Did you see how Elon Musk's SpaceX rescued those two astronauts that were stranded in space? Sort of amazing. We'll show you some footage, and then we'll talk to our friend Alan Bokhari, who has the latest inside scoop on censorship in the world of big tech. That's ahead.
00:05:42.320It was one giant step for SpaceX as it launched its most powerful rocket ever built.
00:05:48.320We're now down to three Raptor engines.
00:05:50.900And then flew its first stage booster back to the launch pad where giant metal arms called chopsticks grabbed it just seven minutes after lifting off in Boca Chica, Texas.
00:15:05.080But when there's an organized campaign of violence and destruction, whether it's against property or anything else, that is for political reasons, that's terrorism.
00:15:15.260The definition of terrorism is violence for political purposes.
00:16:43.460And all I could think of was, wow, what a great way to move these prisoners beyond the reach of district judges who might want to overturn it.
00:16:52.460But mainly, as they would say, pour encourager les autres, to send a message to the others that if you come to America, you're going to have an extremely bad ending.
00:17:06.740The reason I mentioned that story, Alan, is because in at least in that one case, and perhaps some others, perhaps some of his moves in the Middle East, Trump is signaling, don't mess with me.
00:17:20.800Do you think that between Trump and his friendship with Elon Musk and the new FBI directors and the new department secretary, the attorney general, do you think that the force of the United States police and perhaps others could be used to find out who's organizing and causing these?
00:18:54.100She joins a foundation called the Thousand Currents Foundation as a VP.
00:18:59.180And that foundation goes on to fund Black Lives Matter, which were responsible, of course, for all the death, the violence and destruction in people getting killed even in the summer of 2020.
00:19:12.120So you can actually trace present day unrest, present day political violence back to the people who perpetrated political violence in the 70s and 80s.
00:19:22.400And again, that's a foundation that gives out grants.
00:19:25.720And, you know, it has it has a hat or had, I think, I think she's left now, but it had a former left wing terrorist as a VP, which is which is incredible.
00:19:34.620So I don't think for a second that any of these that, you know, these foundations that fund these left wing courses are, you know, all opposed to political violence.
00:19:42.800And, you know, in at least one case, they weren't.
00:19:47.100And to address your second question, and that goes into your second question, really, what's going to stop it?
00:19:53.660The only thing that will stop it, really, because, you know, as being taskfully encouraged by people on the left, by people in the legacy media, the only thing that will really stop it is a unequivocal response from the authorities, from the FBI, from law enforcement.
00:20:07.160And that will be the only thing that will actually deter these people, because they're perfectly happy to make heroes out of the perpetrators of violence.
00:20:16.060An excellent recent example is Luigi Mangioni, the the person who is accused of killing the UnitedHealthcare CEO.
00:20:24.880He's a hero to many people on the political left.
00:20:27.920So, you know, in the minds of many of these people, there are no there are no bad tactics, only bad targets.
00:20:35.640And, you know, when you're dealing with an attitude like that, then the only possible way to deter it is, you know, a stern response from the authorities.
00:20:43.900Wow. I didn't know that about Susan Rosenberg.
00:20:46.860You make me think of Bill Ayers, who is also a 70s activist, good friend of Barack Obama.
00:20:54.360You know, Luigi Mangioni is a very interesting story because he was handsome.
00:21:31.940It's sort of like when Saddam Hussein was arrested in Iraq and they sort of, frankly, humiliated him by shaving him and cutting his hair on camera.
00:21:42.980And whether or not you think that that was appropriate or you might even call that a war crime, treatment of prisoners, it served to reduce the morale of the fighters left in his cause.
00:21:56.720Even, I mean, frankly, I think it probably was a violation of some Geneva convention to show a prisoner like that.
00:22:05.820I think that there is a tremendous risk of violence becoming cool again.
00:22:14.160And we've already seen several assassination attempts against Donald Trump.
00:22:19.520Elon Musk says he has assassination threats all the time.
00:22:23.320I think this really is an extremely serious event.
00:22:28.440Do you think the same way the FBI went after the January 6th neanderers, that's what Gavin McInnes calls that, the great neandering.
00:22:38.980And literally thousands of FBI agents were tasked to January 6th.
00:22:44.320Which I, there may have been some minor offenses there, but I think it was overblown and politicized.
00:22:52.840Do you think the FBI could be tasked to going after these actual violent firebombers?
00:22:58.420Well, I think that's the biggest threat right now in terms of domestic political violence.
00:23:05.780It's people who feel that political power has been taken away.
00:23:11.020People who feel that they're not going to get political power back through the regular democratic process and are lashing out in a very violent way.
00:23:20.740I think that that should be a focus for the FBI.
00:23:23.380It's what they're supposed to investigate.
00:23:25.100But, you know, as we know, the FBI and the security state over the past 10 years was completely radicalized and politically weaponized and, you know, really went after targets that, in my opinion, were not a really big threat at all.
00:23:40.820People like the, you know, the January 6th protesters are now dealing with a spate of actual violence.
00:23:47.300And, you know, I'm not sure who at the FBI, who in the security state is really, really looking at this.
