The Anti-Defamation League is an organization that wields a lot of power, especially when it comes to censorship and media. And it has had a big impact on what kind of content can appear on different sites, and where it can be monetized.
00:00:33.400I've got a great stream with a great guest that I think you're really going to enjoy.
00:00:37.660So, I really try not to turn the show into just kind of a Twitter recap.
00:00:42.460I hate it when people are just constantly talking about whatever happened on Twitter.
00:00:45.820However, this week, something really important happened.
00:00:49.560Something that could have far-reaching effects well outside of that social media site.
00:00:53.800And so, I wanted to drill down into it.
00:00:55.620So, for those who are not familiar, there's a hashtag trending on Twitter called Ban the ADL.
00:01:02.060The Anti-Defamation League is, of course, an organization that has a lot of power, wields a lot of influence, especially when it comes to censorship and media.
00:01:11.560And it's one that has had a big impact on what kind of content, especially conservative content, can appear on different sites, different places, be monetized, be present on things like YouTube or Twitter.
00:01:23.920And with this hashtag trending, Elon Musk brought up a lot of things about the way that the ADL might have influenced Twitter and possible actions he might be taking to uncover what's going on with the ADL.
00:01:38.400So, to break all this down with me, I have Matthew Peterson on.
00:01:42.020He is the editor-in-chief over at The Blaze.
00:01:51.020So, we're looking at, of course, the action that kind of Elon's looking at taking with the ADL.
00:02:00.560One of the big complaints that he made once people started kind of having this hashtag, talking about the ADL's desire to ban a lot of people, to change terms of service, to influence who can be heard on the site.
00:02:12.620One of the things, the big thing that he focused on was the way that he believes that the Anti-Defamation League has interacted with Twitter's advertisers.
00:02:23.260He said that there's a large amount of, you know, he contacted many of the advertisers after he took over, and many of them referenced the Anti-Defamation League's campaign against Twitter.
00:02:33.900Even though Elon said there was no real change once he had taken over, they said there was a big increase on hate in the platform, and they were pushing against monetization, pushing against advertisers to continue to support people on that platform.
00:02:50.360What do you think about kind of his approach?
00:02:52.500The angle he's taking specifically is the way that the ADL approaches and influences advertisers on the website.
00:02:58.840This is really, really important, and I'm glad that you had me on to discuss this, because what he's describing is where the rubber hits the road.
00:03:10.740And so, you know, everyone wants to talk kind of in these generic political terms about censorship and people fighting back and forth.
00:03:18.020But the way in which this works economically, right, in our quote-unquote free market, is that they do go to advertisers, and they scare the hell out of these companies, because they're almost a quasi-public institution at this point.
00:03:36.600I mean, so what happens is these nonprofits, and the ADL is just one of them, these organizations, are held up as the arbiter of the standard, right, by which you tell whether something is racist or not or offensive or not.
00:03:50.080And they're increasingly colluding with the government, as we can discuss, but they're held up as the standard by which you judge.
00:03:57.900And so when you go to the advertisers who, you know, who the companies themselves, the CEOs, the executive team, may or may not be very political, but the people who are in marketing, who are supposed to be most sensitive to this, are usually very much inclined, shall we say, to be against Elon Musk already.
00:04:18.080And then the ADL comes to them and starts shouting and yelling and screaming about how terrible it is.
00:04:23.940And then the people in these companies who are receiving these messages go to their bosses and say, you know, this is very problematic because they paid millions of dollars to a research firm, and they say that we should be woke, and people are very sensitive.
00:04:38.700Our audience, our consumers are very sensitive to this stuff.
00:04:41.280And, you know, we've really tried to have an inclusive marketing campaign over the last three years, and we've spent millions of dollars doing that.
00:04:49.240And now the ADL is coming to us, and they're saying that, you know, Elon is, this is, the hate speech is going up, and we just can't do this.
00:04:57.380And they present a very cohesive case.
00:05:00.860I call it an iron triangle, actually, like the research firms, the advertising agencies, and then the marketing execs within the companies.
00:05:09.320They're sort of all on the same team, right?
00:05:12.480And the research firms literally get paid millions of dollars to tell these companies that they should go woke, otherwise they'll go broke.
00:05:20.280And then the advertising agencies are, let's just say, extremely one-dimensional in terms of how they think about all this.
00:05:28.960And so the ADL comes in, and they're like providing the objective standard.
00:05:33.480And so what Musk is going to is right at the pain point, right, is like right where they're influencing the money, and they have a tight control over this channel between advertising and the rest of these corporations.
00:05:51.940No, yeah, I think that's critical because, like you said, a lot of people like to talk about this kind of abstract free speech.
00:05:58.800You know, we're out there, we're fighting for the principle of free speech.
00:06:01.740But, of course, as you pointed out in this quote-unquote marketplace of ideas, you have this constant battle between access, right?
00:06:10.620Just because you can say something doesn't mean anyone can hear you.
00:06:14.520And when you have these critical choke points in all of these social media platforms, whether we like it or not, these places like Twitter, like Facebook, like YouTube, have become the public square.
00:06:25.340They've become the place where people regularly communicate, where people who otherwise would never interact with each other and would never run into each other constantly discuss ideas.
