In this episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, the legendary journalist Michael Bloomberg talks with Alex Blumberg about what it's like to get access to the secret files of the White House, and how it changed the way we look at the world of journalism and politics. Alex is a reporter at the New York Times and a regular contributor to the Daily Wire. He s also a frequent contributor to The Daily Wire and the Los Angeles Times and has been featured in The Daily Beast, The New York Post, and Rolling Stone. Alex talks about how he and his co-worker, Matt Taibbi, got access to a cache of documents from the Trump administration s attempt to deplatform Donald Trump on the internet, and what they learned about the extent of the government s campaign to delegitimize Trump's presidency. He also talks about the dark side of the intelligence community, and why it s important to know what s really going on in the Deep State and the CIA are up to in order to make sense of it. Check it out! Check out the full episode on the Joe Rogans Experience here. It's a must-listen if you haven't already listened to it! You won't want to miss this one! Enjoy! - The Root - Subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe on iTunes Learn more about: Subscribe on Podcoin.co/TheJoeRogan Podcast Learn about our sponsorships and support our efforts to make the show better for you! Subscribe to our new podcast, The Root Podcast by Day by Day, All Day All Day, by Night, by Day - by Night all Day, all Day long, by by Night by Day. Thanks for listening to the podcast? and Good to see you're listening to it? - Good to See You'll get a copy of the show by Day and Good To See You Again? by Good To Hear You'll Have It by Night's Best Podcasts by Night All Day Too Good to Hear It? Thank You, My Pleasible Podcasts, Good To Have It, by Meghan and I'll See You, I'll Hear Meghan & I'm Sending Meghan's Story by Dayday Podcast? -- Thank You & I'll Be Back Soon, Thank Me Back Soon? Thanks For Having Meghan And I'll Send Me Back, Thank You For Sending Me A Review & More Soon,
00:00:56.000I was sort of the least known of the big three journalists that were there.
00:01:01.000It was Barry Weiss and Matt Taibbi who was on.
00:01:04.000And they'd already started thinking about how to kind of what to go after.
00:01:07.000And Matt had done a story on the Hunter Biden laptop already.
00:01:12.000And then we were starting to look at January 6, because Trump gets deplatformed on January 8. And so because I'm like the junior member of that threesome, so to speak, they gave me January 7. So the first thing we one of the first things we did was just to look at how they made a decision to get to pull Trump off the platform.
00:01:31.000And it turned out that the seventh was an important day because that was when they started to rationalize this decision to de-platform Trump, even though their own people inside had decided that he had not violated their terms of service.
00:01:43.000So they were sort of stuck making up a reason to de-platform him.
00:01:47.000And that was an important theme was that they just kept changing the rules basically to do what they wanted to do.
00:01:53.000And that was the same thing on the Hunter Biden laptop.
00:01:55.000The New York Post story that they censored also had not violated their terms of service.
00:02:02.000I mean, it was, you know, people always ask questions about the files themselves, but, you know, the experience was we would ask for these searches and we'd just get back huge amounts of data.
00:02:13.000It was lots of thousands and thousands of emails, thousands of internal messages on their Slack messaging system.
00:02:20.000And so, yeah, I mean, a lot of it was, you know, some of it was very boring because you have to just read tons and tons of stuff.
00:02:25.000But, you know, I think the big theme was we start by seeing a real, you know, super progressive.
00:02:32.000It's like 99 percent of campaign contributions from Twitter staff are going to Democrats.
00:02:37.000You know, the head of safety at Twitter, this guy named Yoel Roth, who, you know, said, you know, said there's actual Nazis in the White House when Trump came in is very progressive.
00:02:48.000But over time, we just kept finding, like, this weird, like, FBI wants us to do this.
00:02:53.000There's these other government agencies.
00:02:55.000Oh, you know, all these people used to work at the FBI. The CIA shows up, Department of Homeland Security.
00:03:01.000And we're kind of like, what the hell is going on?
00:03:04.000The story quickly shifted from us sort of – and I think what Elon thought, which was that it was just very progressive people being biased in their content moderation and their censoring to there is a huge operation by US government officials,
00:03:20.000US government contractors and all of these super sketchy NGOs getting money from who knows where.
00:03:28.000Basically demanding that Twitter start censoring people.
00:03:30.000At that moment, the story shifted for all of us.
00:03:33.000And that was, I think, where Taibbi became particularly important and sort of the lead because he had had so much experience on sort of looking at how the U.S. government during the war on terror had waged disinformation campaigns, propaganda campaigns.
00:03:47.000And it became clear to us over time that the U.S. government had turned its propaganda and disinformation campaigns that had been waging abroad.
00:03:58.000It turned them against the American people.
00:04:00.000And that was where you just sort of get chills up your spine and you were like, this is something seriously sinister is going on.
00:04:18.000That's part of what was so terrifying is that it was all of the social media companies, including Wikipedia, by the way, which we don't talk enough about, but also all of the mainstream news organizations are all being organized.
00:05:09.000I don't really think anybody really believed it.
00:05:11.000There's just – for a variety of reasons we can talk about, there was never any good evidence that whatever Russians did had much of any influence, any measurable influence on the outcome of the campaign.
00:05:24.000But they started to scapegoat the social media companies as a way to get control over them.
00:05:30.000And so then in 2017 they set up – well, two things happen.
00:05:34.000The Department of Homeland Security just declares election infrastructure to be part of their mission of protecting election infrastructure.
00:05:44.000And that meant protecting the media environment.
00:05:54.000So that's the first thing that happens.
00:05:56.000They create something called the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency within the Department of Homeland Security to supposedly protect the media environment from foreign influence.
00:06:10.000They create something called the Foreign Influence Task Force with the FBI to basically start policing domestic speech on these platforms.
00:06:19.000They start organizing all the social media companies to participate in these meetings.
00:06:22.000So you had Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, in here.
00:06:25.000And he says to you, there's this critical moment where you ask about the Hunter Biden laptop.
00:06:29.000And he goes, well, yeah, you know, in the summer of 2020, all these FBI guys come to us saying there's going to be a hack and leak operation involving Hunter Biden, which is super suspicious because, as everybody now knows, the FBI had Hunter Biden's laptop in December 2019. What freaked me out – and I was – I had – so by the way,
00:06:53.000I was a victim of the Hunter Biden laptop disinformation.
00:07:11.000You know, I'm still a big liberal in so many ways.
00:07:14.000And everybody I knew was like, oh, you know, besides Trump, it was just he's so – for all the reasons that progressives bought that the laptop was fake, I bought that it was fake.
00:07:23.000So then when you realize that it was real and that everything in that New York Post story on October 14th, 2020 was accurate – I started seeing stuff in the emails.
00:07:33.000The thing that really freaked me out was this thing that Aspen Institute, it's called a tabletop exercise and it was actually a Zoom call.
00:08:04.000Basically, they are training or brainwashing all these journalists.
00:08:08.000I mean, it's CNN, New York Times, Washington Post, Wikimedia Foundation, the Wikipedia folks, the networks, all of the social media companies, all coming together to be like, okay, well, if something is leaked,
00:08:23.000then we should not cover it in the way that journalists have traditionally covered it.
00:08:29.000Meanwhile, Stanford University A few months earlier had put out a report saying reporters should no longer follow the Pentagon Papers principle.
00:08:39.000Well, the Pentagon Papers, of course, is this famous episode.
00:08:42.000It was – Steven Spielberg made a whole movie about it where the Washington Post and New York Times published these Internal Pentagon documents showing that the US government was losing the war in Vietnam, right?
00:08:52.000This is Daniel Ellsberg and he just releases it.
00:09:01.000It's this kind of incredible moment in American journalism where we are like the First Amendment gives these newspapers the right to publish.
00:09:09.000Not hacked, so-called hacked, but leaked information.
00:09:12.000And here you have Stanford University, Aspen Institute saying, oh, no, no, no.
00:09:29.000It was the creepiest thing I'd ever seen.
00:09:32.000And this is, of course, you've got to remember, Aspen is funded by the U.S. government.
00:09:35.000Stanford is funded by the U.S. government.
00:09:37.000So this is – people go, oh, well, you're just – one of the responses we've got is they go, oh, you're just talking about content moderation by private companies.
00:09:44.000We're talking about U.S. government-funded organizations.
00:09:49.000You can't – if the US government is censoring information, that's obviously a violation of the First Amendment.
00:09:54.000But if the US government is funding somebody else to censor information, that's also a violation of the First Amendment.
00:09:59.000You can't indirectly – it's still a violation if you're funding somebody to demand censorship.
00:10:05.000So – That was quite a steeplechase, but there's a lot here.
00:10:08.000I mean, it's a lot of people, a lot of institutions, a lot to unpack, and that was part of the reason I wanted to reach out and be like, I need a Joe Rogan session to just kind of go through it all.
00:10:16.000Yeah, well, I'm very happy to provide that.
00:10:43.000I would always assume that the so-called deep state Is essentially a bipartisan, that they wouldn't necessarily side with the Democrats or the Republicans.
00:10:53.000They're really, you know, they're just in charge of, they're supposed to be gathering information to protect the country.
00:11:01.000So how did they decide specifically to either stop information or propagate misinformation that would aid Joe Biden?
