In this episode, Oren McInnes talks about the growing tensions between Elon Musk and the people of the United States and Brazil, and the implications for the future of social media and democracy in general. He also discusses the role of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI), a student organization dedicated to educating and promoting conservative ideas and perspectives.
00:00:37.120So, very interesting development with Elon Musk and Twitter, or X as he calls it now.
00:00:43.720I'm never calling it X. Sorry, it's Twitter.
00:00:46.460It's always going to be Twitter to me.
00:00:48.420But of course, we know that Twitter is a really interesting social media platform.
00:00:53.440Social media platforms are very powerful tools.
00:00:56.180They've changed the way that our elections work.
00:00:58.580They have changed the way that we think about our leaders getting put into office.
00:01:04.520But X particular has a way of changing political opinion.
00:01:10.640Facebook, Instagram, all of these things matter.
00:01:13.340But the way that Twitter is set up really drives it into the hearts and minds of the opinion class, the media class, the journalists, those that actually create the information consensus.
00:01:25.400In a world where popular sovereignty creates legitimacy, the ability to control the information that the average voter sees becomes a critical weapon in the arsenal of the ruling class.
00:01:39.020And so, having something like X on your side has been really important for many people who want to continue to keep their brand of politics, their worldview, in the prime position.
00:01:52.720However, Elon Musk taking over this platform seems to have said a lot of these people spinning out of control.
00:02:00.160They're very worried about the fact that Elon seems to not always dance to the tune that they're playing.
00:02:06.340And this means that they can't reliably use X as a way to leverage their position.
00:02:12.300In fact, their opponents might have access to this.
00:02:15.900And this seems to have come to a head in the country of Brazil.
00:02:19.480Brazil is a country that has been in a lot of turmoil and is very worried about the fact that social media might play a role in their politics going forward.
00:02:29.420And so, they've gotten to a legal battle with Elon Musk.
00:02:34.200They've made threats to him that he needs to go ahead and let them censor the platform.
00:02:39.480But it looks like Elon Musk is refusing.
00:02:41.500Now, we're going to talk about the history behind that.
00:02:43.960But more importantly, to me, we're going to talk about the way that Elon Musk has become a rogue non-state actor and the way that endangers state sovereignty.
00:02:55.340Because Brazil's situation is interesting.
00:02:58.420But I think for us in the United States, the far more interesting implications are what this means going forward for social media and elections.
00:03:07.920Because it's very clear in the 2024 election that social media is going to play a massive role and that the federal government is already interested in cracking down here in the United States as well.
00:03:19.480So, we're going to dive into all this, guys.
00:03:21.540But before we do, let's go ahead and hear a little bit about ISI.
00:03:25.180The Intercollegiate Studies Institute is here to help.
00:03:37.640ISI offers programs and opportunities for conservative students across the country.
00:03:42.580ISI understands that conservatives and right-of-center students feel isolated on college campuses and that you're often fighting for your own reputation, dignity, and future.
00:03:53.080Through ISI, you can learn about what Russell Kirk called the permanent things, the philosophical and political teachings that shaped and made Western civilization great.
00:04:01.800ISI offers many opportunities to jumpstart your career.
00:04:05.340They have fellowships at some of the nation's top conservative publications like National Review, The American Conservative, and The College Thinker.
00:04:12.400If you're a graduate student, ISI offers funding opportunities to sponsor the next great generation of college professors.
00:04:18.440Through ISI, you can work with conservative thinkers who are making a difference.
00:04:22.340Thinkers like Chris Ruffo, who currently has an ISI researcher helping him with his book.
00:04:27.080But perhaps most importantly, ISI offers college students a community of people that can help them grow.
00:04:32.780If you're a college student, ISI can help you start a student organization or a student newspaper or meet other like-minded students at their various conferences and events.
00:04:42.260ISI is here to educate the next generation of great Americans.
00:04:52.600So to understand this, I think first we need a little bit of context.
00:04:56.360Now, I'm not going to pretend to be some kind of expert about Brazil's history or its electoral politics or even the ins and outs of its system.
00:05:05.700But we do need to have a very basic understanding of what happened in Brazil before we can then understand the implications that this has for other Western countries and the United States in particular.
00:05:19.060So in Brazil, obviously, you have you had the Bolsonaro election and Bolsonaro had a lot of news media around him.
00:05:29.120A lot of people whinging about him, very concerned because he was supposed to be the Trump of Brazil.
00:05:35.460He was supposed to be this guy who was coming in.
00:06:23.940And so he had been indicted and had actually been charged with this.
00:06:29.580He was sentenced to, I believe, something like 12 years, though he only ended up serving a few years of that sentence or even less than two years before he ended up getting that expunged by the Supreme Court.