00:06:35.480And so if you have access to this megaphone, you have a voice.
00:06:39.100And if you're denied it, then you just don't exist at all.
00:06:42.180It's amazing how quickly I think about some of the people like Alex Jones or Stefan Molyneux, who in many ways just disappeared as soon as they were censored off of these platforms.
00:06:52.320People who had massive reach, massive ability to draw audiences were extremely popular.
00:06:57.660I mean, Jones is still somewhere in the public consciousness, mostly due to his kind of bombastic style.
00:07:03.000But these people, for all intents and purposes, just kind of vanished from the public eye as soon as the hammers dropped on them.
00:07:09.100And a lot of people at that time said, hey, you know, it's fine because these are the most extreme guys.
00:07:15.600They're out there saying all this really dangerous stuff.
00:07:18.280However, a lot of people also noticed this is the test case, right?
00:07:22.560This is going to come eventually for everybody.
00:07:25.180And so just ignoring the fact that they can go to these advertisers, they can go to these choke points when it comes to these different social media sites really makes it very easy to limit the amount of speech anyone can have.
00:07:41.340And I think the question most people would ask is, how does an organization like the ADL or other organizations like it, like the Southern Poverty Law Center, how did they become these arbiters?
00:07:53.780They don't just magically, you know, get elevated into these positions.
00:07:58.100What are they doing to set themselves up as kind of the default voice?
00:08:03.200Because they get selected by things like Wikipedia, they get selected by places like Google, they're routinely used as sources by all of these major credentialing institutions.
00:08:12.820How did they establish that kind of power and leverage inside our system?
00:08:17.740Yeah, that's a great question and one that unfortunately all Americans now have to deal with because, again, they're quasi-official, you know, they're quasi-public institutions at this point almost.
00:08:30.540They're used, they collude with the power of government often increasingly.
00:08:37.520Just real quick before we go to that, though, your point was so important about, you know, the flow of money and free speech.
00:08:43.440Just one example that we should point out real quick is Tucker.
00:08:46.800I mean, Tucker Carlson did not have the same amount of leverage he should have had at Fox News, even though he had consistently the most popular show, because that show did not directly generate the same amount of revenue that other shows, I believe, Hannity's show did.
00:09:05.240And the reason for that is very simple, that the advertisers weren't there for his show, even though, according to free market neutral principles, of course they would have been on the show with the most.
00:09:16.800audience in the audience in the country.
00:09:45.880There's probably better people to answer it, frankly, like the entire history of this.
00:09:50.660But I think that key to it all is leveraging in normal Americans' minds the idea that, of course, we are all against racism, and that is the worst possible sin in American society, right?
00:10:11.880And so there's this fear that grows in post-World War II America as, you know, just culturally as we sort of evolve and change in some ways.
00:10:24.060And people, Americans as a whole basically say Jim Crow is a terrible thing and we're against this.
00:10:29.260And, you know, we want the Civil Rights Act because we want colorblind laws, et cetera.
00:10:35.520And what ends up happening is a real keen sense, not just in elite society, but really in all the aspirational America that, you know, we think that some of this racial is a really nasty thing.
00:10:51.560And we focus on a couple different aspects, right, that come out as, well, this is what racism is.
00:10:58.160And, you know, World War II happens, people went and fought the Nazis, and, you know, the aftermath is looking at, you know, how did this happen, how did all these atrocities happen?
00:11:11.740And so in the American consciousness, there really is almost no society.
00:11:17.440I mean, it's very few examples in history of societies that were so almost open and honest about this is evil, this is bad, and we don't want to be like this, right?
00:11:29.620So it's very powerful cultural leverage in Americans' minds.
00:11:34.020And what grows out of this and becomes sort of monstrous is organizations like the ADL and the Southern Poverty Law Center, which take that notion, which is, you know, deep in everyone's mind, and just use it to start beating an agenda that has nothing to do with any of this.
00:11:52.960And I think that's the simple explanation is, how does this work?
00:11:57.140Well, it worked because people were afraid of being called racist because that was the worst thing you could be called, and that's the thing that would get you marginalized from society.
00:12:06.600And if you look right now, what are the two things you can be called that, you know, are the bad things that we need to attach bad people to to get them out of elite society?
00:12:15.700You're racist or you're fascist. And so, you know, that's what you're going to that's the worst possible thing, the worst possible sin.
00:12:22.700That's what you're going to call people who are your enemy. So being called these names are being being labeled as a hate group by these groups.
00:12:30.340It meant something early on to everybody. And and and that that is the real power that they had, which is real. Right.
00:12:38.500And so what happens over time is and you see the entire, you know, the entirety of elite society in America doing this is they start to realize that's a real power.
00:12:48.960It's a power that, by the way, middle America gave them because middle America was afraid of being called these names.
00:12:54.980They saw these these these these kind of mental stances as evil. And so they they've used that over the years.
00:13:04.120And now it's almost like recognizable, like the thing that they've become, I think, because it almost has nothing to do with.
00:13:13.700I mean, racism is kind of a word they use. Right. An empty phrase. It could be anything.
