Rebel News Podcast - December 13, 2022


Who was really running Twitter before Elon Musk bought it?


Episode Stats


Length

48 minutes

Words per minute

162.73802

Word count

7,928

Sentence count

77

Harmful content

Misogyny

7

sentences flagged

Hate speech

19

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Who was really running Twitter before Elon Musk bought it? And why can t people leave it? And why does Elton John seem to have a problem with the idea that the internet is designed to bring people together?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.080 Hello, my Rebels. I only heard the name Yul Roth recently. I didn't know who he was until
00:00:05.260 just a few weeks ago, really. But he was the de facto CEO of Twitter. So who was he and
00:00:12.640 how did he get his important position as really the chief censor over there? Well, I'll go
00:00:16.900 through a lot of his own writings, including his PhD dissertation. You're not even going
00:00:22.560 to believe me. I won't give it away now. Okay, fine, I will. His PhD dissertation was about
00:00:28.000 the gay sex app called Grindr. He got a PhD in Grindr. I'm not making that up. I'll read 0.99
00:00:33.360 to you from his dissertation. That's ahead. But first, let me invite you to subscribe
00:00:37.380 to Rebel News Plus. That's the video version of this podcast. Just go to rebelnewsplus.com,
00:00:42.660 click subscribe, eight bucks a month, get all the video versions. And by the way, we rely
00:00:47.280 on that money to pay our bills because we don't take any money from Trudeau. All right, here's
00:00:51.220 today's podcast.
00:00:58.000 Tonight, who was really running Twitter until Elon Musk bought it? You'll be shocked but
00:01:12.660 not surprised. It's December 12th, and this is the S. Levant Show.
00:01:16.220 You're fighting for freedom! Shame on you, you censorious bug!
00:01:28.000 Well, Elon Musk, I always thought he was a little bit creative and iconoclastic and a
00:01:37.600 little eccentric, but I always thought of him as the boss of Tesla, which in my mind was
00:01:43.940 sort of a lefty, cool, progressive company. At least everyone in Silicon Valley loved the
00:01:49.300 Teslas. It was green energy, even if it took a lot of rare earth minerals to make the batteries.
00:01:55.660 And of course, there were those government subsidies, but only recently have we sort
00:01:59.940 of discovered that no, he's actually a libertarian in many important ways. And of course, by buying
00:02:05.580 Twitter, he's demonstrated he's a believer in freedom of speech, which of course is the
00:02:09.260 most important of the civil liberties. It's the fundamental freedom, a strategic freedom
00:02:14.520 upon which other freedoms are based. It doesn't make much sense to be able to have an election,
00:02:19.400 say, if you don't have free speech to begin with. So Elon Musk has suddenly upended the
00:02:25.400 world. And everyone who thought he was cool now says he wasn't. 140,000 people on Twitter
00:02:32.180 said they're going to leave. They're disgusted with what he's doing to the platform. But studies
00:02:38.280 suggest that only 1.6% of those people actually did leave because they love it too much. Elton John
00:02:45.400 looks like he's one of the ones who left. He says, all my life, I've tried to use music
00:02:51.080 to bring people together. Yet it saddens me to see how misinformation is now being used to divide
00:02:57.160 our world. I've decided to no longer use Twitter, given the recent change in policy, which will allow
00:03:02.900 misinformation to flourish unchecked. Now, Elon Musk immediately wrote back in a very friendly way,
00:03:08.380 saying he liked his music and wanted to know what he was talking about, what information,
00:03:13.400 what misinformation. Well, we don't know if Elton John answered at all. Looks like he didn't,
00:03:19.660 or didn't at least publicly. I don't know if he actually has an answer. I think Elton John is
00:03:24.840 just repeating someone else's message track. Mark Ruffalo, one of the most cringe-inducing
00:03:30.920 progressives in Hollywood, he said something similar. He said, as Twitter grows more unpredictable
00:03:37.220 and harmful to marginalized groups. I'm exploring some other avenues for us to connect. I'm excited 1.00
00:03:44.620 to continue to foster and be in our great community. If you'd like to come along for the ride,
00:03:49.960 here's where to find me. And he has a list of other places. But you know what?
00:03:54.400 He couldn't even last a few hours. He's tweeting all the time. Why can't people leave Twitter?
00:04:01.240 Well, I think people actually like the conflict and the clash of ideas and the heterogeneity as
00:04:07.600 opposed to an echo chamber where everyone's saying the same thing. I mean, if you only wanted to hear
00:04:12.940 about Mark Ruffalo or Elton John, you would join their fan clubs. And I guess a lot of people did,
00:04:17.460 but some people like to see a clash of ideas. They love the network effect that everyone is there.
00:04:23.840 You know, you might have a superior technological system, but if you're the only one in it,
00:04:30.360 it doesn't really work. That's not how the internet works. I think Twitter, like so many apps, feels like
00:04:36.220 a game. Gets a little bit addictive, doesn't it? And you love seeing, at least I do, the fancy pants
00:04:44.400 getting de-fancied. Because, you know, there's always someone bigger and more important than you. And
00:04:50.400 you could say that a celebrity, entrepreneur, richest man in the world is bigger than any
00:04:55.880 other celebrity he's bantering with. It's sort of fun to watch and clash. And it's also fun to watch
00:05:01.860 Twitter itself figure things out in real time, including making mistakes in real time. That's
00:05:07.720 interesting to see, too. Over the weekend, Dave Chappelle, the politically incorrect comedian,
00:05:15.420 was in San Francisco, and he invited Elon Musk on the stage. Always risky. There were cheers,
00:05:22.600 but there were also boos. Take a listen.
00:05:24.240 Always the richest man in the world.
