Listen… Can you hear it?
All across the propagandist right and the free speech center, there's a new rallying cry: it's time to fight the “censorship industrial complex!”
Researching and documenting digital disinformation—and coordinating to combat its malevolent agendas—is now all being described as a pseudo-academic scam, a hoax covering up an authoritarian liberal campaign of vile and secretive censorship. Now, as it turns out, this gnashing of teeth and shedding of tears at the cruel injustice of social media censorship, and the swift, brutal cancellation of anyone daring to go against the mainstream narrative is actually not new.
We’ll look at the broader topic today, as well as some specific variations on the victim of censorship gambit, which uncannily often precedes being handed an even bigger megaphone.
Show Notes
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Okay, so here's why we've made this decision.
It's been an incredible journey so far.
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Right.
And then, of course, in the midst of all of this, for me, is raising a little girl who's about to turn five.
She's been full time in L.A.
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Except, of course, for every other week when she's home with a new virus and we're paying double for health care.
Yeah, I mean, I don't think we've had full weeks of school for two years now after that first year at home.
Well, I am not a parent, but I agree with everything you said and the challenges of this.
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We cannot do it without you.
Conspiratuality 147, the censorship megaphone.
Listen, can you hear it?
All across the propagandistic right and the free speech center, there's a new rallying cry.
They're fighting back against the censorship industrial complex.
Researching and documenting digital disinformation and coordinating to combat its malevolent agendas is now all being described as a pseudo-academic scam.
A hoax covering up an authoritarian liberal campaign of vile and secretive censorship.
As it turns out, this gnashing of teeth and shedding of tears at the cruel injustice of social media censorship and the swift, brutal cancellation of anyone daring to go against the mainstream narrative is actually not new.
We'll look at the broader topic today, as well as some specific variations on the victim of censorship gambit, which uncannily often precedes being handed an even bigger megaphone.
Chairman Jordan, Ranking Member Plaskett, members of the committee, thank you very much for inviting my testimony.
In his 1961 farewell address, President Dwight Eisenhower warned of, quote, the acquisition of unwarranted influence by the military-industrial complex.
Eisenhower feared that the size and power of the complex, or cluster, of government contractors and the Defense Department would, quote, endanger our liberties or democratic processes.
How did he mean that?
Through, quote, domination of the nation's scholars by federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money.
He feared public policy would become the captive of a scientific technological elite.
Eisenhower's fears were well-founded.
Today, American taxpayers are unwittingly financing the growth and power of a censorship-industrial complex run by America's scientific and technological elite, which endangers our liberties and democracy.
I'm grateful for this opportunity to offer this testimony and sound the alarm over the shocking and disturbing emergence of state-sponsored censorship in the United States of America.
So that's noted climate science denier Michael Schellenberger.
He's sitting beside Matt Taibbi in front of the House Subcommittee on the Weaponization of Federal Government.
His phrase, censorship industrial complex, which both he and Taibbi repeated during their testimony, was of course picked up by right-wing media as they reported on these new supposed revelations from the Twitter files.
Schellenberger casts himself and Matt Taibbi as modern-day sleuths, revealing nothing short of a vast conspiracy to secretly censor Americans, which he compares to what Dwight D. Eisenhower warned about in terms of the military-industrial complex, now rearing its head as the censorship-industrial complex.
Yeah, I had to laugh when you picked that clip, Julian.
The difference, of course, is that Eisenhower stated this during his farewell address as President of the United States, and he had been a five-star general since World War II, so he had some awareness of what he's speaking about.
You can argue that Schellenberger, as a journalist, could also have some experience in the field of his industrial complex, But the problem is, he has a noted track record of manipulating information to suit his own needs, and he's been able to spread misinformation freely, which is pretty much the opposite of censorship.
I know in a little bit we're going to play Taibbi giving an example of what he believes to be censorship, but as you've probably already guessed, that's also going to be bullshit.
Yeah, Schellenberger goes on in the testimony after that clip to list several alliances between academic research projects and government intelligence agencies as if these are all plotting against free speech.
As I've said throughout the Twitter files, and we did several bonus installments on this, Derek, it's like Schellenberger, Matt Taibbi, Barry Weiss, and Alex Berenson were born fully formed and ready to comment last week on whatever documents Elon Musk provided with no background knowledge about the disinformation crisis, about Russian interference, about the salaried bureaus within the governments of at least seven authoritarian regimes around the world, Russia and
China chief among them, dedicated to state sponsored information warfare against Western
democracies, or how they exploit precisely the vulnerabilities exposed by the open architecture and
incentive structure of social media.
It's as if none of the deep research unpacking all of this is available.
Their testimony represents to me the culmination of this bizarre and superficial inversion
of reality in which the many years of work being done to try to protect America from
these deliberate chaos agents is itself painted as the actual propaganda campaign that threatens
Now, as a quick aside here, I'm in touch with Renee DiResta, who, because of this testimony, is finding herself at the center of this shitshow because of her work at the Stanford Internet Observatory.
Now, Jim Jordan, who's the head of the subcommittee in question, has demanded access.