00:07:16.720He wants to dismantle many parts of that bureaucracy that is portrayed by the media as a danger to the state.
00:07:25.800He's trying to get rid of all the restrictions that are placed on the private sector.
00:07:31.240He's trying to sell off Brazil, this kind of thing.
00:07:33.980When his supporters would say, no, he's trying to get rid of all these interests, these interests that have taken over the democracy, that have kept it from actually representing the people.
00:07:43.680Either way, whatever you want to believe about that, that is kind of the battle there between Bolsonaro and his version of the deep state that exists in the Brazilian government.
00:07:55.640Now, Bolsonaro ends up losing to Lula in the 2022 election.
00:08:04.680You may have seen the famous picture of Bolsonaro eating a bowl of KFC in defeat after kind of basically fleeing that situation.
00:08:14.280He lost and there was a lot of accusations of voter fraud, a lot of accusations that the that the election was not legitimate.
00:08:23.620The Supreme Court was helping to put their thumb on the scales because they didn't like Bolsonaro.
00:08:28.200And so they went ahead and kind of muscled him out is the is the accusation and restored kind of their candidate, their preferred candidate with all of the ties to to the bureaucracy and the corruption in the power.
00:08:43.200And so Bolsonaro ends up getting forced out.
00:08:46.620And since then, the government has basically recognized that they don't want social media to be a weapon against them.
00:08:54.720They want to make sure that going forward, another Bolsonaro can't happen.
00:08:59.440They don't want someone who's good at social media, being able to organize, go around the official government channels, kind of bring the the anger of the people to bear on the incumbent government.
00:09:09.960They want to make sure that none of that can happen again.
00:09:13.300And so the Supreme Court, which also kind of doubles, I guess there's some overlap between the main Supreme Court and then like the election Supreme Court.
00:09:21.860And one of the justices on the main Supreme Court also oversees the electoral Supreme Court.
00:09:27.960Again, I'm not pretending to be any kind of expert on on their system.
00:09:33.500I'm just trying to give you a general idea of the way this is set up.
00:09:37.460And so the Supreme Court has been putting pressure on social media platforms all over the place to basically go ahead and do lots of censorship, sell all their data, open up any any private messages or, you know, go ahead and dox their users so that the government can keep tabs on everyone that opposes them.
00:09:58.640So they can go ahead and make sure that no one is making any plans or saying, you know, saying anything behind their back.
00:10:03.920And so they've basically gotten Google and all these other social media and tech sites to give over their information, to capitulate and do the censorship and everything else.
00:10:15.940But Twitter has stood firm, and that means that they've kind of become enemy number one of one of the judges on the Supreme Court who has attempted to go ahead and, again, put all these bans into place, make sure that all these accounts are suppressed.
00:10:32.360Elon Musk has said that he does not like this.
00:10:35.300He thinks that this is a violation of the rights of the people of the Brazil of Brazil.
00:10:39.720And he believes also that this violates the Brazilian Constitution.
00:10:44.100And so instead of complying with what the judge has said, Elon Musk has basically said, I'm going to go ahead and lift these restrictions.
00:10:53.660I don't care what the blowback is going to be.
00:10:56.520I don't care if we lose all of our revenue.
00:10:59.240I don't care if we have to go ahead and close our offices in Brazil because the legal ramifications could fall on our employees and everything.
00:11:07.480I want to go ahead and fight for free speech.
00:11:10.120I'm going to go ahead and make this decision.
00:11:12.460Now, a lot of people, myself included, frankly, are good on Elon Musk, right?
00:11:26.080I'm not going to pretend like I became one because I did research for the story.
00:11:29.880But it does seem like the current Brazilian regime is corrupt.
00:11:33.040It does seem like they are cracking down on the freedoms of the people.
00:11:36.440The few people who I know who are in Brazil say that this is the case, that there was a lot of corruption, that there was a lot of falsification with the elections in Brazil, that their freedoms are being cracked down on.
00:11:49.460And so it seems like Elon Musk is standing up to a corrupt government.
00:11:55.820And again, what's interesting is he's saying he's going to do this in the name of the people of Brazil, that the Constitution is being violated and he's going to stand up on their behalf.
00:12:06.460Now, that creates a very interesting scenario because while you might agree with the actions that Elon Musk is taking from just a power politics analysis, this is an imposition on state sovereignty.
00:12:22.380Now, I want to be really clear here because there was some confusion when I went ahead and explained this on Twitter.
00:12:30.460There was a big I did a big thread and it went very wide.
00:12:33.540And some people were angry because they thought I was I was supporting Elon Musk.
00:12:37.660Some people were angry because they thought I was supporting the Brazilian government.
00:12:41.100It just goes to show you that whenever a thread like that goes wide on on Twitter, it really just becomes a Rorschach test.
