The Auron MacIntyre Show - Elon Musk Battles Brazil Over Free Speech ｜ 4⧸8⧸24

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00:00:30.280 Hey everybody, how's it going?

00:00:32.540 Thanks for joining me this afternoon.

00:00:34.380 I am Oren McIntyre.

00:00:37.120 So, very interesting development with Elon Musk and Twitter, or X as he calls it now.

00:00:43.720 I'm never calling it X. Sorry, it's Twitter.

00:00:46.460 It's always going to be Twitter to me.

00:00:48.420 But of course, we know that Twitter is a really interesting social media platform.

00:00:53.440 Social media platforms are very powerful tools.

00:00:56.180 They've changed the way that our elections work.

00:00:58.580 They have changed the way that we think about our leaders getting put into office.

00:01:04.520 But X particular has a way of changing political opinion.

00:01:10.640 Facebook, Instagram, all of these things matter.

00:01:13.340 But 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.

00:01:25.400 In 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.

00:01:39.020 And 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.

00:01:52.720 However, Elon Musk taking over this platform seems to have said a lot of these people spinning out of control.

00:02:00.160 They're very worried about the fact that Elon seems to not always dance to the tune that they're playing.

00:02:06.340 And this means that they can't reliably use X as a way to leverage their position.

00:02:12.300 In fact, their opponents might have access to this.

00:02:15.900 And this seems to have come to a head in the country of Brazil.

00:02:19.480 Brazil 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.

00:02:29.420 And so, they've gotten to a legal battle with Elon Musk.

00:02:32.600 They put him under investigation.

00:02:34.200 They've made threats to him that he needs to go ahead and let them censor the platform.

00:02:39.480 But it looks like Elon Musk is refusing.

00:02:41.500 Now, we're going to talk about the history behind that.

00:02:43.960 But 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.

00:02:55.340 Because Brazil's situation is interesting.

00:02:58.420 But I think for us in the United States, the far more interesting implications are what this means going forward for social media and elections.

00:03:07.920 Because 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.

00:03:19.480 So, we're going to dive into all this, guys.

00:03:21.540 But before we do, let's go ahead and hear a little bit about ISI.

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00:04:51.740 All right.

00:04:52.600 So to understand this, I think first we need a little bit of context.

00:04:56.360 Now, 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.

00:05:05.700 But 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.

00:05:19.060 So in Brazil, obviously, you have you had the Bolsonaro election and Bolsonaro had a lot of news media around him.

00:05:29.120 A lot of people whinging about him, very concerned because he was supposed to be the Trump of Brazil.

00:05:35.460 He was supposed to be this guy who was coming in.

00:05:38.180 He had the populist wave.

00:05:40.360 He was going to challenge the status quo.

00:05:42.440 He was very good on social media.

00:05:44.680 He made a lot of bombastic statements that scared the institutions and the establishment there.

00:05:51.100 And he was running against a guy named Lulu da Silva.

00:05:54.500 Now, Lulu had been president of Brazil, I believe, twice already.

00:05:59.940 And he was actually running for his his election in prison because he had been indicted on a money laundering scam.

00:06:10.540 Apparently, there were a lot.

00:06:12.500 There's a lot of collusion inside the Brazilian government.

00:06:16.720 A lot of people siphoning off money, especially from the state's gasoline development.

00:06:22.460 It's oil business.

00:06:23.940 And so he had been indicted and had actually been charged with this.

00:06:29.580 He 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.

00:06:43.340 Now, he lost to Bolsonaro.

00:06:46.280 Bolsonaro won their first election.

00:06:48.340 And Bolsonaro ends up coming in, again, feeling a lot of pressure for being the Trump of Brazil there.

00:06:56.040 A lot of people worry that he's going to dismantle the bureaucracy.

00:07:00.180 And you'll see a lot of themes here between the United States and Brazil.

00:07:04.460 There's an entrenched bureaucratic system that's tied heavily to one party.

00:07:09.480 That party seems to stay in power forever.

