Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - June 12, 2019


Ep 124 | YouTube Crackdown


Episode Stats

Length

33 minutes

Words per Minute

188.40755

Word Count

6,241

Sentence Count

380

Misogynist Sentences

2

Hate Speech Sentences

4


Summary

YouTube has been cracking down on conservative viewpoints. Should we be worried about this? Is this censorship overblown or is there something bigger going on than we realize? In this episode of Relatable, I give my thoughts on this and why we should be concerned.


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Hey guys, welcome to Relatable. Happy Wednesday. I hope everyone is having a wonderful week. For
00:00:06.620 those of you who are at YWLS this weekend, it was so wonderful to meet you. I love seeing you
00:00:13.780 guys in person and just hearing your stories and hearing how inspired you were by all of the
00:00:18.720 speakers. And those of you who do listen to my podcast, just hearing you say, you know,
00:00:24.080 what you get from this every week and what you appreciate about it. It just, I mean,
00:00:28.560 I've always loved my job. I've always loved doing this podcast. It's always meant a lot to me to hear
00:00:33.280 from you guys. But when I get to see you in person and hear these things in person, it just takes
00:00:38.680 everything to a whole other level of reminding me of why I do this. And everyone should have a why
00:00:44.820 behind what they do. Of course, the chief why is to, to glorify God and to obey him. But another huge
00:00:52.080 why behind what I do is you guys. And so just thank you for always being encouraging and for giving
00:00:57.520 feedback and for being such an engaging audience who is so smart, who always gives me really good
00:01:03.520 thoughts, really good ideas, really good critiques. And I just, I just love you guys. I think relatable
00:01:08.340 listeners are the best listeners in the entire world. Some listeners, I'm sure like super boring,
00:01:14.020 don't know that much. They just listen to a person and they don't even really think about the things
00:01:18.580 that they're listening. But that's not you guys. You guys are really thoughtful. And I don't know,
00:01:23.280 you're just, you're just my friends. And I just, I love the people that listen to this podcast. So
00:01:27.540 thank you for that. Okay. Today, what we're going to talk about is YouTube and this crackdown that's
00:01:33.280 been happening on more conservative viewpoints. Should we care about this? Should we be worried
00:01:39.360 about this? You probably know that censorship is something that we have been hearing about
00:01:44.540 nonstop, mostly from the conservative side. So we should ask ourselves, I mean, obviously you guys know
00:01:51.900 that I'm a conservative and you guys know that if this is the case, I probably would be a so-called
00:01:57.480 victim of this kind of censorship, but I want to be objective and stand back and say, okay,
00:02:02.380 is this being overblown? Is there really that much of a bias? And if there is a bias, does any of it
00:02:11.020 really matter? Well, I'm just going to go ahead and tell you my thoughts on it up front. I'm not going
00:02:17.120 to try to hide it from you. I would like to argue that yes, this matters very much. And I don't
00:02:21.520 actually think that it's overblown. Sometimes it is, but what we have seen devolve over the past
00:02:26.740 couple of weeks with YouTube and some conservative voices, I think should, uh, it should, it should
00:02:33.920 worry us and it should make us say, okay, this is not something that's being exaggerated. This is not
00:02:39.580 something that's overblown. This is something that we actually need to look out for really, no matter
00:02:44.360 what side of the aisle that you're on. Um, okay. So the thing that kind of spurred all of this,
00:02:49.860 that started yet another controversy between social media and conservative voices, it has to
00:02:56.600 do with Steven Crowder. Steven Crowder has an extremely, extremely popular podcast that is also
00:03:03.440 distributed by the blaze like minus or blaze TV. Um, and he has a huge following on YouTube. I think he
00:03:11.020 has almost 4 million subscribers. His videos get hundreds of thousands of views. Every time he has
00:03:16.740 a podcast episode go out, uh, some of them get millions of views. He's just a really popular voice
00:03:23.220 in the conservative world. He's very unique because he's also a comedian. And so he's always kind of
00:03:28.580 pushing the limits on the things that you're like, Oh, can you, can you say that is, is that really
00:03:33.280 okay to say? And he just kind of goes there, which is, you know, different than what we do on this
00:03:38.420 podcast. It's certainly, he certainly says things. And I would say this to him certainly says things
