The Charlie Kirk Show - Exposing the Dark Plot Against Free Speech Online with Allum Bokhari
Aired: 2020-09-07
Duration: 37:41


=== Hashtag Deleted: Big Tech's Erasure (01:53) ===

[00:00:00]  Thank you for listening to this podcast one production.
[00:00:02]  Now available on Apple Podcasts, Podcast One, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcasts.
[00:00:08]  Hey, everybody, happy Labor Day.
[00:00:09]  Today on the Charlie Kirk Show, we have Alam Bukhari, who is the senior tech editor at Breitbart News, does a phenomenal job at Breitbart.
[00:00:18]  He has a new book out called Hashtag Deleted, hashtag deleted.
[00:00:23]  He is a great mind, an important mind.
[00:00:26]  In this conversation around big tech tyranny and what it can represent to the destruction of a free society, we have a very honest and I think very healthy conversation around tech tyranny and steps that need to be taken to challenge big tech.
[00:00:40]  This episode is brought to you by those of you that support us at charliekirk.com slash support, charliekirk.com slash support.
[00:00:48]  Alam Bukhari is here, everybody.
[00:00:50]  Buckle up.
[00:00:51]  Here we go.
[00:00:52]  Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
[00:00:54]  Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campuses.
[00:00:56]  I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
[00:01:00]  Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
[00:01:03]  I want to thank Charlie.
[00:01:04]  He's an incredible guy.
[00:01:05]  His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
[00:01:13]  We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
[00:01:22]  That's why we are here.
[00:01:25]  Hey, everybody.
[00:01:26]  Welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.
[00:01:28]  I am joined by Breitbart's senior tech writer and editor, Alam Bokari.
[00:01:34]  Alum has a new incredible book called Hashtag Deleted, Big Tech's Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal the Election.
[00:01:43]  I've had an opportunity to read a couple chapters from this book, and I want to read one part in particular.
[00:01:48]  But before I get started, I just want to reinforce how important this issue is.

=== Silicon Valley as Unaccountable Government (09:50) ===

[00:01:53]  This is probably the biggest issue in our country that the ruling class does not want to talk about because they actually benefit from the censorship happening in digital social media.
[00:02:02]  And I really believe it is the greatest attack on first principles and freedom of speech that the West has ever seen.
[00:02:08]  Alam, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.
[00:02:10]  Hi, Charlie.
[00:02:11]  Great to be on.
[00:02:12]  And I just want to agree with what you said.
[00:02:13]  It is really the biggest threat.
[00:02:15]  We are sort of barreling towards a future where there's going to be no free speech because it's controlled by these unaccountable tech giants.
[00:02:22]  There's going to be no privacy because we've signed away to these tech giants.
[00:02:26]  And all of our behavior, all of our beliefs are going to be manipulated by these all-powerful companies because they know so much about us and can essentially flood us with propaganda without us even realizing it.
[00:02:39]  That is exactly right.
[00:02:40]  So I'm going to read from your book here.
[00:02:42]  It says, quote, and it's really well written the way that you put this through.
[00:02:46]  And I just, I have a, I'm very partial towards a British vocabulary, I have to say.
[00:02:50]  Just the diction is terrific.
[00:02:52]  In November 2016, a disturbance in the force hit Northern California.
[00:02:57]  It was as if millions of trendy, high-income Silicon Valley leftists suddenly cried out in terror and haven't stopped crying since.
[00:03:04]  No, I'm not badly quoting Star Wars.
[00:03:06]  I'm describing the actual reaction of the tech nerds who had, for a previous decade, spun an image of themselves as the smartest people in the world and now felt that they had been let down by their alleged galaxy-sized brains, just as it had done to the election pollsters and journalists.
[00:03:21]  The U.S. presidential election outcome had utterly confounded Silicon Valley's predictions.
[00:03:26]  The impossible had happened.
[00:03:27]  The reckoning was here.
[00:03:28]  Donald Trump was president.
[00:03:29]  Can you expand on this?
[00:03:30]  It's just an opening shot in your book.
[00:03:33]  The tech giants really kind of felt as if they let their team down.
[00:03:38]  Is it almost as if they were vested to be the vanguard or the bulwark of kind of globalistic, globalist philosophy, and they felt some form of guilt.
[00:03:49]  Is that right?
[00:03:50]  Absolutely.
[00:03:51]  And, you know, Silicon Valley, much like other, You know, parts of elite America were, you know, convinced Hillary Clinton was going was going to win.
[00:04:02]  So they got complacent.
[00:04:03]  They thought they didn't have to do anything to stop Donald Trump, that he was going to lose by 10, 20 points.
[00:04:08]  They believed the polls.
[00:04:10]  And obviously, they were completely shocked on election night.
[00:04:14]  You know, back in 2018, I got my hands on an internal video from inside Google.