00:12:47.940But the point is, I'm not trying to now advocate for either side.
00:12:52.680What I'm trying to explain is a phenomenon that is going to have a very serious impact on politics, basically across across the globe going forward.
00:13:01.980And so I want to explain this dynamic.
00:13:03.760I'm not arguing for state sovereignty.
00:13:05.340I'm not arguing for corporations having any particular powers here.
00:13:09.280I'm simply explaining the dynamic that is going to continue to unfold.
00:13:13.040It's already unfolded and is going to continue to unfold.
00:13:15.720And I think Brazil is a really interesting test case.
00:13:18.380And on this program, I like to explain the theory behind behind what is happening.
00:13:22.840I like to explain the mechanics behind what is happening.
00:13:25.620And so I think Brazil gives us a good case we can study so we can actually apply this theory.
00:13:33.160We can take take the things that are in the theoretical realm, the realm of political power and political theory.
00:13:39.620And we can directly apply them to the things that are happening in real time.
00:13:42.880And they can help us better understand the world so that if this happens in our own country, and I think it probably will, then we will have an understanding of what is happening here.
00:13:51.900So Elon Musk, of course, is just the owner of a corporation.
00:14:05.400And Elon Musk bought it with the explicit purpose of changing the culture of the company.
00:14:10.360He probably could have spent his money elsewhere on far more lucrative things.
00:14:14.380But Elon Musk understood something that, unfortunately, a lot of people on the right don't understand, that wielding power is more important than dollars.
00:14:24.920And his dollars allowed him to buy a piece of power.
00:14:28.760And so when he bought that piece of power, when he bought a node out of the information network that was critical to the way that the public filters its understanding of the world,
00:14:39.600he was buying a piece of political power in a way that you can't even buy it if you directly bribe like a congressman is a very important move.
00:14:48.320And Elon Musk very much understood this.
00:14:50.560So he might end up turning X into a highly profitable thing.
00:14:54.340He might end up making Twitter, you know, this huge cash cow for him.
00:14:58.160But his primary concern seemed to be controlling this flow of information.
00:15:03.220Taking something that was almost entirely controlled by the left and putting one piece in his hands.
00:15:09.960Now, a lot of people don't like Elon Musk.
00:15:11.880They don't think that he's really right wing.
00:15:21.920I don't think Elon Musk is entirely, you know, some kind of social conservative.
00:15:26.400I don't think he's aligned with your traditional right wing political project.
00:15:32.360He's not going to pass your pass your ideology test.
00:15:35.020But I think he is an opponent of the regime.
00:15:37.220And I think that while he does often have to work inside of its framework and he does have to go ahead and use many of their conventions in order to get contracts and make money and everything else that he does working with the state.
00:15:50.240I think that he does have a he does have an opposing ideology, even if it's not a explicitly right wing ideology.
00:15:58.480And so that makes him an interesting actor, even if he's not completely on the side of the right.
00:16:06.400And that's what's really interesting for me.
00:16:09.760So when Elon Musk buys this piece of X or this X, this this piece of the information system, what he's doing is he is throwing a wrench into the hegemonic control that the kind of wider global American empire has had on the consensus manufacturing apparatus apparatus of the United States and the wider Western world.
00:16:35.920He understands the critical role again, X, while it has a much smaller social media profile than many other platforms.
00:16:44.100It is a it is one that is wired directly into kind of the dopamine feedback system of people who are journalists, people who craft narratives and opinions and help to change the way that people understand events.
00:16:58.420And so that means that things that happen on Twitter tend to flow outward into all kinds of news articles and TV shows and everything else.
00:17:10.220And what we're seeing with Elon's defiance of the Brazilian court is a non-state actor who's directly challenging state sovereignty.
00:17:22.600You have to understand that this power has, of course, existed for a long time.
00:17:26.440In fact, this is something I explained in my upcoming upcoming book, The Total State, that the that the state apparatus has grown well beyond the formal government, the things we think of in America, the legislative branch, the judicial branch, the executive branch.
00:17:40.680These are the three branches of government.
00:18:09.160Of course, you can think of, I don't know, you know, the Holy Orders and the Crusades,
00:18:13.580or you can think about the, you know, the British trading company and its impact on other states.
00:18:20.280There have been many cases where these corporations or orders or, you know, even the Vatican, if you want, like these have had influences on states.
00:18:31.920They have been able to, in their own ways, challenge state sovereignty.
00:18:35.480So this is not the first time that non-state actors have been able to challenge state sovereignty.
00:18:40.760But they usually had to be really big and really powerful to do that.
00:18:45.540And they certainly couldn't do it through a press of a button.
00:18:47.900They had to have a very real and very direct impact on either the finances, culture, or even the actual, you know, physical safety of a region.