00:07:12.560 And Bolsonaro ends up taking over.

00:07:16.720 He wants to dismantle many parts of that bureaucracy that is portrayed by the media as a danger to the state.

00:07:25.800 He's trying to get rid of all the restrictions that are placed on the private sector.

00:07:31.240 He's trying to sell off Brazil, this kind of thing.

00:07:33.980 When 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.

00:07:43.680 Either 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.

00:07:55.640 Now, Bolsonaro ends up losing to Lula in the 2022 election.

00:08:04.680 You may have seen the famous picture of Bolsonaro eating a bowl of KFC in defeat after kind of basically fleeing that situation.

00:08:14.280 He lost and there was a lot of accusations of voter fraud, a lot of accusations that the that the election was not legitimate.

00:08:23.620 The Supreme Court was helping to put their thumb on the scales because they didn't like Bolsonaro.

00:08:28.200 And 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.

00:08:43.200 And so Bolsonaro ends up getting forced out.

00:08:46.620 And since then, the government has basically recognized that they don't want social media to be a weapon against them.

00:08:54.720 They want to make sure that going forward, another Bolsonaro can't happen.

00:08:59.440 They 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.

00:09:09.960 They want to make sure that none of that can happen again.

00:09:13.300 And 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.

00:09:21.860 And one of the justices on the main Supreme Court also oversees the electoral Supreme Court.

00:09:27.960 Again, I'm not pretending to be any kind of expert on on their system.

00:09:33.500 I'm just trying to give you a general idea of the way this is set up.

00:09:37.460 And 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.

00:09:58.640 So they can go ahead and make sure that no one is making any plans or saying, you know, saying anything behind their back.

00:10:03.920 And 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.

00:10:15.940 But 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.

00:10:32.360 Elon Musk has said that he does not like this.

00:10:35.300 He thinks that this is a violation of the rights of the people of the Brazil of Brazil.

00:10:39.720 And he believes also that this violates the Brazilian Constitution.

00:10:44.100 And 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.

00:10:53.660 I don't care what the blowback is going to be.

00:10:56.520 I don't care if we lose all of our revenue.

00:10:59.240 I 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.

00:11:07.480 I want to go ahead and fight for free speech.

00:11:10.120 I'm going to go ahead and make this decision.

00:11:12.460 Now, a lot of people, myself included, frankly, are good on Elon Musk, right?

00:11:17.320 He's standing up to these people.

00:11:19.160 It looks like a corrupt government.

00:11:21.260 Again, I don't know anything about the Brazilian government, really.

00:11:25.000 I'm not an expert on it.

00:11:26.080 I'm not going to pretend like I became one because I did research for the story.

00:11:29.880 But it does seem like the current Brazilian regime is corrupt.

00:11:33.040 It does seem like they are cracking down on the freedoms of the people.

00:11:36.440 The 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.

00:11:49.460 And so it seems like Elon Musk is standing up to a corrupt government.

00:11:55.820 And 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.

00:12:06.460 Now, 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.

00:12:22.380 Now, I want to be really clear here because there was some confusion when I went ahead and explained this on Twitter.

00:12:30.460 There was a big I did a big thread and it went very wide.

00:12:33.540 And some people were angry because they thought I was I was supporting Elon Musk.

00:12:37.660 Some people were angry because they thought I was supporting the Brazilian government.

00:12:41.100 It just goes to show you that whenever a thread like that goes wide on on Twitter, it really just becomes a Rorschach test.

00:12:47.940 But the point is, I'm not trying to now advocate for either side.

00:12:52.680 What 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.

00:13:01.980 And so I want to explain this dynamic.

00:13:03.760 I'm not arguing for state sovereignty.

00:13:05.340 I'm not arguing for corporations having any particular powers here.

00:13:09.280 I'm simply explaining the dynamic that is going to continue to unfold.

00:13:13.040 It's already unfolded and is going to continue to unfold.

00:13:15.720 And I think Brazil is a really interesting test case.

00:13:18.380 And on this program, I like to explain the theory behind behind what is happening.