[00:04:19]  And this video showed the leadership of Google, the co-founders, the CEO, their top leadership team, a couple of days after the election reacting to Donald Trump.
[00:04:29]  And it's exactly as my sources describe in the book: a complete sense of panic and dismay.
[00:04:35]  You even had the co-founder of Google saying the election result, the decision of the American voters personally offended him.
[00:04:43]  And then they go on to describe, you know, the things they need to do.
[00:04:47]  You had one Google executive talking about how he wants to make the populist movement a blip or a hiccup in history.
[00:04:54]  Those are his words.
[00:04:55]  And, you know, the sources I've interviewed in this book, people from inside Facebook, people inside Google, and people who used to work for Twitter, all of the tech companies had exactly the same reaction.
[00:05:06]  First, complete shock and then anger and then guilt.
[00:05:10]  Guilt that they didn't do enough to stop Donald Trump.
[00:05:13]  And that's been the story of the last four years in Silicon Valley: how to make sure 2016 doesn't happen again.
[00:05:20]  What's been really interesting, Alan, and I think we need to start framing it like this.
[00:05:25]  These tech companies are not companies.
[00:05:26]  They almost operate as governments.
[00:05:29]  They have more powerful than our power than our government.
[00:05:32]  They seem to have more authority to suppress dissidents than most governments.
[00:05:37]  They can make decisions that most governments never could even imagine.
[00:05:40]  They're actually more financially solvent than most world governments.
[00:05:45]  So I guess, can you kind of just dive into more detail?
[00:05:48]  Who's actually staffing these companies?
[00:05:51]  What are their worldviews?
[00:05:52]  And what's to prevent them from using this incredible amount of power to try and silence the opposition and try to put forth a political agenda that very well might be at odds with most of our country?
[00:06:08]  Absolutely.
[00:06:08]  These Silicon Valley companies are dominated by an extremely far-left ideology.
[00:06:14]  My sources inside Facebook and Google, you know, everything we're seeing, we've seen over the past three months, corporations going woke, you know, hiring Robin DiAngelo to lecture their employees on so-called white fragility.
[00:06:28]  That was happening in Silicon Valley years and years ago.
[00:06:31]  They were very much ahead of the curve on this woke, far-left, progressive, sort of anti-American, very racist ideology.
[00:06:39]  That is the ideology of Silicon Valley.
[00:06:41]  And you can't speak out against it because if you're a conservative in one of these companies and you speak out against it, like James Daymore did, like Palmer Lucky did, then you just get fired.
[00:06:50]  You get ostracized.
[00:06:51]  So it's completely dominant and it's going to go on to influence these technologies that control so much of our lives.
[00:07:00]  You know, our businesses are going to be dependent on those technologies.
[00:07:02]  Our elections that are going to be dependent on these technologies.
[00:07:05]  Everything we do is dependent on these technologies.
[00:07:08]  And if you don't conform to their ideology, you simply won't be allowed to use them, or you'll be allowed to use them and you'll be covertly suppressed.
[00:07:18]  You compared these companies to governments.
[00:07:20]  That's something Mark Zuckerberg has actually admitted to.
[00:07:22]  He's even set up a so-called Facebook Supreme Court to judge as a kind of a way to almost reinforce that sense of Facebook being a new government.
[00:07:36]  But there's no checks and balances.
[00:07:38]  There's no constitution.
[00:07:39]  There's no First Amendment.
[00:07:40]  You don't have any rights on these platforms.
[00:07:42]  They can do what they want to you.
[00:07:44]  It's always struck me as incredibly bizarre that, you know, if you're the owner of a business and your landlord, you know, renting your commercial property decides to evict you for an arbitrary reason, you can take them to court and they have to follow a very clear due process for evicting tenants.
[00:08:02]  But if your entire business depends on a YouTube channel or a Facebook page or a Twitter account or an Instagram account, you have no recourse.
[00:08:10]  You have no rights whatsoever.
[00:08:12]  You can take these companies to court, but they have special legal immunities given to them by the government that will make your efforts almost completely futile.
[00:08:21]  So you have no outcomes whatsoever.
[00:08:25]  A lot of conservatives have said these are private companies and we shouldn't do anything.
[00:08:29]  I think this is an excuse, either because they like their dogmatic ideas more than actually what's right for our country, or they're purchased by the tech companies.
[00:08:38]  I kind of put them into two brackets if they give that excuse.
[00:08:41]  And the people that just hide behind their ideas, I think that eventually they're going to come around as soon as they realize these tech companies are more powerful than the Pentagon.
[00:08:50]  The people that are purchased by Silicon Valley, though, are in some ways more dangerous.
[00:08:55]  I haven't finished the book.
[00:08:56]  I've read a couple of chapters.
[00:08:57]  It's terrific.
