00:00:19.040And it seems to me that if you take certain kinds of authority on the platform,
00:00:26.700you accept certain ability to, for example, make people administrators,
00:00:34.980then the world has a right to know who you are, essentially.
00:00:39.440You know, if you're making really important decisions about what is arguably the most influential single information resource of its kind,
00:00:51.460probably more influential than any newspaper or news outlet.
00:00:56.700Well, we know who runs those, and we know who the reporters and the researchers and so forth. Those outlets are. We have no idea who really runs Wikipedia.
00:01:09.160Wikipedia has never really opened up Wikipedia articles to rating.
00:01:29.420There's no good answer that they can offer to that.
00:01:34.680And it really is important in the case of Wikipedia articles, you know, if there's some article that is just not up to snuff in the opinion, especially of experts, right, people who make it their lives, you know, mission to know something about some narrow corner of the world, we should be able to find out easily what they think about the article, right?
00:02:00.400I was looking, for example, recently at an article about a topic in philosophy called Unmoved Mover.
00:04:31.060I know you have a new project called Wikicritic that I really want to hear about, but also I understand you've been blocked, been blocked from any participation with Wikipedia.
00:04:45.300I mean, how have you been ostracized from the worldwide phenomenon you helped create?
00:04:52.020Well, basically, it's been about five or six weeks now, and it all began last year, actually, when I posted nine theses on Wikipedia.
00:05:06.860It was a whole reform proposal. And without getting into the details of that, people didn't really take the initiative in putting the reform proposal into effect.
00:05:23.840So I decided I had to do that. So I became active on Wikipedia and I actually started organizing people in something called WikiProject Intellectual Diversity, which is just like it sounds.
00:05:42.920It's just a collection of people that were going to push for greater openness and intellectual tolerance, essentially.
00:05:54.580And it was going very well until I actually went to apply for official recognition of the Wiki project.
00:06:04.620And then the application was just absolutely flooded with a lot of people who before had not really said anything.
00:06:16.920And I was accused of canvassing, which is collecting people from off wiki to participate in the wiki project.
00:06:29.020But actually, that's something that's required, or at least strongly encouraged by the rules.
00:06:37.740But I think the idea was that because this wiki project was a reform project and actually had a chance of working, they were really threatened by that.
00:06:50.900And what happened is I simply updated my ex-feed, my followers, to say, well, there's a big controversy going on right now.
00:07:34.060And that same day, I just happened to be in New York, a trip that had been planned for a long time to accept an award, along with other people from Tablet Magazine, for founding Wikipedia and for actually making this effort to reform it.
00:07:52.700Right. And two hours later, I was blocked from Wikipedia.
00:07:58.980Well, I mean, that that's almost appropriate, isn't it?
00:08:02.040The arbitrariness with which they can manipulate the rules is very reflective of sort of the arbitrary nature of the facts that you can find on Wikipedia.
00:08:10.580Now, the one that jumps to mind is wasn't Marco Rubio said that Spanish, a cowboy culture was originally Spanish.
00:08:18.000And AOC came out and said, that's ridiculous. How dare you?
00:08:21.100I can't remember exactly how it went. But basically, Wikipedia then changed to reflect the talking point of AOC, even though it had been, you know, in support of Rubio.
00:08:30.360So it's it's not really about facts for them. It's not really about what's true.
00:08:34.120It's about manipulating this to achieve certain political ends. So in a way, they're sort of acting just, you know, in in line with their with their traditional behavior.
00:08:43.840Yes, I think they were very threatened by the fact that I could actually succeed in reforming Wikipedia, and they couldn't have that.
00:08:56.100Because the reform that I would make is, you know, it's perfectly in line with the original vision of Wikipedia, which was have a wide variety of people coming together to develop articles that fairly reflect everybody's views.
00:09:15.340You know, it's not a conservative value, actually. It's actually more of a classical liberal value to let everybody have a say on an equal platform. And yeah, they don't like that.
