Nov. 22, 2022 - The Benny Show - Benny Johnson
38:20
Participants
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| The results are in. | ||
| Put the main bank on. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you, Elon. | |
| Very cool Right now a historic moment of Donald Trump winning an astounding upset victory. | ||
| Tell everybody I'm back in the game. | ||
| Welcome to our continued celebration of the return of fun to Twitter. | ||
| The based god Elon Musk has reinstated some of our dearest friends, including some who were reinstated just hours ago. | ||
| Joining us tonight will be Seth Dillon, the owner of the Babylon Bee, which you could potentially say was the domino that flipped. | ||
| The entire website of Twitter.com into the hands of the greatest, richest, and most successful African-American in human history, Elon Musk. | ||
| You could also potentially say that the banning of ALX started a movement. | ||
| Far before Donald Trump was banned, our boy ALX got the chopping block from the Marxists. | ||
| Why did they do it? | ||
| We'll never know. | ||
| But we're going to find out tonight what it was like to be banned on Twitter and what it was like to come back to Twitter. | ||
| How did Twitter communicate this message? | ||
| What happened? | ||
| Did Elon Musk text ALX? | ||
| Did he share dank memes or emojis with him? | ||
| We don't know. | ||
| We're going to find out tonight. | ||
| And also joining the program will be Savannah Hernandez, one of the greatest on-the-street reporters. | ||
| In America. | ||
| She is finally back on Twitter and we don't think she's going anywhere this time. | ||
| We love to share her Man on the Street videos with you all the time. | ||
| She is on our program, but you can't find her online because she's too good at her job. | ||
| A man who is far too good at his job and one that we are so deeply... | ||
| Thankful for every single day because he brings the fire. | ||
| The man, the myth, and legend ALX joins us right now. | ||
| ALX, we have been trumpeting your story about Twitter censorship and Marxist censorship for years now, and we are finally victorious. | ||
| Tell me, sir, the update. | ||
| What was it like to get your account back? | ||
| What happened? | ||
| Walk us through the process. | ||
| Okay, so I was already celebrating the reinstatement of Donald Trump, which was surreal for me. | ||
| And then I'm getting notifications from multiple members of the House Freedom Caucus. | ||
| So it was Troy Nels and Lauren Boebert. | ||
| So they were all replying to Elon's tweet saying, hey, the people have spoken. | ||
| I'm reinstating Trump. | ||
| So right after it happened, I'm getting all of these notifications from texts and stuff saying, oh, we're tweeting at Elon to get you unsuspended. | ||
| 20 minutes later, I'm getting phone calls, I'm getting other texts saying that my account had been unsuspended and try and log in. | ||
| And that's what happened. | ||
| I had just logged in and I could use it like I did two years ago before I was banned. | ||
| And I was awestruck and I could not even believe that it was real. | ||
| But, yeah, it happened in less than an hour after Trump was reinstated. | ||
| Okay, follow-up question. | ||
| Were you even able to use your device? | ||
| Did your phone melt down like molten lava? | ||
| Yes, the second I logged in, my phone froze up. | ||
| I was getting a lot of texts saying, say something, say something. | ||
| What's your first tweet? | ||
| I know you'd asked me that before. | ||
| I was thinking of that. | ||
| And I was trying to send the tweet. | ||
| It took me about 20 minutes to even send that tweet. | ||
| But yeah, my phone was going off. | ||
| Phone calls, texts, FaceTimes, just the notifications from Twitter. | ||
| Charlie Kirk tweeted right away. | ||
| He's like, hey, Alex is back. | ||
| You tweeted a video at an emergency press conference right away. | ||
| Followers from your million account, from his million account, from all of these accounts, just melting down my phone. | ||
| And it was unusable for about three hours. | ||
| My phone shut off, and it was a black screen, and it was like the circle of death. | ||
| And I'm like, oh my god, I'm so overwhelmed, and so is my phone. | ||
| I think I tweeted something along the lines of that. | ||
| So it was definitely a night to remember. | ||
| I think we have your first tweet here. | ||
| Royce, this is the ALX complicated business tweet. | ||
| I think we have... | ||
| There we go. | ||
| Sorry to keep you waiting. | ||
| Complicated business. | ||
| The audience for this show is well familiar with your story, but perhaps you could just truncate it and rehash with us exactly what happened to you on Twitter.com, these Marxists. | ||
| Yes, so about two years ago, before the 2020 election, I had... | ||
| I posted a meme of Joe Biden. | ||
| His campaign kind of was trying to get everyone to be cool with his campaign and upload a picture of them saying, oh, I stand with Joe. | ||
| So I thought it was funny to put Xi Jinping there and said, oh. | ||
| Xi Jinping stands with Joe. | ||
| And, like, 20 minutes later, I found my account was suspended, and no reason, no email. | ||
| We reached out to Twitter. | ||