[00:08:58]  Can you just quickly comment on how some people in the free market movement have taken millions of dollars from these tech companies, and they actually might be publishing pieces of literature that they themselves don't actually believe, but they're nothing more than intellectual guns for hire?
[00:09:15]  Yeah.
[00:09:16]  So, what Google's strategy has been, and Facebook's to some extent as well, is to flood Washington, D.C. with money, and they fund both sides of the aisle.
[00:09:24]  They fund liberal think tanks and they fund conservative think tanks.
[00:09:27]  And the purpose of this funding on the conservative side is to essentially say, as you put it, that if we interfere with these companies in any way, then we're interfering in the free market.
[00:09:37]  Obviously, it's a completely bogus argument because, as I just mentioned, these companies owe a lot of their dominant position in the marketplace to the fact that they got government handouts in the 1990s.
[00:09:48]  But even if that weren't the case, these companies are so dominant and so threatening to liberty that the government would need to do something about them anyway.
[00:09:56]  It's exactly what Teddy Roosevelt did at the turn of the 20th century.
[00:10:00]  You can't allow these, you can't allow unaccountable private actors to grow so large that they're a threat to American liberty.
[00:10:07]  And that's the point of the free market.
[00:10:10]  But certainly, if you hear someone making the argument that, you know, we're that there are many arguments.
[00:10:17]  First, they say, you know, you're inferring the free market, you're inferring free enterprise.
[00:10:20]  They also compare any regulation of the tech giants to the fairness doctrine.
[00:10:24]  Almost all of these arguments come from these Google-funded conservative think tanks.
[00:10:29]  So this is, and you know, many Republican politicians take money from Google and from Facebook as well.
[00:10:35]  So this is really something where the grassroots will have to make this, you know, unacceptable in their movement.
[00:10:42]  I think taking money from these tech giants needs to be as unacceptable to an ordinary Republican voter as taking money from Planned Parenthood.
[00:10:51]  They shouldn't tolerate their politicians and their representatives doing it.
[00:10:56]  I couldn't agree more.
[00:10:57]  I love that comparison.
[00:10:59]  No Republican would tolerate a primary competition between a Republican who took Planned Parenthood money and someone who didn't.
[00:11:09]  Same as if they took money from Bloomberg's gun group.
[00:11:12]  I think that's how big this issue is.
[00:11:14]  And I actually make the argument that all of these issues that we as conservatives care about-sovereignty, immigration, firearms, abortion-none of them actually are able even to be discussed if the issue of speech is not handled correctly.
[00:11:30]  I mean, it is a first freedom for a reason.
[00:11:32]  If you can't talk, if you can't have the marketplace of ideas, then are you even able to discuss whether we should have firearm ownership?
[00:11:40]  In the second chapter, I want to dive into this.
[00:11:42]  I love this sentence you have.

=== Why Conservatives Lose Their Accounts (12:43) ===

[00:11:44]  The internet promised to be the greatest leap forward for individual freedom since the Bill of Rights.
[00:11:49]  With blogs and newsletters, we are all printing presses.
[00:11:53]  With webcams and podcasts, we were all broadcasters.
[00:11:56]  With websites and online payment processors, we could all start businesses without getting up from our couches.
[00:12:02]  Reddit founder Alex O'Hannon summed it up best in 2013 in an interview with Forbes: To join in the Industrial Revolution, you needed an open factory.
[00:12:10]  The internet revolution, you just need an open laptop.
[00:12:13]  Alam, can you tell us how the internet was lost?
[00:12:16]  Because this actually promised to be a phenomenal source of creative energy and to use a free market term of the people that are bought by Google, creative destruction, which I like in theory.
[00:12:27]  I just don't see it happen very often anymore because of many different reasons.
[00:12:30]  How did we lose the internet?
[00:12:32]  Yeah, this is what I think should make people really angry because the internet as it existed 10 or 15 years ago was this genuine great leap forward for free expression, for the marketplace of ideas.
[00:12:48]  It was this democratizing thing.
[00:12:49]  Everyone had access to this global audience for their messages.
[00:12:54]  It was a huge threat to the old gatekeepers of information.
[00:12:58]  And that's in part why the establishment had to destroy it.
[00:13:02]  But it's really gone from this fantastic expansion of liberties to this extremely dystopian control thing.
[00:13:11]  We've gone from absolute, you know, a great, you know, a giant step forward for liberty to a giant step backward.
[00:13:19]  I think it's getting to a point where it's even worse than the pre-internet age, because now these tech companies are using their power not just to suppress our speech, but to manipulate us into certain behaviors and certain belief systems.
[00:13:33]  I've heard from sources inside Facebook who say these companies have to sort of develop models of changing people's political opinions and they're going to use that to move people away from the right to the center.