00:09:30.680no and and in a weird way that is a concern i mean that is like a far right wing value now if
00:09:36.560you listen to you know the people in charge seems to me so yeah it's like it's crazy for me for them
00:09:43.580as liberals to give that up since it seems like such a beautiful thing but we'll take it right
00:09:48.760okay that's the far right position now is everybody should have a say and that we should actually
00:09:52.940pursue the truth even if it makes us uncomfortable we're the only one still saying that and we've
00:09:57.220been saying it the entire time so what were exactly the reforms that you wanted to put in
00:10:01.880place what do you think is necessary to reform wikipedia because i i follow youtube channels i
00:10:05.900mean there are entire youtube channels that just focus on the drama behind the scenes at wikipedia
00:10:09.760people don't realize because it's got sort of such a you know you don't really get an idea that there
00:10:13.940are personalities behind the the articles and everything but man you look into it there are
00:10:19.200entire civil wars going on behind the scenes and people being banned and blocked and moderators and
00:10:24.260I mean, it gets really crazy. People have no idea the behind the scenes stuff.
00:10:28.100So I wonder if it can be reformed with all the nonsense I've seen go on behind the scenes.
00:10:32.240Is reform the right way to approach it? I guess not anymore.
00:10:36.040I guess they've let you know loud and clear that it's not.
00:10:37.980But what were your ideas to reform it? And do you believe it can be reformed?
00:10:44.080Like my ideas for reform include things like allow competing articles.
00:10:50.220So why should Wikipedia have only one article on each topic? Maybe at this point, if they're going to insist on what I call a gasp point of view, gasp meaning globalist, academic, secular, and progressive, right?
00:11:08.400And that really does describe the framework that Wikipedia acts in.
00:11:15.160Why not allow other kinds of frameworks? And this is not something that would be inconsistent with neutrality, but the very idea is that, you know, if you're like Indian or Chinese or, you know, just French and you approach a given topic like, I don't know, God or photosynthesis or whatever, your approach might be different, you know, in a certain, again, framework.
00:11:45.160is the idea. Why not have competing articles is one idea. Another thing is that you may not know
00:11:53.080this. A lot of people don't know this, but 85% of the most powerful accounts on Wikipedia
00:12:00.000are anonymous. We have no idea who they are. And it's at least 85. It might be more than that.
00:12:07.840They might be using pseudonyms. That just strikes me as bizarre. And it seems to me that if you take certain kinds of authority on the platform, you accept certain ability to, for example, make people administrators, then the world has a right to know who you are, essentially.
00:12:34.000You know, if you're making really important decisions about what is arguably the most influential single information resource of its kind, probably more influential than any newspaper or news outlet.
00:13:01.180We have no idea who really runs Wikipedia.
00:13:05.160That is that is bizarre. And you're not just just saying anonymity is bad, but like these people in particular, the outsized influence they have, the powers that they have.
00:13:13.220They want to exercise those, but they really want to pay no cost for it.
00:13:17.000They want to be sort of unquestionable and be able to hide behind their anonymity, which I think there's a trade off there.
00:13:23.000If you want to have that power, I agree.
00:13:24.820People should be able to know who you are so they can at least judge for themselves in a critical way what may be motivating your perspective on certain issues.
00:13:43.400We can rate YouTube videos. We can thumb up exec comments and so forth, Reddit posts and so forth. Why not Wikipedia articles? There's no good answer that they can offer to that.
00:14:02.060And it really is important in the case of Wikipedia articles, you know, if there's some article that is just not up to snuff in the opinion, especially of experts, right, people who make it their lives, you know, mission to know something about some narrow corner of the world, we should be able to find out easily what they think about the article, right?
00:14:27.760I was looking, for example, recently at an article about a topic in philosophy called Unmoved Mover.
00:14:51.620And I actually gave it a lower because this is something I know something about.
00:14:57.760I give it a lower grade. And we have no way of knowing which are the better articles and which are the worst articles on Wikipedia.
00:15:05.900Wikipedia claims to be helping the public, but it's not helping the public discern which are the better articles and which are the worst.
00:15:14.800I wonder if there could be because I've been very surprised, pleasantly surprised at the effectiveness of community notes on X,
00:15:20.460because, you know, we always were very resistant to the fact checking programs that came about right after Donald Trump got elected.
00:15:27.080all these, you know, newspaper outlets and everything. Well, we're going to fact check.