To email communications between the Stanford Internet Observatory and the University of Washington's Center for an Informed Public and the Virality Project and any of the government agencies with whom they've been working over the last several years.
I'll be talking to Rene next month and we'll get a good rundown for the listeners on how these latest developments unfold.
Yeah, she's a badass and I'm really excited you got in touch with her and we'll be interviewing her for that episode.
Her work is really important.
Agreed.
And, you know, catching up with her a little bit behind the scenes last week was intense.
Digging into the history of her career, going back at least to how ISIS used social media, contextualizes a lot of what we do, actually.
Because, look, we talk about the disinformation dozen on the podcast and how those anti-vaxxers overlap with conspiritualists.
We talk about the religious prophecies of QAnon and their roots in antisemitism and white Christian nationalism.
We talk about how crunchy granola mommy bloggers got lured in by Pastel Q and found themselves at that time promoting Trump and then somehow embracing Putin's war.
But really, all of this, Derek, I think is part of the same epistemic crisis in which more and more the tools of propaganda and disinformation are strategically deployed to confuse and enrage people as carefully targeted As someone looking to buy a new yoga mat might be targeted by Google ads.
Agreed.
By contrast, the opportunistic swagger of these hand-selected, quote-unquote, independent journalists to brand a whole body of academic work in which earnest and brilliant analysts and researchers are seeking to understand and fight back against digital warfare as merely being crass and deceptive authoritarian left-wing censorship is, to me, actually sad evidence of the success of the propaganda.
Before we move on, Chris Rock's new Netflix special is mostly getting press because this is the first time he spoke out about the Will Smith incident, but the opening joke is about Lululemon yoga pants.
That's right.
And the class structure, and it is excellent.
So you just mentioned Google Ads for yoga pants.
Highly recommend checking that out.
It's funny actually, I had someone come to my yoga class this week, this young guy, and he had a new mat and he was slipping and sliding all over it and he asked me afterwards, you know, what kind of mat should I get?
And I said, listen, email me and I'll give you some ideas because I've had the same yoga mat for 20 years.
I stick to it and it works just fine.
And so I was like looking up yoga mats and now every single page I visit on the internet, Manduka!
Here's a representative to tell you why Manduka is the best mat ever and you should give us your 80 bucks or 120 bucks for it, right?
I only buy my yoga mats from Wayfair.
Alright, so before we look at the so-called censorship initiatives going on today, I wanted to cover some actual forms of censorship from past eras and kind of just to show how ridiculous what's being said today really is.
And I just can't help starting with the most misunderstood thinker since the Buddha, George Orwell.
Old Buddha is constantly being attributed to quotes he never said in today's quick share without checking anything social media, right?
But Orwell's 1984 is probably only second to the red pill meme that hardcore right-wingers and conspirators love to evoke for anything that doesn't agree with their worldview.
It's Orwellian.
Thankfully, Orwell was a much broader and more nuanced thinker than any of the Twitter warriors screaming his name when someone wants to take down a Confederate statue or read a pro-LGBTQ book in a public school.
The book I want to address, though, is Animal Farm, which had its own treacherous road to publication in 1945.
So this is a satirical takedown of Stalin.
And at the time, it was not embraced by the British government.
And the government actually intervened and tried to stop the publishing industry from publishing it.
And in fact, the four major houses in the UK at the time all turned it down because, you know, hey, no need to piss off Stalin and all.
But this is eerily similar to certain politicians and rumble hosts taking the, hey, Putin isn't such a bad guy, stance that they're taking today.
Now, anyway, governmental intervention in the press is something we should always be wary of, and Orwell pointed this out in his excellent 1946 essay called Why I Write, and the essay was turned into a short book which I highly suggest reading.
But let's think about another essay for a moment.
This is from The Freedom of the Press, in which Orwell identifies a bigger danger which I find rather pertinent to today.
The chief danger to freedom of thought and speech at this moment is not the direct interference of any official body.
If publishers and editors exert themselves to keep certain topics out of print, it is not because they are frightened of prosecution, but because they are frightened of public opinion.
In this country, intellectual cowardice is the worst enemy a writer or journalist has to face.
The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary.
Orwell, they published a collection of his essays about 1,200 pages long.
I have it.
It is excellent reference material if you actually want to get serious about his broad range of writing, including his defense of English food in the 1940s.
So he wasn't only writing about politics.
Well, he could be wrong about one thing at least.
I read that essay recently and he was definitely wrong about that.
Now, we're not experiencing voluntary censorship today as much as we're dealing with groupthink.
Now, that's a term that William White Jr.
developed from Orwell's 1984 shortly after Orwell's death.
Now, it's an ideal way to think about the pipeline, for example, of far-right message board disinformation being picked up by Fox News.
whose hosts we know don't have to believe in what they say in order to say it, and then be vomited back to audiences by Russell Brand and Ben Shapiro and all the other supposed independent thinkers.
These are the same ones that cry censorship as they share propaganda with millions or tens of millions of followers, and they often reflect many themes that we've seen before.
We're being ostracized and censored, and oh, what we really need is to not teach children that there might be systemic racial inequality that has produced the uneven society we live in, or that science says there are only two genders, when in reality, credible scientists have known for decades that gender is fluid.
