In this episode of the podcast, I sit down with writer and podcaster Andrew Torba to talk about what it's like being a controversial thinker on social media, his time on Gab, and why he thinks it's the most important social network out there.
00:04:47.180But as the years went on, I didn't use Gab at all.
00:04:53.160And then seeing the post of Andrew Torba, I found Gab to be just a huge turnoff.
00:05:03.280And it just seemed to be like an echo chamber where you probably are exchanging comments with some guy who's likely to become a mass shooter.
00:05:17.660Maybe that's, maybe that's a bit much, but you understand my point.
00:05:23.060There's a kind of like Gab became kind of like a movement, not just an echo chamber, but a kind of weird movement.
00:05:30.180And so Torba would say all these wildly contradictory things, like we're the ultimate free speech platform and blah, blah, blah.
00:05:37.900And then he'd also be like, only Christian nationalist allowed, you know, Episcopalians, you're going to get banned or something like, I mean, you know what I mean?
00:05:48.940And in his anti-Semitism and so on, it just became this kind of like, all right.
00:05:53.720I mean, I don't want to hang out with you guys, basically.
00:06:01.820I appreciate that having a home simply for sanity's sake and for the people who wanted to follow me.
00:06:09.880And they were on Twitter and they were not seeing me anymore.
00:06:12.340They wanted to have a spot where they can get the same updates about where I'm at and my show and everything.
00:06:19.720So I really appreciate Gab and I really think that Gab still has a role.
00:06:24.820Even if everyone was to be unbanned from Twitter, we must keep Gab because I think we must credit.
00:06:33.320And I would like to welcome you to this thought because I don't think you've thought about it, but I think you should.
00:06:39.880Andrew Tarba caused, through leverage, caused the current re-rise of Twitter and the takeover of Elon Musk.
00:06:49.720Ultimately, if Andrew Tarba is not there with an alternative, it's not the same thing.
00:06:55.900And it doesn't call for that much of an intervention with that much money for Twitter.
00:07:01.980And in a way, having this kind of alternative power, in the same way that the existence of Russia kind of makes Western Europe stand together more,
00:07:12.660the existence of Gab has led to true liberals and free thinkers and freedom lovers to take over Twitter and liberate it.
00:07:23.140I actually agree with a lot of those sentiments.
00:07:31.120I think truth social might have played a bigger role or even parlor, but I do think that part of the motivation was to cut off the alternative,
00:07:43.280which even if it couldn't surpass Twitter, at the very least would take a huge chunk of it away.
00:07:54.860Now, all that being said, with all the respect due to Andrew Tarba, it's a, it's torture to be on Gab, to be just on Gab.
00:08:05.040Because I'm surrounded with people who think way too much like me, who, you know, my kind of humor that I can appreciate would be considered dark humor by normie standard.
00:08:16.820But on Gab, I'm considered a normie because I want to, because I'm not a proficient user of wood chipper memes and other violent memes.
00:08:29.580And so you kind of get radicalized in the sense that at this point, after one year of Gab, it takes a really seriously dark joke to make me laugh.
00:08:51.620I think there was definitely on, on Twitter in 2016.
00:08:56.000I don't, I don't think this exactly has returned, but there, there was just a, an intoxicating insanity to Twitter.
00:09:06.380Like I, I would just, you know, Trump would win a primary in Indiana or something.
00:09:12.320And then you'd see these just totally wild, you know, 80s synth wave plus Japanese anime plus, you know, gas chamber memes.
00:09:25.080I mean, I'm, I'm not quite endorsing them because I, I do think they're, they are childish and it's probably something we should get away from.
00:09:33.900But there, when we were all captured by that feeling of winning, there was something just insanely intoxicating about it.
00:09:43.680And, and just like no boundaries, every envelope will be pushed, you know, just, just total madness that I, you know, again, I look back on it kind of skeptically and maybe even cynically, but there, there was something, there was something going on.
00:10:00.160It was, it was a moment in time that was pretty remarkable, maybe unique.
00:10:04.860Like, well, it depends on how you interpret it.
00:10:08.160If you look at it seriously, well, of course it's, it's not making you look serious if you engage in this kind of mimetic, but it was a time and it was relevant at the time because we were demonstrating our power level in a way, which is a meme in and of itself.