00:15:30.340And it was always just whatever their view was, you know, an argument for that and against the
00:15:34.640other one. Community notes, I was kind of unsure how is this going to be any different, but it's
00:15:38.440been very good. And I've I've really had no problems with community notes. Occasionally,
00:15:42.000there's one that I'm like, it's kind of an opinion, not a fact. And, you know, but then
00:15:45.440you can downvote it. So, I mean, something like that, I think X has proven that community notes
00:15:49.460function works very well for sort of discrediting lies. It's really good. I mean, I wonder something
00:15:54.900like that could work um i think so i can tell you what i've been working on along those lines
00:16:02.160um so it's called wiki critic now i don't know if it's if it's gonna be ultimately launched right
00:16:10.740now it's experimental um and we've got like a dozen um beta testers right now but uh i really
00:16:19.740like the way it works. The idea is if you can put a review of a Wikipedia article almost anywhere,
00:16:28.660like on X or your blog or lots of places, and then we have an AI agent which will go out and
00:16:37.360grab the text and put it on a dossier about the Wikipedia article. And then in addition,
00:16:47.560the AI will itself come up with a set of grades for the article. And I think, especially if we
00:16:57.040get people to install like, I don't know, a plugin for their browsers, if that's possible,
00:17:05.940and have that running when they're using Wikipedia, and they'll actually be able to see
00:17:11.100grades for the articles um so we can go around the wikipedia administrators it is possible
00:17:21.520um but we have to take some some things into our own our own hands can't just like
00:17:28.220passively consume information so that's that's one idea anyway yeah that that's interesting i
00:17:34.020remember um gab did that at one point because there was again the phenomenon after 2016 where
00:17:39.140all these media sites stopped having comment sections. It used to be a place where, you know,
00:17:45.320you'd read the Daily Mail or you'd go about them, and there were no more comment sections. I remember
00:17:48.840Gab and some other people put together a thing where it's just going to be the comment. Whatever
00:17:52.620page you're on, there will be a dedicated comment section on our server, so they can't shut it down.
00:17:57.240I always thought that was brilliant, but it never really caught on. Maybe with Wikipedia,
00:18:00.980it'll be more sort of direct and focused on Wikipedia, which will, you know, make it easier
00:18:05.680for people to utilize. How is AI affecting this? Because again, AI is this thing that
00:18:11.800it's pitched as, and it's seen in many cases, it works as sort of a truth calculator, right?
00:18:16.840It just sort of spits out the truth. You spit in the input. It gives you the output. It's a
00:18:21.000computer, but we know it gives you different answers every time. It's referencing things that
00:18:25.300it can't really judge whether it's legitimate or not. How is AI affecting Wikipedia these days?
00:18:31.820And, you know, I have a picture somewhere in here. It's not it's not exactly the same as what we're talking about. But, you know, people are asking, can you make a sign saying F Israel? And it said no. And then it said F United States. And it said yes. Now, of course, this has to do with the geopolitical establishment and all that stuff. But it points out that AI is being given guardrails that are that are not advertised, that are secretive, that are invisible, really, but are affecting the output. So how is that affecting Wikipedia?
00:19:01.820You know, there's a lot to unpack there.
00:19:05.720For one thing, I think that it's starting to eat into Wikipedia's traffic, right?
00:19:14.420So I actually looked at the traffic from, I think it was May of 2024 to May of 2025.
00:19:25.020And in that period, there was a significant decline.
00:19:31.820I hope I've got the dates right. And there's been a decline, I know, for the last seven months by about, I want to say, 10 percent.
00:19:46.560I can't vouch for that, but it's significant and it's enough that it might not be statistical noise. And it comes at a time when people are using AI to get questions answered. Right.
00:20:00.220And I know I use AI now when I earlier might have used an encyclopedia, maybe not Wikipedia, but yeah.
00:20:12.000The trouble is the AI itself is trained on Wikipedia articles.
00:20:18.900So it's not like Wikipedia doesn't matter anymore.
00:20:22.780It still matters a lot because it's used in training AI.
00:20:29.080We know that ChatGPT was an earlier version. We know that Grokopedia was written with the help of Wikipedia. That's very clear. So it's hard to say, you know, if we can simply ignore Wikipedia. I don't think we can anymore. I don't think that AI is going to displace it.
00:20:54.180What LLMs do is they essentially make averages.
00:21:00.900This is a very crude way of describing it, but basically averages of the data that it is fed.
00:21:08.860And it just so happens that Wikipedia has information at just the right level that fits the answers that people are looking for.