00:11:16.000Yes, that is exactly the right question.
00:11:18.000So, I mean, I think the thing you have to understand is that Trump was viewed by the deep state, by, you know, CIA, FBI, Pentagon, you know, I mean, all of the elites.
00:11:33.000It's bipartisan in the sense that it's both never Trump Republicans and Democrats.
00:11:38.000What freaked them out the most about Trump is that he was threatening to pull the US out of NATO. I don't think that that was – I just think that was bluster.
00:11:48.000And by the way, I should say I actually – I support what we call the Western alliance.
00:11:52.000I support providing military security for our allies in Asia and in Europe.
00:11:57.000I'm not a – I mean there's parts of economic nationalism that I respect but I'm also – I don't think we should pull out of NATO. I think NATO has provided peace in the world and mostly been a good thing.
00:12:09.000It's obviously had some crazy abuses like Iraq.
00:12:13.000This whole experience has made me rethink my support for Ukraine.
00:12:17.000But I think it's important to understand that Trump terrified the deep state and the national security establishment.
00:12:25.000There's a sense in which you had a guy on here named Peter Zion who wrote this book called – this really apocalyptic book about how the world is going to fall apart.
00:12:32.000And his whole argument, which I don't agree with – I think he's brilliant, but the book is – I think the argument is wrong.
00:12:38.000His whole argument is based on the idea that the United States is going to stop providing – Military security to our allies in Asia and Europe.
00:12:44.000It's all just based on this assumption that Trump is the beginning of some – the US withdrawing from its traditional role since World War II. There's a bunch of people who obviously their ideology, their livelihoods, their identity, just their whole way of life is tied up with providing – the United States providing this protection for Europe and Asia and they view Trump as threatening that.
00:13:08.000I also think they just really hated the guy.
00:13:28.000And what's so interesting is that if you read people like – people on the left like Noam Chomsky and others who have been critics of US or Glenn Greenwald who are critics of – and I think Matt Taibbi, critics of US government military invasions around the world since World War II. I mean we've overthrown many governments,
00:13:47.000You know, Iran, Chile, Guatemala, you know, and what the pattern is, is that these are places where nationalists, sometimes socialists, but often just nationalists who are trying to control their economies and they didn't want foreign interference,
00:14:05.000And the US government would see that as a threat to providing, you know, having this liberal global order, as it's called.
00:14:12.000And so they saw what – they saw Trump as an existential threat to this post-war liberal order and they needed to – and they viewed social media as the means to his power, which I think was exaggerated.
00:14:27.000So on the one hand, they saw a threat.
00:14:49.000He runs the most powerful progressive, frankly, propaganda organization in the world or at least in the United States, the Center for American Progress.
00:14:59.000They were looking also for some reason someone to blame for their own failures, for the dislikability of Hillary.
00:15:07.000And so there was just a lot of motivations to try to get control over social media platforms.
00:15:13.000They felt like they had lost control of them.
00:15:15.000And what was the attitude of these social media platforms when they were exchanging emails back and forth with these intelligence agencies?
00:15:25.000Was there any understanding of the implications of allowing this Web of influence to infiltrate and control narratives and how kind of creepy and dangerous that is?
00:15:40.000Did they understand how other people would perceive that?
00:15:55.000Did they have an understanding of how other people would view this?
00:15:58.000Yeah, I mean, just to back up even further, so there's two interesting dynamics going on.
00:16:03.000You know, the first is that the Internet itself is created by the U.S. Department of Defense, and Google is a spinoff of Defense Department projects.
00:16:21.000But I think the U.S. military and the deep state and whatever, they felt like they had control over the internet until Trump, basically, or really maybe until ISIS around 2014, 2015. That's the first dynamic.
00:16:33.000The second dynamic is culturally Silicon Valley is libertarian, right?
00:16:37.000So you have the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
00:16:53.000But even Mark Zuckerberg, after the 2016 elections, when everyone is accusing him of throwing the election to Trump, he's like, this is ridiculous.
00:16:59.000He's like, our own data doesn't support.
00:17:03.000The Russians clearly did not have this influence.
00:17:06.000They just beat the crap out of him so much and threatened to take away their ability to operate, which is known as Section 230, which is this huge liability protection in the law that passed in 1996, which allows Google, Facebook, Twitter to exist.
00:17:28.000I mean, but basically, Democratic politicians, they would just say, you know, we're going to remove your Section 230 status.
00:17:36.000That's just like saying we're going to destroy your company.
00:17:39.000I mean, it's just – it's not – And they were saying this because their assertion was that Russian disinformation and propaganda led to Donald Trump being elected.
00:18:10.000I mean, it was—they would exaggerate—they would say things like, you know, 140—I think it was like 146 million Americans had Russian propaganda in their newsfeeds.
00:18:20.000That's not the same as saying 146 million people saw the ads.
00:19:12.000But basically you have active disinformation campaigns being run by the US government and US government contractors against the American people on these issues at the same time that they're demanding censorship.
00:19:22.000So you have propaganda on the one hand and censorship on the other.
00:19:26.000Well, here's what appears to be dangerous to me.
00:19:28.000There doesn't seem to be any repercussions for doing these things.
00:19:32.000This is scary because it's shifting a narrative.
00:19:35.000So in step one, the Hunter Biden laptop, for example one rather, the Hunter Biden laptop, no one's in trouble.
00:20:26.000And then, the crazy thing is, one of the things about having a right and a left...
00:20:33.000Is that whenever there's information that's inconveniently bad for that one side, particularly the left, you don't hear a fucking peep about it on the media.
00:21:40.000That is a lie and it's disinformation.
00:21:43.000But you're just saying it because if you can say it's half fake, you muddy the water and now anybody that's looking at that could go, oh yeah, but that's half fake, according to my side.
00:22:11.000Also, I was happy to do your show because literally even my very close friends and family don't understand what I'm talking about.
00:22:19.000And I'm like, I want to go on Joe Rogan and just unpack this for them, how serious this is.
00:22:24.000I mean, you have to remember, and I'll put it on myself, I was so biased.
00:22:28.000The New York Post published the subpoena, which is a kind of receipt from the FBI, showing they had taken Hunter Biden's laptop from this computer repair store owner in Delaware.
00:22:39.000It was published in the New York Post.
00:22:41.000They also published the receipt that has Hunter Biden's signature on it, saying that he had not only had left the laptop there, but also that it gave the computer repair owner The rights to it if he abandoned it.
00:22:53.000Hunter Biden never said it wasn't his.
00:22:56.000He never denied that it was his laptop.
00:22:59.000Well, and subsequently, at least recently, he sued that guy for releasing the information, which the dumbest thing he could have ever done, because now all this half-fake shit gets thrown out the window.
00:23:13.000Well, they're always – look, I mean I think the other thing I want to also emphasize here because I think that when you uncover the level of coordination and the sophistication of the disinformation and censorship campaign, it's easy to also sort of say they're perfect but they're not.
00:23:27.000They're always making stuff up as they're going along.
00:23:30.000But I think the other interesting thing that's important to know here about that laptop story is that within Twitter, they look at that New York Post article, Joel Roth, the head of safety and his team, they look at it and they go, yeah, I mean, it's legit.
00:23:44.000It doesn't violate our internal – it doesn't violate our terms of service.
00:23:50.000And at that moment, I mean, it has a Manchurian quality, Manchurian candidate quality to it, where the former chief legal counsel to FBI, a guy named Jim Baker, who is central to beginning the Russiagate probe of Trump.
00:24:06.000He's now at Twitter as deputy general counsel.
00:24:20.000It looks like it violates Twitter's policies.
00:24:22.000He was – he just – I mean like multiple – I think it was at least four messages and emails of him pushing to the executives.
00:24:28.000And of course it doesn't – we can't see the phone calls that – which is really where a lot of the dirty work happens.
00:24:34.000Pushing to just get this thing censored by Twitter.
00:24:38.000Sure enough, a few hours later, Joel Roth says, well, okay, you know, we think that it could very well have been a Russian hack where somehow they put the...
00:24:48.000I mean, it was this crazy thing where they're like, well, we think he was hacked and then put on the laptop.
00:24:56.000Yul Roth, like there's moments where I respect him because he was he was enough of a truth teller internally.
00:25:02.000It's why he got to the position he was in, which is a very powerful position to be like, hey, this is bullshit, like internally, he would say.
00:25:20.000And he just was like, OK, yeah, I think we've decided that it violates our hacked materials policy and we're going to censor it.
00:25:26.000The other thing I want to point out about this, it's not just that they censored the article because people always go, well, you know, it only lasted for a few days or whatever.
00:25:35.000It was the discrediting of it, the censoring.
00:25:39.000Censorship is a disinformation strategy.
00:25:42.000If you censor that article, in other words, Twitter and Facebook, all the headlines Where Twitter and Facebook are – they're going to restrict the dissemination of this material or they think it's – all that publicity is really what mattered.
00:25:56.000So in terms of like – in my defense and other people that bought the idea that it was somehow a fake, we were being told by the media that everybody had looked at this and was kind of like, look, it looks like it's hacked and there's something funny about it.
00:26:10.000So I think that, you know, I think that there's so many shocking things about it, but I think it's the level of coordination and conformity within these social media companies.