00:13:22.840 I like to explain the mechanics behind what is happening.

00:13:25.620 And so I think Brazil gives us a good case we can study so we can actually apply this theory.

00:13:31.940 We can look directly.

00:13:33.160 We can take take the things that are in the theoretical realm, the realm of political power and political theory.

00:13:39.620 And we can directly apply them to the things that are happening in real time.

00:13:42.880 And 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.

00:13:51.900 So Elon Musk, of course, is just the owner of a corporation.

00:13:57.800 He owns X.

00:13:59.240 He bought it.

00:14:00.220 He bought it from people who have very different ideas about the way it should be run.

00:14:04.200 And he changed it.

00:14:05.400 And Elon Musk bought it with the explicit purpose of changing the culture of the company.

00:14:10.360 He probably could have spent his money elsewhere on far more lucrative things.

00:14:14.380 But Elon Musk understood something that, unfortunately, a lot of people on the right don't understand, that wielding power is more important than dollars.

00:14:24.920 And his dollars allowed him to buy a piece of power.

00:14:28.760 And 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,

00:14:39.600 he 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.

00:14:48.320 And Elon Musk very much understood this.

00:14:50.560 So he might end up turning X into a highly profitable thing.

00:14:54.340 He might end up making Twitter, you know, this huge cash cow for him.

00:14:58.160 But his primary concern seemed to be controlling this flow of information.

00:15:03.220 Taking something that was almost entirely controlled by the left and putting one piece in his hands.

00:15:09.960 Now, a lot of people don't like Elon Musk.

00:15:11.880 They don't think that he's really right wing.

00:15:13.640 I think, OK, fair.

00:15:14.840 There are many things he's not right wing about.

00:15:16.780 They don't trust him.

00:15:18.040 They think that he's actually just a creature of the regime.

00:15:20.820 I would disagree with that.

00:15:21.920 I don't think Elon Musk is entirely, you know, some kind of social conservative.

00:15:26.400 I don't think he's aligned with your traditional right wing political project.

00:15:32.360 He's not going to pass your pass your ideology test.

00:15:35.020 But I think he is an opponent of the regime.

00:15:37.220 And 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.

00:15:50.240 I think that he does have a he does have an opposing ideology, even if it's not a explicitly right wing ideology.

00:15:58.480 And so that makes him an interesting actor, even if he's not completely on the side of the right.

00:16:02.920 He is a rogue elite in his own way.

00:16:06.400 And that's what's really interesting for me.

00:16:09.760 So 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.

00:16:35.920 He understands the critical role again, X, while it has a much smaller social media profile than many other platforms.

00:16:44.100 It 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.

00:16:58.420 And 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.

00:17:08.160 And so it's a very powerful platform.

00:17:10.220 And what we're seeing with Elon's defiance of the Brazilian court is a non-state actor who's directly challenging state sovereignty.

00:17:22.600 You have to understand that this power has, of course, existed for a long time.

00:17:26.440 In 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.

00:17:40.680 These are the three branches of government.

00:17:42.520 And that's all the government is.

00:17:44.140 That's just not true at all.

00:17:45.500 The government is also the media.

00:17:46.900 The government is also the university system, the public education system, the banking system.

00:17:51.340 It's all this other stuff as well.

00:17:52.960 The government is not just the things that are enumerated in the first three articles of the Constitution.

00:17:59.020 And so these new powers have been altering state decisions for a long time.

00:18:06.560 Now, again, even that is not new.

00:18:09.160 Of course, you can think of, I don't know, you know, the Holy Orders and the Crusades,

00:18:13.580 or you can think about the, you know, the British trading company and its impact on other states.

00:18:20.280 There 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.

00:18:31.920 They have been able to, in their own ways, challenge state sovereignty.

00:18:35.480 So this is not the first time that non-state actors have been able to challenge state sovereignty.

00:18:40.760 But they usually had to be really big and really powerful to do that.

00:18:45.540 And they certainly couldn't do it through a press of a button.

00:18:47.900 They 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.