00:21:21.100um there can be more specialized websites that that go into details here and there
00:21:28.120but wikipedia is sort of pitched it right at the level that we use to to interact with an llm yeah
00:21:37.080so um yeah i i do think that grokipedia has a chance but i i have the impression i i can't
00:21:48.300tell you all that i know but let's just say that i have the impression that the project
00:21:53.980may have been abandoned to some extent i i don't know i i really i don't know um but it's kind of
00:22:03.900looking that that way they have stopped um supporting human interaction with it you can't
00:22:12.200you can't post corrections anymore. Well, I wonder, have you had any discussions with Elon
00:22:19.860Musk about this? Because that is what keeps popping into my mind is, you know, to me,
00:22:23.320the greatest use of Grok ever is that it's got that little button on X, where if you see something
00:22:27.440you don't understand or something you think you may be questionable, you just hit that Grok button
00:22:30.800and it sort of gives you, you know, a summary of what it says and what, you know, how truthful it
00:22:35.100is. It's so useful. We have a Grok button on Wikipedia. I mean, that sounds like a good sort
00:22:39.120of merger of Wiki and Critic, and of course, Grokipedia was meant to be a competitor for
00:22:45.480Wikipedia. Elon Musk, I would think, would be sort of barking up your tree and trying to work
00:22:51.400with you. Have you had any connection with him? Well, let's just say I have had his ear,
00:23:00.500at least in my – the announcement of Grokipedia came the day after I unleashed my nine theses.
00:23:09.120which was a great surprise to me um and i can talk at him but he doesn't talk back let's just
00:23:16.640put it that way i don't know what he's listening to to be honest wow um yeah i think he obviously
00:23:22.960is you know he's a very busy guy obviously well yeah of course i just it seems like the the tools
00:23:28.320that he's you you know uh applied to x are very much in line with what you're trying to do with
00:23:33.440wikipedia it's it's interesting that there's not communicated it seems like there should be if our
00:23:38.640Our listeners want to tweet at Elon, tell him maybe we could use his help on getting Wikipedia back on track because it still serves.
00:23:49.380Just, you know, searching stuff, historical stuff, especially if I'm looking up Suta, you know, what is Suta, this this enclave that's being, you know, I go to Wikipedia and it gives me the history.
00:23:59.780So, I mean, it is still such a useful tool, but you don't know where it's biased and where it's not.
00:24:05.040Like I point out the Vaquero and, you know, changes the history.
00:24:07.780If you know Wikipedia, you can sort of see, okay, this has been edited recently. How has it been edited? But for the average user, they just read it, they accept it, they go home. So again, like AI, if this is being manipulated with a bias, we deserve to know. And if we don't know, then we're going to be wrong.
00:24:22.120Yep. Yep. And I actually think the answer ultimately has to be that people have to talk back to Wikipedia.
00:24:33.480And the problem has been that there is, whenever you've got a big constituency, I've discovered, you know, that all will think the same way, it just is the natural thought of us old, you know, internet website developers, entrepreneurs, whatever, is, okay, start a website, get these people organized.
00:25:02.360But things are so locked down to a great extent that actually starting a significant new voice is really difficult.
00:25:13.740So I hope that Wikicritic will serve that purpose.
00:25:19.340And I really do hope, you know, we can get Alex, for example, to write a response to his article on Wikipedia.
00:25:32.360And I know I've already got a whole bunch of people lined up, basically ready to to talk back to Wikipedia and and they can put it on their on their personal websites.
00:25:45.740We will just go and grab it, you know, and and aggregate it all.
00:25:50.540So, you know, OK, we've got to go to commercial break here.
00:25:53.380We'll be back on the other side with Larry Singer.
00:25:55.160Just how can people find Wikicritic if they want to be involved?
00:25:57.640Is it possible for them to become beta testers?
00:28:24.240This is The Alex Jones Show, alexjoneslive.com.
00:28:26.720Of course, support us by going to thealexjonesstore.com.
00:28:29.140I'm your host, Harrison Smith, sitting in for Alex Jones today, joined by Larry Sanger.
00:28:32.880You can go to larrysanger.org to find what he's working on, including things like Wikicritic,
00:28:37.380the new effort he's made to bring some honesty and truth to Wikipedia.
00:28:42.020It's severely lacking there these days.
00:28:43.820Of course, you can follow him on X at L Sanger.
00:28:47.120You know, Wikipedia in its digital form is just naturally vulnerable to manipulation, right?
00:28:54.980I mean, there's something when you print an encyclopedia and it's sitting on the shelf, it ain't changing.