| They were like, oh, that wasn't the reason that it happened. | ||
| And then multiple people reached out, tried to get more information. | ||
| The VP of comms said higher-ups insisted that I remain banned, and that's the way it stood for two years, up until Saturday night. | ||
| You posted this. | ||
| It's on screen right now. | ||
| This is such a neutered meme. | ||
| This is like, I mean, it's actually quite accurate. | ||
| And this is what got you in the gulag. | ||
| Yeah, they say it didn't, but I mean, that was the last thing I tweeted, and who knows. | ||
| Did you get any information from Twitter? | ||
| So you appealed your account, and then what happened? | ||
| So they... | ||
| Told me that I violated their rules against spam and platform manipulation, whatever that meant. | ||
| And then I got a different one saying I was involved in harassment campaigns, targeted harassment. | ||
| So every time I appealed it, I would get a different reason back. | ||
| And we had other contacts at Twitter trying to email and get an exact violation, like a tweet, whatever I did. | ||
| And one of the remarks from a person who is no longer at the company says that he knows exactly what he did. | ||
| And our policy team reached out to him, which was a lie. | ||
| So that's all we got from Twitter. | ||
| Yeah, a snark email that was forwarded to me from a friend. | ||
| So then when your account was reinstated, did someone get a hold of you to tell you this was going to happen? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| The person that informed me was a staffer on Congressman Gates with his team. | ||
| So he was about to tweet my support. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Not Twitter? | |
| Congressman Gates staffer? | ||
| Yeah, Congressman Gates staffer is the one who informed me. | ||
| And this has been a pattern with the past three suspensions that have been overturned. | ||
| Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, Project Veritas, and myself. | ||
| All of us did not receive emails from Twitter informing us that our accounts have been reinstated. | ||
| We found out from somebody else. | ||
| So that tells me that that was a manual reactivation of the account and that it wasn't through the official appeals process. | ||
| So it just tells me that somebody on Twitter is watching what you tweet and watching his replies. | ||
| So take that. | ||
| Responded to us quite a bit, and we've always been an advocate for you. | ||
| We've been a defender of everyone who's been wrongfully deplatformed, but especially our friends, of course. | ||
| You must always fight for your friends. | ||
| This is war. | ||
| Is it a point of pride? | ||
| Will you want it engraved on your headstone that you were reinstated at the same time as Donald Trump? | ||
| Yes, I already told you earlier, so there was a Gateway Pundit article that had that in the headline. | ||
| I'm like, I might just frame that. | ||
| But yes, I think this is kind of a rallying cry to get everyone else who had been unjustly suspended. | ||
| I've been informing people to tweet, hashtag bring them back, at Elon Musk with everyone's ats that they want brought back. | ||
| And I think that's the only way to rectify this whole situation, is to bring everyone back who is wrongly suspended. | ||
| Yes, yes, it's true. | ||
| And some of the people who were wrongly suspended, some of the catalysts for this incredible moment join us right now. | ||
| Seth Dillon, the owner of the Babylon Bee, is with us. | ||
| And Savannah Hernandez, I think we'll do all the four blocks here. | ||
| There you go, now it's a hangout. | ||
| Okay, guys, thank you for being on the program. | ||
| The world is watching and they're so excited for all of you. | ||
| And excited for this moment, especially because, well, Elon Musk essentially transmitted what he was going to do to Seth when you were interviewing him during your podcast. | ||
| It's kind of like you could essentially say that the Babylon Beast saved twitter.com. | ||
| Am I wrong? | ||
| Um... | ||
| If you're asking me a question, I'm hearing double audio right now, so I'm having a hard time hearing what you're asking. | ||
| I might have to try to fix that before I chime in. | ||
| Okay, so we can chat with Seth offline. | ||
| Royce, how about we pop Seth off and get that fixed? | ||
| It means you probably have a window open somewhere with the show on, and that's most likely what's happening. | ||
| Savannah, you are the most recent welcomed back on Twitter. | ||
| How did that go? | ||
| Benny, it's been such an incredible day. | ||
| Yes, I'm so excited. | ||
| You know more than anyone that I have been banned, censored, and silenced for two, almost three years at this point. | ||
| Me and ALX were censorship buddies. | ||
| You were talking behind the scenes for the past couple of years, just patiently waiting. | ||
| To make our return. | ||
| And when I tell you, it's such an incredible feeling to get my work back, Benny, to be able to get all of the reporting from 2020 and show the reality of what was happening in Washington, D.C. in 2020, in the lead up to 2021. | ||
| I'm so just absolutely thrilled to see that Elon Musk has said exactly, you know, done what he said he was going to do. | ||
