Out of Creative Control: Bret Speaks with Matt Orfalea on the DarkHorse Podcast
Bret Speaks with Matt Orfalea on the DarkHorse Podcast. They discuss cancel culture and propaganda, and consider how we face this developing danger. Find Matt on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@OrfFind Matt on Twitter: https://twitter.com/0rf ***** Find Bret Weinstein on Twitter: @BretWeinstein, and on Patreon. Please subscribe to this channel for more long form content like this, and subscribe to the clips channel @DarkHorse Podcast Clips for short clips of all ou...
It seems like I'm seeing society make a bigger deal about jokes than actual crime.
Is that accurate?
Do you see that?
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast.
I have the pleasure of sitting this morning with Matt Orfallia.
Matt, have I pronounced your name correctly?
That's not it, but that is why I go by Orph, because it is almost impossible to pronounce correctly.
In fact, if you had pronounced my name correctly, which is Orphalaw, and anybody had typed that in...
They wouldn't be able to find me.
So it's actually better to mispronounce it because that way people will be able to find me.
Okay, so you go by Matt Orff, but it's Orff-a-la?
Yeah, yeah.
Is that right?
It's crazy.
Yeah, it is.
I know.
It doesn't seem right, but that's what I'm told.
I'm dredging up out of a deep, dusty quadrant of memory here, actually full of cobwebs.
Isn't Orff-a-la a genus of spider?
Um, I don't know.
I don't know.
All right.
I don't know.
All I mean, I don't come from a family of spiders as far as I know.
Well, you know, do you know what Weinstein means?
No.
Weinstein is the glass-like sediment in the process of red wine making.
It's wine stone.
And I don't come from a family of wine sediment.
So, you know, last names are not always a perfect indicator of one's history.
But in any case, I should say you are a video creator fast on the rise that makes I will in a moment let you describe what these things are, but these are video compilations, curations that are simultaneously jaw-dropping in their implication and hilarious in the juxtaposition of things that are relevant to important
Current events.
So anyway, I don't know if that's how you'd describe it.
You want to take a crack at it?
Yeah, no, that sounds good to me.
That's a huge compliment, especially coming from you.
And I mean, the way I describe it is I just try to make videos that kind of fight back against groupthink.
And one of the styles that I've done that's probably the most popular is mashups or remixes.
And so I'll mashup, remix the news in a way to kind of reveal the propaganda.
Interesting.
So, as you probably know, I was a college professor for 14 years, and my key trick for teaching was to say things that would cause These were true things, but they would cause the mind to register an error, you know, things that were juxtaposed in such a way that they didn't make immediate sense, which forces the mind to become conscious.
And it sounds to me like what you're doing is mashing up the news in a way that the mind cannot help but see what is in front of it.
Whereas I think largely it is taken in subliminally as it is presented by those who make it.
Yeah yeah and also it's it's hard to comprehend how Uh, you know, just overbearing and ominous the propaganda is.
Um, so, but if you condense it all, which I try to do, um, then it's like, you know, undeniable, you know, it's, it's very clear to see the narrative.
Uh, but you know, it's, it's hard to make, make it out if it, you know, it's split up between all these commercial breaks and, Yeah, it's actually, it's partially designed and partially it has evolved to become invisible, which is extremely dangerous.
I would say, I would just add, Heather and I used to do a lot of traveling to remote places as, you know, as part of our graduate work in biology.
And one of the things that was most shocking about it was what happened when you came home.
Where you could briefly, you know, for a week or two after you'd been away for...
3, 6, 10, 18 months sometimes.
You could come home and you could actually see your culture as it is, rather than see it as a participant.
And the presentation of events and advertisements are just hard to believe when you see them with your conscious mind, right?
They only work because you're only half paying attention.
Yeah.
So anyway, yeah, your videos really do an excellent job at this.
I forgot to mention you're DC based, is that right?
Yeah.
But as a video editor, I suppose, you know, I could be working anywhere.
But anyway, you could be on Mars.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I first became aware of your work When you tell me if I have the story correct here, you put together a video.
I no longer even remember the exact detail of the content, but I was somehow involved in this video.
I was part of the mashup, and you got flagged by YouTube.
You got struck, if I recall correctly.
