Vivek Ramaswamy Calls For X, Formerly Twitter, To Reinstate Alex Jones If It's Really A Free Speech Platform
I was recently joined on the podcast by Vivek Ramaswamy, a figure who’s been making waves with his unfiltered perspectives and fearless calls for change.In a world where big tech increasingly controls the narrative, Vivek takes a stand that few dare to make. He boldly calls for “X” (formerly known as Twitter) to reinstate controversial commentator Alex Jones. With “X” claiming to be a free speech platform, Vivek challenges their integrity and puts forth a powerful argument about the nature of free expression in our digital age.But this episode is more than just a call to action for one specific case. It’s a deep dive into the current state of free speech, censorship, and the role of big tech in shaping our society. Vivek and I engaged in as nuanced a discussion as possible in fifteen minutes, exploring the complexities of the digital landscape and the importance of upholding the principles that define our democracy.Whether you agree with Vivek’s stance or not, this episode is sure to make you think, question, and reflect on the very fabric of our freedoms.Highlights of this episode include:- Vivek’s detailed explanation of why he believes Alex Jones should be reinstated.- A critical examination of big tech’s influence and responsibility in shaping public discourse.- A passionate conversation about the core values that should guide our approach to free speech in the modern era.Don’t miss this conversation that transcends party lines and delves into the heart of what it means to be One American. Join us in this thought-provoking episode and be part of the conversation that shapes the future of our nation.#OneAmericanPodcast #VivekRamaswamy #FreeSpeech #BigTech #ChaseGeiser
Obviously, internet censorship is uh a major issue.
Some people feel more than others, some people are more active than others on the internet.
It's something that we've really seen kick off uh since the beginning of the COVID pandemic.
What are your thoughts on internet censorship as president of the United States?
What would you do to sort of mitigate that, if anything?
And what are your thoughts specifically on Alex Jones not being allowed on Twitter?
So I have a few things to say about there's a lot of questions in there.
I think the number one most threatening form of censorship is when the government uses private companies to do through the back door what government could not do through the front door under the constitution, that is to censor political speech.
That is happening and has been happening regularly for the last several years.
So what I've said is as a solution, here's what I would do.
Section 230 C2 that gives these internet companies a special form of immunity, of liability protection.
You know what we would do?
We would turn that into an opt-in statute.
If you want those federal protections, which all of them will say they want, then that comes with a restraint, the same restraint as the federal government itself.
If the federal government's going to protect you, you're bound by the same constraint as the federal government.
The First Amendment to the Constitution applies.
If it is state action in disguise, the Constitution still applies.
That's why these companies, I believe, ought to be held to the same standard as the federal government.
That is to say the First Amendment to the Constitution of the U.S. With respect to Alex Jones or anybody else being censored from Twitter.
If Twitter's a free speech platform, right, which is what Elon Musk's thesis for running the platform is, free speech means that there's no such thing as a wrong opinion.
And so somebody should not be silenced for expressing the wrong opinion.
It might be the bad opinion, but the answer to bad speech isn't less speech.
It's more speech.
That's the American way.
That's the path to truth.
I'm a free speech absolutist, and I stand on the side of whether you agree with me or not, you have the right to say it when it comes to expressing an opinion.
Yeah, absolutely.
So regarding COVID specifically, obviously the vaccines have been controversial.
A lot of the opposition to the vaccines has been censored for good or for worse, for better or for worse.
What are your thoughts on the censorship that occurred in terms of claims about early therapeutics during the onset of the pandemic and um claims that are made today that are censored regarding the potential negative side effects of the vaccine?
Obviously, today we had the story of LeBron James' son having cardiac experiencing cardiac arrest.
People say that it may or may not be uh associated with the vaccine.
Do you believe these claims?
Are you skeptical of the vaccines?
What's your position on them overall?
And then, of course, the censorship uh regarding them.
Well, I think the COVID vaccines were the fastest to market vaccines in human history.
And you should just think about the basic hypocrisy of vaccines that normally took over 10 years to bring to market, that the FDA said that that was a requirement in order to be safe and effective.
And you can't even, by the way, think about how extreme that is.
They say you can't even have the choice to take it if you want to, unless it's been through that 10 years of testing, now saying that there's a vaccine that made it in less than a year, and you can't have the choice but to take it.
You can't believe both of those things at the same time.