| I just I'm so excited. | ||
| I can barely talk, Benny. | ||
| You have one of the best accounts on Twitter. | ||
| We always have you on the show. | ||
| We always promote what you're doing. | ||
| But the reason why they banned you was because you were good at what you did. | ||
| You were better than anyone else. | ||
| I think I'm not incorrect in saying that. | ||
| Do you have any data that proves otherwise? | ||
| I don't know, Benny. | ||
| You know, all I'll say is my work goes very viral. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So I would say that people like to see what's happening on the streets, right? | |
| I don't even think it's me. | ||
| I think that there are so seldom few journalists that are willing to go out and give a platform to the American people. | ||
| And that's why that type of reporting is so popular. | ||
| And again, I'm excited too, because on top of doing the man on the street reporting, I've started doing more investigative pieces when it comes to drugs, crime and homelessness that have been plaguing specifically progressive cities here in the United States. | ||
| So I am just so thrilled to be able to share my reporting with the masses. | ||
| Again, it's been wildly popular in the past because the people want to know what's really going on. | ||
| And Elon Musk, you know, he had to spend $44 billion, just a very small change there for free speech on Twitter. | ||
| But I'm excited to be back. | ||
| It's truly incredible. | ||
| The Babylon Bee trying to think of a $44 billion joke. | ||
| Yeah, that's our challenge. | ||
| I feel so inadequate, man. | ||
| There's no way to thank Musk for what he's done here. | ||
| How do you express your gratitude and appreciation for somebody literally buying the platform to restore free speech and set you free? | ||
| It's pretty surreal, this experience. | ||
| But I think the bee in particular, it was just such an interesting case in this whole thing because it was a joke. | ||
| It was just a joke. | ||
| And we got locked out. | ||
| And they were like, They were requiring us to delete it, and we refused. | ||
| And it became this whole big story, you know, this big thing. | ||
| It's like the fact that they're taking humor so seriously, that they're trying to suggest that it's hate speech, trying to couch it in those terms, was just so messed up. | ||
| And that Musk took that seriously, seriously to the point where he wanted to get involved and do something about it and restore free speech on this platform. | ||
| It's absolutely surreal that this all played out the way they did. | ||
| Did you ever think to delete the tweet? | ||
| And could you remind us, what did the tweet say? | ||
| I didn't even consider it, honestly. | ||
| It was kind of a snap decision. | ||
| Afterwards, I thought, you know, maybe I should have thought a little bit more about this decision because it's kind of a big decision. | ||
| But we instantly decided that we were not going to delete the tweet. | ||
| It was a joke that was in response to USA Today naming Rachel Levine Woman of the Year. | ||
| And we joked that the Babylon Bee had named Rachel Levine Man of the Year. | ||
| And so that was, you know, a misgendering violation. | ||
| And we got locked out pretty quickly. | ||
| And when they were telling us that we had to, when we clicked delete on that tweet, that we had to admit that we engaged in hateful conduct, that was when we were like, hey, wait a minute. | ||
| Hold on. | ||
| They're not just taking the tweet down and deleting it. | ||
| They're telling us that we have to delete it and admit that we did something wrong. | ||
| They want us to bend the knee. | ||
| And this is more like... | ||
| Subjugation than censorship. | ||
| So we were not comfortable with that at all, and we decided very early on that even if it meant the permanent loss of our Twitter account, we are not going to play this game and admit that we engaged in hateful conduct and delete this tweet. | ||
| So I just, for anybody who's listening and watching this, I mean, you never know what is going to be the ripple effect of a decision that you make to, like, stand on some kind of principle. | ||
| And do the right thing, even if it's at a high cost to yourself. | ||
| You never know what's going to be the result of that. | ||
| It really did seem as though Elon Musk, who loved your content in the beginning and always interacted with Babylon Bee articles, much to the shrieking of the left, did do this in order to white knight for you. | ||
| It is wild. | ||
| Because I've known you, Seth, for a long time, and this is an insane conversation to be having. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| He did straight up buy Twitter. | ||
| I've never claimed that he did it just for us. | ||
| I think we're part of the equation. | ||
| What was factored into the equation was you have all these voices. | ||
| You have this great imbalance on Twitter. | ||
| You have people on the left who have both a sword and a shield where they can attack you all that they want. | ||
| But the minute you even so much as joke about them, you get banned. | ||
| There's this great imbalance that was happening. | ||