00:18:58.260You know, gunboat diplomacy works because you go in there and you threaten to blow everything up if they don't buy your stuff, right?
00:19:04.000If they don't open up their markets to you.
00:19:05.640And so they had to have a very real kind of injection of direct classical power into a sphere, into a sovereign state in order to have an impact on it.
00:19:17.820But now through the digital information delivery, that impact can be, you know, much less, well, it's as direct, it's as powerful, but it doesn't have to be as obvious.
00:19:29.520It doesn't have to be as formal as it used to have to be.
00:19:33.120And the United States and the kind of its global empire has been using this for a long time.
00:19:38.700The CIA and many other parts of the United States government and other Western governments have been using these non-state actors to go ahead and manipulate color revolutions, things like the Arab Spring, for a long time.
00:19:53.900They've been using platforms like Twitter to go ahead and inject themselves into kind of the consciousness of the people during an election cycle, that kind of thing.
00:20:04.000I mean, this is fundamentally why, you know, Vladimir Zelensky is in power in Ukraine was because they were able to use these forces.
00:20:13.540And it's not even, you know, the modern version has been around for a while as well.
00:20:18.680But the fact that Elon Musk is doing this is different because, like I said, I don't think he's directly aligned with the interests of the current ruling class.
00:20:28.520I don't think that he and the global American empire see eye to eye.
00:20:33.140And that means that he's the first guy to really step outside of their blessing to go ahead and do this.
00:20:39.400One of the reasons that all these other state non-state actors could get away with manipulating elections and everything else in foreign countries is that they had the implicit backing or sometimes the explicit backing of the global American empire.
00:20:54.200Everyone knew that if you actually went after these organizations, if you tried to censor these social media sites or other things that are affecting your election, that the United States was going to come in and maybe NATO was going to come in and say, oh, look, you're anti-democracy.
00:21:08.880Look, you're against all free speech and all this stuff.
00:21:11.720And the might of the kind of global American empire, the machine, was going to come down on you.
00:21:16.340And so they didn't dare stand up against this.
00:21:18.820But like I said, Elon is not aligned, I think, with the regime in the same way.
00:21:24.340And so the fact that he's willing to go ahead and take these actions means that the game changes in a very significant way.
00:21:30.900I want to talk about how that impacts Brazil, their state sovereignty, and how that could go ahead and impact the elections in the United States.
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00:22:52.180Alright, so like I said, I think Elon wielding this power is very different than it has previously been used by the global American empire, by kind of the regime.
00:23:05.220And that's because he is not aligned and this makes him a rogue actor.
00:23:09.300The global American empire has been worried about this for a while.
00:23:12.220They've understood that this is a very real threat because they have deployed these tactics in foreign countries.
00:23:17.480They understood how well they could work and they wanted to make sure that someone didn't do the same thing to them.
00:23:23.060They recognize, well, if we can manipulate elections with these tools, then someone could go ahead and use these tools to break our monopoly on information inside our own sphere.
00:23:33.020Just like we're using it to break the monopoly on state sovereignty inside other spheres.
00:23:38.920And if you need someone to lay this out for you, Mike Binns did a great job of doing this on the Tucker Carlson show.
00:23:45.960He did that really great episode that went viral explaining how basically all of the security apparatus that have been deployed to create these color revolutions abroad has now been turned domestically.
00:23:57.340And for the same reason that the Brazilian government locked down, right?
00:24:04.240And the problem with Trump is that Trump comes in and he threatens to actually start tearing apart kind of the pillars of the American system that keep the ruling class in power.
00:24:14.440The foreign wars, the immigration, these kind of things.
00:24:18.340At the end, he finally starts to realize that the problem is the bureaucracy, the deep state, but it's too late.
00:24:24.080He should have figured that out earlier.
00:24:25.660But hopefully if he gets another chance, that problem will be solved.
00:24:29.200Point being, Bolsonaro created a similar atmosphere that he was going to come in and tear up all these pieces of state power.
00:24:37.180And so they both have the same reaction.
00:24:38.660You know, they both need to shut down the avenues for social media, for the sharing of information, because if they don't, then the same tools that they have used to mess with elections in foreign countries could come home and impact the United States.
00:24:55.360Now, you have to understand something about the way that our current system works.
00:25:00.140We talk about democracy or representative republics, if you're a stickler for the constitutional language that doesn't actually get applied today.
00:25:08.300But we talk about the ability of popular sovereignty to be the legitimating mechanism for a government.
00:25:15.820If the people say the government is legitimate, that's what makes it legitimate.
00:25:20.120That's why elections matter so much, because they carry the voice and the weight of the people.
00:25:24.680However, we have to realize that if you're a real ruling class, like if you're a bunch of leaders who have built a giant leviathan full of power, which has the ability to crush your enemies in a moment's notice, you don't just hand that over to your opponent because you lost an election.