00:18:58.260 You know, gunboat diplomacy works because you go in there and you threaten to blow everything up if they don't buy your stuff, right?

00:19:04.000 If they don't open up their markets to you.

00:19:05.640 And 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.

00:19:17.820 But 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.

00:19:29.520 It doesn't have to be as formal as it used to have to be.

00:19:33.120 And the United States and the kind of its global empire has been using this for a long time.

00:19:38.700 The 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.

00:19:53.900 They'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.

00:20:04.000 I mean, this is fundamentally why, you know, Vladimir Zelensky is in power in Ukraine was because they were able to use these forces.

00:20:11.540 So this is, again, nothing new.

00:20:13.540 And it's not even, you know, the modern version has been around for a while as well.

00:20:18.680 But 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.

00:20:28.520 I don't think that he and the global American empire see eye to eye.

00:20:33.140 And that means that he's the first guy to really step outside of their blessing to go ahead and do this.

00:20:39.400 One 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.

00:20:54.200 Everyone 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.

00:21:08.880 Look, you're against all free speech and all this stuff.

00:21:11.720 And the might of the kind of global American empire, the machine, was going to come down on you.

00:21:16.340 And so they didn't dare stand up against this.

00:21:18.820 But like I said, Elon is not aligned, I think, with the regime in the same way.

00:21:24.340 And so the fact that he's willing to go ahead and take these actions means that the game changes in a very significant way.

00:21:30.900 I 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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00:22:52.180 Alright, 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.

00:23:05.220 And that's because he is not aligned and this makes him a rogue actor.

00:23:09.300 The global American empire has been worried about this for a while.

00:23:12.220 They've understood that this is a very real threat because they have deployed these tactics in foreign countries.

00:23:17.480 They understood how well they could work and they wanted to make sure that someone didn't do the same thing to them.

00:23:23.060 They 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.

00:23:33.020 Just like we're using it to break the monopoly on state sovereignty inside other spheres.

00:23:38.920 And if you need someone to lay this out for you, Mike Binns did a great job of doing this on the Tucker Carlson show.

00:23:45.960 He 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.

00:23:57.340 And for the same reason that the Brazilian government locked down, right?

00:24:01.240 They saw Bolsonaro as their Trump.

00:24:04.240 And 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.

00:24:14.440 The foreign wars, the immigration, these kind of things.

00:24:18.340 At the end, he finally starts to realize that the problem is the bureaucracy, the deep state, but it's too late.

00:24:24.080 He should have figured that out earlier.

00:24:25.660 But hopefully if he gets another chance, that problem will be solved.

00:24:29.200 Point being, Bolsonaro created a similar atmosphere that he was going to come in and tear up all these pieces of state power.

00:24:37.180 And so they both have the same reaction.

00:24:38.660 You 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.

00:24:55.360 Now, you have to understand something about the way that our current system works.

00:25:00.140 We talk about democracy or representative republics, if you're a stickler for the constitutional language that doesn't actually get applied today.

00:25:08.300 But we talk about the ability of popular sovereignty to be the legitimating mechanism for a government.

00:25:15.820 If the people say the government is legitimate, that's what makes it legitimate.

00:25:20.120 That's why elections matter so much, because they carry the voice and the weight of the people.

00:25:24.680 However, 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.

00:25:43.600 That's just not something any ruling class does that's worth its salt.

00:25:48.060 So 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.

00:26:04.120 That's not real.

00:26:04.940 That's that's fake because the real power sits inside these entrenched bureaucracies, just like Brazil 0.60

00:26:12.120 has 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.

00:26:24.600 It insulates itself from the effects of democracy to make sure that it stays in power.

00:26:28.840 And 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.

00:26:44.460 They're not going to have a time to evaluate each issue. Even if they had the time, they just wouldn't have the ability.

00:26:49.760 And 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.

00:26:57.800 And 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.

00:27:08.200 You control elections and their outcomes by controlling the flow of information inside your borders.

00:27:13.960 And 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.