00:23:53.320I mean, they should be, you know, that's for certain, because you're not going to, like I said, you're not going to have that condemnation from the legacy media or from members of the political opposition to the administration.
00:24:05.940All we've seen is tacit encouragement, you know, late night hosts laughing about it on their shows.
00:24:11.020There was even Seth Moulton, who, a Democratic congressman, who went on CNN and seemed to frame the attacks on Tesla as a legitimate form of protest.
00:24:18.920Question, public backlash against Elon Musk.
00:24:22.780The Trump administration is now saying that, like, if you, you know, are attacking Teslas or dealerships, going beyond vandalism, that that could be an act of domestic terrorism.
00:24:34.100But I do want to ask about this as resistance.
00:24:37.700Is this what resistance should look like?
00:24:39.620So Trump thinks that if you try to kill cops to overthrow the government and change an election, that's not domestic terrorism, but somehow having a protest in front of a Tesla dealership.
00:24:50.900The only thing that will deter this from happening, from continuing to escalate, is, you know, the authorities.
00:24:56.760You know, I remember 2020 very vividly.
00:25:00.320And by the way, Trump was still president in 2020.
00:25:03.540He was still president until January of 2021.
00:25:06.180So in a way, all that violence, I remember the Democrats saying that this violence is on Donald Trump's watch, which is, I tell you, the height of chutzpah.
00:26:14.720And he talks about how the Dems keep on taking the 20 side in 80-20 debates.
00:26:19.960Like on stopping transgender athletes from going into girls change rooms, the Democrats are taking the 20 percent side of that.
00:26:29.060He's describing what is currently the dumbest strategy in politics, which is Democrats taking the 20 percent side of every 80-20 issue in America.
00:26:38.380Do you think this would be another 80-20 issue?
00:26:41.140Do you think if the government cracked down on these domestic terrorists, do you think the population would cheer or do you think it would be a Luigi Mangione moment?
00:26:54.320You know, obviously, I think the people who support this violence won't cheer for it.
00:26:57.960But I think it's ultimately a minority of people engaging in the violence and supporting it.
00:27:02.680And the only way it will escalate is if there isn't a crackdown.
00:27:06.240And 2020 is a great example because I believe it was more than two dozen people who died in the in the rioting of 2020 of the summer of 2020.
00:27:17.620And, you know, you know, the media downplayed it.
00:27:20.700We don't even remember the names of most people who are most of the victims of the 2020 George Floyd riots.
00:27:28.800But a few months later, you know, the same legacy media was was happy to to accuse the meanderers, as you call them, of domestic terrorism.
00:27:40.140So it's what I published an article recently on Twitter called Forgiveness Asymmetry.
00:27:45.440And the general gist of the argument is that for decades, for decades, there's been a general sense that if you engage in violence on the left, there'll be some form of clemency.
00:28:01.880And you mentioned Bill Ayers earlier, Bill Ayers and his partner, Bernadine Dorn, they founded the Weather Underground, which carried out so many bombings across the country in the 1970s.
00:28:11.660They faced almost no consequence of that.
00:28:13.700I think Bernadine Dorn spent six months in prison.
00:28:16.820Ayers didn't spend any any time in prison at all, as far as I know.
00:28:19.800And by the 1980s, they were being hired by by prestigious law firms.
00:28:24.400And by the 1990s, they were being given university professorships.
00:28:29.020So that's how left wing political violence has been treated by elite institutions in this country going back decades.
00:28:38.060So you're correcting that asymmetry, I think, is is a fundamental problem of American politics.
00:28:43.540You know, I first learned the word denormalization when I was studying tobacco and how tobacco was denormalized.
00:28:53.940It's hard to imagine now, but there was a time when tobacco was the leading industry in America.
00:28:59.780It's really the crop as much as cotton that got the 13 colonies going.
00:29:05.060The number one thing that the founding fathers had in common is they grew tobacco.
00:29:08.360And over the centuries, tobacco was such an industry and to be a tobacco executive was to be a leading member of society, enormous philanthropy from the tobacco companies.
00:29:21.200But over the course of a generation, a very careful denormalization, not just of smoking, but of like now the word tobacco executive is the lowest slur you could throw at someone.
00:29:36.260I think that it's a very powerful thing, denormalization.
00:29:40.680I think what's happening is they're trying to denormalize Trump and Trump supporters.
00:29:47.360Obviously, this has been going on for a while.
00:29:49.360While they're normalizing terrorism as an act of patriotism, as an act of defiance and resistance, they're denormalizing.
00:29:59.540They're trying to make it scary for an individual person to buy a Tesla.
00:30:03.780They're trying to make it scary for an individual person to wear a MAGA hat.
00:30:09.260They're trying to make it so that at the very least you'll be shunned, if not physically attacked.
00:30:15.320And I wonder what your thoughts are on the way to resist that.
00:30:20.080Because, you know, a lot of people wear a Che Guevara shirt and no one ever punishes or shuns them, even though Che Guevara is actually a murderer.