00:25:43.600That's just not something any ruling class does that's worth its salt.
00:25:48.060So the very idea that we have in the United States that you have this kind of peaceful transfer of power after an election and one side that like has declared the other side their mortal enemy and says that they're trying to like eliminate their way of life, just kind of hands over the keys to the government.
00:26:04.940That's that's fake because the real power sits inside these entrenched bureaucracies, just like Brazil
00:26:12.120has this problem. And so instead, even when someone who opposes them like Trump is in power, the ruling class kind of continues to get to use it, you know, its power during that time.
00:26:24.600It insulates itself from the effects of democracy to make sure that it stays in power.
00:26:28.840And one of the ways it helps to insulate itself from the natural turnover that you would think would follow in a democracy is that they need to go ahead and control information because in a democracy, the average person is just not going to have time to understand what's going on.
00:26:44.460They're not going to have a time to evaluate each issue. Even if they had the time, they just wouldn't have the ability.
00:26:49.760And so in order to be an informed voter and make their choice, they have to rely on the accounts given to them by the news media.
00:26:57.800And so if you're a if you're an elite class that wants to stay in power, then you make sure to go ahead and control the information that people get.
00:27:08.200You control elections and their outcomes by controlling the flow of information inside your borders.
00:27:13.960And that means that really the elections are determined more by the ability to create the frame of information, which is done through, of course, the news media, but social media, the Internet, universities.
00:27:27.800Many of the things that even create the concepts that we talk about every day are creating a framework that allows people to manipulate the results of any given electoral contest.
00:27:39.160And so this has become a key to state sovereignty.
00:27:42.720The governments need to be able to control the information their populace has because their ability to stay in power comes from the votes of their populace.
00:27:54.740And so they need to make sure the votes of their populace reliably fall in a given direction, that they understand issues and options.
00:28:01.700They manipulate manipulate the Overton window in a particular way so that even if you elect someone like a Republican, you get like a Mitt Romney.
00:28:09.360He's not really coming in and smashing anything that you build.
00:28:12.200He's not really going to use the power of the state to punish his enemies.
00:28:15.120He's a safe, he's a safe, you know, controllable kind of opposition that's not really going to go ahead and mix everything up.
00:28:22.840You don't want Trump's, you don't want Bolsonaro's or maybe even like a Ron DeSantis.
00:28:26.740You want safe, controlled guys who don't understand how the system works or, or mainly agree with how the system works and only wants slight reform to the system.
00:28:36.420And that way, when you go ahead and deliver your talking points and everything through media, everything is nicely packaged.
00:28:41.900You can, you can make guys like Mitt Romney sound like extremists.
00:28:45.380And then, you know, you've, you've more or less controlled the entire window in which the election can take place.
00:28:50.720However, if there is a, if there is an entity that can come in and change the opinions of people can open up the opinions of people and give them information they otherwise would not receive that you don't want them to receive that your larger bureaucratic state apparatus doesn't want them to get.
00:29:10.360If you can go ahead and have something like that enter into your country, that's a real danger to your power.
00:29:15.900And so Elon has this ability to get around all of the power of the state.
00:29:23.380You see, the power of most of these states is diffuse and oligarchical in a way.
00:29:30.720It's a lot of people who are corrupt, hiding inside of bureaucracies and, you know, theoretically private corporations, but all sharing the same profit motives, all sharing kind of the same background as an elite ruling class, going to same cocktail parties, graduating from the same
00:29:45.880elite universities, all reading the same publications, all reading the same, you know, publications and that kind of thing, sharing the same values.
00:29:51.560And so the, the governments there are formed by these people and Elon's ability to break in there is a huge deal because he can disrupt the way that they generally control the opinions of that class.
00:30:08.240Those people usually are spreading their responsibility across that oligarchy that the, every decision they make ends up getting checked by kind of this loose network of opinion making, uh, institutions.
00:30:22.400So you might have Harvard and Yale and the Pentagon and, uh, you know, CNN and all these things, and they might have slightly different motives.
00:30:31.340They might disagree on a few things here or there, but more or less their cohesive class and cultural interest keeps them on the same page.
00:30:54.280He doesn't have to check with the DOD in most cases.
00:30:58.480He doesn't have to check with, uh, Harvard or anything to decide what he's going to do.
00:31:03.760He owns the company and he makes the rules.
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00:31:36.000And so this autocratic ability to go ahead and rule on his own without having to check the bureaucracy to go through the consensus manufacturing apparatus of the global American empire allows him to step into these situations and say,
00:31:52.900I don't care, I don't care what I'm supposed to do, I don't care what the other, you know, reputable organizations are saying, I'm making an executive decision and I am going to go ahead and say,
00:32:05.320no, I am not censoring people in Brazil, I am not shutting down these accounts, I am not handing over this information, and I don't care what you say and I don't care what your judge says, I'm making this decision.
