The Auron MacIntyre Show - The Twitter Files ｜ Guest： Mark Hemingway ｜ 12⧸9⧸22

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00:01:30.000 Hey, everybody.

00:01:33.740 How's it going?

00:01:34.560 Thanks for joining me this afternoon.

00:01:36.560 Got a great stream and a great guest for you.

00:01:39.780 Going to be going over the Twitter files, which is still a very much, you know, it's a story

00:01:44.820 that's developing as we're digging into it, but there's plenty to talk about.

00:01:48.680 So joining me to break it down today is Mark Hemingway.

00:01:51.640 Thanks for joining me, Mark.

00:01:52.980 Hey, glad to be back.

00:01:53.820 Hey, glad to be back.

00:01:53.840 Absolutely.

00:01:54.960 Absolutely.

00:01:55.060 So I, there's just, we were starting to talk about putting this together when the first

00:02:01.520 set of Twitter files dropped.

00:02:03.040 And then so much has happened since then, it seems like an entirely different story at this point.

00:02:08.500 It seems like we're going to be getting more.

00:02:10.120 So we'll probably be talking about this for a while, but I guess we should start at the beginning with, with the first drop and kind of Matt Taibbi's original thread and kind of all the revelations that came out with that.

00:02:25.520 So we're looking at these files and this is the release that, that Elon had promised to kind of unmasking the bias at Twitter and all the different things that go on behind the scenes to put the thumb on the sales or the scales of different political networks, different political messages.

00:02:44.760 But it also revealed specifically kind of the meddling that went on and the censorship that went on around the 2020 election and the Hunter Biden laptop story.

00:02:55.180 So I think in some ways, a lot of this was stuff we already know, but what are the big revelations that came out around the censorship with Hunter Biden?

00:03:03.160 Well, this is, this is key to understand, and Taibbi is quite clear about this.

00:03:08.640 He says that, you know, by the 2020 election, requests for intervention to remove tweets, et cetera, from different political actors had become quote unquote routine.

00:03:22.600 Um, um, and a lot of the reason why that's so important to understand is because a lot of the, you know, attempts to dismiss this have centered around the idea that, you know, Taibbi provided like one or two examples of this happening.

00:03:37.880 Um, and in some cases, you know, the, the one examples he provided was there was this situation where the Biden campaign email emailed in and like, yes, we'd like the following tweets removed.

00:03:46.920 And the response from Twitter was literally one word.

00:03:49.440 I think it was just handled.

00:03:51.060 Um, and someone went into the internet archived and looked at those tweets.

00:03:54.440 And apparently the tweets that they want to remove were, um, pictures of, uh, Hunter Biden's Schwanz, um, that had come from the laptop.

00:04:02.740 Um, and, um, so, you know, the, that, that led to this whole talking point about how, oh, well, it's perfectly reasonable.

00:04:09.860 They'd want naked pictures of Hunter, you know, removed.

00:04:12.740 Never mind it.

00:04:13.660 No one is asking about, um, the fact that they, they, they're concerned about these naked pictures being out there would kind of suggest that the information come from laptop was valid to begin with.

00:04:24.100 Right.

00:04:24.860 Um, or there was the issue, which is to say that, you know, Hunter Biden's sex life, you know, it will, you know, you know, this is just an attempt for people to talk about Hunter Biden's sex life.

00:04:34.600 And that's what the laptop's really all about.

00:04:36.480 Well, first of all, no, it was all, it's always first and foremost about the relationship of corruption between Hunter Biden and Joe Biden.

00:04:43.300 I mean, Hunter Biden was making deals with shady Russian, Ukrainian oligarchs and Joe Biden was meeting with them at fancy Georgetown restaurants.

00:04:50.540 And this is all spelled out in emails and stuff that have come off the laptop.

00:04:53.740 Um, you know, in addition to the deals with China and things like that. 0.72

00:04:56.600 So the corruption is, is problem number one, but even if you wanted to focus in on the sex life garbage, um, the fact of the matter is, is that Hunter Biden's sex life was, you know, a matter of public corruption and criminal concern. 0.97

00:05:08.260 Um, you know, the laptop provides lots of evidence that he was cavorting with Russian hookers or hookers that were, um, basically being trafficked by Russians. 0.98

00:05:16.600 And remember, you know, how much crap we endured for years about how, um, Putin had compromise on Donald Trump. 0.99

00:05:23.160 You know, we learned a whole new word because of this, um, because he was cavorting with Russian hookers in Moscow. 1.00

00:05:28.180 Right. So the fact that Hunter Biden is, you know, running around with a bunch of Russian hookers, oh, well, that's not a national security concern at all. 0.98

00:05:35.180 Um, I mean, it's only, only when Donald Trump allegedly does it, nevermind, we get proof that Hunter did it. 0.84

00:05:41.080 Then you get into the fact that he was, you know, transporting, you know, multiple hookers across state lines, which is literal sex trafficking crime.

00:05:46.640 Then we come out with the fact there's a video from his laptop where he is trying to get this obviously distraught escort on camera saying that she, that he didn't hurt her.

00:05:56.920 All right. I mean, this is like just unbelievably, like scary, disturbing stuff.

00:06:01.720 So fine. If you want to make it about a hundred Biden sex life, let's make it about a hundred Biden sex life, a hundred Biden sex life, still national security concern, still, still a national concerning concern, still a criminal concern.

00:06:12.480 And still, you know, something that, you know, progressive liberals that, you know, claim to care about the welfare of women should give a damn about. 0.60

00:06:19.980 Yeah. So even if we're just focusing on the things that they were talking about, still plenty to be, you know, very aware of.

00:06:27.260 And I think it's interesting because like you pointed out so many people, this was the rush, right?

00:06:32.280 This was the storyline. As soon as this started coming out, we got this gaslighting of, well, this is just a social media company doing its job, right?

00:06:40.420 They're just removing revenge porn of, of Hunter Biden from the internet.

00:06:44.180 They're just taking care of, you know, removing something, you know, someone's child from the internet who's exposing himself.

00:06:51.100 You know, it's, it's an adult who's doing so under, like you said, under, you know, criminal conditions and exposing, you know, serious secrets of the United States government or exposing the, the corruption linked to these things during those acts.

00:07:05.420 But on top of this, you know, even if there was nothing there, which obviously there is because at every turn, these people are moving, you know, they're colluding to shut this down.

00:07:15.680 Even if there's nothing there, the coverup is the crime in this case, right?

00:07:19.980 It's, it's the very clear message from Tybee's thread that even though they knew that this information wasn't from a hack and wasn't, um, false, it was all, it was not misinformation.

00:07:32.320 They still actively moved to cover it up under the, the sites, you know, hacked information policy.

00:07:39.700 Right.

00:07:40.000 Well, then that's the other thing that the Tybee's thread makes clear.

00:07:43.480 And actually this isn't, this is also a key component of the, the second part of the Twitter files that Barry Weiss released last night in, in, in several cases, you have a situation here where Twitter is making up policy on the fly.

00:07:55.680 They're bending, stretching, twisting, wholly inventing new policies that they didn't have to justify going out and censoring people that they didn't like or censoring political news that they thought was, you know, counter to their particular interests or their particular concerns.

00:08:11.640 Frankly, frankly, not as a company, but it has like progressives who were running the company.

00:08:16.720 Um, and, and that's, I think a key thing to understand here.

00:08:19.140 I mean, you know, um, uh, Mark Andreessen, the, the venture cap, the billionaire venture capitalist out of, um, um, out of Silicon Valley, who's, you know, a fairly interesting tweeter and seems to be, um, one of the, one of these people along with Elon and Peter Thiel, um, coming out of Silicon Valley that is, you know, sort of questioning official narratives as it were, tweeted something really interesting.

00:08:41.640 Last night, he just tweeted in response to the files.

00:08:44.020 All he said was there was no algorithm.

00:08:46.540 I mean, and that's what it looks like.

00:08:48.100 It looks like a bunch of, you know, you know, you know, 30 something progressives who live in San Francisco, um, using Twitter as their pet to try and control elections and to try and to stifle, um, public debate in a way they think will benefit, um, themselves politically.

00:09:04.880 And again, it's not even like they were like financially profiting off of this and Twitter's been a disaster as a company, you know, financially.

00:09:11.520 And they were literally just using this as a tool to like, you know, weaponize public opinion in such a way that it would advance certain liberal progressive objectives.

00:09:19.600 Um, and, and that's, what's really sort of terrifying about what's going on here.

00:09:23.780 And you see this time and time again about the rot of these institutions, you know, um, what is it, David Burge, the Iowa Hawk has that famous saying about, you know, um, you know, I can't remember exactly how it goes.

