Jan. 15, 2023 - The Benny Show - Benny Johnson
01:13:25
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| My name is Benny Johnson, and welcome to this special edition of The Benny Show. | ||
| Are you a free person? | ||
| You, watching this right now. | ||
| And how would you classify freedom? | ||
| How would you measure freedom? | ||
| What pieces of data are you using to determine whether you are a free person? | ||
| And this is a question that's been grappled with through the ages by our leaders, by philosophers. | ||
| Our founders knew that freedom of speech was a prerequisite to all other freedoms, because freedom of speech meant freedom of thought. | ||
| If you can't think freely, you can't speak freely. | ||
| Speech comes from thought. | ||
| And so they put freedom of speech as the first right that you have inside of a free society. | ||
| That's a great step. | ||
| But are you free today? | ||
| That's the question. | ||
| Do you have actual free speech and free thought? | ||
| Well, the erosion of the ability to think and speak freely is upon us. | ||
| And obvious and oppressive as we go through the Twitter files and the releases of the Orwellian, and what we mean by that is 1984, George Orwell's 1984, where George Orwell predicted that we would certainly not have the right to free speech, that we would have to admit that 2 plus 2 equals 5, or be vaporized. | ||
| And what we're finding out from the Twitter files is that many people were vaporized for wrong think. | ||
| Wrong think is a term that George Orwell made up. | ||
| And man, if there was ever a Nostradamus in our modern era, it was George Orwell. | ||
| Many millions of people were vaporized on Twitter for wrong think. | ||
| This is real life. | ||
| This is not a novel. | ||
| This is actually happening. | ||
| And only with Elon Musk's acquisition of the company are we starting to peel the onion layer back and understand exactly how oppressed we were, exactly how little freedom we had, and exactly how the powerful, the people who were in charge, were able to weaponize their abilities to cancel us, atomize us, vaporize us for wrong think and destroy our capacity for free thought and speech. | ||
| This is the most And we hope that other social media sites follow suit because you cannot have a free society without freedom of thought or freedom of speech. | ||
| Joining us on this show is somebody who's been at the nexus of Elon Musk's thought process in the takeover of Twitter and somebody who's been a deep and abiding advocate for freedom online for his entire career. | ||
| David Sachs is a South African-American entrepreneur, author, investor, and internet technology firms. | ||
| He is the general partner of Kraft Ventures, a venture capital fund he co-founded in late 2017. | ||
| Previously, Sachs was founding chief operations officer of a little company known as PayPal. | ||
| He also led angel investments in Facebook, Uber, SpaceX, Planter Technologies, and Airbnb. | ||
| He's the co-host of the All In podcast. | ||
| And David Sachs joins us now. | ||
|
unidentified
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Thank you. | |
| David Sachs, thank you so much for being on this special edition of The Benny Show, the free speech edition. | ||
| You yourself, sir, have been at the nexus of the free speech movement online. | ||
| All of your work that we just detailed has been extensive, but the Twitter files dropping have truly been the coup de grace, I believe, of any career. | ||
| This has been really the most impressive act of transparency that has ever existed, potentially ever, in American history. | ||
| Would you agree? | ||
| Yes, at the corporate level, for sure. | ||
| Although I don't deserve any of the credit for that. | ||
| I mean, Elon really deserves the credit for that. | ||
| He's the one who bought the company, owns the company, made the decision to open things up and give these journalists unparalleled access. | ||
| I mean, they were allowed to request whatever they wanted, and they were given these large data dumps based on their own requests. | ||
| And as far as I can tell, nothing was held back on the part of the company. | ||
| And it's just unprecedented. | ||
| I mean, it's an unprecedented act of corporate transparency, which is what the media is always calling for. | ||
| And yet, in this case, when we have a corporation living up to total transparency, they refuse to cover it because they don't like what it shows, which is their complicity basically in censorship. | ||
| That complicity is... | ||
| It's far-reaching and covers essentially every topic that the conspiracy theorists who – I mean what is the timeline from conspiracy theory to proven fact now? | ||
| Has it gone from six months, three months? | ||
|
unidentified
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It's shrinking for sure. | |
| Everything imaginable and now everyone anxiously awaits the Fauci files. | ||
| But you're seeing, of course, the COVID censorship regime and maybe lawsuits even spawning from it. | ||
| Can you – Take a step back and explain to us how is it that these files get delivered to these reporters? | ||
| We know you've done your podcast with Elon Musk popping in from Twitter headquarters. | ||
| We know you're very close with Elon. | ||
| How is it that these files are delivered? | ||
| And more importantly, who made the decision ultimately to do it this way? | ||
| Well, Elon made the decision to open things up to these reporters. | ||
| And my understanding is that the only condition they're under is that they have to break their stories on Twitter first. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| He's not involved at all in the editorializing. | ||
| He's not involved in the writing. | ||
| As far as I know, he doesn't approve anything that's published. | ||
| And my understanding of how it works is that the reporters make a request for documents using keyword search. | ||
| You can think of it like a discovery request. | ||
| And it goes to the same lawyers in the company who process discovery requests for lawsuits and so on. | ||
| They have e-discovery tools that allow them to search. | ||
| Through the company's emails and Slack channels and so forth. | ||
| And they basically provide a data dump. | ||
| And I think the only thing that's redacted is maybe the names of junior employees, just so that they're not kind of tangled up in this. | ||
| But I think it's just, you know, it's what you would get if these reporters are getting what they would get if they were submitting depositions in a lawsuit or providing the company with a search warrant. | ||
| I mean, it's... | ||
| Really unprecedented access. | ||
| And as far as I know, Elon is not involved. | ||
| He's not in this loop. | ||
| You know, the only decision he made was, you know, he selected this group of reporters to come in and then said, hey, here you go. | ||
| Here are the keys. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Who handled classified information worse? | ||
| Joe Biden or Yul Roth? | ||
| Well, yeah, I mean, so. | ||
| Yoel Roth would only have received classified information that was provided to him by the FBI. | ||
| And in fact, one of the things that we've learned from the Twitter files is that the FBI had a special tool for communicating with Twitter and presumably other big tech companies and providing them with secret instructions. | ||
| So the way it worked is it's called teleport. | ||
| And so you saw in a lot of these Twitter file emails from the FBI to Yoel Roth, they're saying, You know, go look on teleport. | ||
| There's a document there that will explain, you know, what's going on. | ||
| And so these documents would then be on teleport and then they would disappear after 10 days or whatever it was. | ||
| And they couldn't be photographed or what have you, screenshotted through this tool. | ||
| It was a very weird detail and it shows the way that our government prefers to operate, which is in secrecy. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes. | |
| Yes. | ||
| I mean, what basis is there for the FBI, first of all, to even be engaged in censorship on social media at the extent they were? | ||
| One of the big revelations of the Twitter file is that the FBI had something like 80 agents flagging posts on social media to be taken down. | ||
| Quite extraordinary. | ||
| A lot of those posts were just completely harmless. | ||
| There were people making jokes and so forth. | ||
| FBI didn't really approach this with much of a sense of humor. | ||
| The larger point is just you had this large-scale operation of the FBI demanding that post being taken down. | ||
| They were acting as a conduit for other similar requests coming from many other parts of our government, the so-called intelligence community, the CIA, Department of Homeland Security, and on and on it went. | ||
| They were, in the words of the FBI Bureau, San Francisco field office chief, they were the belly button for the U.S. federal government, meaning... | ||
| They were this centralized conduit through which all these censorship requests were made, as well as surveillance requests. | ||