00:03:42.860 that I would not say that I would not approve of saying that I probably don't think are that great
00:03:47.680 to say. He says them. And that is who his audience is. That's what his show is. That's how he's always
00:03:52.320 been. He has been in this conservative world for a long time. And there are hundreds of thousands,
00:03:57.700 millions of people who respect his voice and who value the platform that he has diligently
00:04:04.660 built, uh, built for a long time. However, someone who takes issue, someone who takes issue with his
00:04:10.620 platform is a guy by the name of Carlos Maza. I think that's how you pronounce his name. He and
00:04:19.080 Steven Crowder haven't always gotten along. So Carlos Maza works for Vox. Vox is a left leaning out, uh,
00:04:24.780 outlet in, uh, Carlos makes videos for Vox on, you know, a variety of liberal topics. Well, Steven
00:04:33.340 Crowder has used his show or a segment of his show several times to refute the content of these
00:04:39.940 videos. Carlos Maza does not like this, or maybe it's Maza. I really don't know how to, I don't
00:04:46.080 know. I'll just go with Maza. Um, he doesn't like this, but that's, I, that's not totally fair to say
00:04:50.920 that he doesn't just like, or he doesn't just not like that Steven Crowder actually refutes the content
00:04:56.120 of his videos. He doesn't like how, uh, Steven Crowder actually refers to him. So he did this long
00:05:02.600 text thread or text, what tweet thread, um, that ended up going, I guess you would say semi-viral.
00:05:09.320 Now I'll just be totally honest with you. I wasn't able to read the tweet thread right away.
00:05:15.540 And so I've been kind of like out of the loop on this whole thing. And the reason why I wasn't able
00:05:20.840 to read the tweet thread that everyone on the conservative side, it seemed like was talking about
00:05:25.540 was because he apparently, he blocked me. I don't even know who this person is. Like,
00:05:29.460 I don't think that I've ever communicated with this person. I don't know. I don't remember ever
00:05:36.040 knowing his name, talking to him, interacting with him, but I was blocked. And so this tweet
00:05:40.660 thread that was going around, everyone was retweeting and commenting on. I was like,
00:05:44.540 well, I have, I have no idea what this is because this person, he goes by the,
00:05:48.260 the Twitter handle of gay wonk. He, uh, blocked me a long time ago for reasons completely unknown to
00:05:55.400 me. So I just kind of ignored it for a while. So, well, let me say what the tweet thread was.
00:05:59.740 So the tweet thread was him saying, Hey, Steven Crowder makes these videos about me. And you know,
00:06:06.560 I have thick skin, but look, he keeps on commenting on my sexuality. He, he, he keeps on commenting on
00:06:12.100 the fact that I'm gay and, uh, the fact that I am Latino and I don't like it. It's harassment.
00:06:18.320 His followers have harassed me. His followers have targeted me and even tried to, uh, even tried to
00:06:25.900 dox me. And so he posted this like video compilation, this like cut up video compilation of Crowder
00:06:31.440 referring to Maza in a variety of ways that do highlight Maza's homosexuality. Um, mostly just
00:06:38.640 like referring to him as gay, but he also called him a gay Mexican. Oh, let me just say, if you have
00:06:44.800 kids in your car, I always try to say this, there are some things that maybe you might not want them
00:06:49.360 to hear. So just FYI, um, called him a gay Sprite, called him a lispy queer. And again, these are not
00:06:56.700 phrases that we would use on this podcast or that I would use in my life, but stick with me as we talk
00:07:02.620 about the actual point of the story, which goes beyond what Crowder actually said. So he's calling
00:07:07.160 these names. Maza puts a compilation, uh, of the, of this name calling that Crowder did, uh, on
00:07:14.800 Twitter. The thread was really long, but in summary, he said, okay, this is harassment. Uh, and I have
00:07:22.060 been harassed by his followers. So why is YouTube allowing this person to have a platform? Doesn't
00:07:26.840 this go against, uh, their rules? Doesn't this violate their terms? Why are they allowing this
00:07:33.280 person to have such a growing channel on their platform? Who is homophobic? He would say, uh,
00:07:39.420 now Crowder responded to this by saying, okay, hang on just a second. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Okay. So I,
00:07:45.560 this is him talking basically. I'm totally paraphrasing and summarizing basically saying, okay,
00:07:50.340 so I, I use some off color jokes that offended you. Yes. I called you those names, but he's saying,
00:07:57.220 I never told my followers to harass you. I never encouraged doxing. Um, he said, I refuted the
00:08:02.420 content of your videos and sure. I might've said some things that offended you, but I never harassed