00:13:19.020You know, it could be any word. It could be an alien language you've never heard of.
00:13:21.680It's just a word that means bad. And they are there to attack, you know, anyone who is full of hate, which means, you know, everyone I disagree with is Hitler.
00:13:34.320Yeah, they've turned into a magical word that can simply be imbued with whatever qualities they currently want to push against.
00:13:41.220And it really has no no tie to any given value or given understanding.
00:13:46.420It's just whatever we can use to other our enemies and justify attacks against them.
00:13:51.640And I think it's pretty obvious, like you said, that this has become the continual operating mechanism by which these organizations work.
00:14:00.680Now, you mentioned this a couple of times, and I think it's really important.
00:14:04.100So we should probably stop to kind of think on this a second.
00:14:07.500You know, these have become basically quasi public organizations.
00:14:12.120These have become organizations that have more or less merged with the government.
00:14:16.060We know that the ADL, you know, trains the FBI on all kinds of things.
00:14:21.400We know that the STLC is used as a reference point by different intelligence organizations and all of these things.
00:14:27.740We know that there there's constantly back and forth communication between these.
00:14:32.680And in many cases, it seems like the DNC can direct these organizations or these organizations can direct the DNC.
00:14:40.360So basically, the ruling party of the United States is almost indistinguishable from these organizations.
00:14:46.880They're not really separate entities so much as, you know, different names for different bureaus of the same ruling party.
00:14:53.820And that becomes a really scary thing because it completely washes over this public-private distinction, right?
00:14:59.720This is a thing that conservatives often hold on to.
00:15:04.460And so, you know, they say at the end of the day, Twitter or Facebook or YouTube, they're making their own decisions.
00:15:10.880And if they're informed by these other organizations, well, that's just part of the magic of democracy.
00:15:15.520But I think you and I know that that's not really what's happening here and that the government and these corporations and these non-government institutions are all working fast and loose.
00:15:28.040They're able to run right past any kind of constitutional restriction on the power of government or the power of any other censorious institution because they can always just pass the ball off to the other branch whenever they're not supposed to do something.
00:15:43.140So if the government wants censorship, they just pass it over to the ADL or they pass it over to the media companies.
00:15:48.360And if the media companies or the ADL want something done, they can then start influencing the government.
00:15:53.920They just move power around and put it where they need it when they need it rather than being restricted by anything that would exist inside the Bill of Rights.
00:16:02.680Yeah, I think that's an important point.
00:16:05.520There's a bunch of important points there, right?
00:16:07.360So one is it's very useful to what you could call the ruling class right now.
00:16:14.280It's very useful for everything not to be inside the government.
00:16:18.360Because, I mean, that looks bad, right?
00:16:22.540You can always, there's always plausible deniability because you can always say, well, look, this wasn't enforced by, you know, some whatever, fascist, communist, whatever word you want to use, regime that forces speech and is censoring speech.
00:16:37.280The ADL made recommendations and it's a separate entity.
00:16:41.740It's a, you know, harmless nonprofit that tries to do good and is against hate.
00:16:58.440And that has nothing to do with us, the government, who also, by the way, was ensconced in Twitter with former, many, so many former FBI agents.
00:17:16.700So, so the problem is they're all, they all agree on the same principles.
00:17:20.560And in the case of the ADL, they work together in a very, in a very close way.
00:17:26.220But what, what it does is it gives it the, the aura of neutrality and because it's a separate entity.
00:17:32.860And what people have to realize is these people are all working together.
00:17:37.160They all agree on the same principles and they, of the same organization.
00:17:41.980So, you know, journalism is this way too, by the way.
00:17:45.700There's all kinds of people who work for SPLC, who work for journalistic outfits, and who are also tied to the intelligence community.
00:17:55.140And so you have to look at that and think about it and think, when has this just all become one thing?
00:18:01.720Like, I look at this in media all the time with certain publications.
00:18:04.940And I think, why don't they just work for Five Eyes?
00:18:08.540Like, why, why, why can't we just have, you know, just give it an agency name and let it work for, you know, the, the actual, the actual powers that be.
00:18:18.800Anyway, I don't, this isn't conspiratorial.
00:18:22.420And what you have to realize is what, you know, Oran just said, look, you can see the collaboration.
00:18:29.420So what, the first thing that people have to do is, is realize these people are all batting for the same team and they're all colluding together.
00:18:37.020And the genius of Elon or just the breath of fresh air, I don't know if it's genius, it's just saying the quiet part out loud is saying, you went to my advertisers, you destroyed the reputation, and you financially hurt my company with what I'm questioning is true at all, right?
00:18:56.160Because we somehow were more hateful now that I took over, rather than we were five seconds ago when we weren't as hateful.
00:19:55.440There's an obvious attempt to get us to implement certain policies.
00:19:58.480And this is directly affecting the amount of money we're making.
00:20:01.780And to be fair, you know, to give Elon his credit, this is a very bold thing for him, right?
00:20:08.280Because the ADL, it's not just another organization.
00:20:12.000You know, there are organizations like the SPLC here that do this, maybe even the NAACP.
00:20:17.080But the ADL, I mean, they specifically target anti-Semitism, right?