| And it was extremely, from us' perspective, A danger to the democratic process of being able to actually debate ideas out in the open and disagree about things openly, challenge each other's ideas. | ||
| That wasn't really possible anymore on Twitter. | ||
| There's certain topics where you couldn't have that debate. | ||
| And so I think that B was just one example, one of the more egregious examples of how ridiculous and how far gone this whole process has gotten. | ||
| And it was part of what factored into his equation for needing to do something to try to restore balance on this platform. | ||
| So it wasn't just like, oh, the Babylon Bee got suspended. | ||
| Let me drop $44 billion real quick and fix this problem. | ||
| It was this is a big problem. | ||
| The Babylon Bee is a symptom of a really big problem, and somebody needs to do something about it. | ||
| I actually have the resources to do something about it, and maybe I'll have fun with it in the process. | ||
| Elon Musk said this to you during your interview with him, and it was a very prescient sign of things to come. | ||
| You're working on some of those problems, but the problem of wokeness specifically, you mentioned that's like a mind virus, and it's destructive. | ||
| And why do you think wokeness is so destructive? | ||
| I'm interested in your opinions, too. | ||
| But, you know, like, I mean, generally, I think we should be aiming for, like, a positive society and, you know, that it should be okay to, you know, be humorous. | ||
| Like, you know, like we should, like, wokeness basically wants to make comedy illegal. | ||
| Which is not cool. | ||
| We've experienced a lot of that. | ||
| I mean, Chappelle? | ||
| I mean, try to shut down Chappelle? | ||
| Come on, man. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| I mean, that's essentially how he's running Twitter now. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, well, one of his first tweets, you know, I think it was on Friday. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It was a couple weeks ago. | ||
| Maybe it was the day that he took over or a few days after he took over. | ||
| He said comedy is now legal on Twitter. | ||
| It took a little while after he said that for us to get unlocked. | ||
| But that's one of the most liked tweets now in Twitter history. | ||
| It's got millions of likes. | ||
| People were happy to see that he was restoring humor to the platform. | ||
| And he has a great sense of humor. | ||
| He cracks jokes all the time. | ||
| He posts memes all the time. | ||
| He doesn't want people to be stifled in their ability to make fun of things. | ||
| It's not hateful to bring a little humor to these issues. | ||
| I mean, his first day at Twitter, he brought in a sink and he said, let that sink in. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And that was our first tweet back. | ||
| We said, we're back. | ||
| Let that sink in. | ||
| I think we got that, dude. | ||
| We got that, Royce. | ||
| There it is. | ||
| Savannah. | ||
| I mean, we thought long and hard about what our first tweet back was going to be. | ||
| And he kind of gave us like a nice setup there. | ||
| We were able to refer back to something that he had done, which is kind of a nod to him. | ||
| But then also it was, you know, kind of short and sweet. | ||
| And, you know, we didn't want to try to overthink it and get too clever with it. | ||
| All humor is based in reality. | ||
| Savannah's reporting is very reality-based and brutal to see. | ||
| There's one thing to make a joke about someone, and it's a totally different thing to just go train your cameras on drug users and homeless people and the horrors that leftists have brought to our major cities. | ||
| And you got banned for doing that. | ||
| You got banned for just reporting on reality. | ||
| Is that correct, Savannah? | ||
| Yeah, Benny, so of course I got banned for ban evasion despite having no prior suspensions, no other accounts. | ||
| It was because Donald Trump retweeted my work, and back in 2020 I was highlighting what was really going on in the streets of America. | ||
| Let's not forget the fiery but mostly peaceful protests that were happening per CNN, and it really was in 2020 when independent journalists, there was a majority of them that took off and they really got their footing that year because they were out there on the streets showing America what was happening, showing people the That's the reality of what happened with Kyle Rittenhouse, right? | ||
| If it wasn't for independent journalists utilizing Twitter, we would never have read the truth of that story, and he could very well be running in jail right now. | ||
| So that's why Twitter is so important. | ||
| And again, too, Donald Trump retweeted me. | ||
| The entire account was gone the next week. | ||
| I made two prior accounts, like I said, to keep showing people what was going on. | ||
| And the second account was deleted because I found the one athlete that was brave enough to speak out against Leah Thomas, the biological male that was swimming in the NCAA Women's Swimming Championships earlier this year. | ||
| Her interview went viral. | ||
| Her voice was silenced because it went against the entire narrative that the media was trying to push that Leah Thomas swimming in this... | ||
| Women's Championship was a good thing. | ||