00:08:08.440 you. I never encouraged anyone else to harass you either. Um, so after all of this kind of back and
00:08:14.680 forth, and of course you had conservatives all over Twitter, uh, defending Steven Crowder because
00:08:18.980 they know that Steven Crowder is a comedian. Comedians often push the limits. They often pick
00:08:24.740 on people. They rib people. They even say things that are offensive to groups of people. And Steven
00:08:29.900 Crowder has been politically incorrect for a really long time. So you had a lot of conservatives
00:08:35.900 defending him. Um, YouTube responded to Maz's thread on Twitter saying this, uh, our team spent the last
00:08:43.100 few days conducting an in-depth review of the videos flagged to us. So he had flagged the particular
00:08:48.060 videos, uh, that Steven Crowder, that Steven Crowder, uh, or what he would call harassed him in. Um,
00:08:55.200 and they said, and while we found language that was clearly hurtful, the videos as posted don't
00:09:01.100 violate our policies. We've included more info below to explain this decision as an open platform.
00:09:06.700 It's crucial for us to allow everyone from creators to journalists, to late night TV hosts
00:09:11.500 to express their opinions within the scope of our policies. Opinions can be deeply offensive,
00:09:16.420 but if they don't violate our policies, they'll remain on our site. Okay. So I was surprised by this,
00:09:21.820 honestly. And I think a lot of people were surprised by this on the left and the right.
00:09:26.780 Uh, to me, this is the correct stance to take. Uh, yes, he said some offensive things and they're
00:09:34.060 saying, okay, we understand that they were hurtful, but look, if, if we being YouTube, if we took down
00:09:39.620 every single opinion or every single comment that someone was offended by, we wouldn't have anyone on
00:09:44.420 our platform. There are people on the left and the right who say offensive things about groups.
00:09:48.960 And if they're not allowed to do that, are they even allowed to say anything of substance? Now,
00:09:53.900 of course you had people saying, well, why is homophobia an opinion? Why is that something
00:09:58.880 that should be protected? But you've got other people that say, okay, it was just gentle ribbing.
00:10:03.700 It was just making fun. You can't possibly say that that violates your terms. You can't possibly say
00:10:10.140 that that goes against our policies, but okay. I think I was pretty happy with this decision.
00:10:16.240 That's kind of a hands-off. We don't agree with what he said, but we're going to allow people
00:10:20.980 of different opinions to be on this platform because that's who we are. We are encouraging
00:10:24.880 an open dialogue as long as they're not targeting people, um, by calling for harassment or doxing
00:10:30.820 or violence or anything like that. I thought that it was a pretty good step for YouTube, but here's
00:10:35.880 the thing. The story does not end there. The story does not end there. So this completely sane,
00:10:41.980 I thought in common sense stance, uh, by YouTube solicited an absolute, absolutely outrageous
00:10:50.160 outrage mob. I mean, people were upset by this. They could not believe that this is the stance
00:10:56.320 that you, that YouTube, uh, that YouTube made, especially in light of pride month and all of
00:11:03.000 this. People were saying this is a direct attack on the LGBTQ community that YouTube clearly doesn't
00:11:08.680 stand with this community. They said, you're not going to police offensive language. You're not
00:11:14.180 going to police what they call hate speech. You're not going to censor inappropriate jokes. They said.
00:11:20.240 So as we would expect, as we would expect, and as we primarily expected, as we expected in the first
00:11:27.680 place, YouTube to do, they bowed down to the outrage, to the leftist outrage, by the way, they did
00:11:32.140 not bow down to conservative outrage. They bowed down to leftist outrage. They changed their minds.
00:11:37.000 They said, okay, you're right. You guys, you are right. We are sorry. We are going to completely,
00:11:42.980 we're going to completely demonetize Crowder's channel. Now, if you don't know what that means,
00:11:47.440 that means that we're not going to allow ads to play on any of his, uh, videos, which means he
00:11:52.240 will no longer get paid the money that he used to get paid from YouTube. Now, like I said, Crowder
00:11:57.420 has almost 4 million subscribers on YouTube. Uh, his videos get hundreds of thousands and usually,
00:12:02.360 uh, you know, over a million views. So that, that means he probably gets paid pretty well
00:12:07.200 from YouTube. I don't know for sure, but I would guess that the monetization of his videos,