But the very strange thing about that story, again, tell me if I'm wrong, but you had not made the video public.
That's right.
There were three rough cuts that I had uploaded, just uploaded to YouTube.
And they were removed before I even published them.
And I wasn't planning on publishing those.
They were old rough cuts, which makes sense, helps my process to upload it on YouTube, unlisted or private, and then just kind of view it, see how it plays in the little YouTube screen with the YouTube compression and all.
Anyway, yeah.
YouTube deleted it.
That was my first strike.
Then all of a sudden, they started deleting older videos of mine, claiming that I was somehow supporting violent criminal organizations.
Am I the violent criminal organization you were supporting?
Maybe YouTube thinks so.
Well, they certainly behave that way.
But, you know, the story was just so shocking because, you know, I suppose I could imagine YouTube has some mechanism for looking at content that is not public.
And I could imagine you getting an email saying, you can't make this one public for some reason, Matt.
But what I can't imagine is that you would get a community guidelines strike for something you had not published.
I mean, it makes a mockery of the term community.
What What exactly did you do that violated a community standard here?
You know, all you did was upload something to see technically how it would work.
Yeah, I mean, this video was basically a mashup of, it was funny, funnily enough, it was about the censorship of the Ivermectin discussion.
Um, I even had a disclaimer even in my rough cuts, but that didn't matter.
And, you know, I featured you and, you know, you just discussing basically the main point it ends with your, you know, big point, which was if ivermectin, you know, could help COVID.
This is just incredibly dangerous and disastrous and, frankly, evil to be censoring a potential cure that the science had not been settled on yet.
The video about censorship got censored, and when you're deleting Material that was never made public.
I mean, that's essentially that's thought crime stuff right there.
Yep.
It's thought crime, pre-crime, whatever it might be.
But I will also say, you know, it's funny.
We're now, what, a couple of years down the road from that incident.
And the story of COVID has evolved quite a bit.
It's interesting that Ivermectin is the slowest of the various topics to actually arrive at some place where we can have an open discussion about it.
Many people still believe the propaganda that says, look, it was promising, we studied it, It doesn't work, and certain people won't get over the fact that it doesn't work, right?
That is not at all the case if you look at the evidence with a critical eye.
But somehow that story has maintained, even as the story that the vaccines are safe and effective, that they don't produce the evolution of viral variants, that the pathogen was altered in a laboratory before it emerged, into the world.
All of these things are now readily discussable, but ivermectin remains radioactive, as do I, because of my willingness to talk about what the evidence said, to correct where I had the evidence wrong,
And to say, look, I don't, you know, doesn't matter how stigmatized the position is, the evidence still indicates that this is a powerful and safe drug to use that is effective against COVID.
But I guess I wonder what you make of the fact that that particular story has remained that of all the stories that have broken, that one has remained most intact.
I haven't seen evidence that ivermectin works against COVID yet.
I'm all for an open discussion about that.
Sure, and I would say I have seen that evidence.
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I think the thing that people do not anticipate is the degree of propaganda that one encounters when you get anywhere near this drug.
Right?
And so I agree.
Yes, there are several studies that appear to settle the question once and for all, it's not effective.
But they settle it in the abstract.
That is to say, in the first paragraph where they describe what they've found.
The evidence that is actually in the papers does not reflect the conclusion that is reported.
What is there, in the methods section, is sabotage.
These studies were designed to fail, and the irony is the drug is effective enough that in spite of designing the studies to fail, they didn't fail completely.
So the evidence that they produced actually does reflect an effectiveness of ivermectin, even though they administered it late, which everybody knows doesn't work when you are talking about an antiviral treatment.
They cryptically hid a dosage cap The people who are most threatened by COVID are people who are very overweight and they hid the dosage of ivermectin that's supposed to be per kilogram.
And what they did is they hid a mechanism that capped the dosage so the fattest people got the lowest dose per kilogram, right?
There's no scientific explanation for why you would do that.
None has ever been offered.
But nonetheless, they buried it in this.
You see it in two different studies, the ones that are trumpeted as settling the question.
So, I think most people do not imagine that if you dig in a scientific study done, you know, by supposedly reputable institutions in the West, that you're going to find outright fraud.
And yet, that's what is here, which tells you something about the importance of this question.