00:26:21.000It was the pre-bunking in advance and it was the complete total, you know, just the complete news media blackout and unanimity And it was just all of them.
00:26:36.000I mean it was like all the networks, all the newspapers, they all just repeated this idea that there was something wrong about the laptop and there wasn't.
00:26:59.000The attorneys general of Louisiana, Louisiana and Missouri are moving forward in the courts in suing the ensuing the Biden administration for violating the First Amendment.
00:27:12.000You know, this is, of course, this 100-bind laptop thing is one of many things.
00:27:15.000I mean, the other craziest thing of all, maybe some of the most craziest stuff of all is that Facebook censored accurate COVID vaccine side effect information.
00:27:27.000Because it didn't want to promote vaccine hesitancy.
00:27:30.000In other words, the White House is, like, just pressuring them.
00:27:32.000I mean, this guy, Andy Slavin, in particular, is just this malign actor, just pressuring, pressuring, threatening them.
00:27:50.000They're basically accusing people of—I mean, these guys, they don't—the gloves are off.
00:27:55.000I mean, they're just like, you're killing people by letting this information out.
00:27:57.000I mean, the information is people telling their own story of vaccine side effects.
00:28:01.000We always point out, like, it was one of the great public interest progressive victories in recent memory that the drug companies have to name the side effects of their drugs in their TV ads.
00:28:19.000Well, here were ordinary people trying to tell stories of the side effects that they had from the vaccine on Facebook and Twitter, and the White House is demanding that Facebook and Twitter censor that stuff.
00:28:34.000I mean that is – I mean that's just Soviet Chinese-style censorship like full on.
00:28:39.000I mean so it's not over and I think that we've already seen – there's other things going on like that agency I mentioned, that cyber – that part of the Department of Homeland Security, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
00:28:51.000They changed their website over the last few months to remove references to domestic – Yeah.
00:29:14.000Let's talk about that because I had her on and what she essentially was talking about was all these Russian troll farms and how interesting it is That they created all these funny memes and they used all these resources to try to shift the narrative And change public opinion on certain things and that it was very effective.
00:29:39.000So first of all, Renee is somebody who I came across because she's actually kind of moderate on a bunch of the stuff that I'm moderate on, like dealing with homelessness, COVID. She's actually like a moderate voice.
00:30:14.000It's a very – so she's also – the reason why she's so important is like when you read the – when you follow the meetings or watch the YouTube videos or whatever, she's like one of the smartest people.
00:30:24.000Like there's something going on with her.
00:30:29.000The other thing about these people is that they move around a lot.
00:30:31.000They move in between organizations and she's always sort of the number two but she always seems a bit smarter than the person that she's reporting to.
00:30:38.000But so she's somebody that she goes to, she gets a computer science degree from State University of New York at Stony Brook.
00:30:45.000That happens to be a major recruiting place for the NSA. She then goes and she gets a job at Jane's Trading, which is like one of the great, it's like up there with Goldman or maybe better, it's where SBF from FTX was at.
00:31:01.000She was there, then she had a couple of companies that did like logistics and cyber.
00:31:17.000She's obsessed with anti-vaxxers, spreading anti-vax misinformation.
00:31:20.000This is long before COVID. I think it's around 2014, 2015. Next thing you know, she's like advising President Obama on counter ISIS disinformation strategy in the White House and advising on the expansion of something called the Global Education Center,
00:31:39.000which is part of the State Department of Counter Disinfo.
00:31:41.000So suddenly she's like the senior person.
00:31:44.000It's very suspicious, very rapid rise.
00:31:47.000If you know anything about those communities, they're very hierarchical and like you have to work your way up over many years.
00:31:55.000In 2017, she is at a consulting firm called New Knowledge that is then caught Doing disinformation against an Alabama Trumpian Republican candidate named Roy Moore.
00:32:11.000They are caught doing fake Facebook pages, accusing Roy Moore of wanting to basically restrict alcohol consumption in Alabama, which is deeply unpopular position.
00:32:33.000But afterwards, she sort of tries to distance herself from it, suggests that she wasn't involved, even though when you read The Washington Post and New York Times articles about her – about that – about the scandal, she sort of – it makes it clear that she was actually the person that brought the funding in to run the program and also kind of conceived much of the strategy.
00:32:55.000After that, she becomes the top researcher to the Senate Intelligence Report of 2018 on Russian disinformation in the 2016 election.
00:33:04.000So she's not – not only is she not punished for her role in it, she's rewarded by the Democrats with this incredibly powerful position.
00:33:12.000So she becomes like the lead witness, the lead author for Senate Democrats, Adam Schiff.
00:33:17.000In promoting the whole narrative that somehow Russians swung the election to Trump.
00:33:22.000And there's no repercussions for promoting this false information?
00:33:47.000I only – like whatever, like a week or two before my testimony in Congress, which was a couple – a few weeks ago, not the one I did yesterday.
00:33:57.000We discovered this guy who was the head of cyber at the State Department, a senior guy named Mike Benz, and he is super deep into this stuff.
00:34:10.000But he basically leaves State Department and starts something called the Foundation for Freedom Online, and he has been documenting this more than anybody.
00:34:19.000So he had it but he's not – he's just really in the weeds.
00:34:30.000But I mean basically a media blackout on all of this stuff.
00:34:35.000Rene DiResta, who then moves from New Knowledge to Stanford Internet Observatory, that organization and three other organizations, Atlantic Council, Graphica, and University of Washington has a think tank on this.
00:34:49.000They get government funding and they run something called the Election Integrity Project in 2020 to basically demand censorship.
00:34:57.000By the way, if I just read the Election Integrity Committee, I get super suspicious.
00:35:05.000I mean, Joe, they basically would flag hundreds of millions of tweets.
00:35:13.000I believe that their database, they had over a billion social media posts, Facebook, Twitter, that they flagged, and tens of millions of them were censored.
00:36:09.000Well, when my book on the environment came out, Apocalypse Never, in 2020, I wrote an article that sort of summarized the book as one does.
00:36:44.000The wrong conclusion being that climate change is real but not the end of the world or vaccines.
00:36:50.000The wrong conclusion would be maybe don't get the vaccine or maybe if you're whatever, under 18 or you're a young man or 18 or if you've had whatever.
00:36:58.000I mean whatever it might be, you don't need to be triple vaxxed.
00:37:01.000So they're basically using an opinion.
00:37:05.000Which is you should get the vaccine or you should think of climate change as apocalyptic as a way to – and then they kind of go to the back door and say anything that's being used to propagate that narrative should be counted as misinformation.
00:37:19.000So just to back up, so this little cluster, the censorship industrial complex – Does this, quote unquote, election integrity project in 2020, they censor tens of millions of social media posts.
00:37:34.000And by censor, do you mean they remove them?
00:37:36.000So by censor, I'm going to use the definition that everybody uses, which is you can remove, you can reduce, or you can...
00:38:20.000U.S. government-funded organizations pressuring the social media companies to censor these posts and these people.
00:38:27.000And they do it in 2020. And then Renee, who does this little video, it's like one of the creepiest videos that we've discovered, there's little videos that they do.
00:38:36.000She's sort of describing, you know, well, and then we realized that we needed to keep going on COVID. And so then in 2021, The Election Integrity Project turns into something called the Virality Project.
00:38:49.000And that's where they then go and wage censorship on COVID information that they don't like.
00:40:38.000You know, often these are reports that they don't get a lot of fanfare or whatever, but they make sure that they get emailed to a bunch of journalists, they talk to the journalists, and they basically just emphasize, never talk to this person, never quote this person, do not platform them.
00:40:54.000We then, by the way, after our testimony, that same Stanford cluster, it's actually more than one group at Stanford even, They emailed – I'm not going to say who because I don't want to give away my sources.
00:41:06.000But they've basically emailed many people about Matt and my testimony, trying to attack our testimony and sharing information.
00:41:15.000They're constantly waging disinformation campaigns against disfavored voices and demanding censorship while also spreading their own misinformation.
00:41:25.000God, it's so creepy that the people doing this don't understand how deeply un-American this is.
00:41:32.000And that they feel like it's okay to do because the side that they're on is the right side.
00:41:45.000I mean, Joe, it's funny because, like, I mean, so I graduated from high school in 1989. I remember distinctly that that was the year that the Supreme Court upheld your right to burn a flag.
00:41:55.000And I remember just being like, God damn, that's why I'm a Democrat.
00:42:59.000They want to ruin our—I mean, for me, it's been years of just trying to survive, of, you know, just trying to deplatform, discredit, keep you off of—out of newspapers, out of TV shows, whatever, podcasts.
00:43:14.000And so, yeah, these guys, they're ruthless.
00:43:18.000It's definitely a hall monitor mentality.
00:43:42.000Like, they literally—I remember at one point I briefly asked her about climate change, you know, where we talked about the climate stuff, and I could tell that she felt like she was actually probably an expert on that, too.
00:43:52.000You know, it's like literally—my book, I spent 20 years of research going into my book.
00:44:27.000You have these ideologies that these people subscribe to.
00:44:31.000But it's so disturbing as a person, you know, Who grew up liberal to see this from the left, this hardcore censorship from the left and this support of government disinformation that's purely aligned with monetary reasons.