00:09:34.280 But it's about, yeah, liberals, you know, hollow out these institutions and they, they wear them like a skin suit, you know, um, but the problem is, is the more that you politicize an institution, the less you, I mean, so the less institution that that power is able to wield because they've become perceived, perceived as overtly political, as opposed to having the credibility and authority on the subject matter that gave them, um, the, the power that they had to begin with.

00:09:59.860 Um, and, you know, um, uh, obviously Silicon Valley and social media companies are no different.

00:10:05.480 Yeah, I think it's really interesting because as somebody who has talked a lot about kind of the cathedral and the, the disorganized, the, the, um, decentralized kind of network of these different organizations that move the same direction consistently.

00:10:20.700 But maybe don't have a direct, you know, top down, uh, you know, organ that's telling them this is exactly what's going to happen.

00:10:27.760 These, these files are really revealing, right?

00:10:30.480 Because we can see, like you said, it's an abuse of a lot of the things that progressives like to use to hide their power.

00:10:37.380 Right.

00:10:37.880 So on one hand, you have kind of this, uh, these procedures that are set up and they're supposed to provide kind of this bureaucratic oligarchic diffusion of responsibility, right?

00:10:48.920 No individual makes the particular decision, but kind of, there's a group think.

00:10:54.660 And once that group think starts and snowballs, it kind of takes over.

00:10:59.500 So what we see with the Biden laptop is once, uh, one or two people have suggested that we're going to go ahead and move forward and censor this out of an abundance of caution, multiple people kind of in this email chain, in this different chain of events, kind of stand up and say, Hey, isn't this a violation of the first amendment?

00:11:17.820 Hey, aren't we stretching our policy?

00:11:19.480 Does it really apply here?

00:11:20.800 But those people kind of get snowballed and it's made very explicit in the, in the Twitter files that the, the big concern was, like you said, not that this is violating any policy that existed or anything like that.

00:11:34.280 The major concern was, we don't want this to turn into Hillary email server 2.0, right?

00:11:39.840 The purpose of this is explicitly to manipulate the election and make sure that a big story does not wreck the democratic candidate right before Trump's election again.

00:11:50.800 Right.

00:11:51.000 That is the explicit reason this is done.

00:11:53.280 Right.

00:11:53.560 And it's, and in the whole time, they're just using these policies that they've turned into kind of a malleable shield to try to prevent any kind of responsibility from landing on an individual person for those actions.

00:12:04.420 Right.

00:12:04.860 And I just want to point out again that, you know, Hillary server was an actual crime, you know, I mean, this is the thing, you know, if they're, they're acting nakedly politically.

00:12:14.580 It'd be one thing if they're saying, you know, well, we don't want this to turn into some story that turned out not to be true that everybody went with.

00:12:20.360 No, the substance of the Hillary Clinton stuff was an actual legitimate concern to voters.

00:12:25.820 It was a legitimate criminal concern.

00:12:27.660 It got, and frankly, if anything, she got off easy because of it.

00:12:30.660 You know, I mean, remember James Comey, you stood up and he had that press conference.

00:12:33.920 He spent the entire press conference discussing about how, why it was so awful and criminal what she did.

00:12:38.380 And oh, by the way, you know, for the sake of, you know, not tearing apart the nation's social fabric, we're not going to do a damn thing about it.

00:12:44.940 And of course, you know, and then again, it just speaks to the whole thing that's driving everyone crazy about this is the double standards.

00:12:50.300 I mean, they're going after Donald Trump right now for criminal charges for what again, violating top secret, you know, document stuff.

00:12:56.780 I mean, wasn't that the issue at the heart of the Hillary Clinton thing? 0.99

00:13:00.060 Again, you know, there are two things here. 0.88

00:13:02.800 You know, one is the, as you point out, you know, the one is it just on one hand acting, you know, nakedly political and hypocritical about all of this.

00:13:11.540 And then the second concern is that they're, you know, to the extent that they even begin to justify this with any sort of like remote policy, they're doing something that is very, very new and fundamentally very un-American.

00:13:23.060 They're using this concept, this completely amorphous concept of harm, right, to justify everything that they do.

00:13:31.640 You know, the idea is that somehow if they let misinformation out in the world, that they're directly responsible for the consequences of other people's decisions.

00:13:40.480 That's not how free speech works.

00:13:42.380 That is not how America has traditionally operated in these situations.

00:13:46.580 You know, we have trusted people and our citizens to, you know, go out there and get the right information and go out and make decisions accordingly.

00:13:52.880 Because very often there are situations where when you impose top-down dictates on how to handle a situation, whether it's COVID, whether it's how to vote, whether it's any of these other things, you end up forcing people into things and doing things that are actually harmful to them.

00:14:06.680 I mean, COVID is a great example.

00:14:07.900 I mean, there's all kinds of situations here where like, yes, you know, maybe COVID was a serious problem for elderly people or people that had underlying health conditions that put them at high risk.

00:14:16.160 It was not at all a problem for children.

00:14:19.100 And yet all of these top-down dictates went around and, you know, harmed children for the sake of protecting a much smaller population of vulnerable people.

00:14:26.240 And that's just no way to run a country.

00:14:28.400 That's no way to live your life.

00:14:29.920 That's, you know, no way to, you know, look at how to make decisions.

00:14:34.100 And yet we are constantly creating these engines of decision-making in this country that take away the kind of autonomy that will allow people to make the best decisions that would actually protect themselves from harm in the guise of that someone else knows better than you how to protect yourself from harm.

00:14:51.700 And it's just, you know, an appalling way to do things.

00:14:58.380 So there's a lot to unpack here.

00:15:00.980 A lot of events have happened between the first drop and the second drop.

00:15:04.940 So we'll break down a few of these things because they're all really important.

00:15:07.780 So the thing that kind of happened, the major event that happened between the first and the second distribution, because they were supposed to come pretty close together.

00:15:14.440 Originally, it sounded like, right, we got the Taibbi drop on Friday and it sounded like we were supposed to get Weiss on maybe Monday or something.

00:15:21.580 But, you know, the story kept getting pushed further and further back and everyone's wondering why.

00:15:26.000 And then we discover that these files were actually being vetted by an attorney at Twitter.

00:15:33.400 And that attorney also happens to be someone who worked at the FBI and was directly involved, as I understand it, in like the Russiagate investigation.

00:15:43.740 And so one of the main things that a lot of people pointed out from Taibbi's drop and Taibbi himself said in the thread was, hey, it's weird.

00:15:51.000 We don't have the smoking gun from the FBI, like from direct contact with the government.

00:15:56.760 We just know the government from other revelations, like with Facebook and such, was meeting with these people on a regular basis and was, which should be chilling enough, but was meeting with these people on a regular basis talking about the possibility of hacks and disinformation.

00:16:10.800 But we don't have like a direct communication.

00:16:12.760 We'll come to find out all of this information is actually being strained through an attorney who had direct connections with the FBI and with these corruption investigations that specifically targeted Donald Trump.

00:16:23.900 Yeah, James Baker, you know, he was also an attorney at the FBI and was involved in a number of other of the FBI's controversial episodes leading up to his, you know, departure, you know, partly because of his involvement in those things.

00:16:40.060 Now, on one hand, you might just say, look, being an attorney, the FBI is by, you know, whether you like it or not, is going to be force you into a bunch of situations where you're going to be dealing with sort of controversial, you know, missteps sort of the FBI has has done.

00:16:53.900 But on the other hand, you know, I, you know, came out last last night, I saw Andy Ngo was tweeting about the fact that Twitter had another guy working there, a guy named Jeff Carlton, who previously worked for the FBI and CIA.

00:17:09.200 And, you know, at some point, you know, you have to ask what's going on here.

00:17:14.060 I mean, I imagine there's more than a few of these people floating around Silicon Valley.

00:17:17.080 I mean, I don't want to sound like too paranoid or conspiratorial, but have you ever heard the phrase sheep dipped?

00:17:24.060 My father, my father was a retired Marine colonel, right?

00:17:27.960 My dad spent a year working for the CIA in Laos before Vietnam broke out in the early 1960s.

00:17:33.000 And what they were doing at the time was they were providing, you know, military aid to Laos in order to, you know, keep the conflict from, you know, in check or whatever it was building up in Vietnam.

00:17:43.360 And what they were doing is they were taking a lot of young Marine officers to do military training and other things they did for the Laotian army and working for the CIA.

00:17:50.620 But since we were not supposed to be in Laos and there were all these public assurances that we weren't getting involved in Southeast Asia leading up to Vietnam, what the CIA was doing was taking all these Marines or, you know, other people and taking them off books for a year or whatever.