I mean, I should also just add, as long as we're on the topic, people also have this wrong idea.
You know, ivermectin is very useful at treating parasitic infections, and they thought that it might be useful for treating COVID, and then it turned out that it didn't.
That's not the story.
The story is ivermectin is actually extremely effective against a range of RNA viruses, of which COVID is one.
So if it didn't work for COVID, that would be the exception.
The fact that it does work for COVID means it's just consistent across RNA viruses.
It works against them and COVID is not exceptional.
Is it a fact at this point?
What?
That it works against COVID?
Depends what you mean by fact.
Well, let's put it this way.
From my perspective, it is as close to a fact as you're going to get.
That even the studies that claim it doesn't work, if you look at the evidence those studies produced rather than the way they summed up that evidence, yes, it is effective.
And you wouldn't expect it to be very effective in these studies because it was given so late.
All antivirals have a non-linear relationship with time given.
The earlier you give them, the better they work.
The efficacy and the effectiveness drops off the later you administer them.
The studies were designed not to show an effect and did anyway.
That's how good the drug is.
Yeah.
I'm not a biologist and I mean I'm just against censorship and more studies sounds good.
Anybody that wants to censor the science and the discussion, that's horrible.
I guess I think one of the... What about like hydroxychloroquine?
Did that ever... I remember there was a lot of questions about that, you know, hope, but it didn't follow through in some studies.
Some studies apparently did suggest that it was effective.
Whatever happened with that one?
Same pattern.
The fact is, and there's a reason for this, or there appears to be a reason for this.
The reason appears to be That the emergency use authorization for the so-called vaccines required that there be no viable treatment available.
The idea that there not only was a viable treatment available, but there were several of them, they were highly effective, and they carried virtually no risk, meant there was no reason to expose the human population to this radical experiment of especially mRNA-based vaccines for which there was no precedent in humans for a successful use.
So now I will say among my errors in COVID was I missed for too long that hydroxychloroquine was actually an effective drug.
I bought the propaganda and only late in COVID did I discover Actually, that was wrong.
That they had sold us, again, just like they did with ivermectin.
Two wrong ideas.
One, it doesn't work.
There's no evidence for efficacy.
Two, it's dangerous.
You'd be a fool to take it, right?
The way they got the evidence of danger was they hugely overdosed people, right?
They actually did harm in studies in order to make a safe drug look dangerous.
That's how crazy this propaganda is.
Yeah, I... Yeah, I mean, I wish I could have better, you know, more to say on this topic.
You shouldn't.
You shouldn't.
You know, you're a layperson.
The problem is you are stuck in an impossible bond.
Are you supposed to imagine that scientific evidence isn't scientific evidence when it comes to certain drugs that do or don't work against certain diseases?
You're not in a position to know, right?
You don't know that I'm not crazy, so I wouldn't expect you to have a sophisticated position here, but I would point out that the idea that, hey, I'm for more studies Doesn't address the question.
If the thing that has captured our journalistic apparatus, our regulatory apparatus, if that thing has captured our scientific apparatus so that it cannot do a study without influences that cause foregone conclusions to be manifest in studies to supposedly settle questions but in the direction that is not true,
Then more studies doesn't help, because the fact is science works on the honor system.
It really, you know, you have to report what you did honestly, and you have to set up your experiment to function, and even peer review doesn't tend to catch major errors.
For example, the the underdosing of overweight COVID patients, right?
Apparently peer review didn't catch that.
These papers emerged that Unexplained sabotage remained in there and nobody said anything.
Yeah, the whole, um, yeah, I mean, just because there's a scientific, scientific study doesn't mean it was done right.
And unfortunately that's, uh, that complicates things very much.
Um, and we, you know, this was people, some people already knew this, uh, like yourself, um, because, you know, you, you worked in science, but, um,
Now it's more undeniable, and even some of the studies on the vaccines, I remember Thomas Massey, he noticed an error in a CDC report or study and contacted them over the phone, recorded it all.
They eventually admitted it wasn't accurate, And they never really fully corrected it.
I mean, it's just amazing.
Just one thought, though, I had on... So, during COVID, when I was discussing potential, you know, these taboo possible remedies, right?
A lot of the times I would be given anecdotes.
So people saying that, Oh, I know Ivermectin works.