| I mean, they were surveilling American social media postings on a large scale. | ||
| Now, my understanding of what the FBI is supposed to do is investigate crimes, right? | ||
| Investigate crimes. | ||
| So what is the crime that they were investigating here? | ||
| What is the criminal activity they were trying to stop by engaging in censorship? | ||
| This has never been explained. | ||
| And so you start with that set of facts, and then you add to it the fact that the instructions they were providing to Twitter via the so-called teleport were secret disappearing instructions. | ||
| Why isn't that a matter of public record? | ||
| If the government is instructing social media to engage in censorship, first of all, that's a violation of the First Amendment. | ||
| Second of all, it's even worse if they're not being transparent about what's happening. | ||
| Well, of course it's a cover-up, right? | ||
| To do this with any other crime and you were to institute or execute a crime in some type of disappearing tech, that would be called obstruction of justice. | ||
| I mean, this is exactly what they attempted to prosecute Hillary Clinton for. | ||
| This may be something that Joe Biden gets the business end of. | ||
| Could you burrow down on that just a little bit since I haven't seen a lot of this out there? | ||
| We've been following the Twitter files release very closely, but Teleport? | ||
| Is this tech that is developed by the FBI? | ||
| This is not tech that was developed by Twitter, right? | ||
| No, no. | ||
| The only reason we know about it is it's referred to in the emails that go between the FBI and its SF Bureau chief. | ||
| I think his name was Elvis Chan and Yoel Roth, who is the head of trust and safety at Twitter. | ||
| So they're communicating. | ||
| And periodically, Elvis would tell Yoel, go check out Teleport. | ||
| You know, contains more information there about what we want you to do and what the justification is. | ||
| So they're acting like there's all these state secrets that are being transmitted on teleport. | ||
| But, you know, I'm just like highly skeptical of the idea that the information that's being provided to Twitter are really national security secrets. | ||
| By the way, I mean, this is the common connective tissue between... | ||
| What's happening with the Twitter files and what's happening right now with this classified document scandal. | ||
| I think we just have an overclassification problem in this country where, you know, ever since the Freedom of Information Act was passed, there's a very easy way for the government to get around providing the public with the information it wants to know, which is simply to declare a document classified. | ||
| So the incentives we provided for the government to not make anything foiable... | ||
| You know, again, discoverable under the Freedom of Information Act, is they declare everything classified. | ||
| So, you know, this is where my take is probably a little different than most Republicans who are attacking Biden for his mishandling of classified documents. | ||
| You now have the last three presidential candidates. | ||
| You have Biden, Trump, and Hillary Clinton all mishandling classified documents. | ||
| I think there's a very simple reason for that, which is everything's classified now. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| We have this massive overclassification problem. | ||
| And so I think it's probably quite easy for our elected officials to mishandle documents because almost everything they're handed is now classified. | ||
| And I think what's happening is that the elected branches of our government are being made subordinate to the rules and regulations that are created by basically the deep state. | ||
| I mean, the National Archivist. | ||
| I mean, what Biden is doing, like, you know, if Biden... | ||
| We're Trump right now. | ||
| How would Trump be reacting to it? | ||
| He'd be saying, listen, I'm the President of the United States. | ||
| I'll just say these documents are not classified anymore, right? | ||
| I don't report to the National Archivist. | ||
| But Biden basically is paying obeisance to this bureaucrat in the National Archives. | ||
| But this is the way that the government works now, is that, again, our elected representatives are now being made subordinate to the procedures that are created by the deep state. | ||
| Who gave them that authority? | ||
| What is the check on that authority? | ||
| So in any event, this is where I think there's some conservatives out there who kind of have this conspiracy theory that the Democratic Party and the media are now turning on Biden. | ||
| And my take is a little different. | ||
| I mean, I understand why they're saying that, because what they can see is that the media now is finally criticizing Biden around this mishandling documents issue. | ||
| But I think there's a simple reason for that. | ||
| It's not that the media doesn't love Biden. | ||
| They just love the deep state more. | ||
| They love the deep state more. | ||
| So, you know, they want the President of the United States and all of our elected officials to be subordinate to the deep state. | ||
| It's an inversion. | ||
| Remember, the deep state, the executive branch of our government should report to the President. | ||
| The Constitution makes it really clear. | ||
| The Constitution says the President of the United States is the chief executive of the executive branch. | ||
| They all report to him. | ||
| But yet, the President is being bossed around here by the National Archivist. | ||
| It's weird and bizarre. | ||
| That's the really weird thing that's happening, but everyone's kind of buying into it. | ||
| And even the Republican critics of Biden, I understand why they're criticizing him, because there's this massive hypocrisy going on, right? | ||
| I mean, the hypocrisy is that they basically raided Trump's house for the exact same thing that Biden has now done, right? | ||
| So when's the raid on Biden's Delaware home going to happen? | ||
| So I understand why Republicans are... | ||
| Criticizing him because there is this massive hypocrisy. | ||
| However, what I worry about is that in the process of jumping on this bandwagon, we're buying into the overclassification problem. | ||
| We're buying into this fetishizing of six-year-old government documents as if they're like all top secret and they contain the nuclear codes. | ||
| I highly doubt that. | ||
| I don't think any of these documents are probably very relevant. | ||
| I don't think the documents that were in Trump's basement were very relevant. | ||
| I don't think. | ||
| The documents that were in Biden's garage are probably very – I mean, I could be wrong. | ||
| But in my experience, very few documents are still relevant six years later. | ||
| The real problem here that we should be focused on is, yes, Biden was hypocritical. | ||
| The Democrats were very hypocritical on the classified documents issue. | ||
| Obviously, Trump shouldn't be prosecuted for something they themselves are doing. | ||
| We can all agree on that. | ||
| But I just think that we need to drill in a little bit more around this overclassification issue. | ||
| You know, because if the deep state has its way, everything would be classified. | ||
| And the only way that our elected officials would be able to operate would be to go into a clean room or something like that, never touch a document, never bring their phone, never take notes. | ||
| This is the way that the government wants our democracy to operate. | ||
| And it's bizarre. | ||
| You know, you can never run a business this way, right? | ||
| You can't run a government this way. | ||
| So, you know, I would not buy into this hamstringing of our elected officials, and in particular the President of the United States, and making them subordinate and subservient to the policies and procedures of this national archivist, even if this particular president is one that we don't like. | ||
| I think we're just conceding way too much in that. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, glad you brought up the deep state. | ||
| I think this is just a flex by the super state and the permanent state in order to say you must adhere to our fealty, right? | ||
| You must come under the ring. | ||
| And you said you were going to run in 2024. | ||
| We hadn't given you permission to do that. | ||
| And so, you know, we're going to spank you. | ||
| And we're going to use some opaque procedure with probably, yes, you're right, some boxes that Barack Obama and his team packed. | ||
| and put in your garage and you've never seen them. | ||
| But we're going to make sure that you hurt because of this. | ||
| And now everyone's going to ask the question. | ||
| Everyone is now free. | ||
| The dogs are unleashed to ask the questions. | ||
| And you're exactly right. | ||
| I mean, it's it is. | ||
| It becomes easy when you realize the same people that hated Trump hate Joe Biden for the exact same reasons because they're disposable. | ||