00:18:03.200 Like if my dad had died somehow during that year, he was working in Laos, you know, his death would have been officially disavowed as an act of the U.S. government or anything like that.

00:18:11.160 But that didn't. But as it happens, my dad was basically on the payroll of the Marine Corps with, you know, promotions and all the other stuff happening the entire time.

00:18:18.160 And then, you know, after a year of working with the CIA, they just reintegrated him back in the Marine Corps and he did this.

00:18:23.120 Now, this happens a lot with intelligence agencies.

00:18:25.060 I mean, you know, was James Baker and this guy, Jeff Carleton, were they literally working directly for the FBI and the CIA all along, even as they were, you know, collecting a paycheck for from Twitter, which I presume was handsome.

00:18:40.380 So, you know, I don't think these are, you know, paranoid questions to ask.

00:18:43.500 I mean, I think responsible journalists would, you know, be asking about the involvement of these things in that and, you know, what Twitter's, you know, specific interaction with the government was.

00:18:51.180 Was there a First Amendment violation? And it's just absolutely, incredibly appalling hackery that all of these journalists are just like, oh, well, you know, this is old news.

00:19:00.220 This is a nothing burger. This is just about, you know, people, you know, Republicans thinking they have a constitutional right to see Hunter Biden naked on and on and on.

00:19:08.820 When the reality is, is that, I mean, I don't even know what to say.

00:19:12.760 I mean, you can't get a more clear cut case of, you know, flashing, you know, neon sign, klaxons going off, government possibly being involved directly in, you know, horrifying First Amendment violations than what we're seeing here.

00:19:25.960 And it begs and begs to be, you know, dug into. Do we have like, you know, definitive proof of like our worst fears just yet?

00:19:32.420 No. But, you know, there's there's, you know, so much smoke here that, you know, we're we're choking.

00:19:37.740 You know, so we should probably go and find the source of that fire and put it out, shouldn't we?

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00:20:12.440 Yeah, but the problem is, you know, 95% of the press corps wants all this, right?

00:20:17.120 Like this is this is what they want.

00:20:18.640 This is their vision of speech, right? 0.98

00:20:21.620 Like, like, sorry, but they don't give a crap about the First Amendment or free speech.

00:20:25.880 What they want is a information distribution apparatus in which their values filter every bit of this.

00:20:33.560 And they are more than fine with the FBI or the CIA, you know, even if this isn't direct.

00:20:40.000 Like, even if these people didn't explicitly get sent into these positions by intelligence agencies, the fact that, like, their position within those intelligence agencies qualifies them professionally, provides them the essential credentials and connections to get placement reliably in these positions means that their interests, the interests of those agencies will constantly be mingled with those of private corporations, right?

00:21:05.360 Like this this rotating door of the public private partnership between intelligence agencies, social media and all this kind of stuff.

00:21:14.080 So if if what qualifies you to sit on a trust and safety council is time investigating people in the FBI or operations in the CIA, then you're never going to be able to kind of untangle the interests of these institutions.

00:21:27.680 Yeah, no, that's absolutely right.

00:21:30.000 And of course, I was saying all the stuff I was saying about this specifically as an indictment of the press.

00:21:34.860 I mean, you got to remember, we're less than 20 years from the outbreak of the Iraq war where, you know, every journalistic institution, you know, with the exception of maybe a few missteps, but the New York Times or something was screaming bloody murder about, you know, the intelligence apparatus manipulating evidence to march the United States in the war, right?

00:21:53.740 And there was a decades long history going back to the 60s of the media being deeply, deeply skeptical of the FBI and, you know, counter terror, you know, domestic terror operations, you know, and, you know, we had the church hearings in the 70s dealing with the FBI and the CIA's abuses and all this stuff.

00:22:12.180 And it was like, it was taken for granted when I was coming up that if anything, the media was too paranoid about what was going on in the national security state.

00:22:19.860 Now, they have, I can't even begin to tell you, the opposite problem is so much worse than that.

00:22:27.120 You know, I would so much rather have a press that is, you know, too unfair to the FBI and CIA, however necessary some of their national security functions might be, than a press that just never asks any questions whatsoever.

00:22:41.840 And we've now been through, like, several issues here where we have, you know, you know, Russiagate, the impeachment, first impeachment of Donald Trump, the Mueller investigation, and now this, where all of a sudden the FBI and the CIA have become national heroes.

00:22:59.360 And don't you dare question for a second about whether they're manipulating anyone.

00:23:03.320 And the reality of it is just simply that in the last 20 years, what's happened is that liberals have amassed enough power in corporate boardrooms and, you know, all of the, and the government itself, that they now feel that they're in control.

00:23:17.500 So, therefore, these tools went from being things that were abusing constitutional rights to things that can actively be manipulated to abuse the constitutional rights of people they don't like.

00:23:29.100 And that's, and we shouldn't be, we should be very clear-eyed about where we are in this country right now.

00:23:34.260 Yeah, so this is a really interesting problem because we know that these institutions are far more interested in, say, going after parents who disagree with gender ideology and protests at school board meetings or arresting pro-life protesters than they are at, you know, any kind of actual police work, any actual protection of the nation.

00:23:58.260 We see at the same time, this network of intelligence agencies and federal law enforcement that is clearly willing to go after the political enemies of the Biden administration, also willing to take an active role in the manipulation of elections through their own prosecute prosecutorial actions and through their involvement with social media and other actors.

00:24:22.280 And so that really begs the question, what, what is to be done here?

00:24:26.500 Like, I hear a lot of people in the Republican Party telling us that about candidate equality, right?

00:24:34.140 Like, we have to get back to very straight-laced, buttoned-down, serious candidates, the kind of candidates that talk about, you know, tax code and, you know, talk about, you know, the marginal tax rates, all that stuff.

00:24:48.940 And they, we have to stop electing people who might talk about, I don't know, reforming the FBI or completely demolishing the FBI and starting out with something new.

00:24:58.500 How does this get addressed?

00:25:00.160 What does this look like?

00:25:00.800 Is there anyone willing to take this kind of problem on?

00:25:04.680 Well, that's a really good question right now.

00:25:06.660 I mean, I think there are some legitimate candidate equality issues to be discussed, you know, from what we saw in the midterms, right?

00:25:12.540 But on the other hand, you know, if you look at who is in the Republican Senate currently, you know, we just had 12 Republican senators vote for this marriage bill.

00:25:24.280 And, you know, to be clear, I mean, I think that, you know, gay marriage is here to stay, whether people like it or not. 0.60

00:25:31.760 And it was never in danger of going anywhere.

00:25:33.440 But what we had 12 Republican senators do is go out and basically sign away the constitutional rights of a lot of people who are being attacked over religious liberty concerns.

00:25:43.260 And I look at that and I say, I got 12 Republican senators in the, in the, there in the, that voted for this, that they don't give a damn about the first amendment or people being persecuted by their government.

00:25:54.420 That's a candidate quality problem, isn't it?

00:25:56.560 And then you look at like, oh, well, we need, just need to run more respectable straight-laced people.

00:26:00.480 Does anyone remember the 2012 campaign?

00:26:02.500 We literally ran Mitt freaking Romney for crying out loud. 0.99

00:26:06.300 And he was literally portrayed in the press as a racist, gay-bullying, dog-abusing felon. 0.99

00:26:14.300 And these were literally all storylines that were eagerly promulgated by the media. 0.98

00:26:18.740 I mean, the Washington Post ran like, what, a cover story?

00:26:21.260 It was like 4,000 words about how Mitt Romney allegedly bullied a young gay guy when he was a teenager and his, like, family disavowed the whole thing and the guy was no longer alive.

00:26:29.980 I mean, it was just absolutely bananas what they got away with.

00:26:32.720 But I think part of the problem here, and again, this is why the freak out of Twitter is going so, is the freak out of the Twitter files is so pronounced right now among the journalistic class, even if it hasn't broken through the mainstream in a lot of ways yet.

00:26:46.580 And it's simply this, which is that this system of control doesn't work if you have, it doesn't work unless you have a completely asymmetric media information system, right?

00:26:56.900 They're really depending on that.

00:26:57.800 The other day, or like a day or two ago, I tweeted something about firebombing crisis pregnancy centers. 0.99

00:27:03.820 You know, these are the Christian groups that go out and they try and help women who are pregnant that don't want to abort their children.

00:27:10.180 And abortion activists have been targeting them.

00:27:12.720 And I tweeted, you know, something about firebombing crisis pregnancy centers. 0.68

00:27:16.280 I got a retort from a liberal doctor in Portland, Oregon, and said, post one link to a story where crisis pregnancy centers have been firebombed.