| And then, of course, we go to the third account, and I showed a naked transgender person twerking in front of children on the streets of Washington, D.C. at a Pride event. | ||
| And going back to that narrative, people were trying to say, oh, these LGBTQ events are good for kids because it helps these kids to be exposed to a variety of experiences. | ||
| And I'm like, okay, well, this is what we're exposing children to. | ||
| You know, Seth, I really enjoy the Babylon Bee because it brings some humor to the horrific realities of what is happening on our streets. | ||
| Like, you know, basically all the jokes you're making, I'm reporting and I'm meeting these people in real life and I'm just standing there baffled that, you know, we have human beings that genuinely only have two brain cells. | ||
| But it's just great that we're all back and we're able to, again, highlight what's happening in America and, you know, fix these issues. | ||
| What happens when you get your account back? | ||
| Does your phone, again, does the Babylon Bee melt your phone down to the core, Seth? | ||
| Was your phone unusable? | ||
| Did you have to throw it into a furnace? | ||
| I don't think I had quite that dramatic of an experience, but it was pretty crazy. | ||
| The activity that we got. | ||
| I mean, that tweet alone, that first tweet that we put out there got like 400,000 likes. | ||
| So we were getting a lot of traction coming back. | ||
| But I do want to just say, you know, I'm thankful, obviously, that Elon Musk took the action that he did. | ||
| But I'm also super thankful, Benny, for you and some other people who are out there tagging him constantly, holding him to the fire, you know, holding his feet to the fire and saying, look, you promised free speech. | ||
| Unban these people. | ||
| They were unjustly banned. | ||
| You need to get them back on the platform. | ||
| Bring them back. | ||
| Bring them back. | ||
| You and very other few voices, as far as I could tell, were some of the only ones out there consistently holding him to that. | ||
| And he was hearing that. | ||
| I mean, he was seeing that all the time. | ||
| And, you know, he had a lot of pressure on him from different sides. | ||
| He had pressure on him from advertisers, activists. | ||
| You know, everybody trying to say, you can't restore free speech, we'll take our money elsewhere. | ||
| And so he's having to balance that against what he's hearing from people on the right, saying, hey, you have a commitment to free speech, you need to keep your word. | ||
| And so people putting pressure on him, I think, you know, and being in his ear for that, it was important, it was necessary, it was a good thing. | ||
| And I'm very appreciative that there were people like you out there looking out for the silence to the band. | ||
| I'd like to feel that if you had been in the same position that we were in and your account was banned, we'd be doing the same for you. | ||
| Well, you know, the reason that it makes it so easy to fight for our friends is that none of this has been fun for anyone. | ||
| Even if you were still up on Twitter, it still isn't fun to see a total search ban where you can't find your account, or to see your account de-boosted, or to suddenly start losing followers, thousands of them a day. | ||
| They can really torture you on these places. | ||
| And so it's kind of like prisoners sticking together inside of a gulag and just fighting for survival. | ||
| And that's what it felt like. | ||
| Savannah, is all your work back? | ||
| All of the work that you put up on Twitter, is that back? | ||
| Do you get that back? | ||
| So the majority of the work is back, but because I had two other accounts, I mean, I don't know if I'm going to, you know, try to get those ones back because there was work on each specific account that went viral. | ||
| So I've just been reposting. | ||
| That's what I've been doing today is posting a lot of that deleted work. | ||
| But from my original account, all of that 2020 reporting is back. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, good. | ||
| I mean, this is, I think, why Elon did it, actually. | ||
| I personally believe that it's, one, good for business. | ||
| Because Seth, I mean, Seth, you have 500,000 followers. | ||
| We got your account here. | ||
| We can toss that up. | ||
| Everyone go give Seth a follow. | ||
| Then we'll throw up Savannah's account. | ||
| She got 150,000 followers. | ||
| It's wild. | ||
| This is exactly the kind of user that Twitter would want, right, to be a profitable business. | ||
| It seems insane to ban people that are power users. | ||
| Seth, you, the Babylon Bee, Savannah, you're all power users. | ||
| Thank you, thank you. | ||
| It also seems insane, though, you know, to let, from the left's perspective, it seems insane to let people who are spewing misinformation and hate speech stay on the platform. | ||
| So, you know, from their perspective, it's just crazy that Musk would even consider unlocking and unbanning terrible accounts like the ones that you see here that you're, you know, showcasing tonight. | ||
| You know, from their perspective, that's madness. | ||