| They become disposable to a super state that lives in Washington, D.C., and these people are just playthings. | ||
| And you can just – Do away with them, right? | ||
| When they become inconvenient. | ||
| And perhaps Joe Biden is becoming convenient. | ||
| I think that's where a lot of that stems from. | ||
| Could you define the deep state? | ||
| I mean, since you brought it up, could you define what your functional definition of somebody who obviously works inside and is a major player inside of companies and organizations that the deep state would love to get access into or tentacles on? | ||
| What is your functional definition of deep state? | ||
| It's the permanent Washington establishment. | ||
| It's the people who work for the government who are there permanently, who don't come in and out with each administration. | ||
| There are millions of these people now. | ||
| I mean, millions and millions. | ||
| Actually, there's just an article I was reading the other day. | ||
| The government, the U.S. government, is by far the largest employer in the United States. | ||
| Something like 9 million people. | ||
| Walmart's number two with 1.5 million. | ||
| That gives you a sense of the scale. | ||
| And then I think there's a part of the... | ||
| Permanent Washington establishment that is the security state. | ||
| So it's this so-called intelligence community, which also works very closely with the FBI. | ||
| And that's the part of the government that we have to be most concerned about, because they have all the guns, they have the ability to engage in mass surveillance, they have the ability to prosecute, they have the ability to really infringe on the civil liberties of Americans. | ||
| And this is what Frank Church of the Church Committee warned about, is you cannot let these guys get out of control. | ||
| You know, President Eisenhower gave us a warning in a similar way about the military-industrial complex. | ||
| Don't let this permanent entrenched interest again has its own interests. | ||
| Don't let them kind of direct American foreign policy. | ||
| So whether you're talking about church, you're talking about Eisenhower. | ||
| You know, they can effectuate policy. | ||
| This is not, by the way, this is not a conspiracy theory. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| It's just a way of describing two very simple things. | ||
| One is that there's a huge chunk of our government, which is permanent. | ||
| It's not elected. | ||
| And the other thing is just to recognize that, like any group of people, they become their own – like any group of powerful people, they develop their own interests and their own agenda. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| That's what I mean when I refer to the deep state. | ||
| We could call it just, again, permanent Washington if you want. | ||
| You know, over our history, we've received these warnings from people who really knew what they were talking about to keep an eye on this. | ||
| You know, Eisenhower, you know, great general, wins World War II, President of the United States. | ||
| You know, he warned us. | ||
| He knew of what he was speaking about. | ||
| And Frank Church, liberal Democrat, who warned in the 1970s that these agencies, left to their own devices, Could get out of control in terms of surveilling and prosecuting and infringing on the civil liberties of ordinary Americans. | ||
| And now with the Twitter files, we see it in operation. | ||
| Now, one of the ways I think of explaining this is that for people who kind of resist this idea that there is this deep state is, you know, I see in response to some of the Twitter files, one of the things that I'll see is, well, you know, Trump's FBI did this too. | ||
| If you look at when the censorship requests came in, some of them, it wasn't all Biden's FBI. | ||
| A lot of them were coming in under Trump's FBI. | ||
| This is the argument you'll hear from people who have this kind of narrow partisan lens. | ||
| My view on it is that just the words Trump's FBI is an oxymoron. | ||
| You know, Trump's FBI lied to the FISA court to spy on Trump. | ||
| Trump's FBI was sending text messages to each other saying that they were in the insurance policy against Trump. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You know, Trump's FBI was leaking to the media to subvert his agenda at every turn. | ||
| I mean, so Trump's FBI was not reporting to Trump, which is the whole point. | ||
| They were doing this on their own, under their own recognizance. | ||
| They became a power unto themselves. | ||
| That's the whole point. | ||
| That's what the deep state is. | ||
| It's powerful people who develop their own agenda. | ||
| And, you know, if we're going to be a democracy, these people must ultimately report to somebody elected, which is the President of the United States, the chief executive of our government. | ||
| The Constitution makes this really clear. | ||
| So we have this problem of people with massive power in our government being unelected and unaccountable. | ||
| That is not democracy. | ||
| Whatever that is, okay? | ||
| And on top of that, they would like to operate in total secrecy. | ||
|
unidentified
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How? | |
| They make everything classified so it's non-foyable. | ||
| And then through tools like Teleport, when they communicate and give instructions to big tech, they make those instructions disappearing. | ||
| So the picture here that's developing is the kind of thing that Frank Church warned about, warned us about. | ||
| Is that if these powerful actors in our security state ever got to the point where they could start acting on their own and pursuing their own agenda, the power of their tools is just beyond belief. | ||
| And anything that powerful needs to be constrained and be made subordinate. | ||
| If we're to remain a democracy, it has to be subordinate to our elected officials. | ||
| And of course, if you make any criticisms like this, you're accused of, You want to subvert democracy. | ||
| The people who are defending these sorts of rogue deep state actors are always claiming to be the protectors of democracy. | ||
| Well, how are you protecting democracy if you're defending the actions of people who are utterly unaccountable, who don't even report to our elected representatives? | ||
| That is not democracy. | ||
| That's something different. | ||
| That's something that needs to be reined in. | ||
| And I think the Twitter files show that. | ||
| And I think especially, you know, you look at the... | ||
| Hunter Biden's story, that we could deep dive on that, too. | ||
| But all this stuff comes together. | ||
| That's the common theme, is a lack of accountability that needs to be restored. | ||
| And I think, to me, this should really be what the Republican agenda should be, is the restoration of Democratic accountability to every part of our government. | ||
| And I think they're kind of missing the boat here by focusing on this or that. | ||
| Particular document mishandling, violation. | ||
| Where do these rules come from anyway? | ||
| This is not the problem, you know? | ||
| So I hope that, again, the restoration of that Democratic accountability will ultimately be the agenda of this new church committee that's going to be under Jim Jordan and that McCarthy agreed to set up. | ||
| And I hope it'll be a major plank of the Republican platform in 24. Because Democrats evidently don't want to... | ||
| Focus on this at all. | ||
| You called for this church committee on Twitter. | ||
| Is McCarthy reading your Twitter? | ||
| It's really interesting how that worked. | ||
| I tweeted the need for this on December 20th. | ||
| Now, I wasn't the only one. | ||
| The meme was starting to percolate. | ||
| I retweeted a video clip of Frank Church explaining the need for the church committee in the 1970s. | ||
| I was like, wow, you could play this today in light of the revelations from the Twitter files, and it is totally current. | ||
| And again, he was a liberal Democrat back in the 1970s, I think, from Idaho. | ||
| And anyway, he lost in 1980 when we had the big Republican wave. | ||
| He was one of those old-school liberals who believed in civil liberties. | ||
| You know, I wish we had more of them. | ||
| But in any event, so I retweeted this, and being familiar with following the Twitter files, I just said, you know, we need a new church committee to investigate this. | ||
| And, again, I think other people were saying it, but the idea seemed to gain steam. | ||
| And then I think Tucker endorsed that idea, I think, a week before the speaker fight on his show. | ||
| And then somehow that became part of the negotiation between McCarthy and the holdouts. | ||
| By the way, I don't know the details there. | ||
| I hope McCarthy just wanted to do it anyway. | ||
| I hope he didn't need to be arm twisted to do it because I think it's really the kind of thing that both parties should be concerned about, you know? | ||
| And it's really a shame that the new church committee vote was on straight party lines. | ||