00:27:27.800 Many 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.

00:27:39.160 And so this has become a key to state sovereignty.

00:27:42.720 The 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.

00:27:54.740 And so they need to make sure the votes of their populace reliably fall in a given direction, that they understand issues and options.

00:28:01.700 They 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.

00:28:09.360 He's not really coming in and smashing anything that you build.

00:28:12.200 He's not really going to use the power of the state to punish his enemies.

00:28:15.120 He'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.

00:28:22.840 You don't want Trump's, you don't want Bolsonaro's or maybe even like a Ron DeSantis.

00:28:26.740 You 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.

00:28:36.420 And that way, when you go ahead and deliver your talking points and everything through media, everything is nicely packaged.

00:28:41.900 You can, you can make guys like Mitt Romney sound like extremists.

00:28:45.380 And then, you know, you've, you've more or less controlled the entire window in which the election can take place.

00:28:50.720 However, 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.

00:29:10.360 If you can go ahead and have something like that enter into your country, that's a real danger to your power. 0.93

00:29:15.900 And so Elon has this ability to get around all of the power of the state.

00:29:23.380 You see, the power of most of these states is diffuse and oligarchical in a way.

00:29:30.720 It'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

00:29:45.880 elite universities, all reading the same publications, all reading the same, you know, publications and that kind of thing, sharing the same values.

00:29:51.560 And 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.

00:30:08.240 Those 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.

00:30:22.400 So 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.

00:30:31.340 They 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.

00:30:39.920 They check each other.

00:30:41.180 They, there, there's a distributed understanding of what's acceptable.

00:30:46.440 Elon gets to act basically as an autocrat.

00:30:50.120 He gets to act as a dictator.

00:30:51.680 He doesn't have to check with CNN.

00:30:54.280 He doesn't have to check with the DOD in most cases.

00:30:58.480 He doesn't have to check with, uh, Harvard or anything to decide what he's going to do.

00:31:03.760 He owns the company and he makes the rules.

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00:31:36.000 And 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,

00:31:52.900 I 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,

00:32:05.320 no, 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.

00:32:15.840 Now, that's really interesting because Elon Musk is not a representative of Brazil.

00:32:21.460 He doesn't represent the Brazilian people, he hasn't been elected to anything, he doesn't hold some title of nobility in Brazil.

00:32:28.140 Like, in any way that you legitimate power inside Brazil, Elon Musk does not have it, right?

00:32:34.660 And again, I'm not speaking against what Elon did, I'm not saying that he's doing something wrong here.

00:32:39.160 I'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.

00:32:56.960 He is a rogue elite who has his own base of power outside the reach of the Brazilian government.

00:33:02.800 And 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.

00:33:14.260 And you can go pound sand, right?

00:33:16.620 Now, 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.

00:33:37.860 But instead, it's actually Elon Musk who gets to go ahead and step in.

00:33:42.400 And that's a big threat to political power.

00:33:44.540 That's a big threat to break the monopoly that these bureaucratic state apparatuses have on their people. 0.99

00:33:54.160 It breaks the control that they have on the information, which could therefore impact the elections.

00:34:00.260 And this is kind of the big selling point of Brazil's ability to do this.

00:34:05.440 This 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.

00:34:12.960 They've made the same arguments that the American government is making now.

00:34:16.140 Oh, it's misinformation.

00:34:17.520 You have to watch out for disinformation and misinformation.

00:34:20.540 They're looking to endanger democracy.

00:34:22.900 It's all the same arguments.

00:34:24.480 It's all the same rhetoric because it's all part of the kind of more global managerial system of managed democracy.

00:34:32.420 That's really what's happening here.

00:34:34.040 And so they all are kind of saying the same thing because they're all running the same scam.

00:34:39.240 They're all running the same type of government.

00:34:41.220 It's all the same structure.

00:34:42.900 Obviously, Brazil and America will have differences.

00:34:45.820 But you understand what I'm saying.

00:34:47.080 There'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.

00:34:56.920 There has been a particular form of state that has arisen because of these factors.