00:44:59.000And like I said, it's like – it's not even – I mean I think mostly like I said, I think the Western Alliance and NATO have brought peace since World War II and I don't think we should be pulling out.
00:45:10.000And honestly, the extent I've rethought my position on Ukraine is just because of these nefarious actors.
00:45:19.000It's, you know, it is what kind of we all have known it is.
00:45:22.000The U.S. is part of this empire and we're trying to make the world safe for Western capitalism and Western corporations.
00:45:30.000And, you know, that's actually lifted a bunch of people out of poverty.
00:45:33.000It's not totally negative, but obviously you also get the Iraq invasion, which was terrible, and the Afghanistan occupation, which resulted in horrors.
00:45:43.000But you also get some things that aren't beneficial to anybody.
00:45:45.000If you're censoring information about the lab leak hypothesis, that's a real problem.
00:45:50.000Because if we are still funding gain-of-function research, or if we are funding it through a proxy, and they're denying this and lying about this and covering this up through emails, and then when you find out that certain physicians and doctors changed their testimony or changed their opinion and then received enormous grants,
00:47:52.000I think the Obama administration stopped the funding.
00:47:56.000And then it kicked back in in 2016. What would have been explained to me was that the Trump administration was so chaotic Yeah.
00:48:16.000I think the punchline, though, is that Fauci knew very well that gain-of-function research was not only occurring at the Wuhan lab, but that it was being funded by the U.S. government.
00:48:26.000And then they get on these conference calls and Two of the main researchers, I believe they're both from Scripps, they both go, yeah, I don't know.
00:48:34.000It looks like it could have been manufactured from a lab and not from zoonotic spillover.
00:48:40.000So it's even more sinister than just being arrogant.
00:48:46.000It looks like a cover-up and it looks like a cover-up where the people who covered it up were compensated.
00:48:51.000Oh, and not only that, but did you see – I don't know if you saw this recent report where there's – it looks like they were double-dipping.
00:49:01.000So they were basically getting paid twice by U.S. taxpayers.
00:49:06.000CBS News, which is like only one of the few mainstream media outlets that's actually done a good job covering this.
00:49:11.000They also covered the 100-billion laptop accurately – belatedly, but they did – Yeah, they wrote about how these contractors were getting paid twice for the same work.
00:49:22.000So that's a way now to kind of get in there and try to figure out what's going on.
00:49:27.000The crazy thing is, back to the Twitter files, Because, you know, Elon is obsessed with Fauci and wants to have the Fauci files, but none of us have looked for this in the Twitter file.
00:49:39.000Like, literally nobody has yet even looked to see whether or not this COVID origin stuff was being censored from within Twitter.
00:51:08.000When they talk about the AIDS crisis, it's essentially a version of what you're seeing now, but with no internet.
00:51:16.000Where they were allowed to do things with no investigative journalist, no social media outrage, no people posting different studies that contradict what they're saying.
00:51:59.000It did result in a bunch of reforms that reminded the—you know, we had a bunch of reforms that basically prevented the federal government from spying on the American people and— That's out the window.
00:52:25.000I think, you know, just talking about this and testifying about it, I think actually because sunlight is the best disinfectant.
00:53:40.000I'm like white knuckling the whole thing, being like, this is scary.
00:53:42.000I guess having $200 billion really puts a nice cushion on the repercussions for whatever the fuck you do, other than him getting assassinated.
00:53:51.000And he has publicly stated that I'm not suicidal.
00:53:54.000And I think he's legitimately concerned.
00:53:57.000Like, that could be something that happens to him.
00:55:06.000That's why I think, you know, we were talking about this person, Renee DiResta, but these other groups in the censorship industrial complex, they're constantly promoting the idea that it's okay and necessary to have more censorship.
00:55:20.000So both times, I've testified now, you know, twice in the last three weeks, both times the Democrats were like, I mean, the Republicans were like, why are we taking stuff down?
00:55:29.000And the Democrats were like, we're not taking enough stuff down.
00:55:32.000I mean, there's this sense in which More stuff needs to be censored.
00:55:35.000That's the idea they're trying to promote.
00:56:09.000This whole idea of vaccine hesitancy, once enough data was out there, particularly when you're talking about vaccinating people that had already had COVID, that's preposterous.
00:56:38.000Because what you're saying is side effects.
00:56:41.000You're talking about not telling people about the dangers of something, which has always been something that we considered with every drug.
00:56:56.000And you don't get herd immunity with the COVID vaccine.
00:57:00.000And so you have to remember that what's crazy about it, too, is you go from this, well, we're going to have a vaccine and then we're not going to get it.
00:59:06.000Groupthink is a natural inclination that people have.
00:59:08.000But it's accelerated by the rise of the internet and the rise of these voices.
00:59:14.000So people like you, you trigger people because it's like, oh my, there's people out there that are influential that are saying things different than what the mainstream are saying.
00:59:30.000And I think it did freak a lot of people out.
00:59:32.000Instead of saying, hey, how'd that guy get better so quick from some horrible, deadly disease and three days later?
00:59:38.000I mean, when they used my face and put it through a filter to turn me yellow, all of it was wild.
00:59:45.000For a person to watch it, for a person to be in my position and watch it, It was really interesting because, first of all, it's like I'm not on a network.
01:00:10.000Like, this is not a thing like the 1970s when you could just get someone removed from a television show, like when they attacked the Smothers Brothers for the criticism of the Vietnam War.
01:00:43.000Like, I mean, it was like, I mean, on the one hand, that's really, being censored is such a horrible experience.
01:00:48.000It really feels dehumanizing to be deprived your voice or to have this super powerful media company being like, Schellenberger is spreading disinformation.
01:01:36.000And this is why when you read a scientific paper and you read the conclusion, What you don't understand is that this was designed, this study was designed to show one very specific outcome.
01:01:48.000And if it didn't, you would never see it.
01:01:52.000I would have never imagined that before COVID. I thought that when there's any sort of scientific study or a medical study or anything about something, what they're trying to do is find out what's true.
01:02:05.000I did not know that they can do ten studies and if eight of them show negative side effects, they could remove those and just find some carefully constructed, very biased study that points to a very specific outcome that's desired.
01:04:15.000So this is the revolt of the public by Martin Gurry.
01:04:18.000He argues that really all of this is just the elites freaking out about the rise of the internet.
01:04:23.000And that the response is very similar to the response to the printing press.
01:04:27.000The printing press suddenly makes books available and the elites in Europe freak out.
01:04:31.000Yeah, I just found out recently, like fairly recently, that some of the earliest books, the really popular ones, are about witches, finding witches.
01:04:38.000I always assumed that books in the early days, like, oh, what a great thing the printing press was.
01:04:43.000When the printing press came about, people got access to all this knowledge and information.
01:04:48.000No, no, a lot of the early books were about how to spot a witch.
01:05:11.000So the big one, of course, that we're all talking about is the trans issue.
01:05:18.000And that issue, by the way, has completely changed in Europe, particularly in Britain, where there's a big new book out, A Time to Think, about the Tavistock Gender Clinic.
01:05:26.000But basically, it looks as though a lot of autistic kids or kids with autism spectrum They – who are just uncomfortable in their bodies, are more prone to be thinking in black and white, are basically being misdiagnosed with gender dysphoria.
01:05:43.000And then you also have a different group of folks, maybe kids that would end up being gay or lesbian if they didn't transition who become convinced that they are the opposite sex.
01:05:54.000This is one of the ideas is some of it's a social contagion.
01:05:59.000In other ways, it's iatrogenic, which means that it's actually caused by the medical profession.
01:06:03.000So you start to get doctors and others misdiagnosing people.
01:06:08.000I mean, this is something that we just published a piece on this where this was what happens with anorexia and bulimia.
01:06:13.000You know, these doctors identify eating disorders and then they publicize them and it gets all this publicity about it.
01:06:24.000I mean, it's not— Well, then there's all these gender-affirming care clinics that pop up, and they're enormously profitable, which is terrifying.
01:06:33.000Same as Eisenhower's speech about the military-industrial complex, they have a vested interest in going into war.
01:06:40.000These people have an interest in diagnosing people with gender dysphoria, which is— It's terrifying to think that their opinions and their diagnosis would be based on something other than, what's going on with you?
01:07:34.000I mean, it's funny because you had Abigail Schreier on, who wrote this big book on transgenderism as a social contagion, I think it was in 2020. I remember at the time being like, I think she's, I mean, what she's saying makes sense, but it's so horrible to consider.
01:07:48.000I just was kind of, it took me like three years to finally work on it or write on it.
01:07:52.000But I thought, you know, part of what's—I mean, the people—like, first of all, people with autism spectrum should be up in arms and outraged about the mistreatment of people with autism by these gender clinics.
01:08:03.000The other group that would be completely up in arms are gay and lesbians.
01:08:06.000I mean, Andrew Sullivan, to his credit, is speaking out on it.
01:08:11.000Abigail had to explain it to me because I would read all of her stuff, but sometimes you just like miss some of it.
01:08:16.000These kids who go through this gender transition, they not only are infertile afterwards, but then they don't have sexual pleasure.