But by positioning themselves as censored martyrs trying to relay a suppressed truth, they are partaking in both doublespeak, which is the intentional obscuring of terms to confuse the listener, and by proxy, groupthink, as many followers are immediately on board with their messaging without actually thinking about the lack of nuance in their arguments or whether they make sense at all.
And as you flagged, we've covered this in our extensive Russell Brand bonus episodes.
So really what it comes down to, hey man, it's really just a vibe.
One of the things about Woke is, Matt, can you explain it to your mom?
Think about that.
And I remember when President Trump was running, and this was before he won in 2016, he used to get standing ovations initially when he would say, political correctness is ruining our country.
And everybody that was clapping knew exactly what he meant.
But it's sort of like the Supreme Court definition of pornography.
You know it when you see it.
So, the Democrats want to get you in an argument where you're having to define wokeism as if the Webster's Dictionary is defining it.
And that's not what it is.
It could be a feeling.
It could be a sense.
And I wonder if Republicans or conservatives are going to have to define it more.
You know, in this case, woke is kind of like what they accused the left of saying gender is.
It's just it's a it's a feeling.
It's hard to put your finger on.
It's just something, you know, and you know it deep down intuitively and you better fucking respect it.
Yeah, that's it's insane.
You can't even debate such a ludicrous statement.
And that's that's the whole point, right, is you can't debate it.
It's the same thing.
I'm working on this future episode.
J.P.
Sears recently did a video about why he has become more interested in God.
He's become more of a faithful believer.
And you know what?
I'm never against anyone's conversion story.
If they're faithful or whatever, let them the faith.
But I did endure and watch it last night.
And it's not an actual faith argument.
It's a Christian nationalistic argument that led him there.
And the problem with these sorts of arguments is when people say, hey, it's my faith.
You can't take it away from me.
I only know what I believe.
But then you use that belief to monetize it as he's done wearing his Got God shirt, for
example.
Or you try to make people – you try to bring people into your downline through your propaganda.
Then it actually is open for debate.
So this sort of argument is really prevalent on the right in order to create a facade of
And if you can't define them, you can't actually use them in an argument.
to get people to believe in them.
And the fact is, words have meanings.
And if you can't define them, you can't actually use them in an argument.
Though, since we're on Orwell, I'll point out that in 1940,
he actually reviewed Mein Kampf for a newspaper
and concluded that regardless Regardless of the monster that Hitler is, and let me point
out, Orwell was a war correspondent as well, so he has a lot of experience writing about
politics.
You can't debate the book's emotional appeal.
That was his last sentence in that essay.
And that gets to the heart of what we're discussing.
People saying they're being censored to millions of people are trying to make them feel as
if they're part of the censored group, which doesn't have to reflect reality or be defined
in any meaningful way.
They can just feel it.
And as I just flagged, it's all very religious.
Now, one more quote from The Freedom of the Press, in which Orwell provides a cautionary tale that perfectly captures the dangers of the Fox News gambit.
If one loves democracy, the argument runs, one must crush its enemies by no matter what means.
And who are its enemies?
It always appears that they're not only those who attack it openly and consciously, but those who objectively endanger it by spreading mistaken doctrines.
In other words, defending democracy involves destroying all independence of thought.
These people don't see that if you encourage totalitarian methods, the time may come when they will be used against you instead of for you.
That's why, like, we had another mass shooting and you can't, immediately you cannot talk about gun reform, right?
That's why they won't even give you a chance because they understand that their methods could come back to haunt them.
Yeah, it's totally preemptive.
Totally preemptive at this point.
It's amazing.
Yeah.
The right tries to get ahead of the against you part by crying censorship at every turn, even when it's a ridiculous premise.
Words don't have to mean anything when they're going after feelings.
You can witness this repeatedly in the CRT is hiding under your bed rhetoric, which is nothing new with the right.
Or sometimes even with progressives, which brings us to the next example, which is Harper Lee.
Now, Lee knows something about censorship.
Her classic work, To Kill a Mockingbird, was removed from libraries in 1966 due to its supposed immorality.
She had the audacity to think critically about race and gender roles in the South.
She started it!
She started this critical race theory thing.
Now, it's fascinating because this book has been censored by different political parties depending on the decade that it was being discussed in.
It was initially criticized for bringing up racial injustice and using rape as a plot theme shortly after publication, but later progressives were upset that a white woman liberally used the N-word 48 times in the text.
So conservatives are mad that anyone would hint that America still has a race problem, while liberals dig into her supposed white savior complex.
Now, I'm not interested in debating all of those arguments, but I am interested in her
reply when her book was pulled from the shelves.
Surely it is plain to the simplest intelligence that to kill a mockingbird spells out in words
of seldom more than two syllables a code of honor and conduct.
I'm sorry, that's fucking awesome, Bern.
A code of honor and conduct.
Christian in its ethic.
That is the heritage of all Southerners.
To hear that the novel is immoral has made me count the years between now and 1984, for I have yet to come across a better example of doublethink.
I feel, however, that the problem is one of illiteracy, not Marxism.