00:35:01.520 And they're all relying on kind of the same things to keep control of their people.

00:35:07.840 And 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.

00:35:16.380 Right.

00:35:16.820 Like, I don't care what the consensus among the legitimating organizations is.

00:35:21.560 I don't care what, you know, the even the formal government apparatus says.

00:35:26.020 I'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.

00:35:35.400 And 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.

00:35:46.820 Right.

00:35:47.020 And to be clear, this is exactly the kind of thing that the United States has done through social media platforms.

00:35:53.420 And, 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.

00:36:01.760 They 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.

00:36:08.840 And that's going to allow people who otherwise would not get a hearing, you know, say to come in and speak their mind.

00:36:14.660 And that's that that's going to allow people, you know, to free up and voice their opposition.

00:36:19.120 And this is going to change the way that elections work inside, you know, the states.

00:36:24.200 And we're going to have a different outcome and the people we want are going to get in power.

00:36:28.140 And 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.

00:36:38.720 He just gets to act because he owns the company.

00:36:42.020 He's the one that gets to go ahead and make these decisions.

00:36:45.260 And so the nature of these modern states can't allow this to happen, right?

00:36:50.600 This is a huge problem for them because they rely on information monopolies.

00:36:55.320 They 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.

00:37:08.720 Right. It's just you can choose from Pepsi or Coke, but that's it.

00:37:13.640 We're definitely not going to talk about, you know, RC Kohler or anything else.

00:37:16.860 And 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.

00:37:25.500 And so Elon's ability to break that monopoly is is very powerful.

00:37:29.680 And 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.

00:37:37.760 We 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.

00:37:49.360 Twitter 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.

00:38:07.480 They 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.

00:38:20.860 Right. 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.

00:38:39.700 Same 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.

00:38:57.020 But 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.

00:39:15.860 And 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.

00:39:31.860 And 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

00:40:01.860 where 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

00:40:31.860 know, 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

00:41:01.860 are 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,

00:41:29.860 a 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.

00:41:59.860 in 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,

00:42:29.860 around 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.

00:42:59.860 obvious prosecution of political opponents, the desperate attempts to shut down opposing social

00:43:07.020 media, these kind of things. This is a regular thing now in places that called themselves

00:43:11.240 democracies, people who bought into this idea that popular sovereignty and the will of the people was

00:43:16.560 going to determine who's in charge. And that's what gave you legitimacy. All of those places are

00:43:20.940 kind of simultaneously trying to control information. And that's because they understand

00:43:26.620 that information is really what controls election. And so they're making sure to make those changes

00:43:32.380 now so that they don't end up in a scenario where another Trump or another Bolsonaro or some other

00:43:39.120 kind of more right-wing populace gets into power and starts dismantling the bureaucracies that they

00:43:45.020 use to control this system. And that's very important to them. All right, guys. So let's go

00:43:51.840 ahead and take a look at the questions of the people over here real quick.

00:43:56.620 All right. Sorry, I'm going to mispronounce this here. Lavasir. I'll go with that. What if Google

00:44:10.520 went to war with France? I mean, this is a constant problem that's going to continue to exist. Anyone

00:44:18.520 who's not aligned with kind of the global consensus, especially the global American consensus, is going

00:44:25.720 to end up in a real battle. And so you're going to have these corporations engaging in lawfare if they

00:44:35.200 stand out. Now, most of these corporations are on the side of this thing. In fact, most of them are

00:44:38.760 central to this control. So that's why Elon having this one node is really important because you're not

00:44:45.760 really seeing Google actually battle very many of these places. In fact, they're willing to go ahead

00:44:53.200 and capitulate to the demands of something like Brazil because in large part, they agree. They

00:44:57.440 also don't want to see someone like Trump or Bolsonaro get elected. But there is this real

00:45:02.440 dynamic where the corporation has, if it's run properly, if it has someone who can kind of take

00:45:11.100 total control and make those immediate decisions and not bow to kind of the machine, does have the