[00:13:46]  That's how bad it is.
[00:13:47]  We've gone from this promised utopia of free expression and democratized information and free information to an absolute dystopia controlled by a few unaccountable technological behemoths.
[00:14:00]  And now these technological behemoths are staffed with the very same people that are burning down our cities.
[00:14:05]  They're staffed with all the very same people that find, let's say, an intellectual home with the Nicole Hanna-Jones of the world.
[00:14:16]  That's basically who staffs Google and Facebook.
[00:14:18]  And if you dare disagree, you dare go work at Facebook as an electronic, you know, as some form of an engineer or at Google or at Twitter, and you dare say there are only two genders.
[00:14:30]  You brought up the point of James DeMoray or DeMore, I can never pronounce his name correctly.
[00:14:36]  You get run out of the company and you get basically thrown at as if it's a college campus.
[00:14:42]  In the third chapter of your book, it's called The Panic.
[00:14:46]  You say, quote, censorship never happens in a vacuum.
[00:14:49]  Certain historical conditions are always present.
[00:14:53]  Whenever there's a crusade to restrain a new form of expression, be it a book, a song, or a video game, or an entire medium of communication, it is always accompanied by its inseparable sibling, moral panic.
[00:15:05]  What do you mean by this?
[00:15:07]  So, in order to constrain something and prevent public backlash against your censorship efforts, you normally have to convince at least a large section of the public that there's a grave threat that you have to contain.
[00:15:19]  And that's exactly what we saw with the fake news panic after 2016.
[00:15:23]  We saw the mainstream media in alliance with Democratic politicians and groups like Media Matters convince their side that there's this huge problem of fake news on the internet or misinformation or Russian propaganda.
[00:15:37]  And if we don't do something about it, we're all going to be convinced into voting for more people like Donald Trump.
[00:15:45]  It's a very infantilizing ideology.
[00:15:48]  It basically says that if we don't control free speech, then voters are going to be manipulated by Russian propaganda on Facebook.
[00:15:58]  That was their argument.
[00:15:58]  That's what they used to justify the censorship of these platforms.
[00:16:02]  But behind that propaganda effort, I want to go a little bit deeper here.
[00:16:06]  The reason the establishment panicked so much at the election of Donald Trump was that it showed what the internet could do.
[00:16:14]  I genuinely believe that Donald Trump wouldn't have won in 2016 without the internet.
[00:16:18]  The margins in those swing states were very, very low.
[00:16:21]  And obviously there are multiple factors that led to his win.
[00:16:24]  But if he took away the internet, which was, I think, one of the biggest factors, he would not have won the election.
[00:16:30]  So what the establishment finds so threatening about the internet, I think, is this concept of virality, of emergence.
[00:16:40]  Obviously, we've seen over the past four years the big tech companies trying to erase the Trump movement, banning prominent Trump supporters left, right, and center.
[00:16:48]  But they're also doing something far more insidious and far harder to notice, which is they want to prevent the emergence of new movements.
[00:16:56]  And they do that by shadow banning, by covertly suppressing conservative content in their algorithms.
[00:17:02]  And they're threatened by a specific type of conservative.
[00:17:07]  They're not threatened by the old establishment conservatives who only talk about low taxes and deregulation and foreign awards and endless foreign wars, exactly.
[00:17:17]  But they are threatened by populist nationalists who talk about cultural issues, who think it's important to discuss thorny issues like race and gender.
[00:17:25]  They're the ones who get banned.
[00:17:26]  So they're almost preventing the next generation of conservatives from emerging.
[00:17:31]  They're preventing them from going viral.
[00:17:33]  They want conservatism to be stuck in the past, useless, growing less and less relevant.
[00:17:38]  That is their goal here.
[00:17:39]  So we're barreling towards a situation where one side of the political aisle, the left, is allowed to use these powerful technologies to go viral and spread their message and allow their own grassroots to form new movements through these platforms, whereas the other side is completely shut off from that, unable to connect with each other, unable to spread their message.
[00:18:02]  And that advantage is just going to be so huge for the left that it's a real threat to, I think, political liberty and to free and fair democracy.
[00:18:13]  I think that's well said.
[00:18:14]  And they do want to keep conservatism kind of in the warmongering pro-corporate approach.
[00:18:20]  And I think, Alam, what's really interesting about what you said, and I wrote it down, the internet elected Donald Trump.
[00:18:24]  I completely agree with this.
[00:18:25]  And the president had almost no choice because he was running up against their traditional establishment.
[00:18:32]  He didn't have a Jeb Bush-style war chest to be able to go on television.
[00:18:35]  Because he wasn't owned, he had to take his message straight to the people.
[00:18:39]  So I have two thoughts on this.
[00:18:40]  The first of which is a question.
[00:18:42]  But before I get to the question, I just want to kind of re-emphasize something you've said, which is the president has changed the Republican Party for the better.