01:08:24.000I mean, think about the gay and lesbian and the bisexual movement spent decades Basically making everybody comfortable with the fact that gay people should be able to get sexual pleasure from their sex.
01:08:36.000And everybody's kind of like, you know, most people are heterosexuals and most people are like, that's strange.
01:08:40.000It took a long time to be like, no, we celebrate that.
01:08:44.000And that we know sex is an important part of long-lasting relationships.
01:08:48.000So to actively deprive children of that, you're not just sterilizing the kids, you're depriving them of sexual function and then being able to bond with somebody.
01:08:58.000I mean, how do you look at that and not go, this is really disturbing?
01:09:03.000It's disturbing and it's thousands of people.
01:09:05.000I mean, just the idea of doing that operation to someone and removing their ability to have an orgasm.
01:09:12.000You know, there's people that have talked about these detransitioners and If you've ever watched any of those videos, those videos are horrific.
01:12:20.000I don't give a fuck what their feeling is.
01:12:22.000If an archaeologist found their body 5,000 years from now, they would say that's a skeleton of a male.
01:12:27.000I have to say I think I'm coming to the place where I think that gender itself is just not a thing and that it's really – there's just – okay, so please say anything to Audrey Hill.
01:13:23.000No, my understanding is that she was a natal female that transitioned to become a trans male, he, and that he was then misgendered by the mainstream woke media.
01:15:07.000Douglas Murray talked about this, that it seems like every civilization when they're at the brink of collapse becomes obsessed with gender.
01:15:16.000He talked about ancient Greece and ancient Rome and it just seems like a thing that people do when there's no real like physical conflict.
01:15:28.000So people look for conflict that doesn't exist and they find conflict in standard norms.
01:15:38.000I was – we did a thing – I did a thing with Peter Boghossian on wokeism as a religion because we had read – I had read John McWhorter's book, Woke Racism, which came out right around the time that San Francisco came out.
01:15:53.000And I just was like – and he argues that wokeism is a religion.
01:15:57.000He argues that like the obsession with race is a religion.
01:15:59.000So I just – we just created this taxonomy.
01:16:01.000We just listed climate change, race – Trans, drugs, whatever, all these things.
01:16:06.000And then we create all these religious categories and it was really easy to fill it out.
01:16:53.000I think the secularization explains a lot because we know that people get a lot of psychological comfort out of believing that they have an afterlife, that they have a soul, that they go to heaven or they get reincarnated, that their lives have purpose and meaning and that they don't really die and that we live on.
01:17:10.000We just know that that provides a huge amount of psychological comfort.
01:17:13.000So there's always been this thinking that That when you don't have that anymore, if you are taught to believe that at the end of your life you just become worm food and that's it and you're dead.
01:17:23.000There's some people, my friend Steven Pinker is an atheist and that's what he thinks and he still believes, but he also has a kind of spirituality around reason and the enlightenment.
01:17:33.000But I think all this stuff – it's sort of end of civilization but it's also the end of this – end of belief in religion.
01:17:41.000I don't know, Jamie, if you could – if you can pull it up.
01:17:43.000But I thought the Wall Street Journal has published this amazing article about declining patriotism, declining belief in the country.
01:17:54.000I mean the numbers are – it's like – I think it's from like the late 90s until today over the last 20 years.
01:17:59.000Over the last 25 years, it was – I mean, first of all, it's terrifying.
01:18:04.000You just kind of go, I hope these trends are nonlinear and they're going to – something's going to turn around because otherwise – It doesn't seem like it though.
01:18:44.000We're in this very strange sort of existential crisis.
01:18:51.000As a civilization that's not being recognized, and in the meantime we're distracting ourselves with things like Greta Thunberg's take on climate, or whether or not gender is a social construct, or whether or not the United States should be doing X,
01:19:10.000Y, or Z. It's like, no, the fucking whole thing is falling apart.
01:19:13.000The foundation of our civilization is falling apart.
01:19:20.000In the name of protecting democracy, they're undermining democratic institutions.
01:19:24.000In the name of maintaining legitimacy of these institutions— In the name of reinforcing ideologies, people are allowing them to do it because they're doing it on the right side.
01:19:45.000I mean, you want to talk about the true end of civilization, the coinciding of artificial intelligence, at least seemingly becoming fairly sentient.
01:19:55.000Like, I don't know what the fuck is going on, but I know that one Google engineer who said that AI had become sentient quite a while ago and everyone's dismissing him like, oh, no, no, no.
01:20:07.000My friend Duncan Trussell interviewed him, and it's a goddamn terrifying interview.
01:20:22.000And when do you get to the side that it is alive?
01:20:26.000If it can answer every fucking question you have about anything, and it's far more intelligent than any human being that's ever existed ever, Like, what are we doing?
01:20:34.000Well, did you read the New York Times Kevin Roos interview with the – it was like a different – it wasn't ChatGPT.
01:21:01.000We haven't even entered into the building.
01:21:03.000Well, it's funny because – so I know a lot about nuclear.
01:21:06.000So when we get the power of nuclear during World War II, ends the war, there's just – I mean there is a huge response to figure out how to manage this thing, how to regulate this technology, how to control it, how to prevent it from spreading, how to prevent bombs from going everywhere.
01:21:22.000And there was a bunch of problems with it.
01:21:24.000But the society responded by saying we need to get control of it.
01:21:30.000There's a thing about Elon actually just called for some sort of a six-month ban on the propagation of this stuff and have a conversation about it, which is fairly reasonable.
01:21:52.000Well, also, we're back to this whole prophet thing.
01:21:56.000You know, there's enormous prophets involved in this stuff and the race to figure this out first and really develop, like, a god, which is what it's going to be.
01:22:05.000What it's going to be is it's going to be something that can make a better version of itself.
01:22:09.000As soon as ChatGPT or whatever this sentient artificial intelligence gains autonomous control and has the ability to create its own self better, then we're really fucked.
01:22:21.000Because it's going to make much better versions of itself like that.
01:22:25.000And it's going to make a version of itself that literally is going to be a god.
01:22:29.000If you just scale it exponentially, you know, like we do with...
01:22:34.000Like computer technology, like anything else.
01:22:37.000But do it in like a quantum leap, in some spectacular, massive improvement almost instantaneously over and over and over again.
01:22:48.000Over the course of a couple of weeks, you're looking at a god.
01:23:08.000The thing that gives me hope is America, we've had some pretty dark moments in the past.
01:23:14.000Watergate coming out of Vietnam, we did have a kind of correction.
01:23:20.000I feel like it needs to start with some – I mean I think the trans issue is interesting.
01:23:25.000It does for me – I just interviewed Jesse Singel on this who's very liberal and progressive still even though he's been a critic of gender ideology or gender theology.
01:23:39.000And he was like, yeah, I mean obviously – For some ways, I think the reason I was interested in it was we have to start some foundational stuff, and that would be acknowledging that we are biological creatures that have a sex and that there's two sexes.
01:23:57.000And then I think I kind of go, if I build on that, I go, there's a healthy and unhealthy way to live.
01:24:38.000You have to affirm the goodness of humans in some ways.
01:24:42.000Jordan's response to this, what we're talking about is basically nihilism, this kind of deeply negative, self-destructive, the view that humans don't have any value or any worth or any meaning.
01:24:55.000I think the response from a lot of people on the right has been to just affirm Christianity of the Judeo-Christian tradition, Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson.
01:25:04.000My problem with that is that America is not founded on a religion.
01:25:08.000It's founded on an enlightenment view, that we have unalienable rights.
01:25:16.000We obviously didn't live up to that in 1776 or 1789, but we've done a pretty good job of getting there over the last two and a half centuries.
01:25:24.000We need – this is like a – for me, it's like a punk rock moment.
01:25:27.000Like things got too crazy and you need to just simplify and come back to some basics.
01:25:32.000And I think you get to humans are good.
01:26:00.000Like, surgery is involved in this trend, which is one of the things that I— Unfortunately, that's not reversible at the individual level.
01:26:07.000But the cultural trend—I mean, I'm sort of like—I was not interested in trends because I was kind of like, that's Abigail and Jesse and these guys.
01:26:40.000I mean, in other words, I'm pushing back.
01:26:42.000There's a cognitive behavioral therapy, CBT. What that is about is about identifying these negative catastrophic narratives where it's basically just three stories.
01:27:14.000They argue that wokeism is actually anti-CBT. Victimhood ideology is anti-CBT. Victimhood ideology says you're powerless, the world is a terrible place, and the world's going to end.
01:28:30.000Well, it's interfacing with these territorial apes with thermonuclear weapons who are full of shit, who are running this country in this very bizarre, transparent money-grab way.
01:28:45.000You have a dead man and a dunce I think?
01:29:05.000Dozens of countries would have nuclear weapons.
01:29:08.000People thought that nuclear war was inevitable.
01:29:10.000Now, nine countries have nuclear weapons.
01:29:13.000We have a very flawed treaty that's based on a big lie, which is that the countries that have nuclear weapons are going to give them up.
01:29:47.000What's amazing about this country in particular is our ability to reinvent ourselves and rejuvenate ourselves.
01:29:55.000I am not—I think that there's more reasons to be hopeful than to be pessimistic, and I'm shocked by the stuff that we've discovered in the Twitter files.
