32:20.600 Fine.

00:32:21.000 Who cares?

00:32:21.620 They're all going to censor us.

00:32:23.720 All of those companies are going to censor us.

00:32:25.440 You can break them up and maybe they'll make less profits and the billionaires will become

00:32:29.260 millionaires.

00:32:30.280 Fine.

00:32:30.760 But I ultimately don't care because my issue is I want actual access.

00:32:35.900 And in that sense, a monopoly is better because Twitter is Twitter.

00:32:40.320 YouTube is YouTube.

00:32:41.220 They have to be taken into effectively public ownership in that sense.

00:32:44.320 Right.

00:32:45.080 Or some way of doing it.

00:32:47.780 You can say whatever you want within the law.

00:32:50.600 That's it.

00:32:51.860 Right.

00:32:52.540 Within the law of America.

00:32:53.660 And that's because America has extremely liberal laws on freedom of expression.

00:32:58.400 And so it would compel worldwide organizations to follow them.

00:33:04.180 The other thing I wanted to mention, actually.

00:33:05.900 Because they benefit from America.

00:33:07.640 They're on the Internet.

00:33:09.420 The amount of infrastructure that went into building public funds infrastructure that went

00:33:15.120 into creating the Internet that allows these companies to serve content instantaneously

00:33:20.880 around the world is tremendous.

00:33:22.660 And I know that's true to a certain extent, even for a gas station or a liquor store.

00:33:27.620 But, you know, because there's highway systems and roads and I get it.

00:33:31.320 I mean, we're going back to like 10 years ago if you didn't build that.

00:33:34.240 I mean, it kind of is true.

00:33:35.800 There is a basic infrastructure that is created by the government that they benefit from.

00:33:40.580 And with the Internet, in any Internet company, it's just as plain as day.

00:33:45.120 They can't operate outside of these governments.

00:33:46.900 All of these companies, Twitter, Facebook, Google, Apple, all those, they're on the NASDAQ or they're on the New York Stock Exchange.

00:33:57.240 They are benefiting from this infrastructure and they need to be regulated in some fashion.

00:34:03.600 And Amazon as well.

00:34:04.540 They should be declared, you are the national bookshop.

00:34:07.580 Right.

00:34:07.840 Exactly.

00:34:09.440 But the other thing I wanted to add, though, I was thinking about this, was we talked a lot in our discussions about this polarization and Turkin's idea and the idea that America is on the brink of a civil war, according to his modeling.

00:34:21.300 And what I was thinking about was, well, perhaps the problem is that in previous cycles, you have all of these things now that militate against the possibility of a civil war in the traditional sense.

00:34:39.120 So let's think about the civil war in Northern Ireland in the 70s.

00:34:42.920 You have no DNA testing.

00:34:44.840 You have no closed circuit television.

00:34:47.180 You have no mobile phones to track.

00:34:49.200 You have no Internet.

00:34:51.260 You have the possibility of a traditional on-the-ground civil war for a person, unwatched, and go in somewhere and plant a bomb and whatever.

00:35:03.200 Well, this is impossible now.

00:35:05.000 And then secondly, you have a society that was much higher in these kinds of group values of in-group loyalty and respect for authority and things like that,

00:35:16.000 and lower in individualistic values and, in particular, harm avoidance.

00:35:20.360 And so the idea of harm avoidance, so harm avoidance, killing people, killing your enemies, shooting your enemies, we're now very, very high in harm avoidance. 0.88

00:35:27.800 And so even to the extreme left, OK, there's some nutters that will kill other people.

00:35:31.480 The idea of physically hurting somebody or killing them is anathema in a society which is so low in this harm avoidance moral foundation.

00:35:40.860 Harm avoidance, harm is so bad.

00:35:42.780 Physical harm, physical harm, and so maybe we'll talk about, oh, when's the civil war going to come?

00:35:48.200 Maybe we're in it.

00:35:48.800 Maybe this is it.

00:35:49.820 I think that's what it is, and it's not quite a civil war because I would – I think we need to distinguish between a real civil war and civil unrest.