I nominate illiteracy, not Marxism, as the new Florida State slogan.
It's been done.
Let's vote on it.
Now, whatever you think of Lee's work, she was actually someone just asking questions about her time and place.
And that is not a bad thing.
What's different about our current environment is that people are rightfully asking questions, but when they receive clear answers, they refuse to believe them or they think they're a part of a plot against them for knowing the actual truth.
And the illusion of censorship plays a central role in this plot.
Okay, two more examples before we move on.
Kurt Vonnegut had some thoughts about censorship in his memoir-ish book, A Man Without a Country, in which he praises the true heroes of censorship pushback in a sentiment that will ring true to many librarians today, especially in states like Florida.
And on the subject of burning books, I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who all over this country have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies, who've tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.
So, the America I loved still exists.
If not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media, the America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.
I love him.
But one last one from someone who I actually don't love as much, and that's Charles Bukowski.
And his book, Tales of Ordinary Madness, was pulled from the shelves in the Netherlands.
As I said, I'm not really a fan.
And in fact, just last week, the best newsletter in the world, which is the Red Hand Files, discussed Bukowski.
Now, Red Hand is Nick Cave's weekly Q&A email where he responds to someone asking questions and someone compared him to Bukowski, and he replied, I don't like being compared to Charles Bukowski.
I appreciate you were trying to be kind and make me feel good and everything, but I don't like the man.
In my opinion, Charles Bukowski is the Bukake of bad poetry, just blowing his junk around.
I don't like him.
I just don't.
Not even a bit.
No, not at all.
I wish I could do a Nick Cave impersonation.
I can't.
But this is the essence of free speech.
Thanks for citing me and trying to compare me to something.
Here's what I actually think.
Now, while I pretty much agree with Nick about the poet, I do appreciate Bukowski's reply to his book being banned, regardless of what I feel about themes in the book.
Censorship is the tool of those who have the need to hide actualities from themselves and from others.
Their fear is only their inability to face what is real, and I can't vent any anger against them.
I only feel this appalling sadness.
Somewhere, in their upbringing, they were shielded against the total facts of our existence.
They were only taught to look one way when many ways exist.
That last point summates so much of what I feel when I hear Bret Weinstein or Pick Your Fox host yell censorship.
What they're really saying is, I don't like other opinions that make me feel bad.
And this is wildly different from actual censorship.
The examples I've been citing so far actually pale in comparison to countries like this.
Afghanistan.
Where since taking control of the government, the Taliban have shut down 231 media outlets, and where they regularly check citizens' cell phones for social media posts that criticize their regime.
How about India, where the Modi government collects VPN user data from internet companies to see what their citizens are accessing.
Let's go to Venezuela, where the government heavily censors political media, silenced independent media outlets, restricts VPNs, and restricts online pornography.
I'd love to see America's misogynistic trolls live in a country where they can't pull up Pornhub at will.
You have Eritrea, where all independent media was shut down in 2001, and where 16 journalists are currently in jail, most from that date in 2001, and not one of them have yet to receive a trial.
Of course, China, which experts say has the most extensive and sophisticated censorship
apparatus.
There are currently 47 journalists behind bars.
No news service or social media outlet is allowed to operate inside the country without
explicit permission of China's cyberspace administration.
There's this country called North Korea you might've heard about.
Yeah.
So, you know, I just want to add here, and I know I talk about it from time to time.
Growing up in South Africa in the seventies and eighties, any film, any episode of a TV
show that depicted any kind of political protest, any kind of love interest between people of
different races, anything that was deemed to be subversive.
It's a good thing.
Immediately banned.
Can't see it.
And then, the deeper we went into the 80s, the more any kind of political activism against the government, any exposing of what was happening in the townships to black people at the hands of police brutality and military martial law.
You couldn't put it in the newspapers.
So, you know, this is very different than saying you are spreading scientific disinformation about the nature of vaccines and we think that's bad for our society.
Yeah.
Oh, let me add one more that I didn't put in the script.
The UK, because whenever John Oliver does a segment that's critical of the Queen, they don't run it in the UK.
Oh my God.
So he actually, and he's talked about this on the show before, he actually makes segments specifically for that audience when he does critical of the Queen.
It is, yeah, it's fantastic and frightening at the same time, right?
Now, I mean, this is all a very short list because I could take the next hour to run down censorship campaigns across the planet.
So with that in mind, let's take a look at examples of figures on the far right and in conspirituality spaces claiming they're so, so oppressed.
I mean, in fact, Julian, I believe you've identified a few popular terms in conspiritual spacers that fall in the category of doublespeak, yeah?
Not only that, it's kind of breaking my brain, Derek.
In the funhouse mirror of today's media landscape, the meaning of the word censorship has joined the list of words like sovereign.
Research, freedom, tyranny, scientists and even propaganda as having radically different meanings depending on who you're talking to.
So, as alluded to already with the recent phenomenon of the Twitter files, we saw a social media event hyped up by the platform's new owner, In which hand-picked independent journalists with no editorial oversight were granted access to documents with no transparency as to their selection process, to then break a set of stories touted as, at the very least, to be as important as the Facebook files, which were in fact substantive, but at most framed by himself as the biggest story of Matt Zaibie's career.