01:31:00.000What have you done to the sky where it lowers your life expectancy by 10 years if you live in a place that's highly populated because of all the pollutants and all the particulate matter that's in the air?
01:31:12.000Like, what have you done to the food that everyone's fat?
01:31:15.000What have you done to the medicine that you hide side effects?
01:31:18.000What have you done to politics where they censor accurate information and go after people that are trying to report the truth?
01:31:27.000Taxpayer funds are supporting these endeavors.
01:33:35.000And the good actors are also bad in other situations.
01:33:39.000But you have popular people like AOC that's talking about the Hunter Biden laptop being half-fake.
01:33:44.000And AOC is also coming out as pro-nuclear.
01:33:48.000She just did an Instagram—she went to both Japan and France to see the worst of a nuclear accident in Fukushima and then France, which recycles all of its nuclear waste.
01:33:55.000And she did these little Instagram posts about—it was soft.
01:33:59.000It was like rethinking nuclear, but that's kind of how people changed their minds.
01:34:02.000We saw the Republican Party go from being a pro-war party to an anti-war party.
01:34:07.000Isn't that just because the Democrats are supporting this war?
01:34:12.000I meant Trump coming out against Iraq war in 2016. So I think it's important when you look at these trends, I mean those trends are disturbing because they're just seeming to go in one direction.
01:34:23.000But I do think we have to keep in mind that trends are non-linear and things do change.
01:34:36.000My conversation with Eric Weinstein leads me to believe that there's something else going on.
01:34:41.000I have a feeling that a lot of what we're seeing is drones that we don't have access to, that we don't understand because these physicists have been working on this with enormous blacklisted budgets.
01:35:29.000I mean, you want to go full tinfoil hat.
01:35:32.000Bob Lazar was talking about the abilities of these crafts when they were talking about him back engineering these things when he was working at Area S4. And this was in the late 1980s when he came out and said, hey, they're back engineering something that came from another world.
01:35:54.000They brought him in to try, allegedly, brought him in to try to back-engineer this thing.
01:36:00.000And this is exactly how these things are operating now.
01:36:03.000When they talk about how these things, like there's a video of one of these crafts that's moving like on a horizontal plane and it turns vertical.
01:36:37.000I think in order to have access to what the higher-ups know...
01:36:42.000Like, the highest people at the DOD, whoever the fuck got the access, whoever in the Pentagon is the one that's saying, listen, we should probably say some of these are not from this world.
01:36:54.000Like, whoever that person is, those people, I guarantee you there's stuff they're holding back.
01:37:01.000I mean, the big moment for Jacques, you know, was when he was working for the guy that's officially supposed to be studying UFOs, this guy Hayek.
01:37:10.000And then at some point, Valet discovers this memo revealing the actual government program to study UFOs.
01:37:19.000Where it was like, he realized that he was, they were just kind of part of a PR, like, thing to kind of create a, he was officially studying UFOs.
01:38:35.000Yeah, and then if you—you know, when you actually talk to astronomers other than Neil deGrasse Tyson— I think we are probably at the cusp of some great change,
01:38:52.000whether it's a great change because of nuclear technology and weapons, whether it's a great change because of artificial intelligence.
01:38:59.000Whether it's a great change because we're on the cusp of destroying the ocean and destroying a lot of natural wonders and beauty that we have just for mining and some of the horrific things that we do in this world.
01:39:15.000Well, probably if I was an intelligent life form from another planet, I'd be like, you should probably get in there.
01:39:23.000It's like if two brothers are fighting in the front yard, let them sort it out.
01:39:58.000Like, why are you ruining it for your children and your children's children?
01:40:01.000Why are you setting in motion these processes that are allowing these people to gain more and more power over people, which will ultimately lead to some sort of a communist dictatorship in America?
01:41:07.000Well, my work on nuclear, it's suddenly like you'll be reading about all these nuclear tests and also around the plants and also around the missile silos is where you have a lot of UFO sightings.
01:41:28.000You're like, what are these motherfuckers doing with nuclear energy?
01:41:31.000Oh my god, they're trying to kill each other.
01:41:32.000Well, but if those are actual beings, if we think those are actual beings from advanced civilizations, their weapons are going to be way more powerful than ours.
01:41:43.000Well, but if you can do what those tic-tac UFOs are doing, if that's actually real, if we think those are not U.S. government or some foreign government tech, then you're talking about civilizations that have firepower way beyond what we have.
01:42:16.000Well, in the sense that if they are – I mean I kind of go if they were that powerful, then I don't think we would be able to fight them if that's what their ships can do.
01:42:26.000So then there's no like – it's not like we can – I mean we're going to try to push our hydrocarbon-fueled jet planes and rockets to go as fast as they can, but they're not going to do what those things are doing.
01:42:37.000So it's more of a spiritual problem because, you know, I think it reminds us that we don't know what's going on.
01:42:45.000The Fermi Paradox, by the way, is kind of wrong in the sense that he was like this huge universe, where is everybody?
01:42:52.000But of course, like at that very moment is when you're—I mean, 1952 is this period where there's this huge UFO sightings in Washington, D.C. They're scrambling jets to go chase them.
01:43:04.000It's in this great James Fox documentary.
01:43:21.000I think he and Jacques are the two people that are actually more careful about...
01:43:30.000I love the phenomenon, though, because I do think it's humbling.
01:43:38.000I think we were getting into this thing where the elites are so arrogant and they're so, on the one hand, on the other hand, they're so threatened by the rise of the internet and by these other voices.
01:43:50.000There just needs to be some kind of moment where we go, hey, you know, we're all on this planet together.
01:43:56.000And, you know, stop trying to rule each other.
01:44:01.000Like, we've got this beautiful America.
01:44:04.000Again, just allow me to be, you know, it's like this system we have is absolutely amazing.
01:44:09.000Amazing and started by people who wrote it with feathers.
01:44:44.000It's about – so when I was censored, it felt like – it wasn't like, darn, I'm not going to sell as many books or it was like – it felt like something like essential in me was being repressed and oppressed.
01:45:12.000So they put you in some sort of a shadow band.
01:45:14.000And then they also put a little warning on it, like they would do on violence or sexual content.
01:45:20.000And then now they just tag everything.
01:45:23.000I don't want to keep—I'm not trying to make it— No, no, no.
01:45:25.000My situation is not— But I just wanted to know, have they ever—did they ever eliminate any of it?
01:45:29.000I mean, like, I tell you, like, I knew somebody that worked at Facebook at the time who was an executive, reached out to this person, was like, hey, you know, nothing.
01:46:22.000On the other hand, SpaceX hasn't gone public yet and when it goes public, he's going to be even wealthier than he is now.
01:46:28.000And in terms of philanthropic investments, in terms of like deathbed legacies, Twitter as a platform is pretty darn great.
01:46:37.000It's pretty amazing, and it's amazing that someone who is so goddamn busy and has so many other things on his plate, he legitimately, one of the reasons why he bought this, he thinks he can turn it around.
01:46:52.000He thinks he can turn it into a profitable business.
01:46:54.000But one of the reasons why he bought it, he thinks it's essential to democracy.
01:47:14.000It's essentially a propaganda network.
01:47:16.000That is beholden to pharmaceutical companies.
01:47:19.000I'll tell you something else that's amazing is that thing where he takes away the blue check marks from the snobs and he lets everybody buy it.
01:47:25.000I mean, I don't know if you saw William Shatner.
01:47:27.000Like, a couple days ago, he's, like, complaining.
01:47:30.000Oh, Elon, you're going to make me spend eight bucks a month.
01:47:32.000It's like, first of all, you're, like, the most highly paid pitch man in, like, American entertainment history.
01:48:20.000They felt like it was part of their moral duty to declare publicly that they were leaving this thing because you're allowing all sorts of different people to discuss things.
01:48:54.000This is so, it seems so basic, but you have to pause on it and be like how radical that was at the time.
01:49:01.000And how, like, you know, because I think we kind of go, oh, you know, the Constitution gives us that right or the Bill of Rights and whatever.
01:49:08.000I was like, no, they like the people that created this country.
01:50:04.000Where the whole world is going to shift in a really wild way.
01:50:08.000And I think one of the things you're seeing from whether it is these corporations or these government entities that are trying to control narratives, this is like...
01:50:19.000It's them trying to grasp at the last bits of control that are potentially available.
01:50:26.000But I think inevitably they're going to lose.
01:50:29.000I think everyone's going to – I think there's going to be no privacy.
01:50:33.000I think zero privacy in a few decades.
01:50:39.000I think that all of these ridiculous black mirror scenarios will come to light.
01:50:45.000And I think we're going to be dealing with a reality that as alien to us as taking Australopithecus and bringing them a million years forward into 2033 and experiencing like modern life in Dallas, Texas, like wandering around.
01:51:01.000That would be so fucking bizarre to them.
01:51:04.000That is what our life in 20 years is going to be to us.
01:51:26.000It's crazy, but I think if you look at this last one, I wrote a piece with a former Financial Times correspondent who also, like me, has been obsessed with the World Economic Forum.
01:51:36.000We called it I think it's called Davos is a cult and a grift, but it's also a bid for global domination.
01:51:45.000And we just looked at how it's all those things at the same time.