00:28:59.300That's what it may be wrong. It may be right.
00:29:01.000But you can go back and reference it with Wikipedia.
00:29:03.660You go to an article today, it can be completely different tomorrow.
00:29:06.380And there's no real alert saying here's what's been changed.
00:29:10.100And this, of course, leads to things like you can go to, you know, A.I. destroying books, destroying all these old books and incorporating them into A.I.
00:29:19.260And it's like we're entering into a world where permanence is a thing of the past.
00:29:24.540Ironically, permanence is a thing of the past.
00:29:26.660And this just sort of unmoors us from reality and allows manipulation to to be utilized in really egregious ways.
00:29:34.960How do we how do we contend with that?
00:29:36.800And there's some technical tools that can be used at a certain point in order to distinguish what people say from the confabulations of A.I., you actually have to use a digital signature of a person on a piece of content to prove that it is theirs.
00:29:59.360And we haven't done that enough. And as long as we continue to own our own digital identities, I'm all in favor of that. So that's one of the things that can be done.
00:30:11.620Now, I'd actually push back a little bit on something that you said about the history of Wikipedia, that Wikipedia does have the entire page history, the whole revision history.
00:30:27.160It's, to be honest, actually, I'm a little surprised that they haven't tried to lock it down a little bit more than they have, because it is quite revealing and damning in many cases when you dig into it.
00:30:40.680But with a lot of articles, you can actually look through the history and you can find all kinds of lines that are not available anymore.
00:30:49.180They have been oversighted, which is a verb.
00:30:53.120It just means that it's been deleted from the database permanently, apparently.
00:31:02.520Usually for legal reasons, no doubt, sometimes quite legitimately so.
00:31:07.780um but not always i think and it's not always obvious to the to the average user they go i
00:31:14.880mean at least you know on some things you'll have a thing saying oh this has just been edited here's
00:31:18.540the updated version you know things like x and stuff but wikipedia if you're not really well
00:31:22.040versed in it it's hard to find those logs where it changes and and to go back through time so for
00:31:26.720the average person it just it just appears as though this is how it's always been right exactly
00:31:35.620Now, another technical solution, it's actually not that technical.
00:31:43.400You can go to Justopedia.org, which is a fork of Wikipedia made by a friend of mine, Buddy Wills.
00:31:54.040And she's an older lady, but she has more energy than most 20- and 30-year-old founders.
00:32:08.660She's a force of nature, and she's actually managed to create something that's really useful already.
00:32:16.840And you can edit, freely edit Wikipedia articles so that they are made more neutral on Justopedia.
00:32:26.280And they're getting quite a bit of traffic, right?
00:32:29.820So that's a story that has not been covered.
00:32:34.300And I wish people did know more about Justopedia.
00:32:39.740Generally speaking, as I think of it, that's part of what I call the encyclosphere,
00:32:45.580which is basically the collection of all the encyclopedias like the blogosphere is not just
00:32:50.760one blog it's all the blogs so the encyclosphere is all the encyclopedias what we need to do
00:32:56.560basically is to promote all the alternatives to wikipedia and um in many cases you know uh
00:33:06.560if wikipedia doesn't tell the truth another one will you know there's a lot of information in the
00:33:14.340world and that's what i was i was getting out with my question in the first segment about like
00:33:18.680is it even worth it to reform wikipedia or should we just have another thing we go just leave
00:33:23.080wikipedia behind it's it'll wallow in its own biases all they all at once and we can go create
00:33:28.280something better is it worth it to reform it or is it better just to to try something new i i would
00:33:34.640have agreed with you i did agree with you for a long time but now i actually it's come to the
00:33:42.580point it's been around for so long it has not died you know the the the uh rumors of wikipedia's
00:33:49.060death uh impending doom began in like 2007 i remember there was some lawyer who who uh said
00:33:57.960yeah yeah by 2009 it won't even exist anymore um and of course that was wrong uh and uh basically
00:34:06.640Basically, here's the deal. You can say, let's just ignore it. But here's the problem is you can ignore it, but it's not going to go away and it's going to continue to have a lot of influence in the world.
00:34:18.780You know, Alex Jones viewers may not actually have any use for Wikipedia, I suppose, on average, but a lot of ordinary people still do. Right.