00:20:21.740They specifically put themselves up there as like the protectors of Jewish people.
00:20:26.440And so this is a very dangerous third rail for a lot of people to touch, which is why they usually run away from these organizations, right?
00:20:35.140Because they do not want to have any question about this.
00:20:38.560They don't even want the hint of this being brought out there.
00:20:41.740And so it really takes a set of stones to put yourself in this situation because Elon knows what he's going to get called.
00:20:48.260He knows how he's going to be attacked.
00:20:52.460And despite all of the heat that's going to come from addressing this issue, he's still stepping in there.
00:20:58.860And that's where having a rogue elite like Elon matters because he's got enough sway to even say to people who wield large amounts of power,
00:21:07.260I'm not going to be cowed by kind of these words, these threats, you know, these taboos.
00:21:13.220I'm going to look into this and we're going to get the answers to this.
00:21:29.280What's amazing to me is Elon is doing what Republicans should have done, you know, for the last 30 years, 40 years, longer.
00:21:38.260I mean, you think about this, think about how many CEOs were too scared to say anything like this to the ADL or the NAACP.
00:21:48.620Basically, this is racketeering in my mind.
00:21:50.780I've said online, I would love if I was in political office, I would hate to run for political office and for the most part hate to be there.
00:21:57.820But I would love to do things like make sure in an executive position that people go after them to prosecute them.
00:22:06.280I mean, under RICO, under racketeering.
00:22:08.300I mean, I'm curious about this right now.
00:22:11.680I mean, we don't have all the resources yet that we're going to build here at Blaze to do more investigative, but we will.
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00:22:59.200I mean, wouldn't you make a contribution to ADL if you knew that maybe that they could tweak up the, you know, the hate meter and get rid of their advertisers?
00:23:08.500I mean, wouldn't that be the most obvious thing in the world if you're going to try to destroy your competition?
00:23:21.580What do the conversations sound like when they talk to the advertisers?
00:23:24.700I'm sure they have a nice little song and dance between them, but exactly what you're saying.
00:23:28.720You start to show this to people and everyone will recognize it for what it is, which is basically a protection racket.
00:23:35.760And it always has been based on the fact that Americans are so not racist that they're terrified of being called an anti-Semite or racist, et cetera, so that you can leverage that to scare the hell out of people and threaten them.
00:23:50.640And that's, you know, that's the whole thing is ridiculous.
00:23:54.200I mean, the entire premise that America is full of this, you know, rampant racism, one of those multi-ethnic empires in the world that's ever seen where you can pull off a protection racket like this because people are so afraid of being called the name.
00:25:09.460Like, there's, there's, they, it's funny because if you go, there's a, they have a hate database.
00:25:13.140And if you go to the hate database, like, basically every number is hate.
00:25:16.840Like, like every numeral that exists, every combination of numerals is itself a hate sequence.
00:25:22.960And so then you have to wonder, like, OK, if, if, if you could just label everything in the world, like the very existence of people, any of the normal hand signs they might use, any opposition to terrorist organizations, any numbers.
00:25:36.820If all of these are indications of anti-Semitism, then really what you're just saying is basically everyone is guilty all the time.
00:25:44.780And so we just, it's like the IRS, right?
00:25:46.940Like, everyone has probably messed up their taxes.
00:25:49.560And so really all the IRS is, is a hammer that the government can drop on anybody.
00:25:53.520And this is, like, true of the ADL, right?
00:25:59.340The only question is, are we going to focus you on you today?
00:26:02.020Are we going to put you in the pain box?
00:26:03.760And when will you give up so that we can collect our due?
00:26:07.580Yeah, I think that's a, it's a very true point.
00:26:10.460And, you know, I first kind of saw that not in relation to these issues, but just in relation to normal political corruption.
00:26:17.940You know, and how, you know, if you want to build real estate, say, in a large American city, in a lot of the large American cities, or if you, you know, when you want to get a trash contract from a city within one of the big metroplexes.
00:26:39.280Let's just say that, you know, what has been normalized is, is not what kind of hilariously most Americans think of.
00:26:49.280I mean, it's 1930s Chicago all the time.
00:26:51.760And that means that the only people getting in trouble for corruption are the people who the powerful have decided to mark out, as you describe, for destruction.
00:27:02.580So, you know, that powerful factions are fighting when there's an article in, you know, a city paper about how so-and-so got busted because they were giving money to, you know, to build buildings.
00:27:14.720And it's like, well, everyone's given money to build buildings.
00:27:19.060Like, you don't make, get buildings done without greasing wheels in a large American city.
00:28:41.140You're always someone who's going to be destroyed.
00:28:44.480So one of the interesting things that I think has happened here is a shift in monetization.
00:28:51.100So, you know, I'm not going to get too deep in the weeds of, like, content creation, but it is relevant for what we're talking about here.
00:28:57.960For people who don't know, obviously, advertisers are very, very skittish when it comes to this stuff.
00:29:06.140Like you said, they're very sensitive to stuff, especially in their marketing departments.
00:29:09.760They hear wind of this stuff, and they just kind of fold up and fly away, which is why conservatives have had such a hard time getting access, right?