| And it's hard to see from the right's perspective, but they obviously feel like Musk was doing something that was really, really, really dangerous. | ||
| And whether that's disingenuous or not, I think that most of the time this is feigned indignation. | ||
| I don't think that they honestly think that these things are really threats. | ||
| I think that they pretend to have a problem with hate speech. | ||
| I think they just hate speech. | ||
| They hate speech that goes against their values, that contradicts them, that holds their worldview to account. | ||
| It's indefensible. | ||
| It's impossible for them to articulate it and defend it with reason and arguments. | ||
| And so they'd rather just silence people who oppose them. | ||
| So I don't think that most of it comes from a place of good faith. | ||
| I think it's the most important thing that anyone's ever done in social media history, what Elon's just done over the last 24 hours. | ||
| I'm still in awe of it. | ||
| I'm still trying to process all of it. | ||
| Because essentially what he said was you don't get a chance to silence someone because you don't like them. | ||
| Have you ever called for the left to be silenced? | ||
| Has anyone on this chat ever called for a leftist to be silenced? | ||
| Like, deplatformed? | ||
| No. | ||
| I've actually said, when I've gotten a lot of death threats, or not necessarily, in some cases, not death threats, but, you know, usually those people, death threats are illegal, but people who are, like, just verbally trashing you and saying terrible things about you, come back to them and say, hey, look, you know? | ||
| You have the right to say what you think. | ||
| This is your opinion. | ||
| But I have my opinion, too. | ||
| And I'm not trying to get you deplatformed. | ||
| I think you should have your right to be here and say what you want to say, even if it's mean and even if it makes me feel bad. | ||
| You have a right to say it. | ||
| I think people on the right generally respect the right of other people to disagree with them. | ||
| That's really the people on the left. | ||
| And it goes back to what I was saying before. | ||
| Their ideas are indefensible. | ||
| They're hard to articulate. | ||
| They're incoherent. | ||
| They're insane. | ||
| They're easy to mock. | ||
| They look foolish when you mock them. | ||
| And they can't stand that. | ||
| And Benny, you know, I would love to jump in here, too. | ||
| So I actually have a Daily Beast reporter that has been slandering me as a white supremacist, neo-fascist for three years. | ||
| I was able to respond today for the first time, and I don't think I've ever seen such a brutal ratio in my life. | ||
| So he's had a good time slandering me, but guess what? | ||
| Sav showed up and showed out, and that's why the leftists want us silenced, right? | ||
| Because just like Seth just said, they have no coherent argument, and they know that any argument... | ||
| That they say does not stand. | ||
| And when push comes to shove, if you go out on the street with a camera and a microphone, anyone can do this. | ||
| And you show Americans what's really going on. | ||
| That's what people are hungry for. | ||
| And that's why we're all so popular here. | ||
| Because we're willing to tell the truth. | ||
| We're willing to show Americans what is really going on. | ||
| You know, highlight the media and all of their lies. | ||
| So, yeah, you know, I'm happy that Steven Monacelli is allowed to be on Twitter because I'm allowed to clap back now. | ||
| Thank you, Elon Musk, for that. | ||
| They can't tolerate a debate of ideas. | ||
| It truly is like Stalinism. | ||
| They have to lock you up. | ||
| They have to use the power of the state to lock you up. | ||
| How much of it do you think is because we do have more fun than them? | ||
| He says Twitter is fun again. | ||
| Elon Musk tweets this. | ||
| Seth, you mentioned this. | ||
| He says Twitter is fun again. | ||
| Humor is now legal on Twitter. | ||
| These people don't seem to have any joy in their lives. | ||
| And I think it's a profound question as to why they're so miserable. | ||
| But they are indeed miserable. | ||
| I think we can all agree with that. | ||
| And so when you meme them, when you ridicule them, when you make fun of them, it really does hurt their feelings. | ||
| They don't think of a good punchline back. | ||
| It hurts their feelings. | ||
| And then they want to destroy you, use the state to silence you. | ||
| How much of this is because they actually live, leftists truly live miserable lives? | ||
| Well, I think some of it is that they live miserable lives, maybe. | ||
| I don't know that I want to say that for everybody. | ||
| But I think that a lot of it has to do with the fact that they've been trained to take themselves so seriously. | ||
| There's this mentality. | ||
| A good example is the misgendering or the pronouns thing. | ||
| The fact that we've trained so many people, especially young people, to think of being misgendered as being this... | ||
| Horrific crime against you. | ||
| Violence. | ||
| Yeah, violence. | ||
| It's like these words are violence. | ||
| Even if it's just a joke, Dave Chappelle got attacked on stage. | ||
| Other comedians have literally been physically attacked. | ||