00:05:26.320 Whoo! 0.78
00:05:26.440 Bean! 0.83
00:05:56.300 pretty evenly split i think but think of any other billionaire how would it have been say if
00:06:07.900 that were bill gates on the stage well i know one woman who would have been booing his ex-wife you 1.00
00:06:14.660 know it was also widely reported that bill had a friendship or business or some kind of contact
00:06:20.600 with jeffrey epstein and that you were not uh that that was very upsetting to you did that play a
00:06:25.480 role in the in the divorce at all in this process yeah as i said it's not one thing it was many
00:06:32.100 things but i did not like uh that he'd had meetings with jeffrey epstein no and you made that clear to
00:06:39.700 him i made that clear to him i also met jeffrey epstein exactly one time did you yes because i
00:06:46.660 wanted to see who this man was and um i regretted it from the second i stepped in the door he was
00:06:53.920 abhorrent he was evil personified i had nightmares about it afterwards so you know my heart breaks
00:07:01.900 for these young women because that's how i felt and here i'm an older woman my god i feel terrible
00:07:07.340 for those young women it's awful you felt that the moment you walked in i didn't realize it yeah
00:07:11.700 and you shared that with bill and he still continued to spend time with him any of the questions
00:07:17.860 remaining about what bill's relationship there was those are for bill to answer okay but i made it very
00:07:23.880 clear how i felt about him yeah so elon musk that's the new ceo of twitter but who was the old ceo of
00:07:32.300 twitter well a lot of people know this person named jack dorsey he was the inspirer the creator of twitter
00:07:40.860 he always had his head in the clouds a bit i found it quite endearing he was a dreamy sort of founder
00:07:47.080 he would occasionally post things like this he said i did my meditation at dhamma mahima in pion
00:07:53.660 this is my room basic during the 10 days no devices reading writing physical exercise music intoxicants
00:08:06.500 meet talking or even eye contact with others it's free everything is given to meet meditators by
00:08:16.420 charity whoa okay then while he was on some vision quest though i don't know where that place was
00:08:26.540 um other more ambitious people were busy interfering in the u.s election you might recall that the story
00:08:34.300 of the year the hunter biden laptop was banned by twitter was broken by the new york post one of the
00:08:40.260 oldest and uh most reputable newspapers in america it's a tabloid but it gets its facts straight it did
00:08:45.860 get its facts straight there but twitter banned the story suspended the new york post account and actually
00:08:51.240 banned people from even privately sharing the story and direct messages now after the election jack took
00:08:57.620 the blame for that decision uh thanks for nothing after the election was already tipped here's what
00:09:04.240 jack said in a string of tweets he was in congress he said we were called here today because of an
00:09:10.080 enforcement decision we made against the new york post based on a policy we created in 2018 to prevent
00:09:17.420 twitter from being used to spread hacked materials this resulted in us blocking people from sharing a new
00:09:23.700 york post article publicly or privately he went on to say we made a quick interpretation using no other
00:09:31.500 evidence and the materials in the article were obtained through hacking and according to our policy
00:09:36.600 blocked them from being spread upon further consideration we admitted this action was wrong
00:09:40.860 and corrected it with 24 hours we informed the new york post of our error and policy update and how to unlock
00:09:47.460 their account by deleting the original violating tweet which freed them to tweet the exact same
00:09:53.380 content and news article again they chose not to instead insisting we reverse our enforcement action
00:09:58.900 yeah it was never a believable excuse i mean what's he saying there we were wrong
00:10:04.020 but we told them to delete it they wouldn't so it's their fault it stayed down it doesn't make any sense
00:10:09.660 it's almost like he was reading an excuse written for him by someone else while he was doing his vision
00:10:15.440 quest in a room with no window so who was the real ceo who was really making the decisions while jack was
00:10:24.320 finding himself donald trump knew early he always did the new york post knew they knew they had his
00:10:31.180 number in may of 2020 yoel roth was the ceo take a look at this uh here's one this is our this is the
00:10:40.500 arbiter this guy is the arbiter of what's supposed to go on twitter he's the one he thought that uh
00:10:48.840 he thought and if you cnn as a guide cnn which is fake news he uses cnn as a guide his name is
00:10:55.880 yoel roth and he's the one that said that uh mail-in balloting you look mail-in no fraud
00:11:03.320 no fraud really why don't you take a look all over the country there's cases all over the country
00:11:07.880 if we went to mail-in balloting our election all over the world would look as a total joke
00:11:14.340 it would be a total joke there's such fraud and abuse and you know about harvesting where they
00:11:21.880 harvest the ballots and they go and grab them and they go to people's houses and they say sign here
00:11:27.480 no it doesn't work out now an absentee ballot you can't be there or you're sick and you go in your
00:11:32.480 register and you do all sorts of things to get that ballot and there's good security measures but
00:11:37.580 where they send out like in california millions and millions of ballots to anybody that's breathing
00:11:43.040 anybody in california that's breathing gets a ballot but mr president that's not true so here
00:11:48.200 here excuse me wait a minute i'm not finished so here's your uh here's your man and that's on twitter
00:11:53.960 yeah that was from may 2020 and look at that front page look at those nutty tweets that this head