[00:18:49]  During the Republican convention, you saw repeated points of praise that the president is ending foreign wars, is standing for freedom of speech, and is now the middle-class president, and also is corporate skeptic, which I think is the proper approach in modern America right now, because a lot of these corporations act as if they're governments and they don't believe in liberty or freedom and they only care about globalist vision of destroying the American middle class, where the Democrats are now the party of endless foreign wars,
[00:19:16]  anti-free speech, the destruction of the American middle class and their pro-corporate party, which I think is really interesting.
[00:19:22]  And I could see why they don't want that message to spread, because a lot of the Bernie Sanders supporters could be very quickly turned into Trump or conservatives if they just understood that kind of paradigm shift.
[00:19:32]  And so I think that there is an incentive structure for the tech companies to try to prevent that kind of distribution of information.
[00:19:39]  Here's my question, though, which I think is, I'm a little uncertain on how this one plays out.
[00:19:48]  At the current trend of where the internet is headed with the tech companies ruling with this capacity, do you think it's long past time for Congress to implement some form of a internet fairness doctrine or at least some speech regulation?
[00:20:03]  Because it seems that they see their power grab right now and they actually feel morally convicted to do this to suppress opposing views.
[00:20:11]  What do you think is actually a policy prescription to this?
[00:20:14]  Well, I certainly wouldn't describe it as a fairness doctrine.
[00:20:17]  That's the word the conservative think tanks love to use because they know it will convince grassroots conservatives that any kind of regulation is a bad idea.
[00:20:27]  But I would certainly say that there are several solutions that need to be considered.
[00:20:32]  You need a solution with a social media censorship.
[00:20:35]  And I think the solution there is to simply give ordinary Americans the right to take these companies to court if they're suspended for arbitrary reasons.
[00:20:43]  And you really have to narrow the bounds by which these companies are allowed to suspend people or ban people.
[00:20:50]  I think the ultimate end game that would maximize consumer choice is simply say that social networks aren't allowed to ban anyone or anything that's First Amendment protected, but you can add optional filters.
[00:21:04]  So Google for a long time has had a safe search button that you can turn on or off, and that'll filter out exceed content from your search results.
[00:21:12]  And they've had that for a long time.
[00:21:13]  So they have the technology to give people optional filters, but they don't want to use that for things like so-called hate speech and so-called misinformation, because that would take away their power to control the flow of information.
[00:21:27]  It would give it to users.
[00:21:28]  So I think any regulation has to aim at that end result of consumer choice.
[00:21:32]  That has to be the industry-wide standard.
[00:21:35]  Filters not bans.
[00:21:38]  Yeah, I think that's well put.
[00:21:39]  Sorry, continue.
[00:21:41]  But also, as I said, if anyone who has been banned, I think needs to have the ability to take these companies to court.
[00:21:48]  And that's essentially what the Trump administration is doing now with Trump's social media censorship executive order.
[00:21:57]  There's now a petition before the FCC written by Adam Kandayev, who's very, very good on these issues, by the way, to narrow the bounds of that crucial piece of legislation that the tech companies use to give themselves the power to ban anyone for any reason whatsoever.
[00:22:15]  I believe it's the fifth chapter, it's just called Deleted, which is the title of your book.
[00:22:20]  You talk about how many conservatives have been banned from these social media companies.
[00:22:24]  And then you go on to point out the double standard.
[00:22:26]  Can you talk about this, about how some of the liberals have been trying to incite harm against minors, such as the Covington Catholic example, and they don't lose their accounts, but conservatives dare speak in favor of the president and they lose their social media accounts?
[00:22:40]  Indeed, this is where you can see the huge double standards.
[00:22:43]  You look at some of the reasons that tech companies have used to ban conservatives or lock themselves out of their accounts.
[00:22:51]  Andy No, I believe, was locked out of his Twitter account once for mentioning actual crime statistics about transgender murders.
[00:23:00]  This was Twitter locked his account for hate speech.
[00:23:04]  When the George Floyd riots were happening and you were doing those very good videos, by the way, on crime statistics, I was wondering, wow, is Charlie Kirk going to get banned?
[00:23:12]  They have this function now.
[00:23:16]  It's not just hate speech, it's hate facts.
[00:23:18]  If you say the wrong facts, you'll get banned.
[00:23:20]  That's the standards.
[00:23:24]  But liberals, meanwhile, they get, you know, we thought in the Covington high school drama that they were able to, you know, these kids with violence.
[00:23:33]  Someone said in all caps, you know, lock these kids in a building and burn it down.
[00:23:41]  And he still has a Twitter account, not banned for that.
[00:23:44]  Amazing.
[00:23:44]  Kathy Griffin suggested that people should dox the kids, wasn't even asked to take the tweet down.