It, you know, it worked on me.
It worked on friends, even from like a nurse saying, you know, she gave it to patients and she saw them recover.
I guess the, because COVID is not as deadly and serious as it was made out to be, it, you know, it gives More power to this kind of anecdotes that people would normally be able to recognize it as anecdotes because most people, over 99% of people, recover just fine.
And so you'd have so many cases of people getting better when given, whether it's hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin.
Anyway, that's just a Yeah, it's absolutely the problem with anecdote.
The frustrating thing, right?
Anecdote, especially in the case of an infectious disease from which people recover.
How do you know whether the drug you took made you better or not?
It's every bit as foolish as people saying, well, I got COVID after getting the vaccine and it would have been so much worse if I didn't have it.
How would you know, right?
Yeah, and because most people don't have severe cases, infections, or reactions, and so most people who got the vaccine would not have had a severe reaction anyway.
Right?
So, yeah.
Yep.
So, you know, I have taken ivermectin when I have had COVID and I believe it has had a dramatic effect, but I don't use that.
I don't report that as evidence because the truth is I can't know, right?
Yeah.
However, I would point out that there are other kinds of evidence that don't function that way.
For example, Where are the doctors who have treated patients early with a sufficient dose of ivermectin for COVID and don't think it works?
There are lots of doctors who have never used it because they don't think it works and they still don't think it works, but the doctors who have used it seem to think it works.
That's an interesting pattern.
Is it possible for doctors to fool themselves?
Yes, although in many cases we're talking about some of the most highly published people in their fields.
These are people who are well versed in science, who are thoroughly aware of the danger of anecdote.
And so I put a very high weight on the clinical experience of people who have tried lots of things and seen plenty that don't work and think that hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin both do.
Yeah.
I know this is one of your big topics of interest.
I always find it interesting to hear you speak on it.
I'm going to attempt to change the topic.
No, no.
Here's the thing.
It's not really my topic of interest, and A topic of interest of yours, not the.
Well, let me fill in why and then you'll see why it will automatically do what you want in terms of change of topic.
My belief is that what happened during COVID reveals the corruption of our system.
Virtually every institution failed.
Virtually every piece of advice that you were given from something official was not just wrong, but the inverse of true, right?
They locked you in your home when you should have been outside, right?
That was a terrible mistake.
They gave you a novel vaccine when you should have been taking vitamin D, right?
Across the board, they did the inverse of the right thing.
And we still don't know why.
So my point, really... Well, we, I mean, yeah, we can, I think it's pretty fair to say why.
If you know, I want to know.
I'm still not sure I know.
Well, I mean, to sell vaccines, right?
Even though they were free to the public, the government's coffin up the cash for it.
So, yeah, absolutely to sell vaccines.
I mean, the evidence that I see that shows that, I mean, it seems kind of obvious, but one specific instance was, you're probably already familiar with how natural immunity was removed from the WHO's website.
So that tells me, and also the timing of it, Brett, the timing of it.
It was removed, I believe, just before or just after The Pfizer's first press release on trials for the vaccine.
So, I mean, it's just the correlation is pretty amazing there.
And then all of a sudden, they removed it completely.
They did bring it back maybe a month or so later after the emergency authorization.
Right.
And it's just so amazing.
And they also brought it back.
On New Year's Eve, when most people wouldn't really notice.
And they also brought it back, they had a different, you know, context saying that they do not think or advocate for treating or curing the pandemic with natural immunity, but vaccines.
So they changed that when they brought it back, of course.
Okay, but let's go back to your premise.
They did it to sell vaccines.
That makes logical sense to me.
But I find it so shocking, given the danger involved in inoculating people with this highly novel gene therapy technology.
The idea that they would Attempt to inoculate children.
That they would push to have those so-called vaccines put on the regular vaccine schedule.
That they would do so on the basis of very little testing, in some cases no human testing at all.
That is a level of indifference to harm to other people's children that I find Very difficult to imagine.
So, are you saying that the policy that you saw simply makes sense to you as people who don't care that they are killing innocents?
Well, I think the majority of people advocating for vaccines for everybody, Don't, you know, are not motivated to sell more vaccines.
But I mean, certainly, I mean, there's no question Pfizer is motivated by profit to sell more vaccines.