00:12:01.640 of censorship twitter head of trust and safety was writing yes that let me let me read one of his
00:12:08.240 tweets yes that person in the pink hat is clearly a bigger threat to your brand of feminism than actual 1.00
00:12:14.500 nazis in the white house oh were the were there actual nazis in the white house like who ivanka trump
00:12:21.600 or jared kushner so who is this yowel roth who donald trump knew was the problem back in may of
00:12:29.060 2020 he's the head of trust and safety i love that that's straight out of orwell's 1984
00:12:34.480 so to become the boss of censorship at twitter what's your background are you an expert in the
00:12:42.280 american first amendment that's what they call their guarantee or freedom of speech is he a legal expert
00:12:48.000 well he does have a phd and i'll tell you a little bit more about that in a moment but
00:12:53.000 here he is explaining why he made the decision to de-platform the sitting president of the united
00:13:00.700 states not the head of iran or russia or venezuela they've never been de-platformed but why he took down
00:13:07.600 the president of the united states here's yowel roth saying how terrified he was how it was about his
00:13:14.960 trauma his own trauma um but what are you worried about these twitter files coming out and what was
00:13:20.980 that experience like having kellyanne who's always in control of herself sticking this mega trolls on 1.00
00:13:27.520 you it's terrifying i thought i was going to be a college professor for a living i like i got a phd
00:13:35.280 and was doing research that nobody cared about and uh and then i was like oh you know like this
00:13:40.240 platform thing is cool like i can go and do research there and and then you know one thing
00:13:45.240 led to another and all of a sudden we apply a misinformation label to donald trump's account
00:13:50.660 and i'm on the cover of the new york post and that is a deeply terrifying experience and i say this from
00:13:57.100 a position of unquestioned privilege as a cis white male like the internet is much scarier and much worse 0.60
00:14:05.200 for lots of other people who aren't me but it was pretty fucking scary for a long time 0.87
00:14:10.140 what was as a result of that you know when you get targeted in some of these ways it's hard to
00:14:17.340 differentiate between what is somebody just online trying to rattle you and what's a real threat
00:14:23.840 you see in things like pizzagate that online conspiracies can mobilize very real and very direct
00:14:31.020 offline violence and i worry about that i had been doxed years before by teenagers actually they're
00:14:38.520 they're always behind it but you know um i saw those harms i experienced those harms and now it was
00:14:46.400 those harms through a mainstream news outlet being held up in in the oval office by the former president
00:14:52.780 of the united states and that is deeply terrifying he's the kind of guy who talks about trauma
00:14:58.700 online experienced those harms um i found the new york post and donald trump deeply
00:15:06.200 terrifying he's the kind of guy who talks about microaggression so obviously he had to use twitter
00:15:13.980 and his powers for his own therapy take a look at this video donald trump that one i don't think was
00:15:21.600 a mistake january 6th so it it starts on the 6th but it also starts prior to that that's correct in
00:15:28.040 the weeks leading up in the weeks between election day and january 6th twitter moderated hundreds i think
00:15:36.100 the the final number ended up was like 140 separate tweets from just at real donald trump that violated
00:15:43.140 various policies yes he was good at that integrity policy every morning it was a new tweet much of it
00:15:49.600 was recirculating some of the same narratives and all of it was focused on the ultimately false claim
00:15:56.420 that the 2020 election had been stolen and so we're going into the events of the 6th and there's that
00:16:03.920 context there's the centrality of his account and so you let him get away with it for a long time
00:16:08.920 in other words well we'd been enforcing on it right so we restricted the tweets we put warnings on them
00:16:14.500 you couldn't like them you couldn't retweet them um but we didn't ban him because it was a relevant
00:16:21.980 part of a moment in american politics right the events of the 6th happen and um if you talk to
00:16:30.160 content moderators who worked on january 6th myself included the word that nearly everybody uses is
00:16:35.920 trauma we we experienced those events not some of us as americans but not just as americans or as
00:16:42.700 citizens but as people working on sort of how to prevent harm on the internet we saw the clearest
00:16:48.380 possible example of what it looked like for things to move from online to off we saw what was we saw
00:16:55.900 the way that rhetoric about a stolen election was being mobilized on sites like the donald.win sure we
00:17:02.060 saw the trafficking of this content in the fringe parts of the internet and we saw people dead in the
00:17:08.380 capital well hang on just one second why can't you dispute whether an election was fair i mean are
00:17:15.960 venezuelans or russians or iranians or cubans allowed to dispute of course they are they should
00:17:21.400 are we not allowed to talk about that isn't that part of freedom of speech you can talk about whatever
00:17:26.020 you want to talk about i mean democrats dispute elections by republicans all the time they they never
00:17:31.880 in fact accepted george w bush saying he stole the election from al gore why can't you talk about
00:17:38.780 whether or not the 2020 election was was uh was rigged i mean is it because twitter had a role in
00:17:46.620 rigging it as we just showed you he talked about the january 6th trauma of course that was the
00:17:52.720 um i guess you could say riot at the capitol buildings uh you heard yul roth say that people died
00:18:01.400 at the capitol it's true two people did die much less than died in the antifa and black lives matter