00:27:21.920 I mean, are you kidding me?

00:27:24.840 A crisis pregnancy center in Gresham, Oregon, the adjacent city to Portland where this guy lives, was firebombed.

00:27:30.600 You know, I mean, this is just absolutely insane, but I have no trouble believing that this guy, and look, even people on the right are victims of this new media environment where we all get siloed off into their own thing.

00:27:41.380 But it's so much more powerful when you still have these legacy media institutions that sort of set the tone, and, you know, even the gatekeepers, these social media companies are allowed to come in and intervene with these things.

00:27:53.320 And the reality is, is that, you know, I, you know, as a right-of-center guy, I want to know what a liberal thinks.

00:27:57.880 I can turn on the television for about 30 seconds and get a pretty good idea of what the conventional wisdom is on a given topic.

00:28:05.240 If a liberal wants to know what, you know, conservatives think about things, you know, are they going out and subscribing to Claremont Review of Books?

00:28:11.760 No.

00:28:13.640 And, you know, on one hand, it's horrifying that we got to this place.

00:28:17.900 On the other hand, it's also kind of a strategic advantage.

00:28:20.200 We're seeing this situation here where I think a lot of these progressives that are controlling these institutions so tightly are getting completely blindsided by these stories that keep popping up, like the Twitter files or whatever.

00:28:32.020 Like, it was obvious this was happening all along, you know.

00:28:34.720 At some point, you know, it was only natural that some details about this were going to come out.

00:28:39.320 And, you know, they run around like their hair's on fire trying to stick their fingers in their ears and making noises, pretending like they're not hearing anything.

00:28:46.340 So we just need to find a way to sort of, you know, keep pressure.

00:28:51.100 I mean, I don't know what to say.

00:28:52.020 I mean, I feel like basically most major media institutions in this country need to be raised and the earth salted where they stood.

00:28:59.080 But, you know, until we completely break that hierarchy.

00:29:02.200 And the good news is I think that, you know, new media in a lot of ways, you know, shows like this, you know, streaming, getting some large streaming programs on different platforms and things like that.

00:29:12.840 You know, other influential people popping up through the Internet and these technologies are threatening to that.

00:29:20.260 You know, I've been on Tim Poole's show.

00:29:22.380 And you know what?

00:29:23.180 His viewership is comparable to cable news numbers.

00:29:26.840 I mean, yeah.

00:29:27.700 Yeah, it's massive.

00:29:28.760 Cable news numbers, you know, on a bad day, but it's still in the ballpark, you know.

00:29:32.860 And, you know, believe me, cable news companies are seeing this happen and they're getting nervous.

00:29:36.960 And the progressives that really want to control these media institutions, you know, are very nervous that these tools are going like YouTube and Twitter are going to allow people to rise to the ranks and speak the truth.

00:29:52.040 And that's why they're trying to assert so much control from the top down.

00:29:56.060 Well, that's a great transition into our second batch here because we've touched on it a little bit, but we didn't actually get directly into the substance of Barry Weiss's Twitter file drop.

00:30:05.180 So what we learned from Barry Weiss's Twitter file drop is something that I think, again, everyone who's really had an account on Twitter and run afoul of the system knew, but the Twitter vehemently denied, you know, point blank on many different occasions that they do shadow ban to each other people.

00:30:25.040 They call it a visibility filtering.

00:30:28.640 Yes.

00:30:28.920 So when they said they didn't shadow ban, they were being truthful.

00:30:32.220 It's, you know, visibility filtering.

00:30:33.800 Very different.

00:30:35.180 And we see that there are these tags placed on major accounts, people like Liz of TikTok, people like Dan Bongino, people like Charlie Kirk.

00:30:45.140 And these tags specifically label those accounts as they cannot be amplified.

00:30:49.980 They're not allowed to trend.

00:30:51.620 They're completely, in some cases, like Dan, but, you know, they're completely removed from search options.

00:30:55.960 You can't find the tweets if you, even if you specifically are trying to hunt them down.

00:31:00.420 And so we know, again, it's something that anyone, if you have ever used Twitter with a decent sized account and you can immediately feel your engagement just drop like a stone.

00:31:11.720 Like you'll do, you'll just have been chugging along, lots of retweets, lots of follows, and then just dead out of nowhere.

00:31:17.540 You can't get anywhere.

00:31:18.660 You know, this is happening.

00:31:19.820 You're not crazy, but we never had the smoking gun.

00:31:22.560 And now with the, you know, release information from Weiss, we know this is something that Twitter does regularly and it does in a particularly biased direction.

00:31:31.320 Yeah, no, it was really, you know, frightening.

00:31:34.540 So they posted these, you know, screenshots of sort of the command center they had where, of, you know, an individual Twitter account where, as you pointed out, they could, you know, tag these things so the accounts are restricted in various certain ways.

00:31:46.880 And, you know, again, it was really just astonishing to see the media reaction to this.

00:31:51.680 It was like, so, you know, we all knew that they were doing this.

00:31:54.000 Well, yeah, the thing is that we all did know, but we didn't know the specifics of it.

00:31:58.160 The other thing is that, you know, we still don't have a good, you know, clue of this based on Weiss's reporting, which, you know, strongly suggests this.

00:32:05.580 And obviously, you know, you know, we're not blind, but, you know, it would be good to get some sort of accounting to figure out, like, how this was being, you know, enacted, you know, was the right disproportionately affected by this, to what degree, et cetera, et cetera.

00:32:18.840 These are things that actual journalists would, like, want to know.

00:32:21.980 Instead, you saw these, like, most incredible things.

00:32:24.300 Like, so, again, they post this screenshot, and off to the side where they're showing all the visibility filters they're putting on people and stuff like that, had a list for, like, what was going on in the account.

00:32:33.480 And the list one said that said direct messages.

00:32:35.700 And all these people were looking at that and pointing this out and saying, wait, do Twitter employees have access to direct messages?

00:32:41.820 Because, you know, one of the things Elon has talked a lot about since he has taken over is, you know, integrating signal technology and having encrypted direct messages on Twitter, which I think would be welcome.

00:32:51.880 But, you know, a lot of people were sort of, you know, worried about this.

00:32:54.240 And I saw this one journalist who, oh, my gosh, was the Philadelphia Inquirer?

00:32:58.240 I wish I could remember.

00:32:59.700 Yeah, I tweeted something.

00:33:01.360 Right.

00:33:02.080 And I saw this, and they're like, wait.

00:33:04.080 Basically, does this mean that Barry Weiss and Matt Taibbi have access to our direct messages?

00:33:09.360 That would be very concerning.

00:33:11.280 Like, wait, so you're worried about Barry Weiss and Matt Taibbi having access to direct messages as opposed to, like, every employee of Twitter since God knows when?

00:33:19.380 Like, that's your concern?

00:33:20.840 I mean, it really tells you where their priorities are on this stuff.

00:33:24.840 I mean, their priorities are making sure their enemies don't know what they're doing, not about, you know, enforcing any sort of, like, decent standards for free speech or, you know, basic fairness or justice.

00:33:35.880 Yeah, it's Abraham Gutman who, you know, says, I can't, you know, do these people, yes or no, could get a straightforward answer?

00:33:43.260 Do they have access to our DMs as if that's the, you know, that's the essential problem here, right?

00:33:48.680 Not the clear and abuse and corruption, but the fact that, you know, the people who are being – and this is my great – that's what I love about this stuff.

00:33:56.660 It's journalists crying about sources, right?

00:33:59.420 Like, oh, how can journalists be acquiring sources to do news stories, you know?

00:34:03.960 It's just all these people who are so precious about the importance of the media and the value of the free press and, you know, the essential job of journalists going out here and just screaming at their top of lungs.

00:34:18.180 How could you possibly give access to journalists so that they can do essential news stories is just ridiculous?

00:34:24.520 And like you said, the amazing thing that has been, again, the gaslighting of people just saying, oh, of course, we always knew this.

00:34:31.720 We always acknowledged that these people were being banned, you know, shadow banned.

00:34:35.280 And on top of that, you know, this is a good thing, and it's a good thing it's been happening the whole time.

00:34:39.840 Except you can find, you know, you just delve, you know, a year back into any of these people's Twitter histories, and you can find them saying, oh, you know, conservatives playing the victim, you know, pretending.

00:34:49.400 You know, they're obviously mocking people who are being censored the entire time and lying to them and saying, oh, this isn't happening. 0.98

00:34:56.520 You guys are just being ridiculous. 0.72

00:34:58.640 And now they're just saying, oh, yeah, no, of course, we knew this was happening until the time. 0.99

00:35:01.700 We always admitted it.