And, you know, and then those in power, you know, it's great political tool, you know, It was a great weapon to wield against Donald Trump, right?
He's weak on COVID, and COVID is this, you know, incredibly dangerous thing that's life-threatening to everybody, was the way it was, you know, kind of framed.
So that's another motivation, right?
Just political reasons.
If you can fearmonger, if people are afraid, they're easier to control.
And you keep your eyes glued to the news, more clicks.
There's all these factors.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, I see them too.
And, you know, I know that I have said many times that whatever motivated this policy, it is clear that the people who architected it are completely indifferent to the death of other people.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So there is a part of me that it's, I think the problem is intuitively, it doesn't feel like it could be true.
But logically speaking, there's really no next nearest competitor.
The, in fact, the least worst explanation is that this was simple greed.
There are explanations worse than that.
But, you know, the floor is they did it to sell vaccines and they didn't care who got hurt, which Is an amazing fact to be, if that's really what's going on, it is an amazing thing to have witnessed.
Terrifying.
But it's happened before, hasn't it?
With the H1N flu, right?
Swine flu, the vaccines, right?
Well, yes.
On the other hand, in prior cases, we've pulled vaccines from the market because of safety signals that were a lot less impressive than the one That the mRNA vaccines generated.
So yes, it's not nothing here is unprecedented, including indifference to the suffering and death of other people.
But the scale of it, the scale of it.
It boggles the mind.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, it all happened on a global scale.
I mean, you had the WHO saying.
Quote, nobody is safe until everybody is safe.
That was echoed in the U.S.
media.
It's one of the mashups I've got in the works.
And they just kept repeating, nobody is safe unless everybody's safe.
Until everybody's safe.
When the reality was at 99.5% of people were safe.
At its worst!
Almost everybody was safe from the beginning and worse, again this is something that you won't be in a position to comment on in all likelihood, but if we had done nothing, right?
Including not applied the Very good drugs that we had available to us.
If we had simply done nothing, there is a pretty good likelihood that this thing would have controlled itself.
That now that we understand that the proliferation of variants is actually driven by this very narrow vaccination campaign, We, you know, not only is the entire pandemic likely a self-inflicted wound with a laboratory escape, but what we did compounded that self-inflicted wound.
We keep, you know, we keep inflicting new wounds on ourselves.
And I really, I think the most important question in the entire pandemic might be how much of the harm that was done here after the thing was already spreading.
was iatrogenic, medically induced harm, that yes, the cost would have been very high, many would have died, but would it have been more or fewer who died if we had done nothing and just simply allowed natural immunity to accumulate?
Yeah.
But Matt, I have derailed your attempt to change the subject and my attempt to show you why it didn't really need to change because we were headed there anyway.
So why don't we, uh, why don't we force the matter?
You make mashups that reveal propaganda.
I think I forgot to say at the top of the podcast that you have been working of late with Matt Taibbi, one of my favorites, one of the last great journalists, uh, on, uh, what does he call it?
Racket News?
Yep, now Racket News.
Formerly TK News, yeah.
Formerly TK.
So, tell me about how you ended up making mashups, where you see it going.
What, as a non-mashup guy, what should I know?
Well, it started, honestly, I wasn't that into politics until 2016.
I think a lot of people had a similar experience.
And I just started seeing stuff, like just how corrupt and unfair the media was at the time.
I saw them, you know, misframing Bernie Sanders constantly.
and clearly propping up Hillary Clinton.
One blatant example was, I went to a CNN site and they had a mashup or highlight reel for Hillary Clinton after the first debates.
There were several candidates at that point They hadn't made a highlight reel for any other candidate.
That's just one example.
And anyway, I could see Bernie Sanders' speeches and his consistency over the years.
And he was just totally not how his enemies were framing him.
You know, they tried to smear him as sexist, racist, you know, all the usual ad hominem attacks.
And unlike most people, Because he had been in politics for so long, there was this recorded history where you could show, it's like, no, that's bullshit.
He was a civil rights activist, got arrested protesting segregation, segregated housing.
Anyway, most people, I don't think, are that into politics.
Understandably, it's kind of disgusting.
And condensing history, was just kind of a way that I could share history with people.
Because most people, they're not going to sit through a full Bernie Sanders speech.