00:10:25.240But we were showing just how far we can go on the internet that previous models of communication couldn't go there.
00:10:34.960And in a way, a little bit like the peacock displaying its tail is showing just how long of a tail he can carry while handicapping himself with the difficulty with regards to predation and other difficulties in life and that the increased nutrient needed to feed that tail.
00:10:53.680But he's doing it to show how strong he is to the female.
00:10:58.240And I think that a lot of the mimetics around 2016, the edgy stuff was to show, look how much we don't care.
00:11:05.540Look how much we see cancel culture rising in front of us and we run to it and we say, try me.
00:11:16.060And, and you could see that in like the alt-right in general, you could see that in Hale Trump and all that kind of stuff.
00:11:21.860It was just this, uh, throw caution to the wind.
00:11:26.420You know, I'm such a bad-ass, I can fly mentality.
00:11:30.980You know, I, not that we might've grown a little bit too big of a tail, uh, but because you, you ultimately, I mean, the peacock's tail is from a strict, hard evolutionary standpoint.
00:11:44.860It's bad, you know, you could, you're more likely to be killed.
00:11:49.380But as you say, on a, on a second level of evolution, it's, it's a way of showing your genetic fitness.
00:11:56.100You're so fit that you can grow this thing.
00:11:59.420And so I think that there's an equivalent to the legitimate use of the peacock tail.
00:12:04.000There's an equivalent to the legitimate use of the edginess, which is we were signaling to the system.
00:12:56.000So I've spent the last year basically refiling an appeal every week.
00:13:01.300And every week they would tell me an email that says, we've stacked your current appeal on your old appeal because we haven't addressed your old appeal.
00:13:18.620And I started appealing even many times a week in the last month.
00:13:23.020What I also did is on my show with a small audience, I was telling my people, clip my request to Elon Musk.
00:13:32.000And I was sending messages to Elon Musk, and they were clipping it and publishing it as Twitter video.
00:13:38.960Basically, every two or three days, I was complaining and yelling at Elon Musk and telling him that his amnesty general was a fake thing and that as long as I wasn't banned, this was all a lie.
00:13:50.700So I made a lot of pressure so that he couldn't publicly affirm really that he had given general amnesty until he liberated my account.
00:14:01.960Now, did he pay attention to those clips?
00:14:19.900So that makes me think I was maybe part of a batch of libertarians or maybe Twitter had some Canadians, maybe, absolutely.
00:14:30.140Maybe Twitter had put me in some box and they were waiting to make a decision.
00:14:35.100But since I'm back on Twitter, I've also published a list of accounts that I would want to be unbanned, about 25 accounts that I've spotted.
00:14:43.640And I've demanded Elon Musk unbanned them before I declared that amnesty general has been achieved.
00:14:51.040And already three of them were unbanned 10 hours after I tweeted about it.
00:14:58.600Yeah, I mean, I do think that if Elon is serious, there has to be a kind of, there has to be, not even a general amnesty, there has to be a bill of rights, so to speak.
00:15:28.160In the sense that, you know, you can definitely ban someone for, you know, posting a death threat or something.
00:15:34.800But even in the legal system, if you post, if you threaten someone's life, you know, you might, will probably go to jail for some time, but you are released at some point.
00:15:48.380There just are certain crimes that don't, most all crimes don't reach the level of the death penalty.
00:15:57.060And I think that should be taken into account.
00:16:23.120He is creating a form of life, basically.
00:16:27.060I think that Elon pretty much approaches the net as a biologist.
00:16:31.800He, you know, he sees life and he didn't feel life anymore on Twitter.
00:16:37.980That's when he keeps complaining about butts.
00:16:42.280Ultimately, we're talking about the creepy line between butts, artificial intelligence and real human beings, which is constantly blurred these days.
00:16:53.880But Elon Musk didn't feel that there was the normal life of the internet anymore on Twitter.
00:17:08.700I could see what was going on on Twitter.
00:17:10.540And I think Elon Musk approaches it from a diversity of thought, humanitarian perspective, and ultimately, perhaps a megalomania goal of having an X platform, the software of all software.