00:35:59.120 We are seeing more civil unrest than we've seen in quite some time, and this did start in 2016, in fact, with Antifa, and if I may say so, me getting attacked in broad daylight while on camera, just someone attacking me.

00:36:14.320 That was one little salvo.

00:36:16.200 But now people are getting inured to street-level violence, and they're still hysteric about it when a right-winger attacks a leftist.

00:36:28.180 They'll kind of apologize or say it's all an idea or something when Antifa burns down someone's building or whatever.

00:36:34.340 But nevertheless, we're getting inured to civil war.

00:36:38.740 Things are breaking down – or civil unrest, rather.

00:36:41.740 But a civil war is the battle for control of the central government by competing parties.

00:36:49.720 And so if you look at the United States, I mean, that – yeah, they were trying to break away, but it was a civil war.

00:36:58.140 You had a competing elite.

00:36:59.860 You had a planter elite that was connected in many ways but distinguished from a East Coast traditional political and economic elite.

00:37:08.780 And they had two different visions for how North America is going to be settled and work.

00:37:15.440 And they clashed, and they were – even though it was a secessionary feud, they were battling over sovereignty and legitimacy and territory in some ways.

00:37:27.020 I mean, the South did want slavery to expand throughout the country, by the way.

00:37:31.140 But now the elite is all on the same page.

00:37:36.440 I mean, there's no competing elite.

00:37:38.700 There's no – the Proud Boys aren't the elite or some guy.

00:37:43.080 So it's just street huggery and violence, and it's almost sadder.

00:37:48.860 It depends how you define elite because you have intra-elite competition according to this Turkin modelling.

00:37:56.880 And so these people, people who are educated and whatever, who are on the far right, they are part of the elite in that sense.

00:38:04.600 And therefore they – although they don't have much power, but they are kind of broadly part of the elite, which is why they're considered so dangerous by the left-wing mob if you're a sort of elitist as they see it and on the far right.

00:38:15.800 So that is an example of an alternative elite that might not have much power.

00:38:20.320 Right, but we don't have billions.

00:38:21.880 We don't have guns.

00:38:22.820 We don't –

00:38:23.600 We have guns.

00:38:24.420 No, we do have guns.

00:38:25.100 Well, we have a six-shooter under our bed to protect ourselves.

00:38:29.580 But I'm talking about, you know, really taking it out.

00:38:32.860 No, but that's what I mean.

00:38:33.400 I mean, I'm saying in a situation where the government is – where the structures of society are so strong and people are so controlled and people – you know, you'll be watched all the time.

00:38:44.400 There's cameras everywhere.

00:38:45.760 Yeah.

00:38:45.900 You could be your DNA and all this stuff that can be very difficult to get away with crime, which is, then what form is a civil war or the nearest thing to a civil war going to take?

00:39:01.240 And that's what I was wondering about.

00:39:02.600 And I was wondering, like, this is the nearest thing that's possible to it.

00:39:07.840 We just hate each other.

00:39:09.900 You know, there wasn't even a presidential debate last night.

00:39:13.240 There were two sequestered groups where the Trump people watched NBC and the other people watched CNN.

00:39:20.980 It was just – we're not talking to each other literally at this point.

00:39:25.680 And when we do talk it to each other, we're just screaming and bantering and whatever.

00:39:30.780 And we hate each other.

00:39:32.220 I mean, the level of distrust – I was actually doing this thing for our election piece that I need to finish up next week.

00:39:41.440 But, you know, people – conservatives are more suspicious of their daughter marrying a Democrat than they are of their daughter marrying an African American.

00:39:51.100 Like, it's – they – this – it's – polarization has created these, like – these things that we've seen throughout history in terms of race and tribe and religion are now in terms of do you pull the lever for these two political parties.

00:40:06.000 But the irony is nothing really changes in the sense of your – yeah, your identity is MAGA or your identity is I'm a liberal who hates MAGA.

00:40:16.040 But you're still just voting for the system.

00:40:18.680 I mean, it's this weird kind of fake civil war that I don't think is ever going to actually – it's never going to be a civil war of old where there's a real battle for – you know, there are coups.