00:18:08.740 riots that were going on in america for a year before the elections now yul roth is almost certainly
00:18:14.020 talking about brian sicknick who was a capitol police officer who did die that day but here is a press
00:18:23.740 release from the u.s capitol police following uh a coroner's report on why brian sicknick died
00:18:31.260 let me read to you from their own website the u.s capitol police accepts the findings from the
00:18:37.980 district of columbia's office of the chief medical examiner that officer brian sicknick died of natural
00:18:46.360 causes this does not change the fact officer sicknick died in the line of duty courageously defending
00:18:52.920 congress in the capitol so the person who yul roth was talking about who was dead on january 6th did in
00:19:02.060 fact die he died of natural causes now there was someone who was shot dead that same day
00:19:08.900 her name was ashley babbitt and here's how the washington post describes her 0.84
00:19:15.300 two previously unreported video clips obtained by the washington post shed new light on the fatal
00:19:21.500 shooting by police of trump supporter and air force veteran ashley babbitt as she and other
00:19:27.820 rioters stormed the u.s capitol i'm not sure if she was storming anything the officer just slowly aimed
00:19:33.400 at her and shot her shot her dead he has not been charged with anything so there were two deaths that
00:19:38.500 day a death of natural causes of a policeman and the homicide whether or not it was in self-defense or in
00:19:46.600 the line of duty we don't know because no one's ever been tried for it so yes there was two people
00:19:51.640 killed on that fateful day i'm not saying i support people breaking windows or barging into the capitol
00:19:57.560 buildings i'm certainly not supporting undercover fbi agents provocateurs mobilizing and revving up a
00:20:05.120 crowd i'm not supporting officers opening doors and welcoming protesters in i don't think you should
00:20:10.200 trespass like that i don't think you should break windows or push your way into property like that i just
00:20:15.420 don't think you should but i don't think it was the insurrection that americans thought it was or at
00:20:20.340 least the american democrats or at least the democrat named yul roth thought it was can can we even talk
00:20:26.280 about all these things well now we can on twitter because yul roth is gone but a number of the things i was
00:20:34.520 just talking about you could not discuss for the last few years on twitter because of yul roth so who was he
00:20:43.960 well he's a guy who talks about trauma and fear and being a privileged cisgender male that's sort of a
00:20:52.700 tip-off to who he is isn't it as in you know ideologically he thinks speech is violence he's
00:20:59.740 one of those kind of guys he thinks seeing and hearing rough and tumble politics is trauma except
00:21:05.960 if it's antifa and black lives matter riots then it's only mildly violent but back to his job chief
00:21:12.340 sensor chief of trust and safety at twitter so what's his expertise like how to get the job well
00:21:17.960 this is his phd from the prestigious university of pennsylvania great school now let me read to you
00:21:23.820 the abstract of it this is a fancy way of saying a summary of the whole phd dissertation so i'm going
00:21:30.280 to read it for about a full minute you're going to go crazy before i'm actually i'm not even going
00:21:33.860 read the whole thing let me read what i can since its launch in 2009 the geo social networking service
00:21:42.380 grinder that's a gay sex app in case you don't know has become an increasingly mainstream and
00:21:49.700 prominent part of gay culture both in the united states and globally mobile applications like grinder
00:21:54.600 give users the ability to quickly and easily share information about themselves in the form of text
00:21:59.300 numbers and pictures and connect with each other in real time on the basis of geographic proximity
00:22:04.740 i argue that these services constitute an important site for examining how bodies identities and
00:22:11.040 communities are translated into data as well as how data becomes a tool for forming understanding
00:22:16.820 and managing personal relationships throughout this work i articulate a model of networked interactivity
00:22:23.160 that conceptualizes self-expression as an act determined by three sometimes overlapping
00:22:28.420 sometimes conflicting sets of affordances and constraints one techno commercial and structures
00:22:34.500 of software and business two cultural and subcultural norms mores histories and standards of acceptable and
00:22:40.660 expected conduct and three socio-political tendencies that appear to be but in fact are not fixed techno
00:22:47.140 commercial structures in these discussions grinder serves both as a model of processes that apply to social
00:22:53.140 networking more generally as well as particular study into how networked interactivity
00:22:57.860 is complicated by the histories and particularities of western gay culture i'm going to stop there i'm going to stop there
00:23:05.540 so he got a phd in the gay sex app grinder that's what he got his phd in i didn't know you could do that
00:23:14.820 here's a section of the dissertation that elon musk tweeted just the other day i think elon musk was sort of
00:23:20.340 startled who his trust and safety boss was looks like yoel is arguing in favor of children being
00:23:27.460 able to access adult internet services in his phd pieces it's worth considering how if at all the
00:23:33.060 current generation of sorry i'm just going to i'm just going to read from that the current generation of
00:23:38.660 popular sites of gay network social ability might fit into an overall queer social landscape that
00:23:44.820 increasingly includes individuals under the age of 18 even with the services extensive content
00:23:51.620 management grinder may well be too lewd or too hookup oriented to be a safe and age appropriate
00:23:58.340 resource for teenagers but the fact that people under 18 are on these services already indicates that we