00:32:15.840Now, that's really interesting because Elon Musk is not a representative of Brazil.
00:32:21.460He doesn't represent the Brazilian people, he hasn't been elected to anything, he doesn't hold some title of nobility in Brazil.
00:32:28.140Like, in any way that you legitimate power inside Brazil, Elon Musk does not have it, right?
00:32:34.660And again, I'm not speaking against what Elon did, I'm not saying that he's doing something wrong here.
00:32:39.160I'm just observing the fact that if you believe in, you know, democracy or even the divine right of kings, whatever you believe in, it's very clear through all the political formulas that have legitimate, legitimated state power, Elon is not a legitimate state actor in that way.
00:32:56.960He is a rogue elite who has his own base of power outside the reach of the Brazilian government.
00:33:02.800And he has said, I'm going to go ahead and make a decision on what the constitution of Brazil means and what the Brazilian people want, and I'm going to enforce that decision on my platform.
00:33:16.620Now, again, I'm not on the side of the Brazilian Supreme Court here at all, but if there's one organization that has the right to adjudicate what the constitution of Brazil means or what the Brazilian people means or, you know, want, then you would think it would be like the president of Brazil or it would be the Supreme Court of Brazil.
00:33:37.860But instead, it's actually Elon Musk who gets to go ahead and step in.
00:33:42.400And that's a big threat to political power.
00:33:44.540That's a big threat to break the monopoly that these bureaucratic state apparatuses have on their people.
00:33:54.160It breaks the control that they have on the information, which could therefore impact the elections.
00:34:00.260And this is kind of the big selling point of Brazil's ability to do this.
00:34:05.440This is what the president and the Supreme Court have invoked as their right to go ahead and censor these people and lock down on information.
00:34:12.960They've made the same arguments that the American government is making now.
00:34:47.080There's a similarity in class interests and governmental structures that is adapted to the modern world, the way that we consume information, the way that we understand state legitimacy.
00:34:56.920There has been a particular form of state that has arisen because of these factors.
00:35:01.520And they're all relying on kind of the same things to keep control of their people.
00:35:07.840And the primary thing they need to keep control is to control information and Elon's ability to step in and say, I don't care.
00:35:16.820Like, I don't care what the consensus among the legitimating organizations is.
00:35:21.560I don't care what, you know, the even the formal government apparatus says.
00:35:26.020I'm just going to make this decision because I think that free speech is good and I think you're denying it to people and I think this is what's good for the people of Brazil.
00:35:35.400And I'm going to act unilaterally as like an information dictator to come in there and ironically, you know, as a dictator, free the speech of these people you're trying to oppress.
00:35:47.020And to be clear, this is exactly the kind of thing that the United States has done through social media platforms.
00:35:53.420And, you know, intelligence agencies have done using information to get rid of people they didn't like, to get rid of governments and regimes they didn't like.
00:36:01.760They did exactly this kind of thing where they they went in and they said, well, we're going to go ahead and free up the lines of communication and information.
00:36:08.840And that's going to allow people who otherwise would not get a hearing, you know, say to come in and speak their mind.
00:36:14.660And that's that that's going to allow people, you know, to free up and voice their opposition.
00:36:19.120And this is going to change the way that elections work inside, you know, the states.
00:36:24.200And we're going to have a different outcome and the people we want are going to get in power.
00:36:28.140And so Elon Musk is kind of getting to do this, but he's getting to do it without the approval of the State Department, without the approval of the DHS or the CIA or, you know, any other bureaucracies.
00:36:38.720He just gets to act because he owns the company.
00:36:42.020He's the one that gets to go ahead and make these decisions.
00:36:45.260And so the nature of these modern states can't allow this to happen, right?
00:36:50.600This is a huge problem for them because they rely on information monopolies.
00:36:55.320They rely on their ability to control the discussions, to have their democratic elections inside very specific and small frames where you're not actually allowed to have any real oppositional positions.
00:37:08.720Right. It's just you can choose from Pepsi or Coke, but that's it.
00:37:13.640We're definitely not going to talk about, you know, RC Kohler or anything else.
00:37:16.860And so there's a very limited range of acceptable opinion and people that can go ahead and run against the government because they're never really running against the government.
00:37:25.500And so Elon's ability to break that monopoly is is very powerful.
00:37:29.680And of course, the United States is watching all of this stuff because all of this is like a test case for what could possibly happen here.
00:37:37.760We know how, you know, how tight the intelligence agencies were, how they were working with social media companies, including Twitter, because of the Twitter files.