But more than that, we saw the continuation of this deceptive language game, describing liberal censorship, somehow enacted in ominous concert with government agencies during a Republican administration, as a way of attacking conservative free speech and undermining democracy.
And it just makes me wonder sometimes, do these people ever stop and go, huh, I wonder why it's mostly right-wing voices that are being told they're spreading misinformation and conspiracy theories.
So, reducing the reach of COVID misinformation.
Anti-vax propaganda.
lies about election fraud, and the very brief blocking of the New York Post over widespread intelligence concerns
that the Hunter Biden laptop story was Russian disinformation, something that Twitter later apologized for.
All of this is now under the umbrella concern for the right, as well as their heterodox allies of social media
colluding with the draconian state censorship agenda.
But speaking of the heterodox, Have we heard this tune before?
Whistled past the melodramatic graveyard perhaps by one Bret Weinstein on his Dark Horse podcast, and of course more recently echoed by anarcho-syndicalist libertarian socialist Russell Brand as he made the move to a right-wing hub rumble prior to kissing the ring of Tucker Carlson.
In fact, the prominent 2021 emergence of Matt Taibbi and Barry Weiss as independent sub-stack journalists, a gig that has become extremely lucrative for them by the way, coincides with their coverage of Bret Weinstein.
How lucrative, I hear you ask?
Barry's Free Press substack generates a minimum of $800,000 a year, and Tayibi's Racket News, also on substack, at least half a million a year, according to the figures that substack makes publicly available.
We first talked in 2021 on this podcast about how aspiring presidential candidate and erstwhile A Course in Miracles teacher Marianne Williamson tweeted Matt Saiby's story to her 2.7 million followers.
It was titled, Meet the Censored.
Brett Weinstein.
Williamson's tweet about the article said it was as critically important as it is terrifying.
Now, I'll just add here that recent estimates by StarStat have Weinstein's Dark Horse YouTube channel bringing in about $75,000 a year, but that's on top of what is likely somewhere between $100,000 and $200,000 a year on Patreon.
Oh, and when he and his wife, Heather Haying, left Evergreen College, these poor, censored, and cancelled heroes won a half-million-dollar settlement for their trouble with the woke.
But the meat of the Taibbi article was how Weinstein's YouTube channel had run afoul of YouTube's misinformation policies by hosting ivermectin enthusiast Pierre Kory and anti-vaccine alarmist Robert Malone.
As we know now, both of these quacks, along with Peter McCullough, would find their way onto Joe Rogan's podcast and become heroes to COVID contrarians and conspiritualists alike while raking in money from the UltMed online telehealth and off-brand prescription networks that we've covered and that the Center for Countering Digital Hate has talked about in their pandemic profiteers report.
So here's Taibbi telling the hosts of Breaking Points how the Weinstein censorship controversy is really a proxy war around the populist freedom for ordinary people who presumably are doing their own research to choose their own medicines.
Yeah, and I think what's happened to this It's become a fulcrum for a larger debate between populists and anti-populists for lack of a better term.
It's acquired the nickname of a populist treatment because all around the world there are people who are self-medicating with ivermectin, especially in South America.
In some cases, governments are actually giving this drug out, or foundations are giving them out by the tens of thousands doses of this stuff.
And the medical authorities see, I think, this issue as a proxy for a larger debate over how much control patients should have over their own treatment.
Should people be allowed to essentially treat themselves?
Should they be allowed to order their doctors to give them a drug?
That's what this is all about, and what's frustrating about it I think when YouTube or Facebook cracks down on the speech surrounding a topic like this, it only fuels the resentment and mistrust of medical authorities and makes people even more likely to go out and self-medicate in a way that might not be productive.
That's what I've been focusing on with this story.
Does any of this censorship really accomplish anything positive?
Probably not.
It's not logical in any way.
Oh boy.
So, look, Taibi's writing framed the Weinstein story as being an example of egregious censorship.
And then as we watched, Weinstein's Patreon account grew by 57% that month alone.
Having already done his two-and-a-half-hour sensationalist crime-of-the-century episode with Pierre Kory on Dark Horse, the sequel then found the pair on Rogan for what they dubbed as its first-ever emergency episode.
And this is all several months after Weinstein was on with his wife on Real Time with Bill Maher.
All of this led to me describing this as the high profile victim of censorship gambit, because as a strategy, it seems to only grow the victim's audience.
Now, this would all result in Rogan's estimated 11 million listeners per episode being subjected next to interviews with Weinstein and Corey together and then separately Malone and McCullough in quick succession.
These many hours were filled with the most outrageous falsehoods and fantastical comparisons, none of which were fact-checked or pushed back against.
One famous example out of many is Malone saying that America was undergoing a mass formation psychosis.
around COVID vaccines and he compared it to German citizens under the Nazis.
Barry Weiss would then, that's an interesting segue from Nazis to Barry Weiss, she would then pen a lengthy substack introduction itself titled The Books Are Already Burning to an Abigail Schreier article in which Weiss cited Weinstein's Dark Horse podcast as an example of big tech censoring those who are willing to ask the tough questions of the medical science establishment.