00:24:04.500 can't readily dismiss these platforms out of hand as loci for queer youth culture rather than merely trying
00:24:10.740 to absolve themselves of legal responsibility or worse trying to drive out teenagers entirely
00:24:15.780 service providers should instead focus on crafting safety strategies that can accommodate a wide variety
00:24:20.660 of use cases for platforms like grinder including possibly their role in safely connecting queer young
00:24:26.100 adults really uh yeah he talks a lot about children and sex um here's another tweet that he just did on
00:24:37.060 his work account he said can high school students ever meaningfully consent to sex with their teachers
00:24:43.780 uh no brother that's called statutory rape um just like we have that old phrase taking candy from a baby
00:24:50.740 that's because the baby is not strong and does not have capacity and doesn't have the ability to deal
00:24:57.140 with someone more powerful that's why we call it statutory rape if you are having sex with an adult and
00:25:03.060 you're a child you cannot consent because you were just a child it may look like consent but it is rape 0.72
00:25:10.020 that's yole roth the head of trust and safety here here's another crazy tweet he did he said
00:25:16.260 i enjoy having the kinds of meetings where googling gay bareback porn is considered academic work
00:25:24.100 i'm just going to read another one here he says um that awkward moment when you can't tell
00:25:30.260 whether your neighbor has a really loud infant or it's just watching really loud porn
00:25:35.460 what the hell he talks a lot about listening to his neighbors having sex like repeatedly 0.62
00:25:41.620 he talks about having a secret dirty twitter account as in what i've just been reading to you is
00:25:47.700 from his clean account here's another one he says twitter will live to porn another day this
00:25:53.780 is the head of trust and safety at twitter he's saying thing i just yelled loudly at work so he's
00:26:01.060 trust and safety boss at twitter fighting to keep pornography in twitter he's got a hundred of these
00:26:08.900 he hasn't taken them down which i find baffling and like i say these are from his public twitter
00:26:14.980 account his work account they're not from his dirty account now i'm not anti-sex i'm not anti-gay 0.80
00:26:22.900 i would be just as grossed out if someone in a professional setting literally would never stop
00:26:28.420 talking about sex and pornography gay or straight if they did their phd on gay dating in the place of
00:26:38.420 teens using gay sex apps i might say you know that's not just a fake academic discipline it's sort of
00:26:45.620 gross and time for you to grow up and do something real with your life instead of just go on dates and
00:26:51.220 calling it scholarship but that would be a microaggression aggression against them but back to my
00:26:56.580 main point what is this guy's qualification for being the chief censor twitter i remember when i was
00:27:04.420 young in canada uh there were a lot of free speech battles over gay pornography i don't know if you
00:27:10.580 remember the case the litter's little sisters bookshop was a lesbian bookstore and they would bring in 1.00
00:27:17.140 lesbian pornography you've just written works and they were always stopped at customs and it was a huge 0.83
00:27:23.780 civil liberties case back then sexual obscenity was the front line of free speech as in there was
00:27:31.860 general agreement that we had freedom of speech about politics and all other matters it was just did
00:27:38.340 obscene gay sex count as free speech that was the battle back then so he was an oversharer of porn 0.97
00:27:47.700 and talked a lot about teens and even kids and even babies but he had no patience for actual free
00:27:57.300 speech he felt traumatized by donald trump criticizing him so so the libertarians in the 80s who fought for
00:28:03.700 lesbian porn they were saying we're going to fight the battle for lesbian porn that shows how dedicated 0.92
00:28:10.100 for free speech we are of course we're for every other kind of speech too look at how far we're willing
00:28:15.060 to go for gay sex joel roth was the opposite he valued gay sex as free speech he didn't value free
00:28:24.980 speech as free speech no wonder child pornography and child sexual exploitation was never eradicated on
00:28:33.380 twitter despite countless victims begging for that to be done no no wonder misgendering
00:28:39.860 someone would get you banned no wonder calling drag queen story time grooming would get you banned
00:28:47.780 that was yoel roth's hobby talking about kids and sex and he hated anyone to the right of him he felt
00:28:55.380 traumatized by them but that's 90 percent of america he was so out there he was the real ceo of twitter
00:29:05.620 you know he met weekly with the fbi he gave government agencies direct access to twitter their own portal
00:29:13.060 right into the system the u.s government but what other governments too who are these masters of the
00:29:21.780 universe these tech bro millionaires not the billionaires the billionaires are the builders
00:29:28.420 they're usually math guys who built the thing the millionaires those are the liberals who came in and
00:29:33.940 colonized what the math geniuses build yoel roth is gone but we still haven't rooted out all the yoel
00:29:41.780 roths from twitter i hope that elon musk continues to do so and more importantly that he shows us what
00:29:48.580 they've been doing all these years stay with us for more
00:30:04.020 well elon musk has everyone's attention he's one of the world's most interesting man he's a man he's a
00:30:08.660 troublemaker he's obviously smart a builder and of course he's rich and he has been using the platform
00:30:14.580 that he bought uh to sow his bald oats and say what he wants to say he criticized dr anthony fauci
00:30:21.860 in a tough way suggesting not only that he's a critic of fauci but that he might have information
00:30:27.540 as the new owner of twitter and every message sent uh therein about dr fauci that who knows may lead to