[00:23:52]  And what are some other examples of people who've been banned for posting facts?
[00:23:57]  Tommy Robinson was banned for pointing out that most of the grooming gangs in England are, you know, Muslim Pakistani men.
[00:24:05]  That's a fact.
[00:24:08]  Laura Luma was banned for criticizing Ilhan Omar, saying she's been sympathetic to Sharia in the past.
[00:24:15]  So many examples of conservatives being banned either for posting facts or for criticizing the wrong politician.
[00:24:21]  Meanwhile, the left can get away with threats of violence.
[00:24:25]  It's a complete double standard, absolutely.

=== Winning Arguments with Viral Facts (11:30) ===

[00:24:28]  So in chapter number six, you've talked, so I kind of want you to dive into this.
[00:24:34]  We have listeners of all ages.
[00:24:35]  We have 15-year-olds and 50-year-olds and people that are in their 80s.
[00:24:38]  And that's one of the things that makes our program unique.
[00:24:41]  Can you dive into this idea of robot sensors?
[00:24:43]  And can you also just reinforce the significance of this?
[00:24:46]  Because sometimes when I talk to people in their 60s or 70s and 80s, they kind of consider this to be a little bit of a fringe issue, that it's just not that important.
[00:24:56]  The tech companies, it'll sort itself out.
[00:24:58]  So can you start with the sixth chapter?
[00:25:00]  You talk about robot sensors.
[00:25:01]  You say your first sentence, one of the most common questions I get is, what is an algorithm?
[00:25:06]  So answer that question.
[00:25:07]  And then can you just reinforce and kind of just complete the circle of why this is not just some inconsequential kind of peripheral issue?
[00:25:16]  So an algorithm, essentially, you know, people have seen these are complicated.
[00:25:20]  They're not that complicated.
[00:25:22]  An algorithm is simply a program that's written to take in a set of inputs and analyze them and reach conclusions.
[00:25:30]  So if you can have an algorithm for sorting apples from oranges and it'll look at pictures of apples or oranges, that's the input.
[00:25:38]  It'll analyze them.
[00:25:39]  You know, is the object green?
[00:25:42]  Is it orange?
[00:25:43]  And then it'll reach a conclusion.
[00:25:44]  This is an apple or this is an orange.
[00:25:46]  That's an algorithm.
[00:25:46]  That's a very basic algorithm.
[00:25:49]  A hate speech algorithm would look at various posts on social media, look at the post you make on Facebook or Twitter, and it'll decide, well, what words are in this post?
[00:25:59]  Are these examples of hate speech?
[00:26:00]  And then it'll reach a conclusion.
[00:26:03]  Now, the problem you get is when the people who are training these algorithms, telling them how to recognize hate speech, are all radical leftists.
[00:26:12]  You're going to get a situation where these algorithms go further and further to the left.
[00:26:18]  The way these programs understand hate speech will mirror how a Berkeley gender studies graduate understands hate speech.
[00:26:27]  And this is really, really powerful and threatening because we're going to be in a future very soon where every single one of our posts, everything you post on social media or on the internet is going to be scanned by these algorithms and used to either suppress you or promote you.
[00:26:43]  So if the algorithm sees so-called hate speech in your post, you're going to be buried down in the search results.
[00:26:50]  You're not going to appear on trending topics.
[00:26:51]  You may even be banned.
[00:26:53]  It may countergain to the secret scores that these technologies, these social media platforms have, sort of similar to a social credit score.
[00:27:01]  If you post hate speech too many times, your score will go down.
[00:27:04]  Your post will go less viral.
[00:27:06]  You'll be suppressed.
[00:27:07]  This is really a formula for censoring an entire movement at the same time.
[00:27:12]  Because as I said, these algorithms scan people's posts automatically.
[00:27:17]  So it's a way to censor not just big, big names by the big names who have been banned, but everyone.
[00:27:24]  And so can you reinforce the other part where some older listeners don't quite understand this issue?
[00:27:29]  They don't have social media accounts.
[00:27:31]  How important is this for the distribution of information, especially with younger voters?
[00:27:36]  So imagine you're an undecided voter and you're using the internet.
[00:27:40]  So you're on Facebook, you're on Google.
[00:27:43]  If every conservative is being suppressed for hate speech, those messages that might persuade undecided voters will never actually reach them.
[00:27:52]  We're getting to a situation on the internet where undecided voters, big tech is flooding undecided voters with a stream of propaganda from the mainstream media.
[00:28:03]  They're flooding it to them in search results and they're flooding it to them on social media platforms because the only sort of trending topics that trending is like what you'll see at the top of your screen.
[00:28:15]  So if it's trending, it's right at the top.
[00:28:17]  You'll see it right at the top.