Oh, that's amazing.
Does Schreier's article include any books on the fact that people across the sexual and gender spectrums are human beings as well as being banned in, I don't know, let's go back to Florida again?
I mean, that's an honest question.
I don't agree with Schreier's argument, but at root, I would hope we can have credible debates around things like, World Athletics reorienting itself around transgender athletes in sports and assigning a transgender athlete to chair a committee to further the discussion.
That's all healthy at a time when you are trying to figure out the science of it.
But I was reading over the GLAAD Accountability Project, that's a non-profit that deals with the LGBTQ community, and Schreier has spread misinformation in a number of hearings and in her articles about transgenderism.
And none of it is being censored.
And I don't know of her coming to the defense of authors actually being banned.
And if I'm wrong on this, please DM us and I would be happy to be wrong on this one, but I haven't seen it.
Yeah, good luck being wrong.
The takeaway for me and the reason I wanted to recap all of this is that at that time, the research-based scientific consensus on ivermectin was easy to find and it has remained consistent as more studies have been done.
The Weinstein and Corey stance on it was conspiratorial in all the classic ways.
It relied on cherry pick data that was easy to refute.
And one study they refer to often was even found to have been completely fraudulent,
a fact that they never publicly acknowledged.
It was also the case that their anti-vax alarmism in concert with Malone and then McCulloch
flew in the face of the phase three trial data and the scientific consensus, which has
again remained consistent as over 5 billion people have been vaccinated against COVID.
But the one-two punch is plain to see.
And we're in your wheelhouse here, Derek.
Falsely claim that the vaccines are killing people.
And it's being covered up by money-grubbing big pharma and their mainstream media stooges,
all of them. And then shill for the supposedly suppressed drug that is safe, cheap and effective
and for sale in off-label protocols as an ongoing prophylactic protection that you take every day.
And let me add that this argument that I keep seeing recurring on my sub stack and in different
places that anytime I mentioned the fact that anti-vaxxers are monetizing their misinformation,
the immediate reaction is, what about fake pharma?
Two things can be true at once, and I don't know how many times that point needs to be made.
But big pharma can be horrible and really bad at monetizing.
I'm looking for the opposite of progressive.
They're really harming people with the way that they've treated with opioids, and you can also make an argument about antidepressants and medicalizing things.
Yes, that is true.
And these figures we're talking about can also be grifting.
Both of these things can be true at once.
So you have to disentangle and make that argument, but you can't just lump them together and say, oh, Bret Weinstein, he only makes a million dollars a year?
You know, Pfizer is making $10 billion, so how can you compare them?
They can both be true.
Yeah, these logical fallacies are extraordinarily easy to slip into when you're arguing that kind of conspiracy logic.
Taibbi, Weiss, Rogan, and other perhaps well-meaning enablers of the censorship megaphone all have one thing in common.
They appear not to know, or perhaps not to care, how to assess the difference between the scientific consensus and fringe evidentiary claims.
In their rush, and I'll give them the benefit of the doubt that it's a well-meaning rush to protect free speech, to encourage open debate, to call out abuse of power, all of which are good things to do, They fell for the oldest rhetorical device in the pseudoscience and conspiracy theory playbook.
Which is to say, the evidence for my wild claims only looks weak because it's being suppressed by the powers that be.
Now, maybe we can forgive them partially for their skepticism not being adequately grounded in understanding scientific method.
It's not their wheelhouse after all.
But all of these very bold contrarian claims about the dangers of COVID vaccines and the efficacy of ivermectin have not turned out to be prophetic truths.
And yet, a revised, apologetic, fact-checked, journalistic integrity that corrects these mistakes has yet to make any appearance.
We've covered Russell Brand's redpilling over the course of 2021, starting with the video about what QAnon got right, and then trending increasingly toward all conspiracy content all the time as the feedback loop reinforced his turn.
The WEF, the Great Reset, the nefarious agenda of Bill Gates, Literal blood-drinking elites and Fauci's lies about vaccines all became the norm on Russell Brand's channel.
And this culminates in the present, as we covered in those bonus episodes, with Brand interviewing Taibbi and Weiss from his show now on right-wing alt-tech platform Rumble about the liberal censorship bias of old Twitter.
So here's Russell now announcing his move to Rumble with a heads-up The bleeped out word here is ivermectin.
We have been persecuted for misinformation, and it's right.
We have a responsibility to make sure that the information we convey is absolutely 100% as accurate as it possibly could be.
In the mistaken video, we said that the NIH were recommending the use of...
What we should have said is they're trialing.
That's what we should have said.
We made an apology video.
We've taken that down as well.
YouTube took down our original video.
The good news is we're moving to Rumble.
All of our content is up on Rumble first and we'll be streaming on Rumble every day.
So both of those videos you can watch right now on Rumble.
That's the reason we're joining them because they're not going to censor our content.
And the reason I think it looks like censorship is because there's mainstream media misinformation up all the time.
That the vaccines work well enough that the virus stops with every vaccinated person.
Now, I think most of us know now that that's not true, but that video is up on YouTube right now.