00:30:34.100 his prosecution but in reaction to that john brennan who i think is really the poster boy for the deep
00:30:40.180 state i think he's a former cia director if i'm not mistaken wrote back dr fauci is a national hero
00:30:46.660 who will be remembered for generations to come for his innate goodness and many contributions to public
00:30:52.020 health despite your business success you will be remembered most for fueling public hate and divisions
00:30:58.420 you may have money but you have no class snap ah well the fun thing about twitter is that everyone gets to
00:31:06.820 weigh in on everything at any time i think that's the fun of it i think it's why it's more fun than if
00:31:12.740 we had a conservatives only twitter or a liberals only twitter which some camps on both sides try to
00:31:18.980 do conservatives have gab let's say liberals are trying to make mastodon their hangout but our friend
00:31:25.140 gordon g chang a close china watcher said this in reply to john brennan yes fauci is a national hero
00:31:34.180 he's a national hero in china boom and joining us now is the author that tweet who's really mastered
00:31:41.140 the forum is our friend gordon g chang who i follow on twitter and i think that might even have been
00:31:46.900 how i discovered him it really is a wonderful platform which may be one reason why it's banned
00:31:52.260 in china right if you don't have a vpn a kind of way to get around the great firewall of china you can't
00:31:58.260 access twitter in that country can you no twitter is unavailable in china except of course for a
00:32:05.220 virtual private network as you point out but that's actually violating china's laws so yes it's available
00:32:12.580 only if you make yourself a pirate of course the chinese government uses twitter to broadcast
00:32:18.500 its message outside the country there are many chinese diplomats who i think marshal uh the internet
00:32:24.900 fairly effectively i i note that none of them to my knowledge have been deplatformed in the way that
00:32:30.740 donald trump was deplatformed but let's get back to your tweet because i think it was a good quip
00:32:35.460 i mean it it was a great zinger but in a way it's true isn't it having forcible lockdowns having the power
00:32:44.580 to override any opposition there's no supreme court in china that's going to strike down xi jinping there's no
00:32:52.020 opposition party there's no you know new york times that's going to be skeptical of a president
00:32:57.300 it really is a one party state all the way through so it really is the kind of i mean look justin trudeau
00:33:03.940 said he would love to have that kind of power he most admires it that is the kind of world that anthony
00:33:08.900 fauci seemed to suggest he would like to i mean i i think that's a fair comment to say what you said
00:33:15.460 yes um to put some context on this ezra in 2014 the obama administration put a moratorium on federal
00:33:25.220 funding of gain of function research because it was so dangerous so what did fauci do well he went
00:33:31.780 around the moratorium by funding gain of function in china and that's why the wuhan institute of
00:33:38.260 virology was actually engaged in dangerous gain of function research and we know that fauci was
00:33:45.140 responsible for it because there are two published papers 2016 2017 which were by wuhan researchers
00:33:55.700 which clearly described gain of function experimentation and both of those published papers
00:34:01.620 explicitly acknowledged funding from the national institutes of allergy and infectious diseases
00:34:07.060 which fauci headed the reason why this is important is because last year twice in direct responses
00:34:14.740 to uh senator ran paul fauci under oath said that he did not fund gain of function in the wuhan institute
00:34:22.820 of virology so that leads to a conclusion either fauci did not know what his institute was doing which
00:34:31.380 is really unlikely because these papers were high profile or he committed perjury but the department of
00:34:38.740 justice is not investigating him and uh you know we have john brennan saying he's a national hero and the
00:34:45.620 reason why i said he was a national hero in china is because fauci funded china's biological weapons 0.81
00:34:52.100 research in the wuhan institute of virology on gain of function yeah i can't think of anything more
00:34:58.260 dangerous i mean doing gain of function research and of course that's that's just like what it sounds like
00:35:04.020 it's giving viruses more functions give it's altering viruses to to weaponize them that's a terrifying
00:35:11.940 almost dystopian fantasy that you might have a horror movie about it's a terrifying thing but the
00:35:18.100 only thing to make it more terrifying is to do it in china you know under the power and authority of 1.00
00:35:25.700 of the chinese government it would be terrible enough to do it in america but to do it in china is nuts 0.99
00:35:29.700 hey i got a question for you do we know if anthony fauci ever visited physically visited the wuhan
00:35:37.620 institute of virology i don't know of any such instance um and um i suspect he hasn't um but
00:35:47.540 that's not really the issue here for right i just want that would be quite something if he actually had
00:35:52.180 been i mean the key is the money and the direction oh well his money went there and echo health alliance which
00:35:59.140 he directly funded they sent their people to the wuhan institute of virology and they were all over
00:36:04.820 china on bat coronaviruses so that's the relevant thing in this is that um he actually funded americans
00:36:12.500 to go to the wuhan institute of virology just just nutty i think you're right and that may be i mean
00:36:18.580 elon musk sometimes speaks in riddles and puns he's a clever fella and that may be what when he says
00:36:24.420 his pronouns are fauci prosecute that may be what he was talking about but let's get back to um fauci's
00:36:33.060 prescription i mean the thing about public health is it's different than a doctor seeing one patient