00:30:28.720How do we stop this cultural denormalization of anyone who supports or does it even or have we passed that in America?
00:30:37.580Do Americans no longer care about that kind of cancel culture, media knows best approach?
00:30:47.900And obviously, I work for a foundation that is completely concerned with online censorship and its effects.
00:30:53.040So I think what I just called forgiveness asymmetry, where left wing terrorists are basically forgiven.
00:30:59.020But if you're on the right, you can have your career destroyed over a mere opinion or an offensive joke or an offensive statement.
00:31:04.140And I think that was a product of information asymmetry, right?
00:31:09.720So the total control of every information dispersing institution by by the pro-blog political establishment.
00:31:18.740And, you know, when I say information dispersing institutions, I mean, the legacy media, I mean, the education system, I mean, universities, all of these things were in charge of, you know, teaching America's young people.
00:31:33.120They were in charge of distributing the news.
00:31:35.360And because that that system was so politically partisan, that's why we had this asymmetry.
00:31:48.800And it broke down very, very recently.
00:31:50.740And I think the fact that it's broken down might give us some hope when it comes to, you know, correcting this.
00:31:56.440What I see as a fundamental imbalance of post-war American politics.
00:32:00.780You know, I was thinking about a change that I've observed, and I'm not part of Silicon Valley.
00:32:08.160I know you were really in the heart of that battle, and you still are.
00:32:13.100Think about the tech people who have moved away from the Democrats over the last 10 years.
00:32:17.140And I think, by the way, that Tim Wall's video of him laughing at the falling stock and cheering it, I think that will hit hard in Silicon Valley.
00:32:25.000Because he's saying, I'm rejoicing in the failure of an American corporate champion.
00:32:31.080I mean, Tesla is the largest car company by far measured by market capitalization.
00:32:39.260It's actually the most popular particular brand of cars sold.
00:32:43.780So I think that Democrats in Silicon Valley, achievers, innovators, founders, I think they'll sort of be shocked by that.
00:32:51.680Maybe I'm wrong on that, but I look at people like Bill Ackman, David Sachs, Elon Musk, Chamath, I can't say his last name, even Peter Thiel.
00:33:14.360Like, has Silicon Valley, which was forever known as the most Democrat place in the world, Nancy Pelosiville, that was where Kamala Harris, you know, made her mark.
00:33:23.820I'm talking about San Francisco in general.
00:33:34.980You know, I think the biggest mistake that Silicon Valley companies made in the 2010s, especially Facebook, actually, especially Facebook, but also Twitter under Jack Dorsey, also Google, all of the big companies.
00:33:51.640The biggest mistake they made was believing that the political establishment and the legacy media was on their side.
00:33:59.200They were never going to be on their side forever.
00:34:03.000I think they were on their side maybe in 2012 when Facebook was praised for its role in helping Barack Obama win re-election.
00:34:15.280The blog, you know, the foreign policy blog, also loved social media around that time because they saw social media as helping them destabilize countries in the Middle East during the Arab Spring.
00:34:25.940They saw it as a tool of American statecraft.
00:34:29.740But there was a fundamental problem with social media in that it undermined that information dominance I was talking about earlier, that dominance of the legacy media and universities and elite institutions in controlling the flow of information.
00:34:48.280And social media was a fundamental threat to that.
00:34:52.540And that is the moment when the political establishment completely turns on Silicon Valley.
00:34:58.900And, you know, they're not going to be friends with Silicon Valley again.
00:35:01.180They're just not because they recognize now that the free flow of information online, the uncensored flow of information online, is a fundamental threat to their power because it breaks down that information monopoly.
00:35:13.980Give me 30 seconds on the release of 80,000 documents touching on the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
00:35:22.120Obviously, that suggests that not all documents were released, but quite a few.
00:35:44.520Is there any meaning there that we should take away?
00:35:49.560Yeah, I certainly haven't looked through them myself.
00:35:52.080I know the founder of my nonprofit, Mike Benz, has been looking through them.
00:35:56.580I know people on social media have been looking through them.
00:35:59.060I think the bigger point is just the level of transparency we've seen from this administration.
00:36:03.820They've been released pretty much unredacted, as far as I can tell.
00:36:08.920And, you know, this has been something that has been sought after by so many people for so long.
00:36:14.420And I think there's a general recognition on the part of this administration, I think, that transparency is the way forward, especially in the era of social media, especially when you have the 24-hour news cycle.
00:36:25.920And where people will discuss, you know, non-establishment theories, people will find information on their own, you know, trying to conceal information, conceal, trying to suppress viewpoints doesn't really work in the modern era.
00:36:42.320And I think the total collapse of Silicon Valley censorship demonstrates that.
00:36:49.020You know, I think the COVID experience of community guidelines banning you from being a skeptic of even, banning you from even talking about, you know, other possible remedies besides Pfizer's drug.
00:37:06.900I mean, the Nobel Prize winning low cost remedy you weren't allowed to talk about on social media.
00:37:16.320You weren't allowed to speculate if it was a release from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
00:37:24.720And so many of those things, I think the level of distrust in institutions is so high.