In my opinion, that's misinformation.
So he's the one who's bleeping there, right?
Yeah.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
It's amazing.
For dramatic effect.
The amazing thing about this clip is that Brand is right in the sense that Matto is wrong, but he's been using this fucking clip over and over, and he fails to ever mention the fact that she was reporting the scientific consensus at the time.
Later on, she and many other journalists owed up to the fact that the science changes and made corrections.
Now, there could be a text addendum on that YouTube clip stating exactly that.
We know more now.
Every time we put up an episode that says anything about COVID-19 in the title or show notes, I mean, we, us as Conspirituality, Spotify puts up a Learn More link to credible and vetted information about the virus.
So if Brand really cared about this issue, he'd advocate for better content moderation, but we know that's not what he wants.
The fact that he continually props up this motto clip is disingenuous and he knows it.
At least I hope he knows it.
If he doesn't, that says even less of him than any criticism that we've ever expressed.
Now, he also never brings up the fact that YouTube is a private company, and this cuts across all of the people we've been talking about today.
Private company, not a government agency.
None of these people ever say that.
You completely have the right to be upset that a platform is doing something you don't like, and then you can leave the platform and go somewhere that shares your values, like Rumble.
Russell, he's trying to play both sides.
He played 17 minutes of a show with Glenn Greenwald on YouTube where he reaches 6.3 million subscribers right now.
The show is about silencing, it's written in all caps, dissent.
Again, both men are not censored.
So go over to Rumble, and you can see that Russell has a million followers there.
He's built it up quite a bit, but that's only one sixth of his YouTube reach, and he can't monetize the YouTube following if he doesn't remain there.
So far, he hasn't been pulled down, even though he's only using YouTube to gain advertising revenue and drive traffic to Rumble, where he'll gain advertising revenue or whatever deal he has with them.
If I were a head of YouTube, I'd be a bit pissed at having my platform used like that.
Only in reality, they still get the revenue from his 6.3 million followers.
So I don't think Google's really going to be that threatened by him.
And in every place, Russell gets to yell censorship and drive traffic wherever he wants.
And he's still up on all of those platforms.
That's really some censorship there.
I feel terrible for him.
So what's really going on here?
This is the latest iteration of an actual information war.
And it's increasingly characterized by both what Steve Bannon calls flooding the zone and by utilizing all of the language, the terminology of some kind of astute political media analysis in laughable but still highly effective ways.
Consider how much we hear the word narrative.
From the right, which is referring to ideologies and stories and ways of looking at the world as being narratives is about as postmodern as you can get.
And here are these people always railing about the amoral kind of consequences of Marxist postmodernism and they can't keep the word narrative out of their mouths.
And we hear this from conspiritualists as well.
We hear this from the Just Asking Questions heterodox online media personalities.
When real news becomes fake news, when pseudoscience is touted as suppressed truth, discredited doctors are held up as heroes.
Journalists who strive to paint a fact-based picture of reality are merely pushing a narrative.
And attempts to manage the very disinformation crisis that is tearing the world apart are labeled as cynical censorship.
I mean, to me, this is really the problem.
We were just talking about Russell Brand.
The reality of what happened with Russian interference in the 2016 election and has been continuing since then.
The reality of a global pandemic in terms of its real threats to human life are somehow downplayed.
Anytime these people Discover the reality, which has largely been in plain view, that there has been ongoing discussions between academic institutions, government intelligence agencies and social media platforms to try to get a handle on these really, really calamitous problems.
To me, that's the problem here.
These people are so disconnected from reality and they want to see conspiracies around every corner.
You want intrigue, deception, espionage, actual conspiracies?
Study up on Rene Diresta's research or just stay tuned because I'm going to do it for you.
Right-wingers love to concoct all kinds of make-believe.
You know, George Soros is clearly behind the New York DA's case against Donald Trump.
Venezuelan operatives rigged the voting machines.
The Clintons are serial killers.
Michelle Obama's really a man.
The truth about vaccines killing millions is being covered up.
You want examples of actual censorship?
Look into what Ron DeSantis is doing to Florida school classrooms and libraries, in which long lists of books are being removed because teaching slavery or civil rights is deemed dangerous critical race theory.
And sweet little books, like the one about two male penguins spontaneously parenting an orphaned baby penguin in a zoo, something that actually happened, So one thing we're often asked about with the anti-vaxxers is what's really the problem if someone doesn't take a vaccine?
take over America that goes all the way back to Marxist academics in pre-World War II Frankfurt.
So one thing we're often asked about with the anti-vaxxers is what's really the problem if someone doesn't take
a vaccine and we've argued that when you're constantly saying there's this big campaign against you
and you lose trust in medical industry, not only are you more susceptible to diseases
that could be eradicated, but on a bigger picture, you're probably just not going to the doctor
as much as you should be going, right?
So there's something similar happening here, and I want to argue about the dangers of this crying censorship campaign on a more individual level, and that's the downstream effects of this grift.
So just one more example of the monetization of it.
You have Joseph Mercola writing that censorship is sweeping across the internet.
Here's how you can protect your privacy and rights to free speech.