00:29:18.520They have such a hard time getting their message out.
00:29:29.100You can get as radical as you want on the left wing.
00:29:31.020You'll still get all the major advertisers.
00:29:33.040MSNBC is going to get every advertiser they ever wanted.
00:29:35.780They never have to worry about this stuff.
00:29:37.640Platforms like The Blaze, which are larger than kind of maybe the average persons, they still have to worry about this.
00:29:43.320They still have to worry about, you know, they have to secure advertisers basically with certain, you know, they agree with certain things.
00:29:51.680They have to go kind of out of their way to do this.
00:29:53.860And then people who are subject to even the smaller stuff like on YouTube or Twitter, they get even less representation, right?
00:30:00.400They're just like completely thrown to the wolves on this stuff.
00:30:03.560And so monetization is a great way to limit what content gets made.
00:30:07.480Because even if people want to make important videos, they want to talk about important things, knowing they're not going to get paid for it, even if people are like super passionate about it, it's just going to limit who's going to do it and how much attention it's going to get.
00:30:20.420So I think a big shift that happened here was Twitter started monetizing its content and paying its creators.
00:30:27.280And in a lot of ways, that's good, right?
00:30:29.200Like people who weren't getting money for this can start getting money for this.
00:30:32.420But on another way, it opens up another avenue of control, right?
00:30:35.820Because now the advertisers have more influence directly on posting, directly on threads, directly on what's getting produced and put onto the platform.
00:30:44.720Because there's always this chain that's now being linked to you, oh, the advertisers could pull their money, they could pull their money, and all of a sudden, everyone is skittish about what they're doing with that.
00:30:57.320I think the monetization that happened on Twitter is not like everyone's getting wealthy right away or anything.
00:31:07.480But it is the case that I think the principle was really powerful.
00:31:12.580So the first reaction that you saw, I thought was, because, I mean, part of it is just people trying to justify the amount of time they waste on Twitter, including myself.
00:31:29.960The best tweet I saw was someone saying, my wife finally saw my monetization check and is filing for divorce.
00:31:36.300But I think the principle of it was meaningful to people because they could just see what could be.
00:31:46.620In other words, you know, we could be monetizing, God forbid, the individual creator, which has been, by the way, the holy grail of digital technology for a long time.
00:31:57.400It's like, how do you actually allow people to rise in a free marketplace, free-ish marketplace, where they actually get rewarded for what they do?
00:32:07.440Because right now, you know, the classic tale of Hollywood is a tale of all this time is that the creator gets used and abused by the business people who take all the money.
00:32:18.260And, you know, they don't have access to get their word out, to get their stuff out, to get their art out.
00:32:25.320So, I mean, the holy grail of the Internet is kind of like, how do we individually, you know, incentivize these people, like you're saying.
00:32:32.760So I think there's a lot of promise to that.
00:32:34.560At least the principle was out there when Elon started to do that.
00:32:40.340I mean, the jury is way out on what exactly happens, because if it's still based on advertising dollars, advertising has become really a chokehold in a pipeline of information and entertainment.
00:32:56.960And so they realize that this is where the rubber hits the road, because this is what actually pays for the deal.
00:33:09.600And so, I mean, I think about this all the time.
00:33:14.320And, you know, the best I could come to, I'll just reveal, like, my secret plan, you know, online right now.
00:33:21.080One of the things that best I could come to would be, the best thing to do would be for the right is to have a nonprofit that reveals all the worst of the ADL.
00:34:19.740So what you need to do is a nonprofit that reveals all this and then says, hey, fast food company that I won't name that's supposed to be conservative,
00:34:27.960why do you give a $50 million contract annually to this company?
00:34:33.360I can't do anything about the fact that this nonprofit, you see where I'm going with this, that this nonprofit out here is going to reveal, right, what these people are.
00:34:43.960You're giving millions of dollars to people who hate you, hate what you pay for, hate your consumer, to take pictures of hamburgers or chicken burgers or whatever it might be.
00:34:58.740You're giving money to these people, right?
00:35:00.520In other words, to reverse this, there needs to be pressure applied in the other direction.
00:35:07.240And that's what I've come to because I don't really see how to eradicate this.
00:35:12.140And then you have to say, if you're a CEO who's going to hire a blue-haired liberal arts grad as your CMO and then turn around and complain to me about the market and how you have to go, whoa, you're an idiot.
00:35:23.220Or worse, in terms of your customers, your loyal base, you're either a moron or you're a traitor to them and you're just here to make money and get out.
00:35:37.320Yeah, I mean, where is the Republican media matters, right?
00:35:40.580Like where are these conservative SPLCs?
00:35:44.440Where are these people who are documenting this stuff, drilling in?
00:35:47.780And this work is so undone that it's interesting that even just a proto version of this would be something like Libs of TikTok, right?
00:35:55.040Libs of TikTok is just taking the words of people, putting them back online, doing very little investigative reporting or anything, just kind of recycling this stuff and collecting it in one place and applying just the smallest amount of pressure.
00:36:08.620And you could have people who do this, I mean, and that's just somebody who was just doing it in their spare time on Twitter.