| I hope they will put some Democrats on that committee who are really willing to look into this idea that the FBI and these other, you know, IC agencies are engaged in censorship of Americans and are engaging in Again, actions sort of on their own recognizance without being ordered to that are outside the scope of their mandate to, say, prosecute crime. | ||
| I mean, this should be a bipartisan issue, and it's really a shame that it's not. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, when did the party of no new wars and when did the party of run DMC and raps about the FBI and the CIA? | ||
| Listen to your authorities and comply at all times and don't question. | ||
| It seems like leftism has completely abandoned – progressivism has completely rotted the Democrat Party and they've abandoned any type of liberal principles that they may have had back in French Church's day. | ||
| They're the party of compliance now with the super state. | ||
| But that's changed in my lifetime. | ||
| I mean I remember growing up like in the Iraq war when the left was – Totally against the FBI, the CIA, waterboarding Bill, you know, Dick Cheney. | ||
| These were the Satan, the great Satans of the left. | ||
| And now they're deified, these agencies. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, so I remember the Iraq War too. | ||
| And back then, it was, I think the only dissenting votes in favor of going into Iraq in 2003 were on the left. | ||
| It was progressives. | ||
| They ultimately proved correct. | ||
| I mean, we were lied into that war. | ||
| They told us that Saddam had WMD. | ||
| And moreover, the Bush administration, this is Bush 43W, they not only said that Saddam has the WMD, he said that, or I think it was Rumsfeld said, we know where they are. | ||
| That was a total lie. | ||
| They also lied about the connection between Saddam Hussein and 9-11, they claimed that he was in cahoots with al-Qaeda. | ||
| That was a total lie. | ||
| But they pushed it so hard that polling showed that at the time we got into the Iraq war, over 50% of the American public believed that Saddam had links to al-Qaeda. | ||
| So we were lied into that war, and the progressive left was 100% right about that. | ||
| And then, by the way, I mean, we were not greeted as liberators. | ||
| It was a costly long-term occupation. | ||
| That ultimately failed. | ||
| That was also, it was predicted by realists like international relations professor John Mearsheimer and sort of that realist school of thought. | ||
| So they deserve some credit. | ||
| And then, you know, again, the progressive left had concerns about that this thing wouldn't be such a cakewalk. | ||
| In any event, the point is that back in those days, the progressive left had an anti-war element to it going all the way back to Vietnam. | ||
| You look today, this Ukraine war, not a single Democrat has voted against the funding, the virtually unlimited funding for Ukraine. | ||
| It's now over $100 billion. | ||
| And moreover, when the Progressive Caucus dared to submit a letter to the president simply saying that, look, why we are giving unlimited aid, weapons, and funding to Ukraine. | ||
| Can we pretty please have a parallel track of diplomacy? | ||
| That's all the letter said. | ||
| And the reaction to that, the uproar was so great that I think every member of the Progressive Caucus, except one, retracted their signature of the letter. | ||
| And the one member, to his great credit, who didn't retract was Ro Khanna. | ||
| So I'm a fan of him just for that reason. | ||
| By the way, he was good on the Twitter files too. | ||
| In the Twitter files, he reached out to... | ||
| The general counsel and sort of chief censor, Vijay Agati, is saying, listen, in terms of the Hunter Biden story, I think it was friendly. | ||
| He was saying, listen, I don't think you guys understand how your actions are being perceived, which is you are meddling in an election, you're engaging in censorship. | ||
| He tried to help them. | ||
| In any event, so, you know, kudos to Ro Khanna for being the one progressive who's willing to at least... | ||
| Endorsed diplomacy on a parallel track. | ||
| But none of them have really voiced any objections or deep concerns to our involvement in the war itself. | ||
| And you're right. | ||
| This is part of a resorting of American politics where all those Bush, Cheney, neocons have now moved wholeheartedly into the Democratic Party. | ||
| Bill Kristol, David Frum, I mean, basically all the writers of the Atlantic Magazine. | ||
| I mean, they all used to be... | ||
| You know, part of, you know, Bush, Cheney, their administration, they were all part of the cabal that lied us into the Iraq war, and now they are all Democrats. | ||
| And they have just, without any explanation whatsoever, have just dropped all of their formerly conservative domestic positions in order to get on board with the party of state power, which is the Democrats. | ||
| And I call it the power sorting. | ||
| You know, there's a lot of, I think there's an understanding among I remember when Reagan was president, there was a group called the Blue Dog Democrats, who were these conservative Southern Democrats. | ||
| And Reagan was able to pass a large part of his agenda with the support of the Blue Dog Democrats. | ||
| There are no more Blue Dog Democrats. | ||
| What subsequently happened over the next couple of decades is the parties sorted. | ||
| And the liberal Republicans, the Nelson Rockefeller types. | ||
| They got defeated and replaced by Democrats, and the conservative Democrats, especially in the South, got replaced with Republicans. | ||
| And so the parties became very pure ideologically. | ||
| There was no longer a conservative wing in the Democrat Party and a liberal wing in the Republican Party. | ||
| There was just a conservative party and a liberal party. | ||
| So I think everyone understands that that sorting, that ideological sorting, has happened over the last couple of decades. | ||
| But I think what's less remarked on is the power sorting. | ||
| What I mean by that is that now... | ||
| Every single power center in American politics is now part of the Democratic Party. | ||
| And frankly, the Republicans don't really have any power centers. | ||
| So, for example, when Reagan was president, you remember that I think largely the Fortune 500, you could say, was sort of on Reagan's side. | ||
| You know, maybe not like entirely, but substantially. | ||
| Similarly, the Republicans were more hawkish than the Democrats on foreign policy. | ||
| And I think the military industrial complex of foreign policy establishment was more On the side of Republicans. | ||
| And then the Democrats had power centers like the media was always pretty liberal, not as liberal as it is today, not as activist. | ||
| They had the unions. | ||
| They had Hollywood. | ||
| And then I think big tech was still in the process of emerging. | ||
| It wasn't the power center it is today. | ||
| Finance, I think, was split. | ||
| You know, big finance had both Democrats and Republicans. | ||
| It wasn't purely one party or the other. | ||
| So you had this... | ||
| Sort of split in terms of the power centers of American life. | ||
| Fast forward to today, what have you got? | ||
| Big tech, 99% Democrat. | ||
| Just look at the data that came out around their contributions. | ||
| Hollywood, certainly the same. | ||
| Big finance. | ||
| There are some individual Republicans who are big donors, like a Ken Griffin or something like that. | ||
| But by and large, you look at the investment banks, substantially Democrat. | ||
| The media, obviously, the prestige media, the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, the Atlantic, the so-called Cathedral, all Democrat, the universities, all Democrat. | ||
| You're hard-pressed to name a single power center in American life that isn't uniformly Democrat. | ||
| And I think the deep state now, I think the deep state itself, the permanent Washington establishment, is also incredibly sympathetic to the Democrats. | ||
| And you saw... | ||
| them suppress the Hunter Biden story on behalf of Biden's presidential campaign. | ||
| I doubt they were ordered to do that. | ||
| I think they just did that on their own recognizance because Biden was their preferred candidate. | ||
| So I think we have a situation today in which where the country is divided ideologically, but it's also divided between the elites, the people who control these power centers. | ||
| And then the rest of the people, the populace. | ||
| And this is why populism is the ascended ideology in the Republican Party, is because populism is a reaction of a powerless majority against elites who are pursuing policies that they don't like. | ||
| That's what populism is, democracy. | ||
| But, you know, it's not, the elitist Republicans are not doing very well. | ||
| The base of the Republican Party has no interest. | ||
| And call them, you know, Davos Republicans. | ||
| You know, all my friends in Silicon Valley think that Nikki Haley is going to be the next Republican candidate for president. | ||
| They're all Democrats. | ||