00:35:02.800 And it's absolutely essential because, you know, liberals are correct and conservatives are wrong.

00:35:06.600 And so conservatives deserve to be censored.

00:35:08.540 Ted Lieu said that directly.

00:35:09.780 He said progressives were right on this stuff.

00:35:11.800 Conservatives are wrong.

00:35:13.020 Conservatives should be banned. 0.93

00:35:14.720 Yeah.

00:35:15.120 In fact, last night I tweeted something defective.

00:35:19.040 The response to the Twitter files with Barry Weiss's drop is going to move from there's nothing here to these people deserve to be censored.

00:35:26.300 And that's exactly what happened in the Ted Lieu tweet is like the classic example of that.

00:35:30.460 I mean, he specifically said it's worse than that because he didn't just say, oh, conservatives deserve to be censored for what they were saying.

00:35:35.740 He said, well, you know, conservatives were wrong and said that COVID was invented and they should have been censored for all their COVID stuff.

00:35:42.260 Really?

00:35:42.780 You're going to use COVID as your example?

00:35:44.140 You know, and one of the examples that Barry pointed out was Dr. J. Bhattachira.

00:35:51.640 I can't say it.

00:35:52.780 It was the Stanford, you know, doctor who was on the forefront of saying a lot of the, you know, and he wasn't denying COVID one bit.

00:35:59.700 He was mostly protesting against its handling of children and a lot of the public policy that was being crafted based on, you know, sort of ridiculous risk assessments.

00:36:10.240 And again, this is a Stanford doctor. 0.90

00:36:12.080 This is not, you know, like some chump. 0.70

00:36:14.040 And yet he got vociferously censored, even though he was right on damn near everything he said in retrospect, precisely because he was going against the official narrative, not because he did anything wrong that was irresponsible.

00:36:28.780 And that is what's really the story here, you know, it's not even about, at the end of the day, about left versus right.

00:36:37.040 It's about official narratives and control.

00:36:41.280 And that's, that's, that's, that's what should really scare people.

00:36:44.340 And that's the reason why the left should, shouldn't take this stuff for granted.

00:36:47.200 And again, you know, Matt Taibbi is not, you know, a right winger.

00:36:51.420 I mean, you know, you can say that, you know, as much as you want, he's just a guy who, you know, I mean, frankly, I hated the guy for a long time because I thought he was, you know, arrogant and mean and everything else.

00:37:00.080 And frankly, he was, I mean, I think he's matured over the years, but it's also true that he stayed entirely consistent on this sort of like, you know, old school left-wing free speech principles, old school left-wing skepticism of the national security state.

00:37:11.600 And he's paying a price for being consistent, essentially the same with Glenn Greenwald, you know, same thing with Barry Weiss.

00:37:18.120 She's, you know, you know, she's a, a lesbian. 1.00

00:37:21.040 I mean, she's no one's conventional idea of a right winger. 0.73

00:37:23.820 She's gone out of her way to distance herself from a lot of that stuff.

00:37:26.700 And there's nothing you can do to convince these people that the people that are out there, you know, trying to be honest and dig in to what's going on here.

00:37:34.380 Aren't quote unquote, the enemy.

00:37:35.960 They're merely people just looking to the truth.

00:37:38.640 Yeah.

00:37:39.120 Well, and that's the thing is you're right.

00:37:40.920 I think these people were specifically chosen because of kind of their middle of the road status, right?

00:37:46.380 Like the fact that they, none of them are flame, flame throwing, you know, right wingers.

00:37:51.600 They're, they're all kind of these people who have established a career and are, you know, center left in orientation in general, but, but have built up this following.

00:38:01.880 And that's been a big, you know, cry from these people too, is it's, oh, it's all these substack journalists, right?

00:38:06.660 It's all these, it's all these bloggers, you know, no credibility here, even though people like Weiss have been, you know, printed in absolutely massive major, you know, mainstream publications.

00:38:17.300 But that's the thing that I think a lot of moderate liberals and kind of the classical liberal crowd needs to get through their head, right?

00:38:25.060 Like, I know some of them already know this, but it's something that they need to learn in general.

00:38:28.960 Their moderation will not save them, right?

00:38:31.200 Like if you're doing it out of principle, then good on you, but if you're there holding on because you think that, you know, oh, well, just, you know, saying I'm not on the right or saying that I'm, you know, I'm consistent on these things is going to protect me.

00:38:44.500 There's not, they're going to come for you again, you know, by all means, hold your principle if that's the motivation, but don't think that's going to provide you any kind of shield against these people.

00:38:52.540 Because like you're saying, we saw a regular manipulation of and banning of people, even if they explicitly were sharing things that were true or things that didn't violate policy.

00:39:02.740 We saw it again with Libs of TikTok. 1.00

00:39:04.980 They explicitly said, okay, Libs of TikTok is not directly violating our policy on hate speech or targeting or whatever, but we don't care, right?

00:39:13.640 Like, because the things that the Libs of TikTok account is sharing is casting a community in a bad light because they are doing bad things and because they are doing it repeatedly and simply showing their behavior will naturally reveal a pattern, that's enough.

00:39:30.500 Even if it doesn't violate the policy, we don't care.

00:39:32.480 We're going to actively take steps to take this person out.

00:39:35.640 Yeah, that's exactly right.

00:39:37.040 I mean, they were literally reposting what other people were voluntarily posting on the internet.

00:39:41.560 And, you know, that was a problem, you know, but I mean, like, what does that say that they feel like that's the thing that needs controlling?

00:39:51.340 It feels like there are certain issues that they feel they can't openly debate because they're going to lose.

00:39:57.180 You know, if we actually have an honest and fair discussion about, you know, quote, unquote, gender affirming care for, you know, underage kids, they're going to lose that debate.

00:40:08.880 They've already lost it in several European countries, for instance, you know, more or less.

00:40:14.500 And so there's this, you know, just sort of panic about this sort of thing.

00:40:19.800 And it really speaks to, like, where they're coming from.

00:40:22.300 They know that the public is not with them, and therefore free speech is something to be feared.

00:40:27.860 Because if we actually have robust public debates about this, they're going to, you know, lose, the power they have is going to be eroded.

00:40:34.780 And, you know, it can't get more clear than that, if that's the case.

00:40:40.820 I mean, if they're actually trying to silence public debate on issues like, you know, important medical issues like, you know, hormone therapy for teenagers or COVID, then, you know, we're never going to arrive at the right decisions, you know, democratically.

00:40:54.340 It's always going to cause all kinds of, like, tension and unrest.

00:40:59.560 And then that's the other thing that I don't get is they think that by squelching dissenting voices that they're somehow going to go away.

00:41:05.640 I mean, particularly in this news environment where there actually are lots of options, you know, in and off the Internet or other things to get the word out more so than ever before.

00:41:14.100 No, it's just going to make a lot of those fringe people more and more powerful.

00:41:18.920 In some cases, you genuinely don't want that.

00:41:21.440 I mean, I do think you've seen a resurgence in a few cases of some aspects of white supremacy and other things like that, because it's been so suppressed on the Internet and other things like that, that, you know, it makes people think that there must be something there because they suppress all these other, you know, perfectly valid things.

00:41:37.460 And the fact that there's no interest in having, you know, I think to some extent, maybe we even need some sort of authoritative gatekeeping, but it's impossible to have it in this environment where everyone is running around with their hair on fire and motivated by political ideology and this sort of thing.

00:41:53.960 Yeah, I think a lot of ways those people are more useful to that community than they are at hindrance.

00:42:00.740 I think they love the Richard Spencers.

00:42:04.160 I think that gives the, I think that gives the journalists and the left-wing NGO complex far more power.

00:42:11.280 I mean, Jake Tapper interviewed Richard Spencer on air and CNN for crying out loud.

00:42:14.740 Yeah, it's got, got itself a contributor contract.

00:42:16.040 You're terribly concerned about platforming these people, except when it gets your ratings.

00:42:20.020 Yeah, no, I think they need them.

00:42:21.580 I think if they didn't exist, they would need to invent them.

00:42:23.620 And I think in some cases they do, but we can go to that.

00:42:25.940 But yeah, I wanted to touch on the debate aspect that you were talking about, because I think this is nothing new, right?

00:42:36.700 Like, I think the reason the liberals think they can get away with this, the kind of kind of progressive Egregore thinks they can get away with this, is that they've done this so many times in the past, right?

00:42:46.780 Like, you smothered the debate, you make sure that the frog doesn't notice that the water's boiling, and then when kind of the inevitable result comes, you've already had control of public opinion so long that you just say, oh, it's no big deal.