00:36:40.260 where your interest is the patient what's best for the patient the patient has to consent the patient can
00:36:45.300 get a second opinion and it's very much particular you may have five patients and each one of them has a
00:36:51.380 a particularly different solution that's a fit for them public health is different public health is
00:36:57.460 by nature socialistic it's uh community oriented and you can look at that in a positive way but at
00:37:04.580 the end of the day you're compelling the community to do certain things as opposed to convincing them
00:37:09.940 it's like if a doctor says look you really got to cut back on the sweets that's a doctor's advice
00:37:15.380 putting a tax on you know uh sweet drinks is a community health enforcement approach my point is
00:37:23.780 i think dr fauci really liked the power of making orders that millions of people had to obey and that
00:37:31.300 really is the chinese communist party way it is the vast public health laboratory because there's no
00:37:38.740 dissent there's no court that's going to stop it that really was fauci's playground in a way
00:37:43.140 in terms of public health did they follow the fauci model in fighting covid well yes everyone's been
00:37:50.500 locking down um you know and and to your broader comment ezra which is really on point you know if
00:37:56.580 a doctor commits malpractice or just makes a mistake or whatever you know on a on a patient that's one
00:38:03.860 death but what fauci did has resulted in according to the johns hopkins coronavirus resource center
00:38:10.820 six million six hundred and fifty three thousand deaths as of today and the number is actually
00:38:17.060 larger because china has been underreporting deaths so you know this is a decision that has had
00:38:23.460 far-reaching global consequences and of course it's not just the deaths it's others um that other
00:38:29.940 medical problems people couldn't go to hospitals um and also all the social disorders that have resulted
00:38:36.740 from the lockdowns which fauci has has ordered so um the the disadvantage disadvantageous effects
00:38:43.860 across the world have have just been incalculable yeah i was thinking more of the public health response
00:38:50.100 to the virus rather than its creation and i and i think you know it's funny how in the early days you
00:38:56.100 were not allowed to speculate that the that the virus was man-made and they they came up with alternative
00:39:01.940 explanations and that was one of the issues that many tech companies would de-platform you if you
00:39:07.860 even mused about its origin it's funny how that worked now let me ask you about zero covid and which
00:39:13.620 is the idea that you don't allow a single case you lock down so hard you stop that thing at first i
00:39:20.740 thought that was just a western overreaction but actually china really embraced that deeply zero
00:39:27.860 killed covid they locked down millions of people actually longer than we ever did tell me a little
00:39:32.660 bit about how zero covid um went to the limit in china and how i think maybe it finally broke the
00:39:39.380 patience of the chinese people who started fighting back in the streets which is something i thought i'd
00:39:43.940 never live to see tell me a little bit about zero covid and how if at all the people rose up to meet it
00:39:50.260 zero covid is um was developed by xi jinping the chinese ruler and he did it for a number of reasons
00:39:58.580 and one of them was he wanted to weaponize the disease in a propaganda sense so from the very very
00:40:05.300 first months of this um the communist party made the case that chinese communism was superior to
00:40:10.500 democracy and american democracy in particular because the chinese communist party had been better able to
00:40:16.660 control the disease and had been better able to control the disease the argument went because of
00:40:22.580 this xi jinping's zero covid policy which as you said is meant to design is designed to prevent any
00:40:28.420 transmission of the disease at all so you would have for instance entire districts of cities locked down
00:40:35.220 if there was one positive case in one building or you had you know you had uh excessive contact tracing
00:40:43.460 you had uh multiple testing of people every day um this really was something that the chinese people 0.99
00:40:50.260 just could not stand and we saw this starting at the end of october at those extraordinary worker
00:40:57.060 protests in jungzhou at the foxconn factory the apple iphone place which makes more which makes more than
00:41:04.180 one half the world's iphones and then um following the november 24th fire in urumchi protests broke out
00:41:11.940 across china and this was north south east west there was no coordination no leadership no organization
00:41:19.860 just people had enough of it now zero covid was the uh the motivating factor because there were all
00:41:26.020 sorts of videos that showed that the fire trucks couldn't get to the burning building because of
00:41:30.420 covid barricades on the streets and also people were locked into their apartments from the outside to
00:41:35.540 prevent them from leaving quarantine and that just sparked outrage but soon that outrage was more
00:41:41.460 than just covet it was down with xi jinping people were chanting people were chanting down with the
00:41:47.060 communist party and so the party for the protests they had to relent but also because the zero covid
00:41:53.540 rules were just so expensive to administer local governments were running out of money and it was
00:41:58.660 destroying the chinese economy so for a lot of reasons beijing last wednesday national health commission
00:42:05.140 issued its 10-point plan which was essentially the repeal of zero covid wow so i i hate
00:42:11.380 to give the government any credit over there because they're they're authoritarian and they're abusive
00:42:15.700 and and and and i think they're they're immoral to their towards their own people but it looks like