00:37:49.360Twitter files have shown us how willing that under the previous management that the social media company was was to go ahead and work with all these different intelligence agencies and collude to shut down talk about the pandemic and the election and all kinds of other things.
00:38:07.480They censored the information about Hunter Biden's laptop before the election, all the basic election interference they were willing to get involved in in the name of preventing election interference, because it's kind of in the eye of beholder.
00:38:20.860Right. If you think that having the truth about Hunter Biden's laptop out there could mess with Joe Biden's ability to get elected and you think that Trump is an existential threat to your democracy, then you'll go ahead and mess with the actual democratic process to ensure that the wrong person doesn't get elected.
00:38:39.700Same things happening in Brazil right now, basically, they need they need to shut down the ability of somebody to go ahead and get around the way that they've set up their elections, and they don't want someone like Elon Musk coming in and endangering that now Musk has gone ahead and made that decision.
00:38:57.020But it's very clear that the Brazilian Brazilian government doesn't like this, you know, ultimately, they probably have the ability to shut down X's reach inside their country to some extent, they've already put Elon under investigation, they've named him as someone they're investigating, they've made wider threats to what could happen.
00:39:15.860And Elon has said that, you know, again, they could lose a bunch of revenue, they are all the revenue, they would have to maybe go ahead and get their people out of Brazil, they'd have to go ahead and move their any any offices they have there to make sure they're not in reach of certain legal ramifications.
00:39:31.860And so it's a really interesting dynamic. Because, again, the global American empires use this technique on a regular basis to mess with the elections of the sovereignty of other states. But now that it's possible that someone like Musk could allow this the same effect to happen in the United States or other states like maybe Brazil, that the United States doesn't want to happen, then he's this rogue actor who could introduce this dynamic, basically anywhere
00:40:01.860where he wants. And that's really important, because that means that there is the possibility of true information access, it's not all going to be filtered constantly, there's always this, at least this one pipeline in this really extremely important pipeline that could deliver free speech into areas that otherwise would be completely suppressed during critical events. And no government likes that, that is a threat to their state sovereignty. Again, you can feel however you want about that. I'm not here, you
00:40:31.860know, supporting Brazil, you know, supporting Brazil, I'm not here advocating for their their state sovereignty and their ability to control and shut up their own people. That's not what I'm doing here. I'm simply explaining a dynamic, no state that relies on popular sovereignty, and their ability to manipulate popular sovereignty to stay in control, can allow someone like Elon to continue to act inside their country, they simply cannot do it. And so that's why I think that so many of these governments are
00:41:01.860are pushing for censorship are pushing for the ability to shut down what they label as disinformation or misinformation, because they recognize that the same tools they've used to manipulate other countries could now be turned on them, that this road kind of runs both ways, and that they need to shut this down before it actually impacts their ability to control things. So ironically, in this kind of era of managed democracies that are run by oligarchs,
00:41:29.860a information autocrat, like a corporate dictator, might be the only thing that I can actually introduce real free speech into the situation. And so that's why I thought, even though I'm, you know, Brazil's a foreign country, I tend not to focus on the internal internal workings of foreign countries. I thought it was important to look at this example, because the way this dynamic is critical, Brazil is not going to be the last country to do this. In fact, it's very likely that this same dynamic is going to play itself out.
00:41:59.860in the United States as we get closer to election time. And so I think that this is going to matter a lot. Now, obviously, in the United States, things are very different. The level of manipulation is not quite the same. And we have a conservative Supreme Court, you know, the dynamics don't work exactly the same. But the same tactics, the same scaring people about misinformation,
00:42:29.860around this, what was an illusion of free speech, right? Like, I'm sure people in Brazil kind of thought to some extent, they had free speech. Maybe they don't. Again, I'm not an expert there. But in the United States, for sure, the illusion of choice needs to what was allowed, because it kind of kept us from recognizing how totalitarian some things were becoming.
00:42:59.860obvious prosecution of political opponents, the desperate attempts to shut down opposing social
00:43:07.020media, these kind of things. This is a regular thing now in places that called themselves
00:43:11.240democracies, people who bought into this idea that popular sovereignty and the will of the people was
00:43:16.560going to determine who's in charge. And that's what gave you legitimacy. All of those places are
00:43:20.940kind of simultaneously trying to control information. And that's because they understand
00:43:26.620that information is really what controls election. And so they're making sure to make those changes
00:43:32.380now so that they don't end up in a scenario where another Trump or another Bolsonaro or some other
00:43:39.120kind of more right-wing populace gets into power and starts dismantling the bureaucracies that they
00:43:45.020use to control this system. And that's very important to them. All right, guys. So let's go
00:43:51.840ahead and take a look at the questions of the people over here real quick.