00:40:30.240 There's – there's, you know, two armies that used to wear the same – you know, march under the same flag fighting each other.

00:40:36.760 We're not going to see that.

00:40:38.220 We're going to see just endless hatred and street-level –

00:40:41.900 That endless hatred eventually comes to a point of some kind of breakdown, some kind of –

00:40:46.820 I guess it does.

00:40:47.920 – getting away, some kind of fissioning.

00:40:50.540 And that's what I think is increasingly happening.

00:40:52.780 I mean, the idea that this – what was this woman called, this Afghan or something that is studying Oxford University, as she was in the news a lot.

00:40:59.420 And she put out a favourable comment about a friend of hers that's standing to be the head of Oxford University Conservative Association.

00:41:06.520 And she was, like, condemned online for having a friend who was a member of the Conservative Party.

00:41:10.540 And that – there was a tea company, and Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor of the Exchequer in Britain, Asian, by the way, was shown drinking that tea company's tea.

00:41:23.900 And they put out a thing where we don't support the Conservatives, by the way.

00:41:27.120 – Yeah, yeah.

00:41:27.540 – When you say that there's no – when you say it's just one system, it is that.

00:41:31.000 But it's the left that has the power and can control all of the cultural levers of power.

00:41:36.640 In Britain, it's something that was set off since the 90s, particularly.

00:41:39.660 – America, I don't know.

00:41:41.500 But – and if that moves back the other way, swings back, then – which it did under Thatcher to some extent, and in Britain, then that's more of a sort of cultural revolution.

00:41:53.740 And that's –

00:41:54.100 – I don't think it's going – I don't think it can swing back because the way the right is articulated doesn't know how to do what the left does.

00:42:03.640 And, you know, there's an asymmetry – granted, this is American-centric, so it might be slightly different.

00:42:09.220 But there's a bit of an – but I don't think it is, actually.

00:42:12.300 There's an asymmetry between Fox News and The New York Times, just to use two – different media, but, you know, bear with me.

00:42:21.420 The New York Times never says things like, well, I'm glad both sides will be heard this time.

00:42:27.640 Or, you know, we're going to take back America for, you know, the citizens of this country. 0.92

00:42:33.480 You know, let's undermine that conservative media out there. 0.78

00:42:38.500 The New York Times is hegemonic.

00:42:40.860 It presents itself as the news.

00:42:44.640 It is not – you can call it liberal all you want.

00:42:47.320 It presents itself as the news.

00:42:49.620 Conservatives for the last 30 years in the Fox News era have been always articulating themselves from this, you know, accurate in some degree inferiority complex of we're pushing back against the elite.

00:43:06.660 Well, that – where does that really go?

00:43:09.160 So the Fox News stuff is kind of like, you know, it's not – I don't want to use the word propaganda, but it's – you know what it is.

00:43:18.420 It's our side of the story.

00:43:20.940 It's punchy.

00:43:22.340 It's calling out the liberals for being unfair and mean and all that kind of stuff.

00:43:28.420 It's this, like, you know, little guy punching up.

00:43:32.120 But the hegemonic news, real propaganda in the way that Jacques Ellul defined it is not doing that kind of stuff.

00:43:40.280 Real propaganda is presenting itself as this is the news.

00:43:43.640 This is your way of life.

00:43:45.080 This is the truth.

00:43:46.760 They know how to rule in the way that the right just doesn't.

00:43:50.480 The right is –

00:43:51.120 The right did rule.

00:43:54.760 If you go back to the 50s or something, it was the right that was doing exactly that.

00:43:59.760 The right –

00:44:00.180 We're not in the 50s.

00:44:01.500 No, that's the point.

00:44:02.580 That's the point.

00:44:04.380 And so – but you do get these swings, these movements, because, as I've said, you've got these five moral foundations.

00:44:10.840 The left are only interested in two of them, which is fairness and equality and harm avoidance.

00:44:16.400 And the right are interested in all five.

00:44:18.380 And so what you eventually get always is a situation – the others being authority, disgust and in-group loyalty.