That is hypocrisy.
And we now know that much of what the public was sold was actually falsehood.
Look at the safety risks today.
People would not have made the same decisions a couple of years ago had those risks actually been exposed.
And I think the censorship on the therapeutics, right?
To say that if you say that certain therapeutics might work, that went hand in glove with censorship to say that the vaccines didn't work or had safety risks associated with them.
This is not science.
This is autocracy.
In fact, the scientific method depends on free speech and open debate.
That's what actual science depends on.
What we have instead is a new scientism, a cult that has nothing to do with science and everything to do with power, dominion, control, and punishment.
And I stand against it.
And so I think that one of the lessons from the pandemic, I think probably the top two lessons are one is there's no such thing as wrong speech.
You should not censor speech, especially in times of an emergency.
It's funny, in times of emergency, they impose free speech restraints.
That's when we need it the most.
And then the Second thing is no mandates.
If something is going to have such a great value proposition, let human beings be convinced of it on the merits and make their own choices.
If it was really as good as they say, the government wouldn't have to mandate it.
That's the real answer.
There's a debate going on on my side of the internet.
And I say my side of the internet because I acknowledge that we all each have our own little bubbles that we we tend to get algorithmically thrown into as to whether or not a lot of the problems that we face as a nation and as a world are the result of sort of a globalist movement versus a national sovereignty movement.
What are your thoughts on organizations like the WEF or policies like ESG or DEI?
Well, I mean, this has been my career for the last three years fighting against these agendas, right?
The ESG agenda, environmental social and governance factors agenda.
Is it a way to accomplish through the back door what governments couldn't achieve through the democratic process?
So I've been a staunch opponent of it, fighting it, not just through the books I've written, but even through the last company I founded, Strive, which competes directly against the likes of BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard by offering ESG alternatives, which are badly lacking in the marketplace.
But I think organizations like the World Economic Forum are downright dangerous for sovereignty, for the vision of the new world.
It's effectively old world Europe rearing its head again.
And we fought an American revolution in this country for what?
For the vision that we, the people, decide in a constitutional republic how we settle our differences through free speech and open debate in the public square, where every person's voice and vote counts equally.
That's what we fought an American revolution to secure.
Now that old world monster rears its ugly head again, saying that no, no, no, we don't trust the people.
The citizens of nations cannot be trusted.
We have to decide the right answers to the pressing societal questions from climate change to racial injustice in the back of palace halls, where a small group of elite leaders decide what's right for the rest of society at large.
I reject that vision.
The American Revolution rejects that vision.
That's what the ESG agenda is about.
That is what the World Economic Forum agenda is about.
It is a 1776 question.
It is about the great reset on one side, which calls for dissolving the boundaries between the public and private sector.
That's the great reset on one side.
I stand on the side of the great uprising, standing up and saying, absolutely not.
Heck no, to the great reset.
We the people decide as citizens of sovereign nations how we actually determine our future through self-determination.
And I think that's the question in this Republican primary.
You have a lot of candidates who will offer you a vision of reform, really just incremental reform.
I stand on the side of the revolution, the American revolution.
I think we live in a 1776 moment.
That's what we're going to have to revive in order to really wake up the spirit of this country again.
And I think I'm the only candidate in this race, frankly, who can do it.
That's why I'm leading the way.
I'm going to ask you why uh Americans should vote for you instead of Donald Trump as the next question.
But before that, I do want to explicitly ask you: do you think that the election was rigged against Donald Trump in 2020?
It was in one important way, big tech interference.
So if that Hunter Biden laptop story had not been systematically suppressed, we have good data.
I'm data-driven.
We have good data, which says that voters would have made, many of them would have made a different choice, enough of them to have changed the outcome of that election.
That is the most historic form of election interference in modern history, only to be topped by the prosecutions that we're seeing in the middle of this election against the same man.
That is wrong.
And I think that if we don't learn from our lessons of our recent past, we can expect even worse in the future.
Frankly, I've seen it in this selection already, LinkedIn, owned by Microsoft, locked my own account, Republican presidential candidate, now pulling a third in the Republican primary future.
How are you going to network, Rivek?
Yeah, well, well, I mean, I'm I'm putting out my messages, right?
Right.
It's just one social media platform.
We have a team that puts, I write the messages and then they put them out at like plumbing across the different platforms.