[00:28:18]  And we're going to get to a situation where undecided voters will never see a conservative post at the top of their screen.
[00:28:25]  They'll never see a conservative article at the top of their search results.
[00:28:30]  They just won't find it.
[00:28:31]  So they'll only see the left propaganda.
[00:28:34]  And that's how big tech can steal elections.
[00:28:36]  It's not by persuading conservatives to become left-wing.
[00:28:40]  It's by persuading those undecided voters.
[00:28:44]  It's so incredibly dangerous what we're playing with right now.
[00:28:48]  And I can't communicate the severity of this enough.
[00:28:51]  You have a 16-year-old who all they see is anti-American, anti-conservative, pro-socialist propaganda on all these tech companies.
[00:29:00]  And TikTok aside, which is a Chinese communist propaganda tool, which is incredibly left-wing.
[00:29:05]  A lot of teenagers use it.
[00:29:07]  And the content there is, let's say, shallow at best.
[00:29:11]  But on YouTube, on Google search results, on Facebook, they see nothing but content that makes them feel and think a certain way, where the Overton window is so far moved by the time you're even able to contact these people as voters.
[00:29:27]  The basis point when they're 18 is not whether or not America is a racist country.
[00:29:34]  They've already made their mind up by the time they're 18.
[00:29:36]  It's what are we going to do to destroy America because it's a racist country?
[00:29:41]  It's as if their question is their decision-making matrix politically is no longer, oh, maybe I should chose search other sides.
[00:29:49]  Their basis point is this is a non-negotiable.
[00:29:52]  Every left-wing dogmatic belief is built into them by the time they want to go make a political decision, where the idea of even voting a Republican is so incredibly, it's so distant to them, it's never going to happen or a conservative or any of that.
[00:30:06]  Can you talk about how conservatives and Trump supporters generally have actually had more viral content?
[00:30:12]  You've mentioned this before, but we as conservatives actually have better content and actually resonate really well.
[00:30:18]  But if we were given the kind of internet we had back in 15 and 16, where these tech companies were caught a little bit flat-footed, we're actually able to win arguments that we actually are able to make viral content better than the left.
[00:30:32]  So YouTube has actually had to change its search results because pro-life content was doing too well in search results for abortion.
[00:30:41]  They've had to take down videos criticizing the Federal Reserve because when people were searching for the Federal Reserve, they were finding lots too many videos from conservatives and libertarians criticizing that whole system.
[00:30:52]  So YouTube is a great example because I remember back in 16 and 17, political YouTube was dominated by right-wing content creators.
[00:31:04]  Even PewDiePie, one of the most popular YouTubers in the world, whenever he does a political video, it tends to be on the right.
[00:31:11]  He tends to lean right in his political opinions.
[00:31:14]  So, you have so many examples of this.
[00:31:17]  But it's so dangerous because big tech companies now are the most powerful brainwashing tools that have ever been invented.
[00:31:25]  They're more powerful even than the indoctrination you'll find in left-wing college campuses because these tech companies have models of human behavior.
[00:31:33]  They collect all this data on us.
[00:31:34]  They know our interests.
[00:31:36]  They know how to prod us and nudge us in certain directions.
[00:31:39]  And they're absolutely going to use that power to influence our political beliefs.
[00:31:44]  Exactly, as you said, by the time people reach 18 in America, it's not going to be about whether America is a racist country or not, whether America's evil or not.
[00:31:52]  They'll already have made up their minds, and the tech companies will be one of the big culprits to that.
[00:31:58]  In closing, here, can you kind of add some more insight into where the tech companies are going to go next?
[00:32:04]  Do they view this speech issue?
[00:32:07]  Are they nervous about it?
[00:32:08]  Are all the tech companies the same?
[00:32:10]  Are some better than others?
[00:32:12]  Meaning, is Facebook better than Google?
[00:32:14]  Or is it just basically you're talking about such marginal points of better, it's not even worth mentioning?
[00:32:21]  What is their game plan moving forward if they are not stopped?
[00:32:25]  Well, what the tech companies want, and I think the establishment is prodding them to do this as well.
[00:32:29]  Democrat politicians are prodding them to do this, is as I said earlier in this show, prevent the emergence of new movements that pose a real threat to the establishment.
[00:32:40]  I think that's what they want to do.
[00:32:41]  That's what all of their efforts over the past four years.
[00:32:44]  I mean, if you read my book, you'll see sources inside these companies confirming this and explaining how it's happening.
[00:32:51]  All of their efforts on so-called election integrity, so-called fake news and misinformation-words that, by the way, only became popular inside these companies after Trump was elected.
[00:33:02]  All of these efforts are focused on preventing the emergence of new movements that are genuinely dangerous to the establishment and keeping politics controlled between this old battle between neoliberals and neoconservatives that has been going on for 30 or 40 years and doesn't offer any real change to the voters.