00:44:26.800 And what this means is that the right will sympathise with the left.

00:44:30.260 The left will not sympathise with the right.

00:44:32.300 And so the left can always hijack the culture and take things in an ever more left-wing direction.

00:44:36.980 And the right will let them do that because it's a one-way system of sympathy.

00:44:41.440 But eventually that needs – because the left will sympathise with the right because they share some values.

00:44:47.020 The right will sympathise with the left because they share some values.

00:44:49.240 But the left does not sympathise with the right's values of disgust and in-group loyalty and authority.

00:44:55.660 And so, therefore, things always move in a more and more left-wing direction until you basically have a situation – because we are adapted to have all five of these moral foundations – where the majority of people are extremely unhappy.

00:45:07.700 Because it's so low in chaos.

00:45:10.060 It's so low in authority.

00:45:11.300 It's so low in in-group loyalty.

00:45:12.940 The majority of people are disgusted and horrified all the time.

00:45:16.980 And then people start to talk about this.

00:45:19.040 People start to realise that others feel the same way.

00:45:21.320 You end up with a challenge to the system.

00:45:23.140 And then you have a movement back in a right-wing direction.

00:45:25.880 And what this will often be led by is people who are very high in in-group loyalty, in authority, and in disgust, and very low, very low in harm avoidance and inequality.

00:45:38.620 And the consequence of that will often be that you'll end up with wars, expansionist wars, and very nasty situations, you know, right-wing tyranny.

00:45:46.720 And this will make people unhappy.

00:45:48.820 And then you'll get a move back towards the left.

00:45:50.980 And that's why things tend to go in these swings.

00:45:52.760 And if you think in England, for example, you have this movement left pretty much from the war, all from the 50s, sorry, in the 60s, goes left, left, left, left, left.

00:46:02.680 It creates eventually complete chaos.

00:46:04.900 And then you have this movement back under Mrs. Thatcher. 0.67

00:46:07.460 And then by the end of the 90s, there's this feeling that, oh, we've become unsympathetic.

00:46:12.680 The very things that caused the leftward shift in the early 60s.

00:46:16.380 We're low in sympathy.

00:46:17.640 We're low in kindness.

00:46:18.740 We're low in equality.

00:46:19.980 All these people are unhappy.

00:46:21.080 Princess Margaret's not allowed to marry the man of her dreams.

00:46:23.760 Oh, isn't it terrible?

00:46:25.040 And so then you get the Blairite revolution.

00:46:27.420 And now we've had a kickback against that in England over the last 10 years.

00:46:31.600 But the problem is that they've, in that period, they've taken over the culture in such an extreme way.

00:46:38.140 I don't totally disagree with looking at personality profiles in terms of this.

00:46:43.980 I just think the arrow is pointing in one direction.

00:46:48.460 I mean, the general hegemonic discourse is so strong towards it because it's based on fundamentally liberalism and a kind of Christian heresy that we're just going in a direction. 0.94

00:47:01.540 And when we react, we don't consolidate any wins.

00:47:05.920 You know, it's like there have been these right-wing reactions that haven't really gone anywhere.

00:47:09.960 No, they're not true.

00:47:10.820 I mean, the David Cameron, Boris Johnson right-wing reaction.

00:47:13.560 Give me a break.

00:47:14.520 Or the Trump reaction.

00:47:18.320 I mean, look, trannyism is going wild. 1.00

00:47:22.580 It has been mainstreamed in a way that if you had told me this five years ago, I would not have believed you.

00:47:29.260 It's just insane what is happening.

00:47:32.360 You know, my eight-year-old is transitioning.

00:47:34.280 I mean, this is unthinkable a decade ago, even five years ago.

00:47:38.800 It's now mainstream, and this occurred under Trump.

00:47:41.400 So we are – the culture is just going in a direction, and I think if we're going to fight back, there has to be an extremely strong re-articulation that the right is not good enough.

00:47:56.940 And they deserve to lose.