But after you see a little, you know, an intriguing highlight, you know, maybe you would.
Now, the whole Bernie Sanders thing that there's a whole story that goes, goes along with that.
I don't know if you're aware, but I was eventually asked to work for the Sanders campaign.
I did not know this.
Okay, so my videos consistently outperformed the actual campaign.
And so they finally called me in, and this is in 2019 at this point.
And they said, we love your videos.
We want you to come to, you know, want to hire you.
This is the campaign manager, Faz Shakur at the time.
And so I go to headquarters.
Now, honestly, this is something that I had wanted for a while.
I mean, I was making these videos for nothing.
And if I could get paid to do this, You know, that was like kind of a dream come true.
But when I went to the headquarters, the first thing I asked, so what's the first, you know, what's the first project you'd have me do?
After they asked what projects I was interested in making or had wanted to do myself.
And they said the first thing they're going to have me do, or they would have me do, is edit Videos that I had already made that were so successful that they had reached out to hire me.
How crazy is that?
It's just, that's insane.
And they specifically, they wanted me to cut out like a clip of Trevor Noah, where I'm kind of making fun of Trevor Noah and showing how he's kind of bullshitting about Bernie Sanders.
And Now, overall, I would say Trevor Noah might have been an ally of the Sanders campaign, and that's probably why they wanted me to cut out this little criticism.
But it's like, he was wrong here, and he's jabbing you.
Why not jab him back?
Anyway, so I got really uneasy, because I'm sitting there in the headquarters being offered a job, but I'm like, this is just weird.
So, I mean, long story less long, I know I've been going off for a while, but eventually they, you know, they promised me I'd have creative control, which was my big concern, right?
I'm like, and because it did, because the fact that they wanted to cut already successful videos up Didn't seem like they would give me creative controls, but they promised me that over the phone eventually, and I said, okay.
Then, and this is a story that you might be able to relate to, I think.
Okay, an old video, an old remix mashup got uncovered.
So they'd hired me to be creative editor And then all of a sudden, when they found out that I had a history of creative editing, they got worried because it could be offensive and pressured me to resign.
Now, interestingly, this remix or edit that was of concern to them was, well, I recut Martin Luther King Jr.' 's I Have a Dream speech.
I cut granular editing, so by the phoneme, to totally recreate it.
Basically, you'd call it a deepfake now.
But I did it like 10 years before deepfakes was a thing.
And it was documented in the description.
I understand this might offend people, but this is to remind people how easy it is that the media can be manipulated.
Um, anyway, it was, it was obviously a parody comedy.
I have a wet dream instead of I have a dream, right?
So, and so he had it, I had him saying, I have a dream to do drugs.
I have a dream to have sex.
Okay.
And, and so this was like deemed too offensive.
Um, and I was canceled.
I was effectively canceled and which is, Yeah, so there's so many funny things about this because at the time, Sanders was stomping and advocating for a job guarantee.
So he guaranteed everybody a job except the one guy who did a better job than his entire video department.
Anyway, I had all these I did have flashbacks of your experience, which I observed, you know, in, in, you know, podcasts and videos where you explained it and where it was recorded, that whole thing.
You're talking about the 2017 incident at Evergreen.
At Evergreen.
Yeah.
And I remember seeing that and I was just so, um, it really troubled me and, Yeah.
And then, yeah, just it came for for me, too.
I mean, a little differently, but still the same like kind of crazy cancel culture.
Well, that's that's interesting on several different levels.
One, there is a I don't know, let's call it an ironic stupidity.
Where people see something like what you're doing and they think, this is fantastic, right?
And what they're resonating with is the authenticity of what you're doing, right?
And then as soon as they have you, their point is, okay, but this makes us a little nervous.
And it's like, look, either the authenticity is good, or you're going to start chopping it away and we're going to end up right back where you were, right?
At some point, you take the risk of the authenticity.
And the fact is, you know, for Heather and me, a big part of why we have a large audience is that it's just pretty obvious we're not faking, right?
We're real people trying to do the right thing.
And so the point is, the rarer authenticity becomes, the more prized it is.
So when people do recognize that, yeah, how terrible would it be if you took Trevor Noah to task?
Trevor Noah screws up every now and again, right?