| You know, they think that that's their idea of a winning Republican. | ||
| Right? | ||
| But that's not what the base is after. | ||
| The base is not looking for more elites to represent them. | ||
| The base is looking for a populist alternative to these elite power centers that the bulk of the country believes is either pursuing misguided policies or pushing an ideological agenda on them that they do not agree with. | ||
| And that is basically the source of all this friction and tension in this country that I think we all feel. | ||
| The elite is very out of touch with the people. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And hasn't ever been the gap this wide ever, I think, in American political landscape. | ||
| I don't think you've ever had a gap between the people who elect. | ||
| And send representatives to Washington and them being heard in the superstructure permanent Washington. | ||
| I don't think that's ever been as wide. | ||
| It certainly has always existed. | ||
| There's always been classes in this country. | ||
| But I think that we're reaching superstructures of classes never seen before. | ||
| And you're exactly right. | ||
| That's where the breaking is happening. | ||
| It's remarkable to listen to you talk about populism. | ||
| And I'm having this clairvoyant moment here because I did want... | ||
| I did want to tell you this, and I guess we haven't spoken before this interview, but you have profoundly affected my life. | ||
| Thank You for Smoking is one of my favorite movies ever, perhaps in the top three. | ||
| And it actually brought me to Washington for 15 years because I'm so curious about what I saw in that movie. | ||
| And if you haven't seen it, you have to check it out. | ||
| David Sachs is the producer of that movie, I believe. | ||
| Yes, I produced it. | ||
| I funded it. | ||
| This was a startup basically that I created back – well, geez, we did it back in 2005. | ||
| I think it came out in 2006. | ||
| So it's been – You nailed it. | ||
| You nailed Washington perfectly. | ||
| It's perfect. | ||
| Well, the reason for that – Yeah, the reason for that – Like how Washington works. | ||
| It is. | ||
| It is. | ||
| What the movie is really about is the use of dissembling as a corporate and political PR tool. | ||
| And it's about spin. | ||
| And it's based on a book by Christopher Buckley. | ||
| Who is a great satirical writer. | ||
| And he learned about Washington because he's the son of William F. Buckley. | ||
| So the father kind of wrote these very serious columns about the way that politics in Washington worked. | ||
| And the son wrote the satirical version, which is much more entertaining and much more conducive to the movie treatment. | ||
| But yeah, I mean, it does. | ||
| Nick Naylor is a populist, right? | ||
| I want to fly on the plane with the American people. | ||
| These are my people, right? | ||
| I can convince one of them to pick up smoking, man. | ||
| I paid for my ticket round trip, right? | ||
| Yeah, the reason why Nick Naylor comes across well in that movie, even though he's the spokesman for Big Tobacco and he's basically, you know, shilling or dissembling on behalf of these Big Tobacco companies, is that there is a fundamental honesty to him and all the people he deals with are worse. | ||
| So when he goes to meet the Hollywood super agent, that guy's a bigger liar. | ||
| Or when he meets the senator who wants to pass legislation, that person's a bigger liar. | ||
| Worst. | ||
| And so on down the line. | ||
| So, yeah, and he's also representing a uniquely American perspective, which is around assumption of risk, right? | ||
| That the American people should have the right to do something to themselves that is manifestly harmful. | ||
| Which is smoking. | ||
| You know, Chris Buckley once described it to me as Tom Sawyer does PR. | ||
| You know, there's something uniquely American about defending the rights of people to do something harmful to themselves. | ||
| You know, only in America can you do that, right? | ||
| And so, yeah, I mean, it's an expose. | ||
| It's not really an expose. | ||
| It's more, again, like a satire of the use of corporate and political spin. | ||
| But there's something, again, just very quintessentially American about it. | ||
| It's magical. | ||
| And he gets to roll the Bernie Sanders of the Senate in the end. | ||
| It's just a beautiful thing. | ||
| That's right, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Because that person wants to restrict the freedom of Americans even though – again, what Nick Naylor – again, the side he's ultimately on is – You know, is that, you know, ultimately he admits the truth about, yeah, of course smoking is bad for you, but if you want to do it, then, you know, it's kind of on you. | ||
| And that ultimately is the more popular position than like a puritanical view on the subject. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| By the way, like thinking back through Thank You for Smoking, you nailed it on the retrofitting Hollywood. | ||
| And taking cigarettes out of Hollywood films. | ||
| They would totally do that now, actually. | ||
| I can't put on Peter Pan for my kids and have them watch it without some giant, massive warning label for five minutes about how offensive. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, what Christopher Buckley always said is that it was tough being in the satire business because he couldn't stay ahead of USA Today. | ||
| You know, meaning that every time he came up with a satirical idea, like, he would see it proven out on the front page of the newspaper. | ||
| And, I mean, so many of the crazy ideas that he wrote about, not just in Thank You for Smoking, but in some of his other books, like, they all came true. | ||
| So, yeah. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So, it's coming true with the Twitter files. | ||
| Is anything profoundly shocked you? | ||
| And what has been the most shocking thing in the Twitter files for you? | ||
| I would say three things where I was genuinely very surprised. | ||
| Okay, number one is that despite their years of protests and denials, it turns out that Twitter management was engaged in shadow banning. | ||
| And I know a lot of conservatives thought that this was happening, but I assume that if Twitter management was flatly denying that, including under oath in congressional hearings, I never thought... | ||
| That they would have the temerity and the gumption to basically engage in shadow banning. | ||
| Now, they call it a visibility filtering. | ||
| But as it turns out, they had these elaborate Big Brother-like tools that they had created to throttle traffic to accounts they didn't like. | ||
| So, for example, they could hide you from search. | ||
| They could hide you from trends. | ||
| They could make it so that they could do a do-not-amplify setting. | ||
| So that people who ordinarily would see your tweets couldn't see your tweets. | ||
| So, you know, a lot of people weren't surprised about that, but I was actually genuinely surprised that they would lie about that the way that they did. | ||
| So that was number one. | ||
| Number two, I think, was the revelation that the FBI and other government agencies were deeply involved in the censorship, and they devoted substantial resources to it, something like 80 FBI agents like we talked about. | ||
| I mean, that blew my mind that we could live in a country that has state censorship. | ||
| I mean, again, these types of things were speculated about by some people, but they were always called a conspiracy theory. | ||
| I generally don't like to believe things unless there's evidence for them. | ||
| But now there's evidence for it. | ||
| You can't call it a conspiracy theory anymore. | ||
| So the existence of state censorship, I think, was pretty stunning. | ||
| And then I think the third one. | ||
| Is this, which is that how did the FBI justify its involvement in the state censorship? | ||
| What they went back to over and over again was this idea of foreign influence, foreign interference, especially in our elections, the so-called Russian collusion, Russian interference idea. | ||
| And what you see in the Twitter files is that there is no evidence. | ||
| Quite the contrary. | ||
| Yoel Roth, who is a loyal, liberal, and apparently subservient to the party and the deep state in carrying out all of their wishes, expresses discomfort. | ||
| He is happy to ban Trump. | ||
| When they want him to take an action, he's compliant and generally happy about it. | ||
| He's looking for excuses. | ||
| To ban Trump. | ||
| But when it comes to the FBI coming to Twitter and saying, listen, we think that there's a huge amount of foreign influence going on. | ||
| We want you to look at these accounts. | ||
| And Yoel Roth would come back and say, listen, we can't find any foreign influence. | ||
| The 50 accounts you gave us, they're not Russians. | ||
| We're just not seeing any of this foreign interference stuff. | ||
| And they would get pushback from the FBI saying, no, try harder. | ||
| You haven't found it yet. | ||