00:47:59.860 And, again, I don't have a lot of harm avoidance, I guess. 0.96

00:48:03.060 The right – they're weak. 0.72

00:48:04.980 They need to get kicked off the team.

00:48:06.980 We need players on the squad who are tough and who get hard-nosed.

00:48:11.880 That's what I want.

00:48:13.140 The right – they should go to the cheerleading squad. 0.85

00:48:16.320 It's your football coach speaking.

00:48:18.080 Coach –

00:48:18.280 Yeah, they should –

00:48:19.320 Coach Spence.

00:48:20.340 It should be –

00:48:20.980 It should be an episode of South Park where Randy goes to watch these games and gets into fights with the dads every time, and they play the –

00:48:30.980 They're arty in the background.

00:48:33.480 Right.

00:48:33.660 Yeah, yes, something like that.

00:48:36.160 But the only thing that I hold out hope for is that the fertility of the right is 40% higher than the fertility of the left.

00:48:42.780 It's 1.1 child for the left, 1.4 for the right.

00:48:45.360 If they're still in control of the culture, we're just going to be their cattle, though.

00:48:48.880 Heritability of 70%.

00:48:50.340 So – but it's interesting.

00:48:53.040 Eddie, all I can say is it's a positive sign of the confusion, the Soviet-like, political-like confusion of this.

00:49:01.840 Okay, I totally agree.

00:49:04.500 Let me do one more thing before we go because this – I do like to at least offer some kind of solution and then criticize what's happening now, offer a solution, but then also offer a kind of critical view of this, of saying this would be a solution, but let's just be realistic about the way the world's headed.

00:49:26.840 So what the right is now excited about is – and this is, again, this is American-centric, but I imagine there are analogs in Britain and all over Europe.

00:49:37.460 What the right is getting excited about now is removing this Section 230 from the – I think it's like the Standards and Decency Act of broadcasting.

00:49:48.640 Let me do this.

00:49:49.960 I'm just going to read a press release by Stephen Hawley from last summer, 2019, and you'll kind of see where this is going because this is quite operative right now.

00:50:02.380 Hawley is calling for Jack Dorsey to be taken before Congress and read the Riot Act, so to speak.

00:50:09.760 So this is from June 19th, 2019.

00:50:11.520 Today, U.S. Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, introduced the Ending Support for Internet Censorship Act, a major update to the way big tech companies are treated under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, CDA.

00:50:26.680 Senator Hawley's legislation removes the immunity big tech companies receive under Section 230 unless they submit to an external audit that proves by clear and convincing evidence that their algorithms and content removal practices are politically neutral.

00:50:45.740 Senator Hawley's legislation does not apply to small and medium-sized tech companies.

00:50:49.960 With Section 230, this is Senator Hawley speaking, tech companies get a sweetheart deal that no other industry enjoys, complete exemption from traditional publisher liability in exchange for providing a forum-free of political censorship.

00:51:03.520 Unfortunately, and unsurprisingly, big tech has failed to hold up its end of the bargain.

00:51:09.340 Okay.

00:51:11.280 This is what is being offered by – effectively by Trump.

00:51:15.200 I mean, he's monitoring the situation, but this is the – this is where the rubber would hit the road if the Republicans or Trump-aligned Republicans actually do something.

00:51:24.920 The Libertarian Republicans are like, it's a private company.

00:51:28.160 But this is where some Trump-aligned people are saying we're going to do something.

00:51:32.480 And this is where this just doesn't work.

00:51:34.860 First off, in terms of being politically neutral, it's already codifying things in terms of Democrats and Republicans.

00:51:45.620 Well, you and I arguably would not be protected under that because we're not always talking about, you know, both sides of the latest political issue.

00:51:55.600 We're talking about stuff that gets denounced often by both sides of the political spectrum.

00:52:03.460 And I wonder if this kind of language, which is there at the beginning, would actually protect real alternative thought and not just some conservative on Twitter who got a little wild on Saturday night.

00:52:15.600 Secondly, if they don't submit to this, you know, audit of their algorithms and community patrolling or whatever they call it, then they'll be immune from that removal of liability.

00:52:31.540 So they could be sued.