Click the link in my bio to read the full story.
Of course, that brings you to Dr. Mercola's censored library.
Which is a substack that claims to have 288,000 subscribers and costs either $5 a month or $50 a year.
So on the low end, that's $1.4 million per month to take recycled content from years of grifting someone whose value or net worth is put at $100 million.
And reminder, he's gotten in trouble a number of times for monetizing pseudoscience and sometimes dangerous products.
Yeah, one of them, yes.
And he puts it under the banner of censorship, and he makes even more money on it.
That's unmatched conspiritualist recursion.
To point out what we were talking about Russell and taking down content, and here's my response about moderation.
As long-time listeners may know, we have a moderation policy on our social media handles.
We don't get involved in a lot of conversations on our Instagram, for example, and some of them are contentious.
But if someone's sharing stuff we might not agree with, we let it stand.
We sometimes reply, though often someone else jumps in, and then a debate ensues.
I actually think this is a healthy function of social media.
You're letting people work out their ideas with one another.
Here's where it's different though.
If someone's being misogynistic, racist, or they're just freely sharing disinformation, we'll remove it and we'll block that person.
And that's not censorship.
It's telling assholes to stop harassing people.
But then I head over to someone else who's been crying censorship to sell products for quite some time, and that's Jason Schurka.
And you know what?
He can run his social media account however he wants.
But I have to say, he's franchising this ridiculous frequency healing machine that I covered extensively a few months back on our Shirk a Tank bonus episode.
The thing looks like a version of the Matrix if it was designed by My Little Pony.
It's this glitchy stream of pastel colors, the type of gaudy design that Charles and Ray Eames spent a lifetime fighting against.
And then I look at the comments on his feed.
And this is the type of thing that's happening over there.
So again, he's promoting this ridiculous, nonsensical frequency healing machine that's pretty expensive.
And you have a user write, we have a center in my town, but the price is prohibitive for us.
My husband would likely require far more time than one hour with severe kidney disease, diabetes, CAD to name some problems.
Someone replies, put him on an all meat diet.
To which she replies, yeah, been there, done that.
Tried vegan too, but he hated it.
Good advice.
Most meat that's healthy is good for you.
Our food pyramid is a fraud.
We need proteins and good fats.
All these different sugars added into everything.
It's a wonder how people can live on grocery store poison.
Just my opinion.
Peace sign.
Emoji.
So what else jumps in?
Diet is key.
No seed oils.
Tallow.
No artificial anything.
Sending prayers.
Another expert.
It's the water.
Most water we drink is actually aging and oxidizing our bodies.
And I want to point out that that person who said that is selling alkaline water.
So the recursion again, right?
Monetization within monetization.
And then finally you have someone, right?
Chlorine dioxide leaves it at that.
So the point being is here is this just stream of, and I'm saying this is one comment thread out of hundreds.
Now let's just look at one more comment here.
And this, this is, we're just going through the beginning of the argument, but this is the type of Just craziness that's being spread on these posts.
So someone writes, protect this woman at all costs.
She's referencing the woman who created the healing frequency machine that Shirka is trying to monetize and spread around the world, right?
So protect this woman at all costs.
This is, quote, forbidden knowledge.
They do not, they, doesn't say who, they, they do not want us to have access to this type of information.
Here's where it gets really fun.
Monks have known about this for thousands of years.
They heal terminal cancer in their temples through the frequency of their chants slash mantras.
Here's the reply.
Look up all the monasteries that have been closed recently due to mass meth addiction spreading between monasteries and monks.
You cannot play in the spiritual world without Jesus.
Demons will fake heal you to get you to submit your soul to them just to take it all back
again including your eternity in heaven.
Jesus heals the right way and you can keep your eternity in him.
Look into deliverance ministries.
That's the right way to get healed.
If Jesus's name isn't spoken, I don't trust it.
Jesus has shown himself to me and saved my life.
I might not be sure of a lot of things, but Jesus I'm absolutely sure of.
I'm grateful for what he did for me every day and pray that anyone on here that is willing
to ask him in prayer could have that same.
supernatural encounter in the name of Jesus. God bless you all. And there's some various
emojis that you can imagine.
Hands up emoji, cross emoji, prayer emoji, black heart emoji. And again, I just want
to say because that he kind of got long and he actually comments a number of more times.
But this is all to do with this idea that healing frequencies can heal you of afflictions
or diseases that the Western medical establishment cannot treat.
So I want to put that in that context because it's really important because this is the things that people are saying.
And you know what?
If Jesus is your dude, cool.
And I actually love Buddhist chanting, but making false cancer claims is not helpful.
So this is a really brief example, and it's extremely common and reflective of the misinformation and at times different disinformation happening on these pages.
And there's no oversight, there's no moderation, and there's definitely not any censorship happening.
But all these people are downstream from someone who's using the concept of censorship to sell very expensive sessions and products.
And that leads to a cesspool of pseudoscience and magical thinking.
And the more people roped into these spaces, the more bad information proliferates.
And with all these figures, censorship isn't their only gambit.
But it's become one that they regularly use when it fits into their agenda.
And that agenda always seems to benefit them the most.