| And you would see Twitter trust and safety people expressing discomfort about this, going, gee, what are we missing? | ||
| It's like, okay, I guess we'll keep trying. | ||
| So what you see is that the larger frame of this foreign influence, which had been used by the FBI to engage in this mass censorship and surveillance operation, was itself concocted by them. | ||
| That if they were really looking empirically at the data, data put together and shown them. | ||
| By, again, loyal liberals like Yael Roth, they would have seen that this was total nonsense. | ||
| And yet they kept pushing it and pushing it anyway. | ||
| And this sort of larger frame dominated American political discourse for years. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And it's turned out to be... | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| They sign up the American people. | ||
| And they're doing so now by issuing statements saying that the Twitter files aren't real. | ||
| I just cannot believe the temerity, the hubris. | ||
| You saw the FBI statement, right? | ||
| It's a conspiracy theory by people who are trying to discredit the FBI. | ||
| Listen, I didn't know the FBI was involved in any of this until I saw the Twitter files. | ||
| I mean, like, it's in the emails. | ||
| There are, like, hundreds of emails going back and forth between the FBI and Twitter. | ||
| I mean, like, this denial is not going to fly. | ||
| It's all there in black and white. | ||
| So then they talk about, well, you're cherry picking. | ||
| Well, what does that mean? | ||
| I mean, yeah, you know, there's like tens of thousands of Slack messages and emails and so forth. | ||
| But if you search for the ones that show communication between Twitter and the FBI or Twitter and the government, they all look like this. | ||
| This isn't cherry picked. | ||
| This is what they look like. | ||
| They're all of a certain theme. | ||
| And the theme is that the FBI was deeply involved in mass censorship of the American people and simultaneously was pushing, as the justification for this, this, again, foreign influence narrative for which there was no evidence. | ||
| And whenever Twitter would show them there was no evidence, they would just push back on that. | ||
| They were utterly impervious to the data. | ||
| You know, the conclusion that you have to come away with is that this was almost like a type of red scare. | ||
| You know, this is what they did in the days of McCarthy, right? | ||
| When the FBI wanted to expand its power massively under J. Edgar Hoover, they created this red scare. | ||
| We have to root out all the communists. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And, I mean, this is a, you know, it's hard to believe this is still going on today, but this is the playbook that they used. | ||
| I mean, I think it's stunning. | ||
| I mean, I genuinely was surprised about all these revelations because, look, I knew that big tech was engaged in censorship, and I knew the media loved, the mainstream media loved to, you know, talk about this Russian collusion, you know, narrative. | ||
| That, you know, for which the Mueller investigation could then find no evidence for, right? | ||
| So, I knew the media was in on it. | ||
| I knew big tech liked to censor. | ||
| I didn't know that behind the scenes, the intelligence community and the FBI, the so-called security state, was behind this pulling the strings. | ||
| And, you know, whether it was pulling the strings or lending credence to it or just being involved, I mean, this is really surprising. | ||
| Because, again, remember... | ||
| What was the justification that liberals were making for all this big tech censorship at the time it was going on? | ||
| Well, these are private companies. | ||
| They can do whatever they want. | ||
| Well, now we find out that they were not acting like private companies. | ||
| They were acting as a subsidiary of the security state. | ||
| They were taking actions at the behest of the security state. | ||
| It was an alliance. | ||
| Twitter was an op. | ||
| It was an op. | ||
| It was an alliance between big tech and... | ||
| The mainstream media and the deep state, and they were perpetuating this narrative for which there was no evidence, and using that narrative to then seize control of these powerful technology tools and then use them to engage in state censorship. | ||
| I mean, it should be a gigantic bipartisan scandal. | ||
| But one party is completely and wholly captured by the power of this permanent state and its interests. | ||
| Well, like I mentioned, it's a power sorting. | ||
| It's a power sorting. | ||
| So again, all the power centers of American life now have sorted. | ||
| And the Democratic Party is basically the party of elite power. | ||
| It's the power of big tech monopolies. | ||
| It's the power of the big finance, the too big to fail banks. | ||
| It's the power of the deep state. | ||
| It's the power of the mainstream media. | ||
| it's a very stubborn problem because, you know, again, all the elite power centers have formed an alliance, and this is basically the backbone of the party. | ||
| But I don't think they represent the views. | ||
| of most americans yeah i think most americans do not share their ideology and i think they also see the manifest failures of this elite class yes and this is basically why there's a sense of fracture and you know in our society so just to give you some data on this um The political scientist who I look to for all this is Roy Teixeira, who is a Democrat. | ||
| He wrote the book, I think it was The Emerging Democrat Majority. | ||
| Do you remember this in the early 2000s? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| He basically predicted that an alliance or a new coalition, let's call it, of minorities, women, young people, and then the traditional sort of union base, the kind of blue-collar base of the Democratic Party. | ||
| Would form and create a winning coalition in electoral politics and create Democratic presidents as far as the eye could see. | ||
| And when Obama got elected with that very coalition in 2008, he was hailed as a prophet within the Democratic Party. | ||
| Because it seemed like all of his views have been validated. | ||
| But Teixeira today has been excommunicated as a heretic to the Democratic Party, even though he still professes loyalty to it. | ||
| Now he's had to join AEI. | ||
| As a think tank. | ||
| And what is he saying today? | ||
| He is saying that the Democratic Party has lost touch with its working class roots, and it has become a professional class party. | ||
| He calls it professional class hegemony. | ||
| And it represents now the interests of the professional class. | ||
| And this sort of dichotomy between professional class and working class, what it really means is whether you have a college degree or not. | ||
| So you're professional class if you have a college degree, and you're working class if you don't. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| But this one variable accounts for something like a 30-point voting gap in the electorate. | ||
| Basically, the working class is shifting to the Republicans in huge numbers, and the Democratic Party is sort of sorting into being more of a, again, professional class party. | ||
| So he's been warning about this because the professional class is only one-third of the country and the working class is two-thirds. | ||
| So he's warning, listen. | ||
| A professional class party cannot win presidential elections. | ||
| You have to be a working class party. | ||
| And this elite and effete sensibility, this professional class hegemony that the Democratic Party has bought into, is going to start costing you elections. | ||
| And really, Biden, in a way, is a throwback to the old Democratic Party, the kind of lunch pail, blue-collar Democrats. | ||
| I don't think that's his ideology anymore, but in terms of who he is and what he represents, I think he's sort of like the last. | ||
| It's like a pantomime of a working man, right? | ||
| Biden's never done a day of physical labor in his life. | ||
| He'd been in office for 70 years. | ||
| It's a pantomime, right? | ||
| Yeah, I don't think it's real. | ||
| He's playing a character. | ||
| He's playing a character. | ||
| Yeah, the boy from Scranton or whatever. | ||
| But he understood. | ||
| But if you contrast him with Elizabeth Warren or Gavin Newsom or... | ||
| I don't know, even like a Bernie Sanders. | ||
| Bernie Sanders has a little bit of that kind of, you know, lunch pail Democrat thing going on. | ||
| But by and large, you look at all the rising stars in the Democratic Party, and they're all bought into this kind of woke ideology. | ||
| And it's very much, you know, that old, you know, wine track, Democratic wine track circuit. | ||
| It's a professional class ideology. | ||
| So what, you know, Roy Teixeira is warning about is he doesn't think this party is going to be winning. | ||
| It's in danger of losing its electoral majority because, again, it keeps pushing way too far to the left on social and cultural issues. | ||
| That's his concern. | ||