00:17:32.140That may be his ultimate dream, but for now, what he's interested in is reawakening the life of the internet that he has known as someone who was an early adopter of the internet world.
00:17:44.660Now, of course, this is all subscribed in a global kind of political goal, because he's also admitted recently being a Republican.
00:17:57.400So I think that what he saw in 2016, as much as the big tech leftist keeps saying we should never redo 2016, never again.
00:18:09.060I think that Elon is saying, yes, again, let's do it again.
00:18:12.720Right. I guess I'm a little bit more ambivalent towards doing it again than you are.
00:18:22.880But I think you were traumatized. I think you carry trauma from 2016. Is that correct?
00:18:30.420Well, sure. There might be some truth to that.
00:18:34.360The main thing is that if it's going to be done again, it will be done.
00:18:40.360We already saw it. It would be like you're up at bat in the big game, and it's the ninth inning.
00:18:51.720I'm sorry for the American sports metaphor for a French-Canadian, but follow along if you can.
00:18:57.340You're up at bat and you strike out, and then you go home and you start pretending to hit a home run and swinging away and going to the batting cage and hitting all these homers and imagining that it was real.
00:19:12.240Because what I mean is that we've seen this thing, and it didn't exactly work.
00:19:21.680And there was some trauma involved. There were some things that shouldn't be repeated.
00:19:28.800And I do get the sense from a lot of alt-right Twitter that they desperately want to reinvent 2016.
00:19:36.820And kind of like a programmer, they're trying to put the pieces back together.
00:20:40.020And if we were to go at it too much from a position of redoing exactly 2016, that would be cringe.
00:20:49.500And it's a little bit what Donald Trump – it's the same cringe that I feel when Donald Trump goes with his I love America type of speech in 2023, 2022,
00:21:01.160and where it doesn't kind of catch like the 2016 because we all know it's a pale copy of who he's been and who he's been projecting to be.
00:21:12.000So if you go just from a nostalgia perspective, it will suck.
00:21:16.140But I think that the path that Elon is allowing, which is much cleverer than this, is let's make a chaotic situation again and let's see what happens with the world once freed.
00:21:30.600Because I think that there are certain ingredients that haven't been mixed in properly in 2016.
00:21:38.820And I think that the redo of the experiment will lead to different results.
00:21:43.280For example, in 2016, I think that the whole discourse of the Democrats, this kind of radical anti-far right,
00:21:55.160stemmed and succeeded at making things like Charlottesville really labeled as extremist things.
00:22:04.380And in a way, this is all constructed.
00:22:07.320This is a kind of fiction, if you want my opinion.
00:22:11.020Now, why has this fiction rooted itself into people's mind?
00:23:40.840I see the takeover because the January 6th events occurred under the same type of mediatic elitist control.
00:23:48.280I think, to the contrary, that the takeover of Twitter by Elon Musk is the beginning of the end for this form of control of the discourse,
00:23:59.300and that things that will happen from here will have a kind of fair window to express themselves through a truly organic population of individuals on Twitter.
00:24:11.040That's why this fight against bots and is kind of a principle of you have a Twitter account, you're a human, and we won't promote the liberal talking point systematically.
00:24:24.860All of this creates very fertile ground for innovative stuff to happen, stuff that we can finally look at and be surprised.
00:24:33.120Because I'll be honest, it's been seven years that I haven't been surprised by the world.
00:24:39.900Maybe if you put out the yay stuff, because yay kind of came out of nowhere and surprised me.
00:26:43.980And let's also not forget that all of those, you know, CNN, New York Times, etc.
00:26:50.780I mean, a lot of the criticisms of me do have a kernel of truth to them, even if they are given in bad faith and kind of silly on some level.
00:27:01.440This idea that the mainstream media actually loved the alt-right and promoted it.
00:27:09.880I mean, that was one of the interesting dynamics is that Bannon and, you know, Bannon obviously has his connections.
00:27:19.340He wanted to get the alt-right as basically the Breitbart comment section.
00:27:26.200And if they were racist or even anti-Semitic or certainly if they're a misogynist, they were welcome.
00:27:34.940But it was ultimately kind of serving his end.
00:27:38.160I mean, as he said famously, you know, Breitbart is the platform for the alt-right.
00:27:45.220And what I read from that is that he wanted to channel it.