Then they said, your posts about climate change and the ESG movement actually violated their Policies on hate speech, misinformation, and I'm not kidding you, violence.
Think about that.
So I asked them to point out what was false.
They couldn't.
Eventually they had to concede that it was what they called an error and then unlocked my account.
But if we don't learn from the mistakes of the past, we're destined to repeat those same mistakes in the future.
And I think we ought to learn about what happened in the lead up to that 2020 presidential election.
Or else, I mean, I think that's systematic censorship, that's exactly what gave us what happened on January 6th.
I don't want to see us marching to some national divorce.
I want to see a national revival in this country, and that's what I'm leading.
Why should we vote for you instead of Donald Trump?
I think those are the two relevant choices.
I think we're the two outsiders to the system.
The first thing I wanted to say is to speak truth.
I think President Trump was an excellent president.
So I want to start from that premise.
He sets a high bar.
But I think I'm in a position to take our America first agenda further, far further than Donald Trump did.
Not just building the wall.
I was the first candidate to say we have to use our military to secure our southern border and our northern border too.
They're building tunnels underneath that wall.
I've said that not only will I put, you know, he put Betsy DeVos, a good person on top of the Department of Education and said we reform it.
I stand on the side of revolution.
We will shut down the Department of Education.
We will shut down the FBI, the IRS, the ATF, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
And I've offered unprecedented detail and legal specifics on how we'll do it.
I'll end affirmative action, something that Trump was not quite willing to do in his time in office.
And here's the reason why.
It's not his fault, but it's just a fact.
The 30% of this country becomes literally psychiatrically ill when he's the president of the United States.
They lose it.
People who would have agreed with the things that you or I or he would say disagree with them just because he's the person saying it.
And I care about having one nation under God running towards our vision of putting America and the interests of our citizens first.
And the fact is, America first does not belong to Trump.
It doesn't belong to me either.
It belongs to you, the people of this country.
It belongs to us, to we the people.
And so the question is who's going to be best positioned to take that agenda further?
I'm 37.
I have fresh legs.
I've built companies.
I'm also a constitutional scholar.
I'm independent.
I'm not bought and paid for by the donor class either.
Trump and I are the only two candidates who have that in common.
But I've got fresh legs.
And I think I'm ready to take the movement that he began.
That movement belongs to us, to the people.
We're going to take that even further than Trump ever did.
And I believe then Trump can.
I respect him at the age he's at.
I respect him for his accomplishments.
But I want to go further, and I believe that I'm going to be able to in a way that he or any other candidate can't quite achieve in the way that I will.
Final question.
Obviously, human trafficking has been a topic of conversation given the border crisis and the recent success of Sound of Freedom.
How will you address what's happening to our children?
First of all, I'm grateful for the producer of that movie.
I'm grateful for Trump for actually bringing attention to this as well through his recent screening of it.
It's an issue that, frankly, even in third world nations, my parents came from India.
This is a big issue in other parts of the world.
I'm glad we're waking up to it.
And sadly, it exists in the United States of America.
It's a dark underbelly.
We have to wake up to that.
Seal the southern border.
That's a big part of this.
Border security leads to this being an American problem.
We have to address that.
We have to also ramp up the penalties to say that this isn't something we're going to sweep under the rug.
This is something that has to be criminalized proportionate to how serious of an offense it actually is, and also better enforce the laws that are already on the books.
Yet another way the FBI has been a disastrous failure.
I've said that I would shut down the FBI, but the 15,000 people who are on the front lines, in the 20,000 back office positions, they're going to have to be laid off and find honest work in the private sector.
But the 15,000 agents on the front lines, I'm going to move many of them to the U.S. Marshals, which are actually an agency that has been very effective in breaking up child sex trafficking rings in a way that the FBI has not.
And that's how we actually not just recite the slogans of shut down the FBI, but drive actual change by restoring the integrity of the government itself to solve problems like this one that have long escaped notice.
I refuse to be one of these people, whether it's fentanyl, whether it's child trafficking, sweeping these things under the rug.
Those aren't somebody else's problems.
Those are our problems.
And we will, you deserve, we deserve leadership in this country that actually addresses American problems, puts America first, rather than sending $200 billion and troops to defend somebody else's border and God knows where.
No, we will solve actual problems that protect American lives, including American children, here on American soil.