| Because they've made jokes that violated the safe space of the people in the audience. | ||
| First of all, if you think you need a safe space, what are you doing going to a Dave Chappelle show? | ||
| I don't know why you're doing that. | ||
| But this idea that you need to have your feelings insulated, that you need to take yourself so seriously. | ||
| And this is what humor is so important for in culture. | ||
| The purpose of comedy, from my perspective personally, is that it helps us take ourselves less seriously. | ||
| That's why comedy is so important. | ||
| And so if you make all these rules that you can't make jokes because people's feelings need to be protected and everyone needs to take themselves so seriously, you basically outlaw comedy. | ||
| That's exactly what Musk is talking about. | ||
| Comedy has essentially been outlawed in our culture and he wants to do what he can to restore it. | ||
| And that's a noble thing. | ||
| It's a good thing. | ||
| If If anyone on this chat was advising Donald Trump right now, would you say grab that glowing iPhone and tweet? | ||
| Yeah, I would say, so he might be trying to, if he is intending to post on Twitter, he might be trying to make two news cycles out of it. | ||
| First is him being reinstated. | ||
| He'll wait a week. | ||
| If he intends to post on the platform, the next news cycle will be his first tweet. | ||
| So there's two news cycles he gets out of this. | ||
| But he should just post screenshots of his Truth Social things, similar to what he does with his Save America PAC press release things. | ||
| Post on Truth Social. | ||
| Post the screenshot and post the link to his post. | ||
| That way he's plugging his own platform. | ||
| And always post on his own platform first. | ||
| But if he is intending to post on Twitter, I think that's what he might be up to, trying to drag two news cycles out of it, if I know what Trump would like. | ||
| Have you seen the memes? | ||
| Do you have any of the memes that Musk has posted trying to goad Trump in tweeting? | ||
| And Benny, I apologize. | ||
| I do have to jump. | ||
| I apologize for being brief. | ||
| But thank you so much for having me on. | ||
| And yes, please do show those Elon. | ||
| Savannah, absolutely. | ||
| Let me toss up your account one more time. | ||
| Everyone go follow Savannah Hernandez. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| She is spectacular and she deserves your follow. | ||
| She is one of the best reporters on planet Earth, I would argue. | ||
| Thank you, Savannah. | ||
| Thank you, Benny. | ||
| And again, thank you so much for going to bat for me and for highlighting my work over these past couple of years. | ||
| I really truly cannot express how grateful I am. | ||
| Thank you, guys. | ||
| Great talking to you. | ||
| I'll see you guys later. | ||
| We got you. | ||
| Hey, guys. | ||
| So, yeah, I mean, I didn't want this conversation to go all night. | ||
| I just wanted to sort of celebrate this moment. | ||
| Elon Musk, I think we do actually have the Elon Musk meme here. | ||
| Maybe we could just end with this. | ||
| Like, Seth, you know. | ||
| Elon Musk. | ||
| Like, this is wild to people that he's actually going through and doing it. | ||
| And you know him better than anyone on this chat. | ||
| I mean, he presumably corresponds with you. | ||
| You've sat in a room with him. | ||
| You've interviewed him for over an hour. | ||
| Can you give us some insight into the man and what he may do next? | ||
| I don't know what he's going to do next. | ||
| That's the challenge that I have with him is trying to predict what he's going to do. | ||
| He's pretty unpredictable. | ||
| And this is one of the things that I think is really entertaining and fun about what he's doing with Twitter is he's just trying stuff. | ||
| He even said that he's going to do some dumb things over the course of the next couple of months and they're going to get rolled back. | ||
| He's going to roll things out. | ||
| He's going to roll back. | ||
| He's just going to experiment and play around. | ||
| He's having fun with it. | ||
| And I think that's genuinely him. | ||
| You know, he sees this as an opportunity to not just have a big impact on our culture, our society, bringing humor back, bringing speech back, but also an opportunity to have a lot of fun. | ||
| Like, Twitter's never been more fun than it is right now. | ||
| And the usage has never been higher than it is right now. | ||
| And he's just thriving off of that. | ||
| He loves it. | ||
| You can tell he's having the time of his life because he's leaning into it. | ||
| He's making jokes like the one you were just displaying, you know, kind of like messing with Trump and trying to act like Trump is, you know, just... | ||
| Chomping at the bit to try to get back onto Twitter, like he's addicted to it. | ||
| He's having fun with all this, and that's the biggest thing I can tell you about Musk's personality is, as ambitious as he is, as brilliant as he is, he's like a really cool kind of fun guy that just likes to have a good time and get a laugh out of things and not take himself too seriously, which I think is super healthy. | ||
| I think the pretentiousness and the arrogance of the left will be their downfall. | ||
| It often is, and the Bible says so. | ||