00:36:15.200You could have people who do this in a much more professional way, lining this kind of stuff up and preparing it.
00:36:20.700And I think, like you said, that that's going to reveal a whole lot of stuff that people don't want to, which was, I think, part of the threat of this lawsuit, right?
00:36:28.740Because if you start threatening the ADL with a lawsuit and you say, we're going to discovery, how many connections to the American government are you going to find?
00:36:38.320How many connections to foreign governments are you going to find?
00:36:40.520How many people who are funding all kinds of other really shady stuff, involved in all kinds of really shady stuff, how quickly does that unspool, right?
00:36:49.740And so when you start digging in to kind of the nuts and bolts of how these organizations actually work and they don't just get to be this face that shows up every once in a while and says,
00:37:01.580that guy's bad, destroy him in public and then run away again.
00:37:04.240And when these people are exposed like that, I think that you will have, you know, kind of an alternative form of pressure that can kind of bring that back.
00:37:13.360But without that dedication, without, I think, people willing to put together these type of organizations, you're never going to get any kind of pushback.
00:37:21.820And, you know, organizations will be necessary.
00:37:25.300You can't just rely on the random lawsuit or two from Elon Musk to kind of make this happen.
00:37:30.900Yeah. I mean, let's be real about this, right?
00:37:33.740I mean, the realistic counter and everything we've been saying, if you are a CEO or chairman of the board of one of these companies is, yeah, you're totally right.
00:37:42.760But it's also true that my business will be destroyed by these people and we live in a world of mobsters and you have to pay protection.
00:39:00.220But so the question is, is it is it is it the case that there's enough people like watching and thinking about this and talking about it like we are throughout the country saying, will they be inspired by this?
00:39:12.020And will it will lead to, you know, a chain of effects where people start to take action the way you're describing?
00:39:27.780You need one of these guys to step up and he stepped up and he did it.
00:39:31.780And I think there's a lot of room in conservative nonprofit world, in right leaning media to start doing the work to unpack this stuff, because it's interesting and it's it's revolting.
00:39:43.960But it's like the kind of corruption is actually kind of interesting because you start to realize this is the way the world really works.
00:39:48.820And a free market of ideas and free speech is, you know, these people don't even know that word means.
00:39:55.460I mean, they their job is to control speech and they do.
00:39:58.280They do it very effectively, very well.
00:39:59.840So I think we both agree that taking this step by Elon is important.
00:40:05.900But I want to ask you, there's it feels a lot of times with Elon, it's one big step forward, but then a bunch of tiny steps back behind the scene.
00:40:13.480Right. So, for instance, Elon will say things like I'm for freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach.
00:40:18.920And that's honestly the kind of thing that somebody like, you know, Greenblatt over at the ADL has said.
00:40:26.060Right. And he'll he'll say, oh, well, we're all for, you know, making sure that there's this free of exchange of ideas.
00:40:31.640But then we'll see that the Twitter terms of service have suddenly been changed to where people who are no longer commercially viable can suddenly be banned.
00:40:40.700You know, we'll hear about how, you know, we want to make sure that we're going to drop the Twitter files and we're going to show all of these ways that the government
00:40:48.540influence the last election. But we're also hiring, you know, people like Linda, I don't know how you say her name, Yaccarino.
00:40:56.020And, you know, we're we're putting in all of the we're hiring new people to have to have an impact on elections and watching misinformation and those kind of things.
00:41:08.040It feels like they're still kind of going through the steps of assembling the censorship network while kind of also putting on a good face for this.
00:41:17.820And it's kind of like, is that is that him leading with one story and then, you know, complying with the government or in another?
00:41:24.980Or is he trying to, like, give the, you know, the appearance of compliance, but he's actually leading this base revolution?
00:41:32.200Like which Elon is real, I guess, is the real question.
00:42:06.000The good thing about him is just like Trump, he doesn't care about what everyone else thinks.
00:42:13.160And I think I kind of think something like Trump that the problem is that he's not surrounded by a ton of lieutenants or others who even get what he's talking about.
00:42:24.580And I think that, you know, it's almost like every time he speaks, the space opened up by his words and within his own company is just an influx of, you know, your typical blue state Ivy League, you know, smarty who thinks the wrong way about these things.
00:42:47.080But I do think there's a little bit of, you know, one guy can't run all these companies and he gets interested in something and I'll say something and he means it.
00:42:58.200But in execution on it, you know, his attention is all over the place.
00:43:02.500Any one of these companies would be more than a full time job for most people.
00:44:10.400And maybe some mixture of that and some mixture of him kind of realizing, like, wait a minute, you know, this is all BS.
00:44:16.780And then being coy with that sometimes and sometimes being naively, you know, innocent and eye opening and being enough of a spurt where he doesn't care and rich enough where he doesn't care.
00:44:27.240And having these the goals, he does care about, if we take him at his word, are promoting humanity.
00:44:38.680I mean, I don't think SpaceX was just about his own, you know, self-interest or his own self-interest is more tied to the glory of that travel.
00:44:47.140I think he really believes in that stuff.
00:44:48.320So, anyway, although I'm in that realm to explain to him rather than, you know, I have friends who say, no, he's a bad actor.