01:51:48.000It's about power and money and also about ideology and dogma.
01:53:57.000And it's important for people to remember because people think whenever I talk about this and I'm suggesting that you shouldn't worry about these solutions.
01:54:03.000The farmers themselves had been reducing nitrogen pollution through voluntary and sort of cooperative mechanisms.
01:54:10.000A lot of it's just like controlling the manure.
01:55:10.000I have to say, I'm a little, I've always, Macron has been someone that I, it depends on the day of the week, it depends on what he's doing.
01:55:15.000I can be sympathetic to him, but But I think you see the public...
01:56:45.000Well, and this thing where they use power, I mean, I just testified yesterday with the Stanford professor Jay Bhattacharya, who was the co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, beautiful human being, by the way, just separate from his own views.
01:56:57.000But he was like, look, in a crisis, you need more freedom of speech.
01:57:02.000Like when you're trying to figure out how to solve a fast-moving, fast-changing problem, that is not the time to be doing censorship.
01:57:08.000That's the time you want more views, more representation.
01:57:11.000Also, there's like a standard thing that we should ask at any point in time when there's a dilemma and then someone is trying to control information.
01:57:41.000I think that the thing we testified on yesterday was just it's very hard.
01:57:46.000Like the social media platforms, for a variety of reasons, you don't want the government regulating them.
01:57:53.000But what you could do is just say every time the government demands Something to change on the platform, that government official has to file a public notice that they've asked for that.
01:58:04.000So if the White House is going to say, censor true stories of vaccine side effects to Facebook, that government official must report that and it must become public right away, which will both reduce the amount of it that occurs, but also allow us to see it.
01:58:17.000And then secondly, if Elon or Mark Zuckerberg or whatever are going to stop You know, I think there was something going on with the trans shooting that we just talked about yesterday.
01:58:47.000I don't know, and like you said, I suspect it was an algorithm issue where they didn't want...
01:58:52.000I think there was like a Trans Day of Vengeance planned for Tennessee or something, and this was all leading up to that.
01:58:59.000So my point was just to have transparency on it.
01:59:02.000If Twitter is going to de-platform somebody or bounce somebody or censor some post because they don't want to contribute to real-world violence, and there are situations where I think that might be appropriate, Just make it transparent.
01:59:15.000Just tweet it out and let everybody know.
01:59:18.000I think that that just— But that's the Streisand effect there that's going to take over.
01:59:22.000Yeah, although I think it changes—it provides some context to it.
01:59:26.000In other words, if Elon and Mark Zuckerberg had to say, hey, you know what?
01:59:30.000We're actually stopping this Trans Day of Vengeance meme from spreading, I think it's okay because they're actually able to explain and talk about it.
01:59:39.000Then you can have comments and people responding to it.
01:59:41.000Transparency, for me, it's not necessarily the silver bullet, but it's the first thing we should do in order to—it's more free speech.
01:59:50.000It's actually more speech, not censorship.
02:01:18.000Because it's so fascinating to watch the mental gymnastics that people put themselves through to stay within the parameters of the ideology.
02:02:29.000It boils down to they believe their religious ideology trumps your ability to create your own reality or have a reality that aligns with your beliefs and desires and your sexual orientation and whatever the fuck else you choose in life,
02:02:47.000as long as it's not hurting other people.
02:02:48.000And for the Republicans, It was always small government, stay out of people's lives, but why not with gay people?
02:03:08.000The thing that you're doing that is so important and so beautiful, that's why you're the king of this and why this medium is so important, is that you're saying I don't understand what you're saying.
02:03:49.000It's because this is a three-hour-long podcast platform for people to actually – They raise a bunch of threatening ideas, but they're overreacting themselves because, of course—I mean, look, you have to have—this is why I think there is some faith.
02:04:04.000You do kind of go like we just—there's a faith in which more speech is better.
02:04:09.000More speech is better for human beings.
02:04:39.000When you make it a game, and you have a winner and a loser, and if I can get you booted off of Twitter by making a few emails, woo, look what I just did.
02:05:10.000But in their defense, wouldn't it be nice if we had, you know, look, like, Obama's my favorite president because I think he was the best spokesperson for a nation.
02:05:20.000He was the best representative of what is possible in America, you know?
02:07:27.000My real concern is that with technology and the ability to control people, if we don't get a grasp on that, we're going to fall into a situation that's very similar to what they have in China, where you have a social credit score.
02:07:42.000And when I see people like Maxine Waters pushing us towards that direction and people talking about the first sounds of it were vaccine passports.
02:07:52.000When they were saying vaccine passports, I was like, Jesus Christ, don't do that.
02:07:56.000Because that is going to lead to a social credit score system.
02:08:02.000Once they have the ability to make you have an app and that app gets to decide whether or not you travel, they're not going to let that go.
02:08:10.000There's no way they're going to let that go.
02:08:13.000And once they have something like that attached to a centralized digital currency, it's game over.
02:08:18.000It's game over until something really big happens.
02:08:44.000But no, for sure, I've become much more paranoid.
02:08:49.000I mean when you go – when you spend all this time in these documents and you see the way these guys kind of sneak around and they're trying to do all this stuff behind the scenes, it's really – it is like – Elon thought it was funny.
02:08:59.000It was like, yeah, I mean it is like these conspiracies are real.
02:11:14.000And Elon was like, okay, we're going to change that a little bit.
02:11:17.000So, I mean, he, that fast, I mean, so he's, that the whole, I mean, when people, this cliche in Silicon Valley, the whole, you know, move fast and break things.
02:13:12.000But Barry Weiss, who was there and who had brought me in, she criticized Elon in a tweet and was like, look, you know, it was arbitrary before.
02:13:32.000It's like, oh my dad and mom are fighting again.
02:13:34.000You know, and we're like, oh, and I kind of retweet her, but it was like, okay, I retweet her, but we'd still like to have access to the Twitter files.
02:13:41.000You know, we did – there's this famous clip that went viral when Matt Taibbi and I testified in front of Congress where this member of Congress goes, you know, how did you get in?
02:13:50.000They were trying to make it like a scandal that somehow we were reporting on the Twitter files.
02:13:54.000And I was like, I was brought in by Barry Weiss.
02:13:58.000And then she was like, oh, so it's like a threesome?
02:14:01.000And the whole room erupts into laughter.
02:14:04.000And I was like, well, there was actually a lot more people involved than that.
02:14:09.000And everybody laughed, and Elon just loved it.
02:14:13.000Because, you know, he's just, like us, we're all just perverted Gen Xers at the end of the day, you know?
02:14:17.000And so he loved it and was very happy and was just like, all is forgiven with Barry if she wants to come back in, you know?
02:14:47.000He just expresses his feelings about things.
02:14:50.000When he's mad at somebody, he'll tell you.
02:14:52.000But then he also has shown this capacity to forgive, and...
02:14:56.000So, you know, I think there's something there, you know, in terms of, you know, I mean, he really – I think he really – he told us, he's like, I didn't buy Twitter just to replatform Babylon B. And we were like – I was like, but it was part of it, right?
02:15:12.000Like part of it was – but, I mean, I think it was – you know, I do think that some generalizations about our generation is actually appropriate.
02:15:20.000I think that Gen Xers, you know, there was a moment there – I don't know.
02:15:24.000I don't want to create a golden age about it.
02:15:26.000But there was a point there where it was like...
02:15:55.000I mean John McWhorter also talks about it in Woke Racism where it's like – And he's a Gen Xer too, where I think there is a...
02:16:03.000I'm not saying it's the solution to all of his problems, but I think that that Gen X spirit, that Breakfast Club spirit needs to come back into American culture.
02:16:43.000I mean it was – I was in San Francisco in the 90s doing kind of publicity campaigns for different progressive causes and I had some women I knew who were also very progressive and they came and they were like, we want to come and do a diversity training for you and your staff.
02:17:53.000So this idea that climate change is going to be mitigated or that somehow or another we're going to be able to control it, like, are you sure?
02:18:01.000Because it seems like ice ages have always existed and great periods of melting and global warming have always existed.
02:18:09.000Like, whether or not we're having an effect on it, that's what we should say.
02:18:41.000Randall Carlson told me that and I never even thought about it until he said it.
02:18:44.000And I was like, yeah, Jesus Christ, you're fucked if everything freezes.
02:18:48.000And he said there was a point in human history or a point in the history of the earth where things got so cold that we almost became inhospitable to life.
02:19:00.000Life as we currently understand it and know it.
02:19:46.000So we just kind of overthink it and then the issue got – not overthink it but really got hijacked by a bunch of opportunists that want to use it as a way to exercise control.
02:19:55.000So for you, you experienced these people that came along that were kind of grifters that were saying we need to incorporate some – and by the way, you were talking about an extremely progressive liberal organization that you were part of.
02:20:08.000If there was any racism, it would have stood out like a sore thumb.
02:20:12.000If anything, you're promoting the complete opposite of what they're trying to say.
02:20:21.000By giving you some training, they're trying to find implicit racism or hidden racism or...
02:20:31.000I think there's a – when you just abandon traditional religions and the traditional morality, you want to create – I mean, look, even like – I mean, this BIPOC thing is so interesting because it's like – I was like – I finally just wanted to explain what is BIPOC. Well, that's black, indigenous people of color.