00:42:59.920 Like, we saw this again with things like gay marriage. 0.99

00:43:03.040 You look at, you know, the Obama position when he was running, and that is now an untenable position that would get you fired from any mainstream job now, right?

00:43:13.260 And there, it was not that there was some organic movement of public opinion that occurred.

00:43:19.040 They just used civil rights law, and they used court decisions to circumvent democratic will. 0.97

00:43:25.260 They got rid of, you know, you had things like Proposition 8 in California, even, you know, extremely liberal states that still were capable of passing.

00:43:32.420 But it didn't matter, because they didn't care about democracy, and they didn't care about having debate.

00:43:37.400 They cared about pushing agenda forward and smothering the issue, making it impossible to actually have any kind of popular will be exercised on it.

00:43:45.820 And then once they had the feta complete, then we can be like, oh, no, this is what everybody believes now, because they have to, because there's a commissar with a gun pointed at their employment at every moment who says, if you don't get on board with this, then you're toast.

00:43:58.240 Oh, look, public opinion has shifted on this issue.

00:44:00.300 And they run the same game plan here.

00:44:03.000 This is a really old game plan.

00:44:04.620 It's been around again since at least the 60s.

00:44:06.500 And they've been running this over and over again.

00:44:08.380 It's worked like magic so many times, they think they can do it again.

00:44:11.620 But it's that new media, I think, that you're talking about that really makes it difficult to kind of close this.

00:44:16.640 The corner cases are getting more extreme.

00:44:19.300 And the avenues for dissent are too plentiful to completely silence people this time around.

00:44:23.800 Are you familiar with the book, The Age of Entitlement by Christopher Caldwell?

00:44:29.160 Yes, excellent book.

00:44:30.020 My old colleague wrote that book.

00:44:31.560 And it's a really, truly terrific book.

00:44:33.340 It is.

00:44:33.980 Yeah, he demonstrates that basically they've been running this civil rights law game plan since the 1950s, weaponizing people's concern over civil rights that actually advance a lot of things around the margins that were actually quite authoritarian.

00:44:45.440 And, you know, of course, that starts with civil rights in the 50s.

00:44:50.560 And that's how we ended up with Donald Trump, essentially, is this thesis.

00:44:54.320 It's really well written, and I highly recommend it.

00:44:57.240 But, yeah, I mean, part of this, you're right.

00:45:00.160 I mean, it's not just that.

00:45:01.560 I mean, sure, part of this is about suppressing speech.

00:45:04.980 But also a large part of it is also about, you know, intentionally making people feel powerless, you know, making them feel like they have to accept a double standard and like it.

00:45:13.880 And they know full well what they're doing.

00:45:16.540 And, you know, they don't want to confront what that says about themselves.

00:45:23.740 I mean, I mean, this is the thing.

00:45:26.660 If you were to go up to Vijaya Gad or what the woman who was the lawyer was in charge of a lot of these policies or Yola Roth and people that were, you know, most responsible for these, you know, shadow banning whatever policies at Twitter.

00:45:38.480 And you were to confront these people like, look, here's what you did and here's why it's wrong.

00:45:42.580 I mean, it'd be like showing a golden retriever a card trick.

00:45:45.080 They just don't understand.

00:45:47.160 They are incapable of, you know, understanding that they might be in error because of, you know, this sort of, you know, utopian progressive ideology that they, you know, have bought into hook, line and sinker.

00:46:03.420 And you combine that with this sort of technocratic, you know, utopianism that, you know, Silicon Valley has been promising for decades or whatever.

00:46:14.020 Not only do they believe that, you know, total justice is possible, but they have the tools to do it and they're the people that can enforce this.

00:46:21.940 And that's, you know, just sort of terrifying.

00:46:23.760 It's like the old C.S. Lewis quote about how it's better to live under robber barons because their cruelty can be satiated.

00:46:29.600 What, you know, when you live under omnipotent, busybodies, you know, they'll torture you without end because they think they're doing it for your own good.

00:46:37.420 And that's, you know, basically where we've arrived.

00:46:40.200 Basically, everyone controlling all these major levels of power, all these institutions, whether it's the media, whether it is the federal bureaucracy, whether it is academia.

00:46:48.360 All these institutions are run by people that think that they know, you know, what is in your best interest and that they are in a position to force you to accept the fate that they have mapped out for you.

00:47:00.960 And I don't know what the response to that is, other than we've got to be a lot more forceful.

00:47:09.000 You know, don't confuse that necessarily with violence, but we've got to make things a lot more painful for these people that want to do this.

00:47:16.600 I mean, much more painful than we've been willing to do thus far.

00:47:20.060 And, you know, I don't want to sit here and, like, be the guy calling for revolution or whatever, but, like, it's the only way out that I can see.

00:47:26.500 And these people have to be made to suffer as a result of the consequences of their own unjust actions.

00:47:33.100 Yeah, I think, did you catch, by chance, Sam Harris's kind of appearance on Trigonometry, where he talked about covering the cover-up of the Joe Biden laptop or the Hunter Biden laptop?

00:47:47.320 I try and avoid him whenever possible, but I seem to recall there was something where he said it was, like, no big deal.

00:47:54.140 But even, you know, even if it was true or something like that.

00:47:57.160 Yeah, I understand why you would ignore it.

00:47:59.880 But I think in this particular case, it's well worth, if you just want to catch, like, the 15 minutes, it's a really fascinating stare to, you can look directly into the progressive mindset.

00:48:09.300 It's really, it's one of those things where you just need to do the game film so you can understand your opponents here.

00:48:15.800 They're, like, the, like, the theory of mind going on, because he specifically says, you know, the hosts who kind of, they have this classical liberal free speech.

00:48:26.020 We got to, you know, they're left wing, essentially, but we've got to reveal all this stuff.

00:48:30.360 This is their mindset.

00:48:31.820 And Sam Harris is kind of talking to them, and they're like, well, Sam, you know, clearly, if this story was valid, we shouldn't be running, or we shouldn't be suppressing it, right?

00:48:39.940 Like, even if you are against Trump, like us, or whatever, like, you should still allow this.

00:48:45.160 And Sam Harris is like, I don't care if Hunter Biden had the body, the corpses of dead children in his basement.

00:48:52.640 No, you should, like, defeating Trump was way more important.

00:48:56.040 And it is the job of basically good and decent progressives to mold the public opinion and control the information that goes out to the public so the wrong people don't get in charge, right?

00:49:09.780 And I think that's what you're talking about, where you talk about kind of the, you know, that these people, they truly believe in the holiness of their cause.

00:49:19.900 And when you explain to them that what they're doing is a scandal or wrong or a violation of principles, they're just going to stare at you like you've lost your mind.

00:49:27.000 Because, of course, the highest possible principle is the retention of power by progressive forces, because allowing, you know, the right to have any control at any moment will basically just return you to, you know, the handmaid's tale, it'll be the end of, you know, it'll be the, you know, the return of slavery, you know, it'll be the apocalypse if conservatives are in control for 10 minutes.

00:49:49.160 And so there's no reason that you shouldn't do absolutely everything, that you're not morally justified to every turn to completely violate any of these, like, common social fabric, you know, principles.

00:50:00.180 Because at the end of the day, the most important thing is the retention of power to make sure you control these people and keep them from destroying progressive utopia.

00:50:07.120 I, I, what you said in terms of describing how these people view things is almost more comforting than I think what is actually going on.

00:50:17.240 Okay.

00:50:17.680 Which is to say that if there is some sort of higher value that they subscribe to where they're knowingly suppressing things just to, you know, uphold that higher value, that is something that is almost rational, if that makes sense.

00:50:36.560 Like, to have a belief system one way or the other.

00:50:40.320 And, you know, you can sort of recognize that and try and address it and counter it.

00:50:44.080 So, what's going on in the country right now, particularly with the media apparatus and how it feeds this mindset is this insane sort of like feedback loop.

00:50:57.460 So, first, let me just explain.

00:51:00.360 So, in China, there's this weird phenomenon known as internal reference publications, right?

00:51:04.660 Which is to say that the Chinese communist government officials pump out so much propaganda that is fed to ordinary Chinese people that if ordinary Chinese officials were to rely on what they read in the newspapers and whatever was put out for the popular masses,

00:51:21.680 they would make bad decisions because they're not actually publishing the facts and the leaders know it.

00:51:27.200 So, in China, they have these things called internal reference publications where the party in power, people that are the party members, they get actual facts in newspapers that are reported to them and them only, right?

00:51:38.280 So, they can take these facts and then they can go about making rational decisions while they continue to deceive the public.

00:51:44.080 That would be roughly analogous to the vision that you just described.