00:45:26.660And what's the worst case scenario there that he wants to, you know, the thing is, I don't think you can be Elon and be secretly, like, for a lot of the principles that the Borg is for, the ruling class is for.
00:45:45.100You can't say the woke mind virus, and we're never going to get to Mars if the wokeness wins, and actually be secretly part of that.
00:45:53.180So he might be on Elon's side, as everyone is, his self-interest on their own side.
00:45:59.180But I kind of, I am more inclined to take him at his word than not.
00:46:03.300Although, of course, you know, I don't think he has a fixed, I think he's, he's a man on a journey, you know, and I can't take him.
00:46:11.320I don't, he's not my, you know, total hero.
00:46:13.580I don't totally trust him or even see him as on my side if there are sides anymore.
00:46:18.780But, so, I don't, I think we should calm down on the hate a little bit, though.
00:46:24.240And, and more, to me, it's more interesting to, like, we should talk more with Elon, right?
00:46:30.740And Republicans and people on the right should certainly be learning from his example and from what he's exposing.
00:46:36.780And my question over and over again is, why did it take Elon Musk to say all these things that are immensely popular and obvious, and no one on the right could say them, even though they claim that this is where they ideologically stand?
00:46:52.180If he can do it and you think he's a faker, like you said, like you said, exactly, great, then let's have more fakers out there.
00:46:58.560Yeah, and that's the thing I think people really need to grasp.
00:47:01.340I think that last part is really important.
00:47:03.460And I understand a lot of people don't like Trump, they think he betrayed him, they think that he was whatever.
00:47:08.600But the thing they need to understand about Trump, the thing they need to grasp about our moment we're in now, is that both Trump and Elon matter.
00:47:16.200Because even if they didn't mean what they said, I don't think Trump meant some of what he said.
00:47:20.860They said it because they had the ability to do it.
00:47:24.900And we're at the like, you make a really good point that a lot of these people who are paid to say this stuff, a lot of people who are supposed to be key to this movement are terrified to actually tell the truth, actually say what matters.
00:47:50.780And so standing around and hoping that guys like Trump or Elon are like perfectly ideologically aligned with you and saying, I'm not going to give them any credit or I'm not going to push the same direction as they are until they've hit every single one of my boxes is foolish.
00:48:03.920Now, I think there's another side of that where you don't pretend they're your messiah.
00:48:07.400You don't pretend like they're 100% on your side.
00:48:09.980You don't give them your full trust and everything.
00:48:12.100But I think it's really important for people to understand like the value of people breaking and shattering like the edges of the overwritten window is way more important than someone hitting all your checkboxes, but sitting very safely and squarely inside the box.
00:50:17.560But I have to admit, as some of my friends would say, that's exactly what you would tell people if you wanted to convince them to put chips in their brains.
00:50:27.500And I feel like that back and forth is, you know, you see all over in Elon discourse, you know, whether he's good or bad.
00:50:35.680Yeah, I mean, I think you should just launch a butlerian jihad at that point.
00:50:38.660I don't think this technology should exist at all.
00:50:40.660But, you know, I wanted to ask you one more thing before we wrap up, though.
00:50:44.700You mentioned personal interest and SpaceX.
00:50:47.860And I was one of many people who noticed that, like, after SpaceX got threatened with this, you know, government lawsuit over not hiring illegal immigrants or something, which is an amazing thing.
00:51:02.600You know, when they got threatened with this, all of a sudden we started to see, like, announced changes on the platform, on Twitter, you know, things that the government have wanted.
00:51:10.960And a lot of people say, OK, so Elon is really bought in.
00:51:15.740You know, obviously, SpaceX and other parts of his business are highly dependent on government contracts, on being part of the deep state to some extent.
00:51:23.720And obviously, you know, the government leans on him for things like Starlink in Ukraine and that kind of stuff.
00:51:30.560And so the question is, how dependent is Elon on the government and how dependent is the government on Elon?
00:51:37.280And is there a way to even wield power without being part of the deep state?
00:51:40.680Like, does Elon's ties to government contracts and things make him a liability?
00:51:54.780What is that relationship between him and the state mean when it comes to him being able to, like, make decisions and fight back against censorship and other things that the government might want to apply?
00:52:05.400The reason I love that question is because to ask that question spreads awareness about the system that we're in.
00:52:14.200The fact that we have to ask that question, right, tells us a lot.
00:52:18.120And I think the answer to it is very unclear.
00:52:20.520I mean, you remember early on or earlier on in Elon's career as routine for the right to say this guy got all his money from government contracts and government money or is dependent upon China.
00:52:35.400It doesn't say a lot bad about China very often for someone who talks about free speech, for instance.
00:52:40.920That's sort of a was a was a sort of normie con thing to say for a long time.
00:52:44.600I think it's certainly true that Elon is one of the only figures in the world who can potentially compete with or has possibly some power to leverage against what we call the deep state, the administrative state, the permanent government that sort of has the technology that that rules the world.
00:53:10.060So, you know, he's unique in that he potentially could have leverage.
00:53:17.160And so my first thought, for instance, about Twitter and everything else was that they would never let him buy Twitter.