02:20:47.000Literally in the word, it's creating a hierarchy where it's black and indigenous people above Latinos and Asians who are just barely people of color.
02:20:58.000Not everybody, but most people I think actually hate it.
02:21:01.000But it has this power because it's providing...
02:21:05.000In fact, this de-transitioner I interviewed, she was like, the social justice—she's autistic, so she's autism spectrum.
02:21:12.000She was like, as an autistic person—and she's a lot of self-awareness and older now—but she was like, that social justice moral hierarchy provided some comfort.
02:22:04.000So you experienced this and you recognized these people were grifters.
02:22:09.000And then like what moves you other than – is the Twitter files – is that the biggest shift in your political – Becoming more libertarian?
02:23:51.000Like there's many people that are very brilliant people but they're in this trap where they can't say they were wrong.
02:23:59.000And if you can't expose people to your thought process and why you made errors, they're going to lose faith in your ability to discern the truth in the future.
02:24:09.000And isn't it ironic that often those are the people that are always talking about being without ego?
02:24:25.000And I think it's also just a sign of our ideologically driven times where I think the divide between the right and the left and the boundaries in between them are so wide now.
02:24:38.000I think that that thing, too, of where, again, the abandoning traditional religions and adapting to morality, I think people do start to play God a bit, unconsciously.
02:26:11.000It reaffirms my understanding of what's important and makes me want to spend more time with my family and it makes me want to not do things that I'm really not interested in doing just because they're going to make me money.
02:26:22.000If we can get that into the head of some of these fucking people that are censoring people and some of these people that are pushing these crazy agendas and hiding information from people because they think that it's going to Contribute to an undesirable outcome that doesn't fit in a line.
02:26:40.000If the other group wins, you did a shitty job.
02:26:43.000And if you're hiding information that would allow that other group to win, you're a bad person.
02:26:50.000Like, if there's actual, real, criminal evidence that you're hiding because you don't want this other person to get elected, you're doing a terrible thing to humanity.
02:27:01.000And you're doing it based on these very base and normal human instincts.
02:27:07.000And, like, look at that—I mean, they won't—so, first of all, we've emailed—like, I mentioned that Aspen workshop with all the journalists and all the social media companies.
02:27:15.000I emailed every single one of the participants.
02:27:19.000And said, would you please talk to me about this?
02:27:22.000I'm sorry, Washington Post actually, of all places, responded, not the actual reporter, but through a spokesperson, responded with some lame...
02:27:31.000But it's kind of like if you're so confident, if you're so better than everybody, then why can't you come and just have a conversation and defend it?
02:27:59.000It's a natural human inclination to control other people that you might think are threatening or in competition with you or might somehow or another get in the way of your desired goals.
02:28:09.000And people get so self-obsessed in those things without something like your life in weeks, where you can just look at it like, oh, this is all fucking fruitless.
02:28:31.000Well, I think one of the things that has happened, I think has been greatly beneficial, that the exposing of the Twitter files and the making it public where like, especially that we were talking about this last night at the club.
02:28:47.000That woman who was, like, calling Matt Taibbi a so-called journalist.
02:28:57.000Someone who says things only that you agree with?
02:28:59.000Well, and you know who – and we talked about also what a powerful projection it was because she's a non-voting representative from the Virgin Islands.
02:29:08.000Yeah, which is the – Somebody points out right.
02:29:14.000But, I mean, calling Matt Taibbi, who is so decorated, a so-called journalist, and the fact that he got to rattle off all the awards in journalism that he's received.
02:29:44.000Well, there's also Debbie Wasserman Schultz who's famous for derailing – Insider training.
02:29:49.000Insider training derailing Bernie Sanders is good to become.
02:29:53.000So yeah, they're just – it's all Pod calling the kettle black.
02:29:57.000Well, it's also the shittiness in which they communicate with these people who are just exposing something that everyone should be aware of because it's a real problem.
02:30:08.000What Twitter is and what Facebook is and Instagram and all these social media platforms, these are our new public squares.
02:30:15.000And we need some sort of an understanding of the significance of censorship in regards to what kind of an impact it's going to have on our life, our real life world.
02:30:25.000Like how many people who got censored off of Twitter, it's radically changed their life, radically changed, for wrong reasons, changed the progression of their future.
02:31:30.000And so now, you know, she's back on the platform, and, you know, now people get to—she's a brilliant woman.
02:31:36.000And she's also—she has some really good points.
02:31:39.000And her point about trans activists, like, you are trying to silence biological women by—you're bringing in these biological males, Into these traditionally women's spaces and they're calling themselves feminists and she's like, that's not real.
02:31:53.000Like, this is not what's happening here.
02:31:56.000I mean, it's interesting that the people that are trying to kind of put everybody down, the deplorables or the so-called journalists or just all of the insults, they're coming from people who have just been the worst bootlickers their entire careers, suck-ups, brown-nosers.
02:32:13.000Are so proud of having sucked up for so long that they're deeply threatened by people who are actually challenging the status quo.
02:32:22.000Well, that's the mainstream journalist's approach to the internet journalist.
02:32:28.000You know, when you have people like Crystal and Saga from Breaking Points who are, like, beholden to no one?
02:32:43.000Before Substack, there was never a place where someone like a caliber of Matt Taibbi or Glenn Greenwald could post and millions of people could read their stuff and it could make international news, just like a Washington Post article,
02:33:03.000I mean, it's like, yeah, you have to, like, go—you go to work—I mean, if you work at one of those traditional news outlets, you go to work every day, you're not able to publish and write.
02:33:13.000You know, you write something, the editors sit on it.
02:33:15.000My friend Nellie Bowles, who's married to Barry Weiss, you know, when she was at the New York Times, you know, like, you'd write a story, and then you'd argue with editors for weeks, and then maybe they'd publish— The thing that was like half its original length and has been completely woke-ified.
02:33:28.000So they don't have – they're actually – they're jealous of the freedom that people with free speech have and they want to stamp it out.
02:34:44.000And this is this transformation from the world of these corporate-owned distributors of information to independent people that people actually trust, that don't have any sort of weird connection to executives and producers and all these other people that have a vested interest in pushing a narrative that is established by the advertisers.
02:35:47.000That guy, like, when he was doing that thing where he was, like, ranting in his basement about Donald Trump being arrested imminently, at any moment he's going to be arrested, and that thing he would do, the resistance, it's like, God, it was so cringe.
02:36:00.000But it's also, it's like, you're so clearly angry and arrogant and shitty.
02:36:06.000Like, do you not understand that these are personality traits that nobody likes?
02:36:10.000And especially if you're uninformed, misinformed, incorrect.
02:36:15.000And when he was like this vaccine promoter, it's like certain people look for a thing that they think there will be popular opinion behind and they get with that thing so that they can connect themselves to a winning movement.
02:36:29.000And then they angrily advocate in favor of other people complying.
02:36:57.000I mean, I was fact-checked during my campaign by the San Jose Mercury News, which was like, Schellenberger's got some really weird ideas, including this idea that natural immunity is just as effective as the vaccine.
02:37:44.000Not only that, I mean, just the fact that no one has a problem We're good to go.
02:38:12.000Of this impending pandemic that's going to take out your loved ones.
02:38:15.000And, you know, Robert Malone talked about that on the podcast, that it creates this mass formation psychosis, that you have this one thing that people are looking at as the savior.
02:38:26.000And any suppression of that or any resistance of that, you are going to ruin my life.
02:39:46.000I think the other issue, and it struck me as you were talking, the reason that they want to emphasize the vaccine over the remedies, and Steve Kirsch talks a lot about all the different ways in which you can treat the COVID. Bless you.
02:41:12.000You can get them to believe that they have to strap a suicide vest on and walk into a crowded courtyard.
02:41:19.000There's things that you can get children to do that you're not going to get older people to do.
02:41:24.000And to influence them to make a permanent change on their body that will sterilize them and also prevent them from experiencing sexual pleasure.
02:43:25.000No one would ever achieve an understanding of what the other person thought.
02:43:29.000And it would also be probably pretty nasty, which I don't think is necessary.
02:43:32.000I can disagree with someone and have a conversation with them and just talk to them.
02:43:38.000But then there's also people that are bad actors, and they're only saying something because it conforms to their ideology, and they're essentially grifters.
02:43:49.000They've attached themselves to this thing, and that is their business.
02:44:04.000I mean, part of the reason I came back to being a Christian is that Christianity, I came back to it actually while working on Greta Thunberg at the end of my book, Apocalypse Never.
02:44:12.000And I was like, what's the remedy for this intense hatred and anger against civilization?
02:45:23.000Um, but they, you know, it's like, it's like, it's so simple, but they're like, you know, like, you know, Huberman.
02:45:29.000So first of all, I now do my morning run before I drink my coffee and I take a cold shower because, because that amount of adversity, which I mean, it's kind of a joke, like it's not adversity really, but it's a little bit.
02:45:44.000Like I have to get my tennis shoes on and you're running like early in the morning and yeah, But he's absolutely right that actually leaning into the pain a bit.
02:47:44.000If you ever have any more Twitter pages that you have to go through, like if you really do go through the Fauci files or whatever, please come back.