00:27:49.320And even if you look at like Milo's article on the alt-right, I think from like June of 2016, it was this total whitewash.
00:28:04.780It was, you know, it didn't get into the stuff that you're interested in of Darwinism and evolution and the future of intelligence, all that kind of stuff.
00:28:29.240And it was an attempt to channel that energy.
00:28:33.600I mean, none of them believed any of this, particularly Milo, who knew everyone in the alt-right.
00:28:38.920But it was this way of channeling that energy towards Donald Trump, who was at that time, by the midsummer, ultimately the Republican candidate.
00:28:51.160And I think they are very much trying to do this again in the sense that there's less and less of a differentiation between the mainstream right and the dissident right, if we want to use that term.
00:29:04.720So back in 2016, the mainstream right had declared war, absolute war on the alt-right.
00:29:13.000And the alt-right was just like, yeah, bring it on.
00:30:19.400And at this point, I mean, you know, if you go and look on Twitter and someone says like public school teachers are groomers and they want to take away your gas oven and their demons and whatever, you don't know if that is Andrew Anglin or like a Republican in Congress.
00:30:41.940You don't know if you don't know if you just read those lines.
00:30:47.480Well, there are certain costs to that victory.
00:30:53.240There are costs, but I see it as a victory that basically every single point of the alt-right in 2016 has been recycled in one form or another.
00:31:05.420Basically, the alt-right was disembodied and cannibalized and its cadaver was recycled in every possible way.
00:31:15.980This means first that there was some good stuff there.
00:31:19.160And it also means that a relatively organic, although I will agree with you, I've seen the butt problem.
00:31:27.500So, I mean, I've been at the forefront of distinguishing between what's a true audience and what's a fake audience.
00:31:36.020And through the super chats, in a way, I've learned that the butts don't have much money.
00:31:41.680And so eventually you can tire them off.
00:31:46.640But yeah, so I think there's so much victory to be celebrating.
00:31:50.280And I see it as much broader than just the question of the evolution of the alt-right toward its death and the current state of this segment of the population.
00:32:00.060I look at the whole Internet and I see vaccine resistance movement.
00:32:56.360But even if I did embrace, say, anti-vaccine animus and a lot of this stuff, I would even then be a bit skeptical of Charlie Kirk mouthing all my lines.
00:33:16.740And, I mean, look at the difference between, say, the alt-right and QAnon.
00:33:22.000And as I've said, I've stipulated that the alt-right was manufactured in all sort of complicated ways.
00:35:31.120But not only the deaths, like, Ashley Babbitt is someone who's clearly, whether or not you think the shooting of her was justified, and, you know, I could hear arguments the other way.
00:35:44.640Whether or not you think it's justified, there's no question that her mind was warped.
00:35:49.880I mean, her final words on a live stream were a quotation of a Q drop.
00:35:55.180Like, there's no question, like, what am I doing here?
00:36:00.000How did I, this kind of, like, goofy girl from the Air Force or wherever, and has a pool cleaning company, how did I end up invading the Capitol?
00:36:28.680I feel, I guess maybe also I have a bit of a tendency of, like, yeah, the alt-right, that's so 2016.
00:36:35.240Like, we've got to move upwards and onwards.
00:36:37.140Like, no one was praising me for writing alt-right content in 2010.
00:36:44.300You know, all I got were attacks from the conservative establishment, but I did it.
00:36:48.300And then there's a point where, you know, I, you know, I'll just say it with the stuff that Mark and I are doing.
00:36:58.720It's like, you guys are going to be saying this in 2030, whether you like it or not.
00:37:04.900You're going to, so, like, we've moved on.
00:37:07.640And when I see people just, like, in a trench or a rut, I just kind of, like, you know, I don't see it as, like, a new freedom awakening or something.
00:38:04.940What happens in particular, I don't really care.
00:38:07.760I want it to be as big and as beautiful and as life-changing because you mentioned the comparison between QAnon.
00:38:14.960I agree with everything you've said between QAnon and the alt-right.
00:38:18.880But QAnon will have literally zero cultural impact, whereas the alt-right can be argued to have one of the great, one of the events and one of the groups with the greatest cultural impact in the history of the last few decades on America.