00:52:32.940 So what is going to happen?

00:52:34.000 Let's say there's some perfect client who gets suspended from Twitter or kicked off Facebook or gets demonetized or whatever.

00:52:44.780 A conservative Republican law firm is going to work pro bono on his or her behalf.

00:52:50.960 They're going to perhaps win a lawsuit that this was an unfair removal.

00:52:56.460 You inflected politics into the situation.

00:53:00.320 This woman will be paid tens of millions of dollars. 1.00

00:53:04.540 The lawyers will get even richer than they already are in the process.

00:53:09.020 And what will really change?

00:53:11.400 Because they're demanding that you lawyer up in order to sue a company for doing this.

00:53:18.080 So that in itself is hundreds of thousands.

00:53:21.320 I mean, I know this.

00:53:22.840 Lawyers are horribly expensive.

00:53:26.340 To sue Twitter, you are going to need a lot of money.

00:53:30.320 Even to sue it on a small-time basis like it has been done, you need tens of thousands of dollars.

00:53:36.080 To do a serious suit that might win, this is a huge endeavor.

00:53:40.080 We're already talking seven figures.

00:53:42.220 No one can do this.

00:53:44.060 And it seems to me like conservatives are looking for another folk hero.

00:53:47.900 Like, oh, look, this gal from Missouri just sued Twitter and she got $10 million. 0.92

00:53:53.920 And now she can post her conservative memes again. 0.94

00:53:57.460 It doesn't interest me.

00:53:58.900 The only solution that would serve us is Twitter is an American company.

00:54:05.440 It is on the stock exchange.

00:54:06.620 It operates through the internet.

00:54:08.700 Richard Spencer is an American citizen.

00:54:11.000 If Richard Spencer breaks the law in a semi-public sphere, then he can be arrested.

00:54:18.300 If he doesn't break the law but engages in the rights of a citizen, he will not be arrested.

00:54:23.480 He has the right to say things as controversial as they can be.

00:54:27.540 He has a right to say them.

00:54:29.260 Even things that are protected by Brandenburg decision, et cetera.

00:54:33.100 He has the right to say them.

00:54:34.540 And Twitter is a semi-public sphere.

00:54:36.820 He has the right to speak.

00:54:37.800 It is a no-censorship act.

00:54:40.960 If I cannot sell drugs on Twitter, I can't give a death threat, which is certainly not protected by the First Amendment.

00:54:48.360 I cannot pass a certain threshold.

00:54:52.980 But other than that, I have a right as a citizen to not be censored.

00:54:57.520 I concur.

00:54:58.660 It should simply be that if you are a company that operates in the United States, then you must uphold the Constitution of the United States.

00:55:09.220 Right.

00:55:09.720 Because I have a right to get in an argument with you or someone.

00:55:13.580 I have a right to go to a bar and express my mind to a liberal and say, I don't like Joe Biden.

00:55:19.560 Whatever.

00:55:20.080 Twitter should be defined not even as a bar because a bar is a private place.

00:55:25.340 Right, but it's kind of semi-public.

00:55:26.840 Twitter should be defined as a street.

00:55:30.760 Well, I know what you're saying, but free speech rights actually do extend to, like, malls or things like that.

00:55:37.140 I'm just saying.

00:55:39.420 It's different than going into someone's home.

00:55:42.240 A global, whatever, area of America.

00:55:44.480 It's non-physical, but it's America.

00:55:47.220 And if that's not accepted, then it should be shut.

00:55:51.160 This is the solution.

00:55:52.920 It's so simple.

00:55:54.060 And it would ironically save these companies money.

00:55:56.840 Let them be monopolies.

00:55:58.140 The same should be true of YouTube and the same should be true of any other thing of this time.

00:56:02.820 And therefore, you can't discriminate on – they have laws in England that you can't discriminate on the basis of race.

00:56:09.880 They need to have laws that you can't discriminate on the basis of opinion.

00:56:12.260 Yes, and they do have these that are in California that were put in place on behalf of the left, actually.

00:56:20.540 The other aspect is bring back checking accounts, savings accounts, or maybe a PayPal-like service to the post office.