00:45:16.920 ability to break through and in a way make an information war on those states. And that is a

00:45:23.100 very interesting dynamic that we're seeing now. Because again, it can happen with a push of a

00:45:27.240 button. You don't have to land your gunboat. You can just go ahead and have people log on. And that

00:45:33.420 can totally change the way that elections go and therefore the way that people see the legitimacy of

00:45:38.500 your government. Kripper Weirder says, did you hear the French, the Fresh Prince theme? It's a little

00:45:43.620 bit scuffed, almost like it's being remixed or degraded. Yeah, we're, again, I think that

00:45:50.460 Academic Agent is correct. That's what he's referencing, Academic Agent's famous return to

00:45:55.180 Fresh Prince. I think he's correct that to some extent that the left would like to do this. But

00:45:59.700 like I said, I just don't think that's happening. Now, I don't know how events in Brazil really play

00:46:04.540 into that theory. But I just would say that I think that they would like the containment to return if

00:46:12.140 they could get it. The problem is that their vanguard is too rabid. They bought in to the

00:46:17.640 cool, you know, they drink the Kool-Aid. They really believe in a lot of things that they believe.

00:46:22.100 And I think some of the sheen has come off their kind of containment system. I think that,

00:46:29.540 you know, the way that they've pushed things too much with Trump and Bolsonaro and others

00:46:34.340 has made it clear to people what's going on. And some percentage of the people aren't just going to

00:46:39.620 go back to pretending like everything is fine, even if they did try to pull the containment thing.

00:46:44.580 Though, I'm sure that that would be a better move if they could.

00:46:49.140 Let's see. Friendly says, I've gotten two interviews through New Founding. It's legit.

00:46:53.700 Sign up. Also, FYI, it's not backslash. Yeah, sorry. I did say backslash in that commercial.

00:47:00.420 But yeah, it's just a slash. It should be the way I should say that. But yeah,

00:47:05.120 New Founding, doing good work, guys, they are finding ways to place people if you want to go

00:47:12.100 ahead and, you know, especially employers, right? Employees, obviously, they're just joining the

00:47:19.080 network trying to go ahead and find a based employer. But employers, it's on you, right? You

00:47:24.160 can talk a good game. You can talk about how you want the world to change. You can talk about,

00:47:29.440 you know, why don't we have power or control or all these things? But if you're sitting there

00:47:33.920 hiring a bunch of people who hate your guts through all of these old systems, legitimating

00:47:39.080 the power that the left has over a lot of these things, you're not really changing the game.

00:47:42.840 So you need to take you need to go ahead and take a chance. You're not even really taking a chance.

00:47:46.740 You're just investing in what is probably a higher quality of person by going through something like

00:47:51.600 New Founding, which is going to deliver a far better quality of candidates who don't, you know,

00:47:56.480 actually hate your country and hate your way of life. All right, guys, well, we're going to go ahead

00:48:00.120 and wrap this up. As always, thank you for coming by. If you'd like to go ahead and get

00:48:05.340 these broadcasts as podcasts, you need to go ahead and go to the Ora McIntyre show on your

00:48:09.620 favorite podcast platform and subscribe there. And of course, if you haven't subscribed to the

00:48:13.260 YouTube channel, you need to do that. If you do, make sure that you go ahead and click the

00:48:17.940 notifications and the bell and everything so that you know when these streams go live.

00:48:22.160 And of course, if you'd like to understand even in even more depth what's happening with our

00:48:27.300 managerial elite, what's happening with the bureaucratic class and the way that they are

00:48:31.360 now controlling our governments, you need to go ahead and get my book, The Total State,

00:48:35.640 which is coming out May 7th. You can preorder that in places like Amazon, Barnes and Noble,

00:48:40.320 Books a Million. Large retailers usually have the link there for you to do that. All right,

00:48:45.060 guys, thank you once again for coming by. And as always, I'll talk to you next time.

The Auron MacIntyre Show - April 08, 2024

Elon Musk Battles Brazil Over Free Speech ｜ 4⧸8⧸24

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