00:34:35.460and you know that's a place where it is i mean we need to take yeah we need to take the fight
00:34:43.340to wikipedia we saw this with social media i i hate to keep bringing up elon musk but it seems
00:34:48.400like you and he are sort of fighting the same monsters in a lot of different ways but same
00:34:52.080thing with that right they created parlor and gab and there were all these other truth social and
00:34:56.500all these alternatives to x but x is still the place to be or you know twitter at the time that
00:35:00.680was the place to be it was it was too big to ignore you couldn't just ignore it and even if
00:35:04.780your own thing that you created was successful it would never really you know be a competitor
00:35:09.180you know except when something like tiktok came out and it was so different that it
00:35:12.860it created a whole new uh category with wikipedia it's uh not not that not quite that easy but again
00:35:18.900i wonder um what the effects of ai are going to be with this and uh what is your take on the
00:35:23.940the destroying of the books uh that places like anthropic are are involved in which again i want
00:35:29.280to remind people the judge for some reason the judge decided they could scan the books as long
00:35:35.100as they destroyed them which is just insane you know they they weren't saying we're going to
00:35:39.400destroy these books because we have to the judge said well it's copyright infringement unless you
00:35:43.540destroy the book so now there's just they're buying up every old book they can get destroying
00:35:48.500it and then putting it into ai and i guess it's you know we have to we trust them to say what the
00:35:53.700contents were. I mean, that seems insane to me. Well, what's your take on that process?
00:35:58.640I mean, I have not studied the legal reasoning, but my impression is that they're only supposed
00:36:07.360to have one copy or something like that, right? In their possession. Yeah. But of course,
00:36:13.160the information in those books, which is like the important thing, is going to be in zillions
00:36:19.660of copies on everybody's, you know, screens.
00:36:45.160Um, but, but generally speaking, uh, there aren't that many books that have so few copies that, you know, it's likely that, that the last copy was, was destroyed by, by the, you know,
00:37:07.920Well, you know, it's, it's just, it's just kind of weird because we're entering into this world where there's so much information.
00:37:15.000I mean, it's the information age, and yet everybody kind of seems dumber than they ever have been before.
00:37:20.900And it's, you know, at a certain point, it's like, do the facts even matter?
00:37:24.520I mean, it's like we can deliver the facts to you, but they don't seem to care.
00:37:28.720They don't seem to – it doesn't seem to actually affect them.
00:37:31.100I mean, yeah, book, The Dumbest Generation, tell us about this.
00:37:35.880We've been talking about this for a long time, right?
00:37:39.360You know, I remember buying this book back in, like, what, 2008 or something like that.
00:37:45.000Um, and, uh, uh, we've gotten dumber since then. There you go. And, uh, and we've been complaining about that, you know, basically, um, cheap information, uh, put into, uh, bite-sized chunks essentially has taken the place of really understanding, um, whole systems of thought, which are necessary.
00:38:15.000To be able to deal with whole subjects in an intelligent manner.
00:38:26.640So it's, I think the problem is because there is so much emphasis on video, on short communications, on quick and easy answers.
00:38:45.000I mean, forget about kids. Even adults now are finding it harder and harder, or so they say, to read books.
00:38:55.500You know, I still read a lot of books. I'm reading several books at a time at any given time.
00:39:03.440That's just me. You know, I'm an ex-academic.
00:39:08.400And but I think, you know, the rest of you got to get it on the ball here.
00:39:18.500The reason why we read books and the reason why books continue to matter,
00:39:25.520even in an age of AI, is that books provide the sort of logical, meaning-driven scaffolding that we need to think through problems in a systematic way, right?
00:39:43.440And that is simply not given by ready answers.
00:39:49.920This is an old talking point of teachers and philosophers alike that essentially knowledge occurs in systems and you cannot reduce what is learned when you read a book to a set of facts that it contains.
00:40:13.180Right. Right. They actually have to be structured, actually have to go through the thought process that the author went through.
00:40:21.460Yeah. I was I was actually just talking about this earlier in the show before you came on, because I saw this with Anthony Fauci and the Fifth Amendment.
00:40:29.960I thought people know what the Fifth Amendment is. I mean, you watch crime shows every lowdown criminal.
00:40:35.040They might not be able to spell their name, but they know they have a right to stay silent.
00:40:38.040Do they know why? Do they know what the purpose of that is? Why was it created in the first place and what what it's protecting us from?