00:12:12.280 um, helps him out a lot. Uh, that's no longer going to happen because YouTube decided to kowtow
00:12:19.100 to people like Mazza and all of the people that, uh, got really upset about their original decision.
00:12:24.600 But Mazza actually still isn't happy about this. I saw a tweet that was screenshot because,
00:12:29.180 you know, I can't see it because I'm blocked. Uh, he still isn't happy about this. He says that
00:12:33.040 demonetization doesn't actually work, that it doesn't go far enough. So he really wants,
00:12:38.160 he really wants Crowder and other people like him to be completely taken off the platform. Now,
00:12:43.320 it makes sense once you realize that Mazza used to work for media matters, which is literally in
00:12:49.060 the business of deplatforming and demonizing conservative voices. This is just who he is.
00:12:54.920 This is a guy who has also called, um, for violence and harassment in person against
00:13:00.900 conservatives. Other tweets that I have seen that you can look up if you are not blocked,
00:13:04.980 he has called for milkshaking conservatives, which is like this thing that apparently people do is
00:13:10.460 like throwing milkshakes on like conservatives in the public sphere, uh, that you see out in everyday
00:13:16.900 life. Really solid stuff, really, really mature, solid stuff that probably makes, you know,
00:13:22.900 a lot of people in the middle say, you know what, I'm going to become a liberal now.
00:13:26.000 Now that I see that these, that these guys are throwing milkshakes on conservatives, you know,
00:13:31.460 they must have some pretty good ideas, some pretty good ideas that are probably, probably worth joining.
00:13:37.880 So that's, that's who this guy is. He also said that he wants conservatives to be terrified
00:13:43.220 to gather in public. So that's good. Good guy here. So he is out here saying all of that,
00:13:49.320 that literally in public, literally calling for harassment against conservatives in the public
00:13:54.680 sphere, throwing milkshakes on them. I, I promise you, if I am with my daughter and you throw a
00:13:59.360 milkshake on me, that's not going to end well for you. One jokes on you. I love milkshakes too.
00:14:05.620 I promise you, I promise you, I promise you if you do anything to me when I am with my daughter,
00:14:11.960 I'm just saying, it's just not, it's not going to turn out well for you. It's not going to turn out
00:14:16.000 well for you. So that's who this guy is. He's a complete and total hypocrite. The bottom line is
00:14:20.400 that he just doesn't want conservative voices to have a platform. And this is a full-on assault.
00:14:25.320 I'm not saying that he shouldn't be offended by what Steven Crowder said. Look, if I were him,
00:14:29.600 if someone had a channel, a very popular channel, and they were talking badly about me on multiple
00:14:34.780 episodes, and they were calling me names that I didn't like, and their followers were coming to my
00:14:39.600 channel and harassing me and threatening to dox me, I would be really upset about that. I would.
00:14:44.600 So I do not blame this guy, even though I don't like him, even though I don't like his tactics,
00:14:49.120 even though I don't like his views, I don't blame this guy for being upset. I don't. I don't blame
00:14:54.080 this guy for not liking Crowder. I don't blame this guy for being, you know, maybe somewhat upset at
00:15:01.400 YouTube. Maybe I don't blame him for that. But if I were in his situation, would I be calling for the
00:15:08.020 systematic censorship of everyone who doesn't agree with me? Would I be calling for the complete
00:15:12.580 deplatforming and removal of someone who said, I don't know, something like, girls shouldn't have
00:15:18.220 podcasts? No, of course not. I would disagree with him. I wouldn't like it. I definitely would
00:15:24.280 report all of the users that tried to harass me or all of the users that tried to dox me. But if that
00:15:30.420 person weren't calling for direct harassment or calling for direct violence or calling for direct
00:15:36.400 for or calling directly for doxing, well, then that's not really that's that person's fault because
00:15:42.240 I'm in the public sphere. They can comment on my content if they want to. And that's just, you know,
00:15:47.440 that's part of the game. And again, I understand why this guy doesn't like Steven Crowder and the
00:15:52.180 things that he said. And I think that he's totally in his he has every right to be offended by this
00:15:58.060 totally justified. But that does not justify trying to shut someone down just because they said
00:16:04.420 something that offends you. So YouTube, I think I think I started to say something and then I went
00:16:12.500 away from it and now I'm coming back. So YouTube changed their mind and they said, yes, OK, I said