00:56:28.620 They used to have that kind of stuff.

00:56:31.140 If we could use a government PayPal, that would be imminently helpful.

00:56:37.420 Even if it's kind of janky, it would just be fantastic.

00:56:42.620 No one would worry about getting their bank account canceled.

00:56:45.340 We have to start thinking in these directions.

00:56:48.040 But I would say this.

00:56:50.460 As this is the simple solution, it's infinitely better than this Hawley 230, let's sue them into oblivion, make money off the deal thing, which I hate.

00:57:01.480 No, it shouldn't have to involve lawyers, no.

00:57:05.160 Exactly.

00:57:05.760 But I don't think it's going to happen because we're – I think the age of the free and open internet has ended.

00:57:14.980 And what we were able to do, we kind of overplayed our hand, at least some of us who were getting really outlandish on the internet.

00:57:22.160 But I just don't think this is going to be allowed to happen in the future because the elite is now properly viewing Twitter and Facebook as the New York Times, as CNN, as NBC.

00:57:38.240 They're viewing these as the media of power dissemination or the way that information flows.

00:57:48.680 And they're just not going to allow it to be the kind of like weird sibling of the mainstream media.

00:57:56.220 It is the mainstream media.

00:57:57.680 It's more powerful than these legacy companies in the moment.

00:58:01.100 And they're just going to simply use it like they did the other media.

00:58:05.760 And I kind of understand their position.

00:58:09.360 I mean, if I were in their position, I would do much of the same thing.

00:58:13.180 You don't want the most powerful medium to be the Wild West if I were in charge.

00:58:21.800 But it just is what it is.

00:58:23.620 And we're going to have to live by it.

00:58:24.300 I mean, for example, with reporting about Muslim rapes and whatever, in Britain, you get more truthful information from local newspapers.

00:58:32.680 Right.

00:58:32.880 Because the national newspapers are more censored and more under political pressure.

00:58:36.680 Local newspapers was where to go.

00:58:39.000 Nobody cares what you put in local papers.

00:58:41.000 Yeah.

00:58:41.240 So maybe we'll get to a point eventually where Twitter is less censored than the newspapers.

00:58:46.680 It's more censored than the newspapers.

00:58:48.460 And the newspapers are...

00:58:49.780 They're acting like publishers.

00:58:51.240 I mean, Twitter is acting like...

00:58:53.680 I mean, that's another, this kind of irony of like they have this immunity to being sued as a publisher.

00:59:00.300 A publisher can be sued for publishing, you know, total lies about someone or other things.

00:59:07.060 But Twitter is acting more like a publisher.

00:59:09.180 They're curating content.

00:59:11.140 They're kind of making it more of like an app, almost like Apple News or something.

00:59:15.560 They're going in that direction, clearly.

00:59:17.560 And that's going to be how they're treated.

00:59:21.180 But again, what we want as alternative intellectuals...

00:59:25.440 I don't like dissident.

00:59:26.300 I don't want to be thought of as some guy in the Soviet Union whining or whatever.

00:59:31.000 As alternative, with alternative views, we, what would be best for us is some government regulation of the Wild West, basically.

00:59:44.420 Saying you can't, no death threats, no drugs.

00:59:48.340 But other than that, if you're not breaking the law, free and clear.

00:59:53.620 But I, you know, not exactly optimistic that we're going to get there.

00:59:57.940 I don't think it should just be constituted as America's 51st state.

01:00:02.900 The internet.

01:00:06.020 Right.

01:00:07.300 That, that might totally ruin it.

01:00:09.520 Yeah.

01:00:11.280 I wonder what it would vote.

01:00:12.820 Democrat or Republican.

01:00:27.940 Are you?

01:00:41.080 Not too.

01:00:41.300 I don't know.

01:00:43.460 I don't know.

01:00:45.280 I don't know.

01:00:45.920 E-books.

01:00:48.340 I say you are worth it.

01:00:50.480 We'll be right back.

RadixJournal - October 18, 2020

Fear and Loathing in Odesa

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