00:40:45.180Because now you've got an agent of the government using the Fifth Amendment to shield his activities in the government.
00:40:51.400It's like, I think this is all wrong. So you you sort of dislocate the idea of the Fifth Amendment from the structure that it that actually informs it.
00:41:00.580And suddenly you're completely lost. You don't know why this thing exists or what the value of it is or when it should be used and when it shouldn't.
00:41:06.720So it's really almost worse than useless. And I see this everywhere. And this is hard. We're in a democracy and we got a bunch of people voting and they don't even understand the first thing about the reason we have rights and the reason they, you know, how they were created.
00:41:20.780I think you're exactly right. We need this systematic. I like how you put it. I'm going to have to go back and quote that the scaffolding, the intellectual scaffolding to understand this stuff is missing now, which is why it's sort of everything's topsy turvy.
00:41:32.880Yep. There's a great example that I can give that sort of links this segment with the previous segment. So most people have no idea what due process is, but it's really important, right?
00:41:49.880the Fifth Amendment is one of the amendments that actually defines due process. Okay, so I'm
00:41:58.620going to give you a little lecture. Just bear with me. It's actually kind of fun and important.
00:42:03.780Due process is the set of rights that we have that basically define how we should be treated
00:42:14.680by the law. All right. So just for example, when we go into a court, there should be a difference
00:42:23.720between the prosecutor and the judge. The prosecutor shouldn't be the judge, just for example. And
00:42:30.720that's one of the things that's like required. Another thing is the judge shouldn't have like
00:42:35.860reasons to be biased, right? If there are things that would make a judge tend to judge the case in
00:42:44.480one direction rather than another, apart from the bare facts of the case, then, you know, that judge
00:42:52.140should be out. I'm not going to go through all the rules, but there's a lot of them, you know,
00:42:56.580and they basically define what impartial justice, a process of impartial justice looks like.
00:43:03.720Okay, now here's the thing. On Wikipedia, when I was taken before that administrator's notice board,
00:43:11.260It was just a mob of people talking about me, like bad-mouthing me in front of my back and saying all kinds of false things, not being really subject to any rules of decorum, not being answerable to anyone in particular.
00:43:37.680there was no charges. There were no charges in particular in my case. I didn't find out why I
00:43:44.940could be blocked officially until I actually was blocked in the end. These are the reasons you
00:43:50.820were blocked. They didn't say that in advance, so I couldn't respond. I was not guaranteed a right
00:43:58.160to reply, right? Okay, so what's the point of all this? The point is, if these idiots who staff
00:44:07.140Wikipedia, the administrators who staff the administrator's notice board, knew why due
00:44:15.440process rights are important, right? Like if they had worked, if they had been required to work
00:44:21.600through the answers, well, why is there this rule? Why is there that rule? Then they might actually
00:44:27.780be open to an argument to the effect that, you know what, this whole process is wrong
00:44:53.880And I remember being outraged going, they're making accusations, but not giving the accused a right to reply.
00:44:59.560This is this is in total violation of our fundamental beliefs about what is fair in justice.
00:45:05.360So, I mean, you're you're seeing it, obviously, on the Internet.
00:45:07.700I mean, people can make up the rules they want.
00:45:09.240But even in our politics, you know, you have things that are functionally they look like courtrooms.
00:45:14.020They act like courtrooms. There's a guy with a hammer in it.
00:45:16.000But it's not a courtroom. It's something else.
00:45:17.960And people people can't recognize that for some reason.
00:45:21.380Right, right, right. They have to be or they have to be made to read books for probably when they're young that explain all of these things and actually work through all the issues.
00:45:32.720It's kind of hard, you know, and certainly the leaders of society have to understand these things in their bones, has to actually be part of a common education, not just some specialists.
00:45:43.720Yeah, absolutely. And and of course, I've got, you know, on the in the last hour of the show, I'm going to play a lot of videos from some of the new socialist mayors that are coming up.
00:45:52.900And, you know, whether it's Mom Donnie or this woman in Seattle or there's a woman running for governor of Michigan, I believe now.
00:45:58.940And it's like these people, they have no experience. No. And they think just because they sort of can put things in a clever way that that means they're right.
00:46:07.220What I'm trying to get as there's there is a lack of respect for like older generations that is that I see everywhere.
00:46:13.720And to me, that that what provides part of the ability of these people to justify why they don't care about this stuff.