00:53:22.820Like it wouldn't happen because they would threaten what he really wants, which is to put people on Mars and to perpetuate humanity.
00:53:30.600I mean, you know, he's got all kinds of transhumanist ideas that I find despicable.
00:53:36.580But overall, I approve his message because his message is that humanity must live on and that having children is good.
00:53:43.800He's a natalist. He sees that the world could be depleted and destroyed and that human life is good.
00:53:50.200I mean, go forth and multiply. He's for it.
00:53:52.100So so so I thought his real love would be, you know, SpaceX and the the you know, the to paraphrase, like to make a cartoon of the message of the administrative state would be, OK, you know, you want you want Twitter.
00:54:06.800We're going to make your life a living hell and you're never going to get to Mars because we don't want you to have this.
00:54:12.800And we have, as Charles Schumer would say, six ways from the sun destroy you.
00:54:18.200Now, you saw moments in the in the news cycle where they got into his personal life a little bit and then it kind of dissipated.
00:54:25.320I mean, they they after this, like you see this, these these movements in the water, you can see the ripples on the surface.
00:54:33.140But then you see him sort of counterattack or they fade away.
00:54:36.840So they have not like crushed him, you know, in any way.
00:54:40.800But are there implicit or explicit deals behind scene?
00:54:48.860At least implicitly, yes, there has to be because he is inextricably tied, you know, to to to the administrative state and to the United States government in many ways.
00:55:01.820Now, the thing about that is I look at it as this.
00:55:05.780Of course, his interests are are tied up with the administrative state.
00:55:12.320But the difference is, as opposed to everyone else, he is one man, not Boeing.
00:55:19.640Right. Not a large Byzantine bureaucracy.
00:55:22.060And he can leverage what he has against them.
00:55:29.780I mean, that's the thing with Starlink. Right.
00:55:32.280Yes. Is he using that in Ukraine? Right.
00:55:34.500But there just came a report that maybe he turned it off or didn't allow it to be used in an attack.
00:55:40.180And his words, it would have destroyed the entire Russian Navy. Right.
00:55:44.840I mean, so so he in other words, he's he he has the power to say, well, do you want to you want your people to talk to each other?
00:55:54.180Right. And an even bigger one, which is, do you want to go to space?
00:55:58.760Because I still do that. I'm not sure how much and how well you can.
00:56:03.940Right. So so so that's the the really unbelievable power that he has.
00:56:11.660And it's almost as if he if he wants to stay outside of the control of the Borg, he's going to have to barter and dicker and deal with it and fight it.
00:56:20.040But he's always going to have to have a technological lit up or something that they want in order to stay just outside of its reach.
00:56:30.260And as soon as that stops, then all of a sudden, you know, he's in trouble and all he's got is money.
00:56:36.020But there's a lot of ways to deal with money.
00:56:38.660And so I don't think, you know, they might be locked together, a little Sherlock Holmes and Moriarty falling down the cliff.
00:56:45.700But it's not as if he doesn't have cards in his hands as well.
00:56:50.580No, that's a good point. He's got to maintain that utility to the regime.
00:56:53.920He's got to have something that that's over them at all times to kind of stay ahead of any possibility that they could compromise them.
00:57:01.000We do have one chat from the audience real quick.
00:57:31.400It's always hard to untangle these in the moment that that's the difficulty.
00:57:35.580And, you know, like Matthew said, that's why you want to have someone investigating stuff.
00:57:42.220You want to have people looking into this, being able to keep these facts separate, understand where influence is coming from, who's applying pressure so that when questions like this come out, you can say, OK, well, we've got some indication that there might have been pressure here.
00:57:56.960We have some investors who might have been interested in this move.
00:57:59.800We might have had some people in the government who wanted to, you know, you have that option.
00:58:03.520But because our current media is, of course, deeply uninterested in asking those questions, we don't know.
00:58:09.040And the only thing left to do is speculate.
00:58:10.760And that's what's so frustrating for, I think, many people who are enemies of, you know, kind of what's going on here, who disagree with what's going on here, is there's no kind of legitimate consensus manufacturing apparatus that can present a narrative that opposes the regime.
00:58:26.600Everything just kind of falls into this weird gray conspiracy theory area because no one who's supposed to, in theory, have the authority to look at this stuff, spends the time doing it because they're all interested in sweeping it under the rug.
00:58:42.220And I mean, I think that I do think you can see this again, like ripples in the water.
00:58:47.320Like you say, the timing, you can't tell, but clearly there's a back and forth going on, Elon versus the regime.
00:58:52.840I mean, that's happening and how it plays out, we don't know.
00:58:56.460And really what we have to do, what I have to do at Blaze and other entities like it is try, you know, it's an enormous task, but to try to build a media apparatus that really starts to pick at some of this.
00:59:12.380And it's incredibly difficult, and you have to be extremely careful, frankly, because of the environment in which we're in.
00:59:20.100But, you know, discussions like this are helpful, and then there's a lot of real grunt work that needs to be done to move to the place where we can really create an alternative media apparatus.
00:59:32.520And, you know, you'll know you're successful if they are trying to shut you down, which will inevitably happen, and we all know it.