[00:33:21]  That's their end game.
[00:33:22]  In a bizarre way, though, Alam, is that now those of us that are a little bit critical of the neoconservatives in the Trump movement, in the populist movement, now we're assuming neoliberal values by saying that we want to be able to speak?
[00:33:36]  It's as if there's no one that represents the old marketplace of ideas.
[00:33:40]  In a very bizarre way, it's the left has become anti-liberal and almost very leftist or fascist in nature.
[00:33:46]  And there's very few, if anyone, that represents the ideas of contrarian or controversial ideas.
[00:33:53]  So, the book is called Hashtag Deleted.
[00:33:56]  It's very well written.
[00:33:57]  It's a very easy read.
[00:33:59]  And so, let's just, in closing here, Alam, can you just talk about actionable steps?
[00:34:03]  What can people do?
[00:34:04]  We're going to get thousands of emails from this episode.
[00:34:07]  People are going to say, okay, I got it.
[00:34:09]  What now?
[00:34:10]  Should they search?
[00:34:11]  Should they try to find search engines that are not Google?
[00:34:14]  Should they try to be very protective in how they share their data?
[00:34:18]  What are some actionable steps?
[00:34:19]  I get this question all the time.
[00:34:21]  I would separate it into three big steps.
[00:34:24]  First, I would get active in politics in the real world, send letters, phone your representative, and talk to undecided voters that you know in real life, because as I said, they're going to be flooded with propaganda on these tech platforms.
[00:34:37]  You can't rely on tech platforms to give them a balance.
[00:34:39]  You have to go and talk to undecided voters yourself.
[00:34:42]  That's how you get around this in the coming election.
[00:34:45]  Just don't use the tech platforms.
[00:34:47]  Talk to as many undecided voters as you can.
[00:34:50]  Second, absolutely develop a presence on alternative platforms.
[00:34:54]  Use DuckDuckGo, make an account on Gab, make an account on Parla, make an account on BitChute if you do videos and so on.
[00:35:03]  But don't leave the existing platforms because then you're essentially self-censoring yourself.
[00:35:08]  You're banning yourself.
[00:35:09]  You need to be on there.
[00:35:10]  You need to be challenging the narratives.
[00:35:11]  You need to be finding undecided people on those platforms.
[00:35:15]  Two.
[00:35:15]  Third, this is very crucial.
[00:35:18]  You can't play into the algorithms.
[00:35:19]  The algorithms are trained to, you know, be hyper-aware of anyone who's even suggested to be a so-called racist or a sexist or a bigot.
[00:35:28]  So don't play into it by, you know, calling people racists or calling people bigots on the internet because you're playing into the algorithms.
[00:35:36]  You're making them stronger.
[00:35:39]  Don't buy into cancel culture for any reason.
[00:35:42]  And yeah, so those three things.
[00:35:48]  Use the physicals there.
[00:35:49]  Talk to people in real life.
[00:35:50]  Talk to undecided voters.
[00:35:52]  Build a presence on alternative platforms, but don't leave the existing ones and don't play into the algorithms.

=== Don't Play Into The Algorithms (01:43) ===

[00:35:58]  Very good.
[00:35:58]  Well, Alam, thank you so much for joining us.
[00:36:00]  Again, it is the book is called hashtag deleted.
[00:36:03]  Everyone go pick up a copy.
[00:36:04]  I don't know if you Google it, it's going to show up or not.
[00:36:07]  So where can people find this book if it's not going to show up on Google?
[00:36:11]  Well, you can go to deletedbook.com, type that into your web browser.
[00:36:15]  You can also, you can find it on Amazon, but you can also find it on Barnes and Noble if you want a less evil company to buy the book from.
[00:36:22]  Here you go.
[00:36:23]  Well, Alam, thank you so much.
[00:36:24]  Such an important issue.
[00:36:25]  We deeply appreciate you joining the Charlie Kirk show.
[00:36:27]  Keep fighting.
[00:36:28]  This is the number one issue in our country.
[00:36:30]  And I just wish our political and ruling class took it seriously, but they won't because it actually protects them.
[00:36:36]  But for Republicans and conservatives out there, you got to get this issue right and stop giving money to politicians that take money from these companies.
[00:36:42]  So, Alam, thank you so much.
[00:36:44]  We deeply appreciate it.
[00:36:45]  Thank you, Jelly.
[00:36:46]  Great to be here.
[00:36:46]  See you soon.
[00:36:47]  Bye.
[00:36:50]  Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
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[00:37:32]  Thank you guys so much for listening.
[00:37:34]  We'll be back with two more episodes tomorrow.
[00:37:36]  As always, that's our pledge to you.
[00:37:37]  Two episodes a day if it's a weekday.
[00:37:39]  Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
[00:37:41]  God bless.