00:16:18.420 this. YouTube changed their mind. They're going to demonetize him. Carlos is upset that they're not
00:16:24.340 completely deplatforming them. But they did come out with a statement that said YouTube came out with
00:16:29.840 a statement that said, well, you know, we're actually going to crack down on this stuff. We
00:16:34.720 actually are going to crack down on this stuff. We're going to make sure extremist content doesn't
00:16:40.740 get seen as much. We're going to make sure that even the kinds of videos that could lead to so-called
00:16:46.560 extremist content don't show up as easily. So we're just going to make sure that that doesn't happen.
00:16:51.500 So, OK, here we go. Here we go. This is what happens when you try to give YouTube the power
00:16:56.840 and the authority to take down all content that offends you. When you say YouTube, you don't
00:17:02.800 believe in the LGBT community or you don't support us or you don't like us, you hate us unless you
00:17:09.740 completely deplatform the people that we don't like. When you give YouTube that kind of power,
00:17:13.820 you are implicitly or explicitly, depending on how you look at it, giving them the power to censor
00:17:19.680 all ideas, all ideas that could possibly be offensive. And we saw that with this statement that they made
00:17:25.500 after all of this saying we're going to crack down on it. We're going to make sure that videos that
00:17:29.600 even could possibly lead to so-called extremist views, that we're going to make sure that they
00:17:34.840 don't come up as suggested videos or anything like that. So here we go. Here's the problem with this.
00:17:43.060 We cannot trust Google and YouTube to decide what is extremist, what is actually harmful and what is
00:17:50.380 not. I mean, am I extremist? I've done multiple videos probably about biblical topics that people
00:17:56.180 are offended by. I've done podcast episodes about God's design for biblical marriage. Am I radical?
00:18:01.640 Am I offensive because of that? Am I hateful? Am I engaging in hate speech because I talk about the
00:18:05.920 Bible and I talk about things that non-Christians probably don't like? Am I radical? Am I one of those
00:18:11.400 people that they're going to have to demonetize, that they're going to have to deplatform to make sure
00:18:15.920 that they have a safe community? I mean, who's to say? Is Google to say whether or not a biblical
00:18:22.440 point of view is extremist? I guarantee you this does not stop with someone like Stephen Crowder
00:18:27.560 making off-color jokes that can be offensive to a group of people. This doesn't stop with that.
00:18:32.380 This stops with or this keeps going to people like me, to people who talk about Christianity, to people
00:18:38.560 who talk about, you know, liking Donald Trump or being a conservative, that talk about being pro-life,
00:18:46.080 that even just engage in these conversations. Maybe they don't even hold the views themselves, but
00:18:50.560 maybe they're just open-minded. We've already seen that big tech doesn't really like open-mindedness
00:18:57.160 in the censorship that we've seen of people like, or not even censorship, but just kind of demonization
00:19:02.060 and dislike of people like Joe Rogan and Dave Rubin, who themselves aren't particularly conservative,
00:19:08.860 but engage with people who are. They just don't like that. Which leads to an interesting article that
00:19:15.720 I read in the New York Times, and it was called The Making of a YouTube Radical. The Making of a
00:19:23.980 YouTube Radical. So this writer for New York Times thought that he just busted this like extremely,
00:19:30.580 extremely, extremely interesting case of this radicalized guy who was 26 years old. His name
00:19:36.340 is Caleb Kane. He recently, apparently, he says that he swore off the alt-right. So this article
00:19:43.780 looks at Caleb's journey. It's like this very intensive, interactive timeline of Caleb's journey
00:19:48.640 that YouTube took him on. Apparently he was on the left, or he didn't really know what he believed
00:19:54.480 politically, but then he started listening to conservative commentators, and then he got further and
00:19:59.440 further to the right to where he started listening to more alt-right commentators. And I agree. Some
00:20:04.420 of the commentators that he was listening to, they were alt-right. So he started going down these rabbit
00:20:11.720 holes, and he basically became this alt-right guy who bought into this. But then he started listening to
00:20:20.540 this leftist YouTube channel, and then he was saved, and he realized that, oh my gosh, all the stuff I was
00:20:26.900 listening to was bad. And so this article was basically saying that YouTube is set up in such
00:20:32.760 a way as to radicalize people. Because when you listen to, or you watch one video, it suggests other