00:51:48.320 We don't have that distinction in this country, right?

00:51:50.640 So, we have a situation here where we have a national security state that goes out and makes a bunch of outlandish BS, feeds it to the media, which reports it uncritically,

00:52:00.220 and then proceeds to dig in on, like, every conceivable level of this, you know, pile of manure to come up with, you know, more manure that they think supports the pre-existing pile of manure that they can add to.

00:52:13.140 And you end up with this insane feedback loop where they end up believing crazier and crazier things at every turn.

00:52:17.860 So, the reality is, is that they end up with this sort of, like, self-sustaining feedback loop where every new development is filtered through this prism of how does this confirm what I already suspected about Orange Man bad or, you know, whatever the villain du jour is, right?

00:52:34.400 So, literally, like, these people are losing the kind of critical faculties and, you know, basic, you know, sets of facts that would allow them to distinguish truth from fact in this sort of situation.

00:52:46.600 And the only way that you can begin to have a sense of what is true and what is not is to be someone who doesn't, you know, on some level fundamentally subscribe to this, you know, higher value or whatever.

00:53:00.060 Otherwise, you're just sort of, like, completely lost in this, like, you know, insane matrix where, you know, every decision leads you back to, you know, the starting point.

00:53:10.540 And that's really, I think, where we're at.

00:53:15.060 Yeah.

00:53:15.540 No, I think you're right for the most part.

00:53:17.740 I think at some point we kind of had the Walter Lippman public opinion guided popular sovereignty version of this where there was, you know, that they were aware of what they were pumping out and what they were feeding people.

00:53:32.620 But today they are so deep into their own Kool-Aid that you do just have this, like, accelerationism, but for progressive propaganda that, yeah, I think that's an excellent point.

00:53:44.380 Well, the one thing I think that all this does reveal, and I hope this is a lesson that maybe the right takes away for this, conservatives take away from this, is that the biggest victories come with the capture and exposing of institutions, not by, like, getting two more congressmen or Senate race done.

00:54:05.700 And not to say that elections don't matter, but understanding that, like, the GOP is, like, you know, probably not going to get you out of this one and the far more useful actions are doing things.

00:54:19.500 And I understand, like, Elon Musk is the richest person in the world, so it's not like that's a that's a plan of action for the average person.

00:54:24.880 But at least it shows you, like, what is necessary to kind of truly break this stranglehold, even if Elon isn't, like, the perfect guy, like, what he's doing is having a far more important impact on the political situation in the United States probably than the Republicans have had in quite a long time.

00:54:43.800 No, that's that's exactly accurate. And I don't think that a lot of people on the left quite understand that, which is to say that the reason why you ended up with Trump is there were I talked to so many people in 2016 that were literally of a mindset that I think Donald Trump's crazy.

00:55:01.860 I don't like lots of things he's doing and saying, but the reality is, is that he poses a threat to those people. And I know those people are bad. I'm literally like, I'm rolling the dice with Donald Trump.

00:55:12.800 And I know that it's, you know, he's, you know, could be a bad guy in several ways. But I know those people are bad. I know what they've been doing for decades to me and my, you know, way of life.

00:55:22.840 You know, and, you know, whether it's exporting my job or, you know, or, you know, shutting down my, you know, church, or whatever it is, or, you know, targeting my church with lawsuits or whatever it is.

00:55:33.600 So I'm going to do, you know, it was the last act of a desperate man, like, literally, the only way that, you know, populist populism is a resurgent. The reason why populism is resurging around the globe right now is simply because the ballot box is like literally the only avenue that people feel they have left to register dissent.

00:55:51.880 So the reality is, I think, you know, to get a healthier society, as you point out, I mean, I think it's shown that, you know, voting Donald Trump, you know, getting control of the Senate, you know, isn't going to be the thing that, you know, saves us in the long run.

00:56:05.980 I mean, we're going to have to build some more institutions. We're going to have to expose the institutions that exist. We're going to have to roll up our sleeves and do a lot of that sort of hard work instead of being sort of so passive about it.

00:56:18.320 And, you know, that's, that's a difficult message for people to hear, you know, you're going to have to do the work, as progressives like to say, right?

00:56:25.160 But that's the reality. You're, you're going to have to, you know, be engaged in some kind of, you know, probably progressive term resistance. You're going to have to, you know, build your own institutions. You're going to have to reject a lot of this quite affirmatively, not just ignore it.

00:56:43.380 Well, Mark, I appreciate you joining me. We have a few super chats. Do you have time to hang out and answer a few?

00:56:49.100 Sure.

00:56:49.320 Okay, great. So let's see here. We've got the Laureus here for five pounds. Thank you very much. The end of a century of manipulation, i.e. the end of manipulative elites inspired by Edward Bernays leading the masses through controlled media.

00:57:06.220 Well, Laureus, I think we're going to see this continue for a while. I mean, remember, this is not new. A lot of people learn about like yellow journalism and the Spanish American war. And then we're just like, oh, I guess that just went away. And that, you know, that's not a thing anymore.

00:57:23.140 But I think as long as mass communication and popular sovereignty are two forces that are interacting, you're always going to have political manipulation. And so what does that look like? How does that change in the end? Is there can can the cathedral or whatever the deep state, whatever, can that ever have a different message than it has now? Or do things have to fundamentally change in different ways? I'm not sure.

00:57:46.180 I'm not sure what that kind of looks like at the end. But I do know that, again, as long as your legitimating system is popular sovereignty, and you have mass communication, you're never going to separate kind of the interaction and the need for elites to kind of manipulate those things.

00:58:01.260 Yeah, I think that's basically right. Speaking of interesting lefties, I don't know if you're familiar with Batya Ungar Sargon and her book, Bad News. It's one of the best pieces of media criticism that's been written in years. And basically, the thesis of the book is she basically explains the history of American journalism as a vehicle for manipulating class warfare, essentially. And it's really a fascinating book.

00:58:31.260 And that that really goes through a lot of this. But I think obviously, if you look at like history of the history of journalism in America, at least, you see these periods where, yeah, there were always manipulative elites in the news business. And that's just the nature of the beasts. It's fundamentally human society. But there were definitely periods where things were more in balance than they have been now. Or, you know, say, when they were around the 10th and the turn of the century, and at the height of turn of the 20th century, the height of yellow journalism, etc.

00:59:00.640 So you go in and out of these periods or whatever. And I think a stable society is dependent on being able to, you know, course correct when, you know, inevitably, you stray off into excesses. And I would say, you know, I don't know, maybe I'm just being paranoid. You know, certainly I didn't live through the 60s.

00:59:18.080 You know, I didn't live through the civil war or anything like that. But I would say America has been pretty darn good at, you know, course correcting, even a great sacrifice throughout its history.

00:59:31.200 The question is now, with a whole new kind of control that exists in an entirely new digital realm, that's this mass psychological experiment that's heretofore unprecedented, whether or not we're going to have the gumption and fortitude to find the ways necessary to push back against this new form of manipulative elite manipulation is really the question right now.

00:59:58.980 Yeah, I mean, I guess there's a there's a deeper discussion to have there about how we course corrected, I would say that in a lot of ways, our course corrections, we're usually pushing the problem down the line.

01:00:09.980 More than anything else, but but that's a that's perhaps its own podcast all to itself.

01:00:16.220 Your point.

01:00:17.980 Yeah. But, but I think you're right that it's, we've never had this level of ability to deliver mass propaganda this way.

01:00:30.780 And that fundamentally alters the relationship with leaders and the lead.

01:00:36.460 And the question is, is really, like you said, will we have the ability, will we have the fortitude to find a way to forge a new way or to control that or to provide enough perspective or freedom or whatever the the admixture is that kind of allows popular sovereignty and mass media to interact?

01:00:57.620 Or will that require kind of a reform or removal of one of those two aspects, because I, I am interested, this seems to be a recurring theme, no matter where we're at, whether you see, you know, the Nazi Germany or you see, you know, the Soviet Union or you see American mass media.

01:01:17.620 Even though these are very different systems at the end of the day, centralized mass communication and kind of this in this kind of managerial leviathan seems to be a key part of like modern governance.

01:01:30.620 And I don't know if those things can be separated.

01:01:32.620 I don't know what would separate them.

01:01:34.620 It's a huge problem.

01:01:36.620 Yeah, that's the key distinction.

01:01:37.620 I think the sort of managerial elite problem, which is something that the left has just weirdly stopped caring about.

01:01:43.620 Like they took this scream bloody murder about inequality in terms of things like wealth, right?

01:01:48.620 Well, look, I don't give a damn with Jeff Bezos makes $100 billion and built a disgustingly opulent 20,000 square foot house in the suburbs of Seattle.