00:42:22.020 the democratic democratic the the people's uprising which was unarmed i mean uh worked
00:42:31.540 they made the tyrant blink that that's incredible to me um
00:42:36.420 um what what do you take from that i mean if they managed to get xi jinping to blink on something that
00:42:43.780 was sort of a signature policy of his what what does that uh portend for the future well a couple
00:42:50.500 things first of all xi jinping is not as strong as he appears um you know xi jinping is sort of a
00:42:56.420 malice and and malice believe that humans can do anything they want they can conquer nature and in this case
00:43:03.220 can conquer a pathogen which um is not true in either case but that's that's the way xi jinping
00:43:09.700 views the world um but we've seen the chinese people have had enough um and now the real problem 1.00
00:43:16.100 for china and and this is apart from xi jinping you know once you remove the zero covet rules right away
00:43:23.300 the disease is ripping through the chinese population across the country but especially in beijing and the
00:43:29.940 government which has spent two more than two years uh on isolation um has now hasn't built icu beds
00:43:38.260 they haven't done all the work that is necessary to deal with an outbreak and now they've got an
00:43:43.140 outbreak um pharmacies have run out of ibuprofen um they don't have drugs the hospitals are overcrowded
00:43:50.580 and this just shows you the failure of zero covet um and it shows you communism doesn't work you know
00:43:57.060 ezra we may not have gotten it right here or any place else but at least in democratic societies you
00:44:03.460 have changed faster because people can actually protest people can say things people can write
00:44:09.140 things um twitter notwithstanding yeah but the point here is that uh in a totalitarian society which xi
00:44:16.420 jinping is putting together in china because he's moving back to full totalitarianism the government held 0.98
00:44:22.660 on for the very last moment it capitulated and now the country is a complete mess um and we should be
00:44:29.540 praying for the chinese people because they're suffering from the policies of the communist party
00:44:34.980 wow well i hope this is the beginning of a further liberation of them it sounds like they managed to
00:44:40.340 get the zero covet off of them i hope this is the first of many uh i don't want to call it a democratic
00:44:46.500 success because it wasn't really through the mechanisms of democracy but it's incredible that an unarmed 1.00
00:44:51.780 uh disorganized censored uh uprising managed to achieve change i i'm very excited by gordon it's
00:44:59.780 great to catch up with you i follow you on twitter at gordon g chang i love it i love your banter
00:45:05.060 there and i learned so much we're always grateful when you stop by thanks for being here today
00:45:09.460 oh well thank you so much ezra because we're going to see some really consequential change in china 0.55
00:45:14.260 as the chinese people feel emboldened and i think the word that i would use for these protests
00:45:19.460 is popular popular popular protests right that's the word for sure all right well we'll keep our
00:45:25.060 hopefully 2023 will be the year where popular protests can peacefully move china towards more
00:45:31.140 freedom that would be the most important uh event of the year if that massive country with so much promise
00:45:39.460 and move towards liberty it's had a form of economic liberty but to have personal liberty follow it
00:45:45.860 would be the greatest uh event of our of our generation i think so let's hope for the best
00:45:51.380 amen to that thank you so much ezra thanks gordon there you have it stay with us more ahead
00:45:59.860 hey welcome back your letters to me annalisa vida says well i live on vancouver island and media is
00:46:14.740 isolated here lots of protesters regarding fairy creek get arrested and assaulted by police here even
00:46:21.060 after an injunction was lifted and the protest was legal and they are vilified and called violent when
00:46:26.740 they are not well i'm i'm not familiar with that story but uh you know what it's funny the police
00:46:34.260 can have an extremely light touch and sometimes it can be absolutely brutal sometimes it depends on
00:46:42.340 the facts on the ground but i think so often it depends on the political ideology of the criminals
00:46:49.060 and the government i i have to say i never saw riot horses deployed against greenpeace protesters but i saw
00:46:55.860 them deployed against the peaceful protesters the trucker convoy and if you remember even adamson's
00:47:01.860 barbecue adam skelly's barbecue in toronto just for selling barbecue brisket miss it tom says
00:47:10.660 of course they were treated differently talking about the protesters the anti-pipeline protest was
00:47:16.420 something to fit with trudeau's no energy policies so only government approved protests will be allowed
00:47:22.580 yeah you know what there are uh fake protests in dictatorships around the world if you read 1984
00:47:32.420 by george orwell they had political protests against this enemy emmanuel goldstein this enemy who was to
00:47:41.060 blame for everything they had something called two minutes of hate where you would all scream at the
00:47:46.580 external enemy and then go back to your drudgery and if there was anything wrong it was that goldstein
00:47:52.260 i think that there are some approved protesters in canada where people blow off some steam and
00:47:58.020 pretend that they have some opposition in this country but it's nothing that truly challenges
00:48:02.500 trudeau we saw during the trucker commission of inquiry that what really scared trudeau is that
00:48:06.820 he was losing face including overseas that's our show for today until tomorrow on behalf of all
00:48:12.980 of us here at rebel world headquarters to you at home good night and keep fighting for freedom
00:48:25.460 will try to action sulan-wide and of systems at home good night and do with that
00:48:33.700 to you
00:48:35.140 to help us to ourselves