00:20:38.660 videos that are similar. So you do go down these rabbit holes, and you can just get more and more
00:20:43.280 radicalized. Well, the reason why this was contentious is because the people that they included
00:20:49.460 in this kind of collage that they put up at the top of these alt-right views that the New York Times
00:20:56.820 seems, or says, radicalized people were people like Milton Friedman. Milton Friedman. So the
00:21:02.200 economist, okay? Ben Shapiro, Dave Rubin. I think there were some other more mainstream people. So
00:21:09.660 this is the problem. And this is something that we have seen multiple times. Obviously, the entire
00:21:15.040 article was biased, basically saying that conservatism, any kind of mainstream conservatism
00:21:20.480 or open-mindedness to conservatism, like what Dave Rubin exemplifies on his show, that's going
00:21:28.380 to radicalize people. And it's subtle, but it's a way of making people worried or making people scared
00:21:34.660 of listening to mainstream conservatives, because they don't want to be seen as radicals. If you are
00:21:39.140 someone who is in the middle, or you're just trying to decide what you believe, the more you see
00:21:43.940 someone like Ben Shapiro associated with the name alt-right or associated with far-right people,
00:21:49.920 the more you are going to classify him in your mind, unless you know better, as some kind of
00:21:55.260 extremist, some kind of bigot, some kind of person that you don't want to associate yourself with.
00:22:00.720 This has happened multiple times. I think it happened with Washington Post recently. It's happened
00:22:05.360 multiple times with multiple outlets, this subtle association of very mainstream, thoughtful
00:22:12.200 conservatives with more far-right or alt-right figures that are not particularly thoughtful,
00:22:18.580 that are extremists, that do espouse views, that really don't have any similarities to conservatism
00:22:24.000 whatsoever, and just maybe like Donald Trump and aren't leftists themselves. But the media really
00:22:30.020 likes to clump all of these people together and say, if you buy into any of these ideologies or
00:22:36.160 philosophies or ideas, if you buy into any of these conversations, well, then you're going to be
00:22:41.560 radicalized too, and you don't want that because that's bad. That's immoral. And New York Times,
00:22:47.000 of course, they came out and they said, oh, I'm sorry. Like, we didn't mean to include some of
00:22:50.720 these people in the collage. We'll take, we'll take, like, I think they said, like Ben Shapiro out.
00:22:55.080 This happened a couple of weeks ago, and the same thing happened to Ben Shapiro when they
00:22:58.640 included him. I think it was with Milo Yiannopoulos or someone and called him alt-right. They had to
00:23:04.900 change the description of him there. So they do that a couple of days later and they apologize.
00:23:10.680 But this has happened too many times for me to think that it's accidental. It's totally deliberate.
00:23:16.540 They want people to be scared to listen to Ben Shapiro. They want people to be scared to listen
00:23:22.180 to Dave Rubin, even to be scared to listen to someone like Joe Rogan, who is not a conservative,
00:23:27.840 by the way. But he does have people of a variety of viewpoints on his show. And to the left,
00:23:33.360 that's not something that they want. They don't think that you should entertain any idea or any
00:23:38.660 thought or any kind of reasoning that disagrees with them. They think the same thing about someone
00:23:43.620 like Jordan Peterson, who himself, I would not call a conservative. Now, he's against political
00:23:48.880 correctness. He is against forced speech, of course. Those didn't used to be conservative values
00:23:54.540 exclusively. He is, but he's extremely thoughtful. There is nothing radical about what Jordan Peterson
00:24:01.940 teaches or talks about. And yet the media wants you to think that if you start entertaining any ideas
00:24:07.760 that are not far left, well, then you might become an extremist too. You might become a bigot too. You
00:24:13.480 might go down this dark and deep rabbit hole into the scary abyss of actually believing things that
00:24:19.400 MSNBC doesn't tell you. And that is why I think all of this is a problem. I do not. There are a lot of
00:24:26.800 voices, a lot of voices who consider themselves on the rights that I don't agree with, that I don't
00:24:32.780 like, that I actually think their ideas are really toxic to the public dialogue, that I wish that they
00:24:39.320 didn't try to espouse conservatism because what they're saying is harmful or it's not true or whatever
00:24:45.740 it is. And I think that the people that follow them and follow their ideas typically do end up in this