| That's exactly what's going to happen. | ||
| People who take themselves too seriously can't laugh. | ||
| It's been wild to see them gain all power in this country and still be almost potentially more miserable. | ||
| It's really something. | ||
| People do need to lighten up and I think it makes for a better world. | ||
| ALX, any final advice for Elon Musk as to how to chart a path forward? | ||
| Apparently according to reports he won't remain CEO for long. | ||
| He wants to hand it off. | ||
| Any recommendations? | ||
| It would be tough to recommend one person, but I would say he was looking for a Blake Masters type. | ||
| Well, if Blake Masters doesn't want to run again, presumably, maybe he would be fit for the role. | ||
| But I would just say anyone that has the same kind of philosophy. | ||
| And I'll just say, too, that people were going to say, oh, this free speech is going to drive people away. | ||
| It's going to be divisive. | ||
| He just posted that they added another 1.6 million active users this week. | ||
| And it's another all-time high. | ||
| So, I mean, this notion that it's driving people away, and I pointed out earlier, 15 million people voted in that poll with Trump. | ||
| That's probably record for Twitter polls. | ||
| People are more engaged than ever and enjoying the platform more than ever, so the next CEO has to have that same type of attitude. | ||
| And also, they have to be a user of the platform, which I think is really important to be a CEO. | ||
| Yes, yes, that's exactly right. | ||
| Seth Dillon, please, ladies and gentlemen, go follow him. | ||
| Of course, you already know him, but here's his account. | ||
| Go follow Seth. | ||
| Seth, any parting words or advice to Elon? | ||
| You know, my advice to Elon would be to not let the mob drive him. | ||
| Never feel that pressure that he's got to do what the mob wants him to do. | ||
| He needs to do the right thing. | ||
| He needs to stick to that. | ||
| And I think it's true that it will ultimately bring more people there if he does that. | ||
| People, by and large, I think do want a free speech platform. | ||
| They don't want the heavy content moderation. | ||
| And he needs to avoid getting into this trap of trying to figure out how do we moderate hate speech? | ||
| How do we moderate misinformation? | ||
| How do we become the most truthful, accurate information source on the planet? | ||
| He needs to just provide a fun forum where people can debate these ideas. | ||
| Obviously, no unlawful speech should be allowed. | ||
| But, you know, he needs to resist those pressures that are coming down on him from the other side. | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| Jonathan Greenblatt and the ADL is such frauds. | ||
| Such frauds. | ||
| Such bad faith negotiations. | ||
| They went in and met with Elon Musk and then they go behind his back the next day and get all the advertisers to drop. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Don't trust these people. | ||
| Trust us instead. | ||
| And if Blake Masters isn't available, make Seth Dillon CEO of the Babylon Bee. | ||
| Of Twitter. | ||
| And the Babylon Bee. | ||
| Maybe you do both. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know how Musk does it. | ||
| My job, my plate is so full with running a little satire site, I don't know how he does it. | ||
| When I was interviewing him, he said, you know, he was talking about all these things, how he's put record numbers of satellites into the atmosphere and all this stuff, and boring tunnels and doing all these things, Neuralink, Starlink, and I was like, well, we publish six to eight satire articles a day. | ||
| That's what we do. | ||
| And you saved Twitter, Seth! | ||
| You saved Twitter, which is the most valuable contribution, I think. | ||
| I mean, ALX is sitting here, I'm sitting here, the world is sitting here saying thank you. | ||
| A couple of libs are sobbing with their dinner for one and their cats right now in single-bedroom apartments. | ||
| Never censor yourself, never bend the knee. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Godspeed. | ||
| What great words and wisdom to live by. | ||
| Thank you, Seth. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Alright, ladies and gentlemen, we are ending tonight on a happy note, on a joyous note, and on a triumphant note. | ||
| We want to state, unequivocally, that we are thrilled to be back. | ||
| It does feel like, boys, we are back. | ||
| It feels like, right now, in this moment, there is winning for the side of truth. | ||
| And the side of free speech and the side of American principles. | ||
| We don't ask for any special favors. | ||
| We just want everyone to have the same thing. | ||
| We're the ones who are in favor of equality. | ||
| All men are created equal and all tweets are created equal. | ||
| And for that, we thank Elon Musk. | ||
| We say God bless you, sir. | ||
| Please, ladies and gentlemen, have a wonderful evening. | ||
| This has been our special little unband. | ||
| Performance here with Seth Dillon of the Babylon Bee, Legendary ALX, and Savannah Hernandez. | ||
| Go follow them all on Twitter. | ||
| Have a wonderful evening. |
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