01:01:57.620 That doesn't affect me.

01:01:58.620 When Jeff Bezos buys one of the nation's largest newspaper and that nation's largest newspaper hires someone like Taylor Lorenz, who's a hack that goes around basically harassing people and who's obviously mentally unstable and no one does anything about it.

01:02:11.620 Well, then I care what Jeff Bezos is doing to me and how he reports on the issues that fundamentally affect my life.

01:02:17.620 And that's that's the real issue here.

01:02:20.620 And it's really just sort of like fascinating how easy some the percentage of the left is able to be bought off.

01:02:29.620 I mean, you know, Bill Gates throws all this money at all these progressive causes and like no one cares how many trips he took on Epstein's plane.

01:02:37.620 It's really just appalling that no one actually cares about the conduct of or the like the unequal distribution of power.

01:02:46.620 So, you know, as as based on wealth, as opposed to just the wealth itself.

01:02:51.620 And I think that is especially true in the media sphere where so much when I was in college studying journalism, God help me.

01:03:00.620 There was a very famous book.

01:03:03.620 I don't know if it's still taught in journalism schools by this famous journalist called Ben Bagdikian.

01:03:09.620 And I forget what the title of the book is, but it's all about media consolidation.

01:03:13.620 And it's all about what a warning it was that, you know, the all of the media has been controlled by, you know, seven or eight corporations.

01:03:20.620 And this was like 30 years ago when it was written.

01:03:22.620 And, you know, I mean, I feel like that was these were like standard issue concerns that just no one cares about anymore.

01:03:30.620 And by the way, that was a big progressive concern back then.

01:03:33.620 All the righty people were like, oh, you know, you know, the free market is the engine for liberty and blah, blah, blah.

01:03:39.620 You know, who cares what these big corporations are doing?

01:03:41.620 And the leftists, the ones who are screaming bloody murder about it.

01:03:43.620 Now it's like the roles have been completely reversed and has everything to do with who's being persecuted and who's being not.

01:03:49.620 I mean, I still think the principle applies equally across both situations.

01:03:53.620 You know, it's just bad to have, you know, a group of people, no matter what their ideology is, concentrating too much power.

01:03:59.620 Well, I think you might find very interesting.

01:04:01.620 Sam Francis makes a really interesting argument about this in Leviathan and Its Enemies.

01:04:06.620 He says that the reason that it looked like at first progressives and the managerial elite would be at odds is that the progressive movement had misunderstood the ends of

01:04:18.620 managerial elites. Basically, they misunderstood the relationship between each other.

01:04:23.620 They had the same ends. They were both looking to kind of arrive at the same place.

01:04:29.620 But basically, the managers understood that they needed to kind of boil the frog slowly.

01:04:34.620 They needed to do the process through time.

01:04:37.620 They couldn't bleed the bourgeoisie dry.

01:04:39.620 They couldn't slaughter them. They needed to bleed them dry. 0.99

01:04:41.620 And so they had the same goal of kind of eliminating bourgeoisie capitalism and moving things in a different direction.

01:04:48.620 But because the progressives wanted to go at warp speed and the managers wanted to go at a manageable speed, they looked like they were at odds.

01:04:56.620 And the progressive movement identified them as an enemy.

01:04:59.620 But over time, as the managers have moved things closer and closer to the kind of fulfillment of the progressive agenda, they have merged and worked together more fluidly now because they kind of see that this is an end goal that they can achieve through kind of the managerial process.

01:05:16.620 You know, it maybe doesn't hold up in every aspect, but I think it's pretty fascinating case to be made in that direction.

01:05:22.620 Yeah, I've been meaning to read that book a long time. But yeah, that sounds exactly right.

01:05:25.620 Yeah, I will warn you, it's like 700 pages and it desperately needed an editor.

01:05:30.620 Like they could probably cut 150 pages out of there because he repeats pretty often.

01:05:33.620 But I've seen it enough to know that there's a reason why I haven't read it yet.

01:05:37.620 You could make sure to beat, you know, you can you can defend your home with it.

01:05:42.620 You know, so, yeah, that's understood.

01:05:44.620 We need like a new right CliffsNotes or something like this.

01:05:47.620 Yeah, well, that's kind of what I'm trying to do with the channel and lucrative opportunity there for you.

01:05:50.620 Yeah, if anybody wants to, you know, roll through the through all the back catalog, you've got some of that there.

01:05:56.620 All right, so we got another one here from Slasher from $5 Canadian.

01:06:02.620 Thank you very much.

01:06:03.620 We aren't shadow batting reminds me of the North Korean saying that they don't use the term concentration camp.

01:06:08.620 Therefore, they don't have any.

01:06:10.620 Yeah, I mean that there were, you know, the what's the Iranian thing? 0.90

01:06:13.620 We don't have any gay people. We just we just, you know, get some people to fall off buildings. 1.00

01:06:17.620 It's exactly. Yeah, a 0% existence here because, you know, they yeah. 0.54

01:06:22.620 So, yeah, no, I think that's, again, very true Slasher.

01:06:26.620 Again, that it's it's that manipulation of procedural outcomes, right?

01:06:30.620 It's like the theme throughout all of this, right?

01:06:32.620 There's there's a def it's word manipulation.

01:06:35.620 It's manipulation of policies.

01:06:37.620 It's a constant redirection running people back through these bureaucratic processes.

01:06:42.620 It's Terry Gillian's, you know, Brazil, right?

01:06:44.620 Like you're you're constantly caught in a web of this.

01:06:46.620 And in that way, no one's ever held accountable for what's obviously actually happening.

01:06:51.620 Yeah.

01:06:52.620 In this case, it was pretty directly Orwellian.

01:06:54.620 You know, a lot of people would say, well, Twitter would have disclosed this previously.

01:06:58.620 And then you look at what they disclosed and the headline on these pieces, these things on the website would be like, we do not shadow ban.

01:07:04.620 And then you read like the second paragraph and they have this definition of shadow banning.

01:07:08.620 It was like so narrow and weird. It was unrecognizable.

01:07:11.620 Like, you know, no one defined shadow banning that narrowly shadow banning was always just understood to be like the general algorithmic suppression of someone.

01:07:21.620 Not like this very specific circumstance that Twitter was defining it as.

01:07:25.620 And never mind that the whole idea of literally saying we do not shadow ban in and of itself was so, you know, Orwellian has to be, you know, overtly dishonest.

01:07:36.620 They knew what they were doing and there's no reason they get to be let off the hook for that.

01:07:41.620 Yes.

01:07:42.620 Absolutely.

01:07:43.620 All right, guys.

01:07:44.620 Well, I really appreciate it.

01:07:45.620 Looks like we got to all the questions.

01:07:47.620 Want to thank Mark again for coming on.

01:07:49.620 Mark, is there anything coming up that people should check out?

01:07:52.620 Anything that you're working on?

01:07:53.620 A piece coming out?

01:07:54.620 Anything like that?

01:07:55.620 Nothing other than I generally work for RealClear Investigations.

01:07:59.620 I'm working on a story right now about drug price controls in the Inflation Reduction Act.

01:08:04.620 So, you know, don't get too excited, folks.

01:08:07.620 But it's an important story.

01:08:08.620 It really is.

01:08:09.620 And I do a lot of good work over there.

01:08:11.620 My colleagues at RealClearInvestigations.com do tons of great work.

01:08:14.620 So if you, you know, we've, in fact, we've done a lot of the major work on uncovering stuff in Russia collusion.

01:08:21.620 And, yeah, you know, always make sure you're checking out RealClear Investigations.

01:08:26.620 They're, you know, one of the few outlets, you know, I think that are left with any integrity that are doing that kind of investigative work.

01:08:32.620 Excellent. All right, guys, we'll make sure that you check all of that out.

01:08:36.620 Thank you again for joining me.

01:08:37.620 If this is your first time here, make sure you're subscribing.

01:08:40.620 I've got everything coming out on podcast platforms now.

01:08:45.620 So if you're someone who enjoys listening to this stuff like at the gym or while you're mowing the lawn or playing a video game or whatever, make sure that you check out the Blaze platforms.

01:08:55.620 I've got the links for the different, you know, iTunes and all that stuff that I went ahead and put on the YouTube channel so you can follow those links to make sure you subscribe over there.

01:09:05.620 And once again, great talking to you. We'll see you next time.

01:09:09.620 Thank you. Thank you.

01:09:11.620 Thank you.

The Auron MacIntyre Show - December 09, 2022

The Twitter Files ｜ Guest： Mark Hemingway ｜ 12⧸9⧸22

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