00:46:19.620They go, well, those are just old guys. They're old, fusty guys, white supremacist, whatever.
00:46:24.080Why should we even care what they have to say, which leads you to totally misunderstanding what the policies they were putting in place are, why they were putting them into place?
00:46:32.980It has a lot to do, I think, with this lack of humility, I guess, at the end of the day, especially young people have now where they genuinely think they know everything.
00:46:41.300Even when I was young, I at least, you know, I thought, well, I think my grandpa was wrong about this, but he's my grandpa and he's been around for 80 years.
00:46:47.800So I'm going to go with him on this one. There's no humility now.
00:46:50.880And that's celebrated, I guess, that this lack of humility.
00:46:56.380I think this is like the common complaint of old people talking about young people going back to ancient days.
00:47:05.320Right. But nevertheless, nevertheless, I think it's especially true now.
00:47:10.220And there's a very good reason for that. And it is that basically beginning in, I would say, the 1990s, maybe the 2000s and really ramping up in the last decade, basically, if you get a degree in anything other than hard, you know, technology or science, anything other than STEM, you are going to be indoctrinated to death.
00:47:40.220And so the leaders of society have been indoctrinated, the young ones. And they have a radically different worldview than the traditional American view. They simply don't understand the traditional American view.
00:47:58.280There's a whole lot of information there that they just don't have. They have a very poor grasp on, for example, the contents of the Federalist Papers, just for example. They probably have never actually read the Constitution, you know, your average college graduate.
00:48:19.340So I actually think that the problem is kind of a generation gap that is due to the younger generations who are now actually starting to come into power being totally radicalized by their education.
00:48:41.520And it's, yeah, that bit is kind of scary, but not all of them, I would hasten to add, not all of them.
00:48:48.780No, yeah, certainly not all of them. And I was going to say, I guess I'm officially old now, but I think I've all, I guess I've always been old. I remember being a kid and, you know, these people are like, well, you know, these stupid sheep herders. I'm like, have you read the Psalms? Like, do you know what you're talking about? Like, these people are not stupid. And the arrogance of young people are thinking, well, some scientist somewhere knows how lightning works. Therefore, God's not real. And it's like, this is just, this is absurd. But we're sort of seeing, seeing the outcome of this with some of these people being elected. And it's, it's not going well, but we don't have too much longer with you.
00:49:18.040And I this has been incredibly informative, but I want people to.
00:49:33.480So other than being informed, how can people help you and contribute to what you're doing?
00:49:37.620And whether in their own personal life by, you know, making changes to Wikipedia or whatever it is or contributions, how can people help you achieve your goals?
00:49:46.460So I would say, first of all, follow me on XLSigner.
00:49:54.040If you have an old account on Wikipedia that you haven't used in a long time, you haven't been banned, then there is a special way to use it.
00:50:05.280You really need to be very careful about not breaking the rules.
00:50:08.660But if you're really serious about making a difference and pushing Wikipedia in another direction, the fact of the matter is there are not that many people working on Wikipedia any given month.
00:50:25.240It's a lot fewer than what people assume it is.
00:50:29.160There are a lot of drive-by edits, yes, of course, because it gets a lot of traffic.
00:50:36.200The actual number of people who are working to any great extent is probably in the hundreds, right?
00:50:43.820If you were to, you know, get enough people on Wikipedia making reasonable edits and then occasionally making progress in other directions, that can make a big difference.
00:51:02.000Another thing is I would encourage people, if they've got X accounts or blogs, sub stacks, or even just a Google Doc, write a review of a Wikipedia article and then send it to me.
00:51:21.140I've posted it, you know, a thread about this on X recently.
00:51:26.080So go to L Sanger on X and just post a link to your review underneath that.
00:51:34.000I will give you early access to Wikicritic.
00:51:48.100And, you know, people are always the question I probably get most is like, what can I do?
00:51:52.560What? I want to be involved. And it's like, well, here you go, folks.
00:51:55.460This is how you can be involved. You can do it from the comfort of your computer chair, you know, probably on your phone.
00:52:00.300This is a way you can actually. And hey, you might not feel like you as an individual are able to take on this whole, you know, gigantic array of misinformation.
00:52:09.620But if you and your friend and your family and if we all get involved, then, you know, we overwhelm them with numbers.
00:52:15.420but it takes us actually getting active.