00:43:56.620All right. Sorry, I'm going to mispronounce this here. Lavasir. I'll go with that. What if Google
00:44:10.520went to war with France? I mean, this is a constant problem that's going to continue to exist. Anyone
00:44:18.520who's not aligned with kind of the global consensus, especially the global American consensus, is going
00:44:25.720to end up in a real battle. And so you're going to have these corporations engaging in lawfare if they
00:44:35.200stand out. Now, most of these corporations are on the side of this thing. In fact, most of them are
00:44:38.760central to this control. So that's why Elon having this one node is really important because you're not
00:44:45.760really seeing Google actually battle very many of these places. In fact, they're willing to go ahead
00:44:53.200and capitulate to the demands of something like Brazil because in large part, they agree. They
00:44:57.440also don't want to see someone like Trump or Bolsonaro get elected. But there is this real
00:45:02.440dynamic where the corporation has, if it's run properly, if it has someone who can kind of take
00:45:11.100total control and make those immediate decisions and not bow to kind of the machine, does have the
00:45:16.920ability to break through and in a way make an information war on those states. And that is a
00:45:23.100very interesting dynamic that we're seeing now. Because again, it can happen with a push of a
00:45:27.240button. You don't have to land your gunboat. You can just go ahead and have people log on. And that
00:45:33.420can totally change the way that elections go and therefore the way that people see the legitimacy of
00:45:38.500your government. Kripper Weirder says, did you hear the French, the Fresh Prince theme? It's a little
00:45:43.620bit scuffed, almost like it's being remixed or degraded. Yeah, we're, again, I think that
00:45:50.460Academic Agent is correct. That's what he's referencing, Academic Agent's famous return to
00:45:55.180Fresh Prince. I think he's correct that to some extent that the left would like to do this. But
00:45:59.700like I said, I just don't think that's happening. Now, I don't know how events in Brazil really play
00:46:04.540into that theory. But I just would say that I think that they would like the containment to return if
00:46:12.140they could get it. The problem is that their vanguard is too rabid. They bought in to the
00:46:17.640cool, you know, they drink the Kool-Aid. They really believe in a lot of things that they believe.
00:46:22.100And I think some of the sheen has come off their kind of containment system. I think that,
00:46:29.540you know, the way that they've pushed things too much with Trump and Bolsonaro and others
00:46:34.340has made it clear to people what's going on. And some percentage of the people aren't just going to
00:46:39.620go back to pretending like everything is fine, even if they did try to pull the containment thing.
00:46:44.580Though, I'm sure that that would be a better move if they could.
00:46:49.140Let's see. Friendly says, I've gotten two interviews through New Founding. It's legit.
00:46:53.700Sign up. Also, FYI, it's not backslash. Yeah, sorry. I did say backslash in that commercial.
00:47:00.420But yeah, it's just a slash. It should be the way I should say that. But yeah,
00:47:05.120New Founding, doing good work, guys, they are finding ways to place people if you want to go
00:47:12.100ahead and, you know, especially employers, right? Employees, obviously, they're just joining the
00:47:19.080network trying to go ahead and find a based employer. But employers, it's on you, right? You
00:47:24.160can talk a good game. You can talk about how you want the world to change. You can talk about,
00:47:29.440you know, why don't we have power or control or all these things? But if you're sitting there
00:47:33.920hiring a bunch of people who hate your guts through all of these old systems, legitimating
00:47:39.080the power that the left has over a lot of these things, you're not really changing the game.
00:47:42.840So you need to take you need to go ahead and take a chance. You're not even really taking a chance.
00:47:46.740You're just investing in what is probably a higher quality of person by going through something like
00:47:51.600New Founding, which is going to deliver a far better quality of candidates who don't, you know,
00:47:56.480actually hate your country and hate your way of life. All right, guys, well, we're going to go ahead
00:48:00.120and wrap this up. As always, thank you for coming by. If you'd like to go ahead and get
00:48:05.340these broadcasts as podcasts, you need to go ahead and go to the Ora McIntyre show on your
00:48:09.620favorite podcast platform and subscribe there. And of course, if you haven't subscribed to the
00:48:13.260YouTube channel, you need to do that. If you do, make sure that you go ahead and click the
00:48:17.940notifications and the bell and everything so that you know when these streams go live.
00:48:22.160And of course, if you'd like to understand even in even more depth what's happening with our
00:48:27.300managerial elite, what's happening with the bureaucratic class and the way that they are
00:48:31.360now controlling our governments, you need to go ahead and get my book, The Total State,
00:48:35.640which is coming out May 7th. You can preorder that in places like Amazon, Barnes and Noble,
00:48:40.320Books a Million. Large retailers usually have the link there for you to do that. All right,
00:48:45.060guys, thank you once again for coming by. And as always, I'll talk to you next time.