| So in any event, just to bring it back to what I was saying, so Tushira has a lot of polling, again, about how college degree is this 30-point swing, just that one variable, because if you have the college degree, you're a professional class, you don't, you're a working class. | ||
| My view on it is that the working class has the numbers. | ||
| We call that populism. | ||
| Again, that's two-thirds of the country. | ||
| But the professional class controls all these institutions. | ||
| I mean, if you're going to go work at Goldman Sachs or McKinsey or even a Hollywood studio or Google or a nonprofit, a foundation, an NGO, you need a college degree. | ||
| In fact, you probably need multiple college degrees. | ||
| You might need a graduate degree, too. | ||
| By the way, the effect is even more pronounced. | ||
| The more degrees you have, the bigger the gap in voting becomes. | ||
| I mean, if you have like a PhD, you're probably like 97% going to vote Democrat. | ||
| But in any event, this is basically the fundamental divide in our country that we all feel is that our institutions are controlled by a professional class that does not have the votes, but... | ||
| It has views on the far left culturally. | ||
| And then you've got the majority of the country is, I'd say, center or center right on sociocultural issues. | ||
| But they don't have any power. | ||
| They don't run anything. | ||
| And so I actually think that what you see with censorship is a logical reaction of what powerful elites have done throughout history. | ||
| You know, if you're running a country and you're afraid of the people and you don't have the numbers, but you have the power. | ||
| What do you do? | ||
| You restrict their ability to engage in speech. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That's what's going on. | ||
| What a beautiful crystallization of this moment. | ||
| I have a final question for you and then a follow-up. | ||
| You've obviously been a booster for Blake Masters, J.D. Vance, DeSantis. | ||
| What does the future of the Republican Party look like? | ||
| How do Republicans, if not capturing these institutions, at least put them in check vis-a-vis DeSantis Disney, right? | ||
| You can't... | ||
| You cannot continue as a viable political party with zero institutional power, right? | ||
| That doesn't end. | ||
| It can't end in any type of victory. | ||
| So how do Republicans going forward, and you have certainly have a crystal ball on some of these things. | ||
| I think J.D. Vance is going to be an incredible senator. | ||
| I think he's going to rock the world in the Senate. | ||
| How do Republicans go forward? | ||
| What is the model going forward? | ||
| Well, I think there's a couple of things you have to do. | ||
| First of all, you have to harness this populist energy. | ||
| You do need a leader who's capable of rallying the votes. | ||
| Because again, I do think we have a majority in the country who does not want this hyper-woke, very far-left agenda pushed on them. | ||
| So first, you need a figure who's capable of taking that message out there and marshalling that populist energy. | ||
| But you also then need to translate that into lasting institutional reform. | ||
| And I think part of that is you have to create, you know, a counter-elite. | ||
| So we can't allow all the elites to just be, you know, liberal democratic elites. | ||
| You have to create, you know, Republicans, conservatives have to create their own counter-elites. | ||
| And that's a process of institution building. | ||
| We either have to create new institutions or you have to have a reformation of and take back, you know, existing institutions. | ||
| You're seeing this in media, for example, that while The mainstream media's approval ratings and viewership and credibility with the audience reaches new lows. | ||
| You see the rise of independent media. | ||
| So you get podcasts like this one or Rogan or the All In Pod, the one that I do, or you get the rise of Substack and all those writers. | ||
| So new alternatives are being created in media. | ||
| I think other alternatives are being created. | ||
| But you also, again, you need a leader who's able to appeal to the establishment. | ||
| And I think that one of the problems with Trump is he was only about half the formula. | ||
| He could marshal this populist energy, but he really couldn't translate it into lasting reform. | ||
| And I think a lot of that had to do with the lack of focus and discipline. | ||
| The failures around personnel to actually just choose people who would support his agenda and drive it through as opposed to undermining it. | ||
| I mean, he chose people to work for him who didn't share any of the views that he ran on. | ||
| Hated him. | ||
| Yeah, hated him. | ||
| The RMC is made up of never-Trumpers during this administration. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And then I think the last part of it is just because Trump is so polarizing and so controversial, he alienated a lot of people who I think I think he would be a far better candidate for | ||
| Republicans in 2024 because, again, I think he can bring together the populist wing with sort of the business wing and the establishment wing. | ||
| And kind of bring it all together. | ||
| And I think you need that if you're going to fight back against, again, this sort of, you know, these hyper-woke, you know, Democratic Party, this conformity that we have. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, you're not going to be able to get anywhere without actually being able to fight. | ||
| And I think that's changing. | ||
| And I've been very, very... | ||
| I've had my spirits lifted by watching what McCarthy's been doing the last couple of days and by seeing sort of that new bone and that new spine in the party push back because the American people really want it. | ||
| The Democrat Party is wildly out of step. | ||
| Fighting back is exactly what got one of our favorite people in the world and the executive producer of this show back onto Twitter. | ||
| His name's ALX. | ||
| We wanted to bring him in to just maybe say thank you and ask a final question. | ||
| ALX? | ||
|
unidentified
|
ALX? | |
| That's ALX's stinger when he comes on the podcast. | ||
| So why not? | ||
| Branding. | ||
| Good to meet you. | ||
| Thank you so much for everything you've done in fighting for free speech. | ||
| I just wanted to say that. | ||
| And then I think my final question would be is, what do you think the role of the Twitter files are going to play in upcoming congressional hearings, whether it be with the FBI or big tech hearings? | ||
| And do you think Elon might testify and provide all of that information to Congress? | ||
| Well, I have no idea whether he'll testify, but I do think that whatever information the Congressional Committee wants, I think I'm sure the company and Elon would be happy to provide. | ||
| And in fact, he's already provided substantial amounts to these reporters. | ||
| Like I was describing to Benny earlier, the process has been very much like a discovery process where the reporters would simply make requests with keyword search terms, like you do in a lawsuit or investigation, and the lawyers just give them a big package of documents. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, look, I think that the Twitter files show and lay out so many things that this new committee, this new church committee, should be looking at. | ||
| So this is why I tweeted in favor of creating a committee like this back on December 20th, was based on what we were seeing in the Twitter files. | ||
| Because again, we're seeing the collusion of state actors in the security state with big tech companies to engage in... | ||
| Censorship of ordinary Americans. | ||
| And then, you know, like Benny was saying, we also see them conducting various ops, which is even crazier. | ||
| You know, you see, for example, with the Hunter Biden story, you see now that what happened was, do we have time to run through this real quick? | ||
| Please. | ||
| Yeah, sure. | ||
| I mean, like, I was really blown away by this. | ||
| And actually, the Twitter files reporter who's done a great job with this is Michael Schellenberger. | ||
| I would encourage everybody. | ||
| To go to Schellenberger's substack and just watch this eight-minute video he did laying out what happened. | ||
| But basically, sort of the TLDR on it is that in December of 2019, this laptop repair store contacts the FBI and says, hey, I got this laptop that seems to have sketchy stuff on it. | ||
| So he gives it to the FBI. | ||
| They give him a receipt. | ||
| The FBI knows where it came from. | ||
| They interviewed this guy. | ||
| They know it's not Russian disinformation. | ||
| You know, the lab store owner has a purchase order from Hunter Biden dropping it off, okay? | ||
| So it's a very weird – the origin of it is pretty weird, but that's what happened. | ||
| So at that point, the FBI has three choices. | ||
| Number one, they can investigate what's on the hard drive. | ||