00:24:51.740 really weird and corrupt place. But what I don't want is for us to have these, uh, basically these online
00:25:00.120 police states where you have this leftist social justice group of elites saying what can be, uh, what can
00:25:07.840 be accepted as good speech and what can't based on completely biased views. That's what I don't want
00:25:14.380 because I am perceptive enough. And I think all of you are too perceptive enough to realize, uh, that it's not
00:25:21.560 going to stop with the absolutely crazy views. I would rather it be up to individuals. I'd rather
00:25:27.680 it be up to listeners and to viewers to know what is true. And I understand, I understand that there
00:25:33.760 are a lot of people out there that are susceptible to fake news. And I do think that there has to be
00:25:38.660 some sort of standard for truth, some sort of standard. Like it does get really scary when you think
00:25:47.380 about all the technology that's out there that you can literally make someone look like they're saying
00:25:52.460 something in a video that they're not, or you can manipulate something, um, manipulate some sort of
00:25:58.900 footage into, to, uh, implicate someone for something that they didn't do. And all of that is very scary. I'm
00:26:05.820 not saying that these social media platforms don't have any responsibility whatsoever, especially when it
00:26:11.460 comes to directly hurting someone's reputation. But the more you get into that, the more you start
00:26:18.260 censoring that and policing that, uh, the more biased you become. There was that whole thing with
00:26:24.160 Nancy Pelosi and this compilation, uh, going out of her, this guy who just lives and works in the Bronx.
00:26:32.000 I think that's where he lives. Uh, he made this like mashed up video of Nancy Pelosi at a press conference
00:26:37.540 and slowed it down a little bit, apparently. So it sounded like she was drunk. It was circulating
00:26:42.040 on social media. I'm sure a lot of people believe that it was true. The president and his
00:26:47.060 administration, I think that's the same video they ended up sharing. It could have been a different
00:26:51.280 video, but there were people in, in Trump's administration who ended up sharing it. And Nancy
00:26:56.040 Pelosi was very upset. Hillary Clinton was very upset. You had a lot of people on the left,
00:27:01.100 very upset by this. And what did the daily beast do? The daily beast went and found this guy,
00:27:06.360 found exactly where he works, found what his name is, uh, found his criminal history and they
00:27:11.820 exposed it. Why? Because they don't believe that he should be free to do something like that. And
00:27:17.200 of course they called on Facebook to help them find this guy's identity. Facebook did. And they
00:27:22.000 said, well, Facebook, why didn't you take this video down? Mark Zuckerberg apparently called Nancy
00:27:26.860 Pelosi to apologize, all this crazy stuff. And so when you start getting into things like that,
00:27:33.020 when you can't even tell jokes anymore. If you remember that AOC video that I did, the
00:27:38.440 mashed up interview that I did back in July. So almost a year ago, you had the Washington Post,
00:27:44.600 you had Buzzfeed, you had all of these outlets reaching out to me saying, why did you purposely
00:27:49.100 deceive people? And why hasn't Facebook taken this down? Why hasn't Twitter taken this down? They fully
00:27:54.480 believe that, uh, these social media platforms should step in when there is a video that they don't
00:28:00.340 like if it employs humor that they don't think is funny. I do think it's extremely dangerous when
00:28:05.320 social media platforms come in and they try to censor that. And so I don't know exactly where
00:28:11.540 the line is on these social media companies coming in and saying, okay, we don't allow blatantly false
00:28:18.180 material to be circulated on our platforms. Maybe that's not their job at all. Maybe it's not their job
00:28:23.160 at all. Maybe it's totally on us. Maybe it's completely on the individual, on the viewer to
00:28:29.260 know what's true and what's not. Maybe it's not on them at all. Because I do think that when they come
00:28:34.720 in and say, sorry, you can't do that. You can't do that interview with AOC because it makes her
00:28:39.940 look bad or whatever it is. I think that's extremely dangerous because you're not going to see them
00:28:45.980 doing the same thing to Stephen Colbert when he does it with the president. You're not going to see
00:28:49.800 them take down the videos of Jay Leno doing that. And we've already seen how their new round of
00:28:55.140 censorship when they said, oh, we're, we're going to make sure that we're cracking down on these
00:28:59.740 extremist extremist views. We've already seen how that has backfired because apparently even like