Taking him to task is a way of, it's a kind of feedback, in fact.
It's useful.
But the other thing, a point I wanted to make is, It is funny that their instinct to, you know, to take you, this, you know, wild horse, and tame you, right, so that you could do your cool wild horse thing, but in a controlled way, is in fact a cautionary tale for what happened to Bernie Sanders.
Yes!
Right?
Yeah.
Because Bernie Sanders was Think what you like about his politics, but he was an absolute renegade to be, you know, an admitted socialist in the U.S.
Senate for how many years?
I mean, that is not easy to do.
This was somebody who was truly a maverick and quite capable.
And today he's almost unrecognizable, I think, because something got in his ear and was like Bernie.
That's too much of that.
Too much of this.
And now he's just another Democrat.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's tragic.
It is.
It is.
I mean, I was, you know, obviously that's what attracted me to him.
And, you know, Probably, you know, a huge part of his supporters is he, I mean, he was, he really was independent.
He was critical of both the Republicans and the Democrats.
As, as any right thinking person would be, would have to be in light of the corruption of those two parties.
Yeah, but not, not, not anymore, like you said.
Yeah.
So, okay, let me ask you this.
You've obviously been, how old a person are you?
I'm in my 30s.
You're in your 30s.
That's a nice way of saying I'm older.
Yeah, you are getting older, but as they say, it beats the alternatives.
But all right, you're in your 30s.
You've obviously traveled an interesting road.
You've gone from being an enthusiastic Bernie supporter, making It's not fan fiction, but fan video mashups to reveal things.
You've then been taken inside the mothership and you've discovered that the rot is everywhere and reaches everything.
Where are you now politically?
Do you mind saying?
Oh, I mean, I've always considered myself independent.
But, I mean, technically, I mean, I'm from DC, so therefore, naturally, I was a registered Democrat.
And, I mean, that's where I am.
I mean, I'm still a registered Democrat.
I don't identify as one.
I don't really, I didn't vote last election.
I just consider I did not vote.
I couldn't do it.
I mean, I mean, honestly, there's so many.
What I feared, you know, kind of came true.
I thought Biden could even be worse, mainly because, I mean, I asked the question to myself, like, who's the most dangerous president?
The one who the media is, you know, critical of all day, every day, or the one that the media just gives a pass?
Yep.
And yeah, I just, I just couldn't vote.
I was, I knew either way I was going to regret it.
And so I just.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, I want to I want to try to convince you as a proxy for many in the audience who will feel the same way that your thinking is correct, but that your strategy is wrong.
OK.
Either way, you had a mistake on your hands, right?
I think.
Lots of us arrived at that conclusion.
Neither of these answers was acceptable.
Both of them were a terrible, terrible risk.
The problem is most people don't vote.
And most of them don't vote not because they have a sophisticated position that says, actually you haven't given me a decent option yet.
They're just tuned out.
Now maybe they're tuned out after never having seen a decent option and so they're just not paying attention, but the problem is when you don't vote, you actually don't hurt the beast that has taken over our system.
It's perfectly comfortable with a tiny fraction of people voting as long as people that it likes win, which is why, of course, the primaries are rigged, right?
It may well be that the general election is fair, or ish, right?
It may be that there's no tampering, but the point is the parties rig the primaries to make sure that whoever gets in there, it doesn't really matter.
It all does the machine stuff.
And third parties are, you know, blocked out.
Third parties are blocked out by the lesser evil paradox.
And so anyway, my point to you would be, what you don't want to do is join the apathetic.
In not voting, you cannot help but become indistinguishable from the apathetic.
In voting for something, it doesn't matter whether it's viable, but in voting for something that the major parties hate.
You are delivering a message which says my vote is available to somebody who will deliver something centrally good to me.
Somebody who will protect people who deserve it.
Somebody who will offer a vision for the future.
My vote is available.
That is the incentive that will drive something to challenge the system.
And I will say as much as Donald Trump was a A terrible result, as much as a man with Donald Trump's temperament should never have been in the White House.
He did do civilization a huge favor, and that favor was he demonstrated that the duopoly could be beaten, because he did.
Yes.
He's not who the GOP wanted.
In fact, there's a strong argument to be made that he was in some sense chosen by Hillary Clinton.
Because she thought she could easily beat him.