| Number two, they can just sit on it and do nothing, which you could argue, depending on what side you're on, you could see it as either a cover-up or you could say, well, listen, we're going to an election in 2020. | ||
| So that would have been choice number two. | ||
| And then choice number three was to work actively on behalf of the Biden campaign to just spread it, this story. | ||
| And it is very clear that they did number three. | ||
| So what then happened was that they started doing these briefings with big tech companies. | ||
| And again, we know this through the Twitter files. | ||
| They went to companies like Twitter, and we know they did it with Facebook too because of what Zuck said on Rogan. | ||
| They came to these companies and said, be on the lookout for a Russian hack and leak operation involving Hunter Biden. | ||
| So they primed Twitter executives like Yoel Roth, and Yoel Roth testified to this under oath that he was primed by the FBI to be on the lookout for a hack and leak operation involving Hunter Biden. | ||
| The other thing that happened is that in June of 2020, various employees, Of the FBI started working at Twitter. | ||
| Most importantly, Jim Baker, who had left his job as General Counsel of the FBI to become a Deputy GC at Twitter. | ||
| And so when the Hunter Biden story broke in the New York Post, it was Jim Baker, the former FBI official who is now deeply involved in trust and safety and censorship at Twitter, who was arguing the loudest. | ||
| That we have to censor this, we have to censor on the base of our hacked policy. | ||
| And you had people inside Twitter questioning, wait a second, where's the hack? | ||
| I mean, this is a story in the New York Post, and they claim to have the receipt by the lap store owner of taking possession of it from Hunter Biden. | ||
| So there's no hack here. | ||
| And these sort of people who are skeptical inside Twitter were kind of shouted down. | ||
| So, no, no, we have to do this. | ||
| And then, simultaneous to that, I guess a couple of days later, you had 50 former security state officials write a letter, publishing an open letter saying that this story, this New York Post story, bears all the hallmarks of Russians. | ||
| So, they just somehow on their own, I guess, we're supposed to believe, were bought into this narrative, too. | ||
| You know, you have the FBI creating this Russian hack and leak narrative in mid-2020, pre-briefing social networks on it, priming them to be ready to censor a Hunter Biden story. | ||
| You then have former FBI officials inside these tech companies saying that they must censor the story. | ||
| And then on the outside, you have former FBI officials providing the cover in the mainstream media saying that this is a Russian disinformation story. | ||
| But it wasn't. | ||
| You know, I don't know how you add all this up together and say this wasn't election interference and disinformation. | ||
| I mean, these are just the facts that we've learned as we've come out. | ||
| Look, when the Hunter Biden story came out in the New York Post, honestly, I didn't think much of it. | ||
| I thought it was an October surprise. | ||
| I thought that this was kind of election hijinks. | ||
| Both sides love to drop opposition research at the last minute. | ||
| I didn't think it was that big a deal. | ||
| I think the far bigger deal, you know, now that we know that the contents of the hard drive are actually true, and we're now in a war in Ukraine, I actually think that Biden's business dealings in Ukraine do warrant more scrutiny. | ||
| So as it turns out, I think it's a much more important story than I realized. | ||
| But in addition to just the contents of the hard drive, the fact that this story was censored and suppressed, and again, I thought it was just done at the behest. | ||
| Of Twitter executives. | ||
| I thought this big tech was solely responsible for this. | ||
| It wasn't just them. | ||
| This was an FBI op. | ||
| Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined that something like this could happen. | ||
| I'm really not a conspiracy theorist. | ||
| I only believe things when there's evidence. | ||
| But now the evidence is abundant. | ||
| It's been made clear and we saw it in the Twitter files. | ||
| It's really extraordinary. | ||
| I mean, the FBI should not be getting involved in American elections. | ||
| The FBI should not be getting involved in censorship. | ||
| I thought we could all agree on this as Americans. | ||
| This is just so fundamental. | ||
| Yeah, and I remember one of the drops, too. | ||
| The FBI were actually taking action on accounts that got limited visibility and, like, no retweets on them, but they were still flagging them. | ||
| I think it was that meme where they were posting, oh, Republicans vote on Monday, Democrats vote on Tuesday or whatever. | ||
| But they were getting no retweets or whatever, but they were still somehow finding all of these things. | ||
| Meanwhile, they weren't flagging actual illegal content that was getting, you know, 10 million impressions. | ||
| So it's just like a matter of like a question of, you know, what is the FBI even doing in political matters with Twitter when they're ignoring illegal matters that are still on Twitter? | ||
| And it was just basically like negligence in that. | ||
| So I'm really curious to see what they're going to uncover in that front as well. | ||
| Elon Musk bought a crime scene. | ||
| And ALX was RIP one of the murder victims of that crime scene. | ||
| He's back with us today. | ||
| Revaporized ALX. | ||
| We wouldn't have known any of this, none of it, if Elon Musk hadn't bought Twitter. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| None of these people would have revealed it. | ||
| Twitter management wouldn't have revealed it. | ||
| The FBI certainly wouldn't have revealed it. | ||
| We wouldn't have known any of this stuff. | ||
| And they communicated as if that nobody would ever know as well. | ||
| And that's why they were so blatant, I think, as well. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh yeah, you see that in the Slack channels especially. | ||
| When they are censoring certain people, they're spiking the football. | ||
| I mean, they are gleeful about it. | ||
| So yeah, they thought they were above reproach, above accountability, and above the law. | ||
| They thought they were a power unto themselves. | ||
| And again, I think the agenda now, the political agenda, of both this Republican, this new church committee, and then hopefully... | ||
| The candidate in 24 is the restoration of democratic accountability. | ||
| We cannot have big tech monopolies and certainly not the FBI engaged in the censorship of Americans. | ||
| This is insane. | ||
| And the FBI should not be running its own ops, you know, putting its thumb on the scale of elections. | ||
| That's insane, too. | ||
| It's even more insane. | ||
| I can't even believe this is controversial, you know? | ||
| I can't believe we can even have this conversation in 2023. | ||
| I know. | ||
| Again, this is Alex Jones stuff from – I mean does this make me a Republican? | ||
| It's just crazy. | ||
| But I mean from where I sit, the only party willing to do something about it maybe is the Republican Party. | ||
| So – With the right leaders. | ||
| Yeah, with the right leaders. | ||
| But I have to believe that a majority of Americans feel the way that we do about these issues. | ||
| But we just have to be able to communicate with them. | ||
| And unfortunately, the mainstream media just wants to bury this, call it a nothing burger, which is ridiculous. | ||
| They don't eat meat anyway, David. | ||
| Listen, this is why this is so important, and we thank you so deeply for joining our podcast and speaking. | ||
| We have a very awake audience, and it's growing by the day, and they need to hear this. | ||
| It's an honor. | ||
| It's been an honor to have you, David. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Thanks, guys. | ||
| Really appreciate it. | ||
| Thanks for coming on. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| What a spectacular interview with David Sachs. | ||
| I wish we had a thousand more of him in the tech space. | ||
| You'd have a totally different Silicon Valley. | ||
| California would probably be a red state if you had more David Sachs in the mix. | ||
| Somebody who truly understands that the basis of all technological thought and all advancement and development comes from the ability to be and think freely. | ||
| And somebody who actually like puts his money where his mouth is and tries to create a better digital space for all of us to exist in. | ||
| It's refreshing to hear. | ||
| What did you think about David Sachs and our interview with him? | ||
| Close ally of Elon Musk and somebody who definitely is one of the most interesting men currently operating right now. | ||
| Let us know in the comments section what you thought about our interview here with David Sachs and if we will ever have a truly free society. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Again. | |
| Thank you so much for watching. | ||
| My name is Benny Johnson. |
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