00:29:06.220 Holocaust educational videos are being taken off YouTube. Holocaust educational videos that like
00:29:12.440 teachers are using and professors are using in their classrooms to make sure that their kids know
00:29:17.160 what the Holocaust is. They're literally erasing history, which there are very few things that are
00:29:22.200 more Orwellian than that if you have read 1984, but that's exactly what's going on. And so again,
00:29:28.580 when we give the power to the social media companies to tell us what is true, what is not,
00:29:36.220 what is hate speech, what is not, it just becomes extremely dangerous. The information that we have
00:29:43.720 access to becomes extremely narrow, uh, especially ideologically. Again, I think that if you're
00:29:50.620 inciting violence or you're looking to dock someone or you are inciting some kind of harassment or you
00:29:57.400 are spreading possibly an outright lie, maybe there is a place, um, there is a place certainly in place
00:30:03.880 of, in the instance of violence, but maybe there's a place in those other instances for the social media
00:30:09.020 companies to come in and say something, but look, they're a platform at the very least. If they do
00:30:14.920 enforce rules like that, at the very least, they need to be ideologically neutral and they just aren't.
00:30:20.420 We know for a fact that Google isn't neutral. We saw the leaked video of them after the election,
00:30:25.100 crying their eyes out when Hillary Clinton lost. Like we know that they lean to the left. There is a reason
00:30:29.760 for conservatives to be worried. And in a free country where this is, uh, how we use our voices and this
00:30:35.800 is how we have public dialogue. I do think it's important for them to say, Hey, we're not politically
00:30:40.960 biased. Here are our rules. We're going to enforce them evenly across the board. That's all I ask.
00:30:45.740 They are private companies, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter. They can have the rules that they want
00:30:51.760 to use. And I don't want them to be regulated. I don't want them to be regulated by the government.
00:30:55.400 They can totally enforce the rules that they want to enforce, but as platforms, rather than
00:31:01.600 publishers, platforms who claim to be neutral, who claim to be making fair and even decisions,
00:31:06.200 they should absolutely, um, take their political bias out of it. 100%. I don't anticipate that's
00:31:13.920 going to happen. So this is just a plug and I'm, I never plug this thing, but I never plug really
00:31:21.300 at all, unless I'm talking about bolster sleeper express VPN, but I am going to say, I really do want
00:31:27.780 you guys to subscribe to blaze TV. It's really important because you don't know when I'm going
00:31:33.020 to be kicked off YouTube. Like you don't know when I'm going to be kicked off iTunes. We've already
00:31:36.320 had a problem with Spotify. Um, so subscribe to blaze TV. If you can, I know it's an extra expense
00:31:42.400 every month. You can use promo code alley. You can get $20 off, but that just assures that you're
00:31:48.180 going to be able to listen to the content that you want to listen to because they're not going to be
00:31:52.180 able to censor us on blaze TV. So you can go to blaze tv.com slash alley, and you can subscribe
00:31:57.680 there. And then you know that you're always going to get the content that you want to get,
00:32:01.740 no matter what it's protected that way. Um, probably as far as we know, uh, at least longer
00:32:07.500 than we will be on YouTube or these other platforms that we know have a bias. So yes,
00:32:14.140 all of this stuff matters. Yes. Censorship matters. Doesn't matter if you agree with the voice and what
00:32:18.740 they're saying. It all matters. And it is, it's not just a logical fallacy to say that it's a
00:32:23.940 slippery slope. We've already seen that it's a slippery slope and there is a, an ideological
00:32:27.760 motivation behind it to make sure that conservatives don't have a voice and that the only public dialogue
00:32:33.540 that exists is decidedly leftist. And I think that's something that we should care about.
00:32:37.880 Okay. We will be back here on Friday. I haven't decided what we're going to talk about. There's been
00:32:42.080 a lot that's gone on with the Southern Baptist convention over this past week. There's a lot,
00:32:46.740 there's a lot of contention. And so I might talk about that on Friday. I haven't decided,
00:32:51.160 but if you guys do have suggestions, always feel free. You can message me on Instagram.
00:32:55.240 You can email me, Allie at the conservative millennial blog.com. Of course, if you love
00:32:59.840 this podcast, I would love your five-star review on iTunes. It helps me out a lot. Plus I read them
00:33:04.380 and I love hearing your words. Okay. I will see you guys here on Friday.