That's right, the Pied Piper strategy.
The Pied Piper strategy, that's exactly what they call it.
They elevated Trump.
They elevated Trump.
But anyway, he did demonstrate that it could be beaten.
It needs to be beaten by somebody who knows what to do with the power once he or she gets it.
And Trump did some decent stuff.
But again, temperamentally, he was just not right for the job, and will never be.
But anyway, I would advise you and anybody who thinks that not voting is what you do when you haven't been given a viable choice that makes any sense, you don't want to join the apathetic.
You want to make it clear that you are voting against the duopoly.
That's the powerful thing.
Yeah, and to be clear, if I did see any good option, I would have voted.
Like, in 2016, I did vote for Jill Stein.
I do.
I mean, honestly, all a candidate has to do is just say, I will pardon Edward Stoney.
That just makes so much freaking sense.
And Jill Stein actually said she would do that.
It's like, okay, you're she's all that makes her like levels above anybody else, because it's just such so common sense.
So, yeah, I mean, how can like the saying goes like if.
If telling the truth is a lie, right, you're being or a crime, then you're being ruled by criminals.
Um, and so, geez, just to have someone recognize that obvious truth, I will vote for you.
Yeah.
Well, these are, I hate to use the phrase interesting times, but they are interesting times in part because, you know, I guess you and I might be in a little competition here.
I thought of myself as the world's most reluctant Democrat, but it sounds like maybe that title is at least going to be contested by your reluctance over the Democratic Party.
But, you know, let me ask you a question.
I look at the Democratic Party and, you know, I'm older than you are by quite a bit.
I'm 54.
I've spent my whole adult life as a Democrat.
I'm still a registered Democrat for some reason I can't quite explain to myself.
But I look at this party and I think there's not a single likable person in it.
It's not, I mean, you know, there are lots of voters who are likable, but in terms of people in the party who I think, oh, yeah, if only, you know, could that person make it all the way?
It's like, I can't name anybody that I want to see in a high office, which is stunning, because what used to be true, the Democratic Party had a lock On the go-to strategy, if what you want to do is win, the Democrats had the go-to move, which was you represent working people.
Yeah.
Right?
They never did a great job of it, not during my lifetime, but they did some sort of job.
They advocated for things that would be good for workers, not all the time, but the point is they actually shifted strategies and they became a second corporate party rather than a party of working people.
And it's like, well, okay.
What that tells me is they are more interested in the power that they win than they are in wielding it for anything useful.
Because if they wanted to win, they could go back to representing people and they would instantly become popular.
Yeah.
Right?
So we have two unpopular parties because nobody represents the American people and no room for a third party that just simply said, hey, you know what?
Long as the job's open, we'll represent the people.
You know, that's not allowed because you'll you'll elect the greater evil.
Well, I get it.
It's a trap.
It's a trap that you've set.
Yeah.
Yep.
Are you going to do that?
What was that, you know, call for a third party thing that you did that got censored?
Yeah.
Unity 2020.
Let's put it this way.
There are people from Unity 2020 who are pretty excited about a strategy.
I am reluctant because I know something about the power that opposes anything that might work.
And what I'm waiting for is to be convinced that there is a viable move.
In other words, I don't want to tilt at windmills, but I would gladly take a risk, even a big one, on a plan that might rescue us from the death spiral.
So anyway, I'm not yet committed to either do something or not do something.
Something needs to be done.
And frankly, you know, Unity 2020 Was, I believe, the right idea in the following sense.
The core of Unity 2020, for those who haven't heard of it, was that it was a plan that structurally neutralized the ideological bias in third-partyism.
And so we neutralized the idea of the lesser evil by virtue of the fact that we had a failsafe that we would pull the plug if we couldn't win, which is ultimately what we did.
And we also structured the plan so that it drew from both right and left in a way that both sides knew that they were not going to lose as a result of this.
So it didn't draw heavily from either side.
We actually tested this.
We tested the people who were supporters and it turned out that it actually It gave almost no bias and the tiny little bias that it gave was in favor of Biden rather than Trump.
So even though the Democrats were the ones pissed off about it, they were wrong that it was, you know, a spoiler for Trump.
It was the opposite, if anything, and it wasn't, and it was built not to be.
So, you know, it's structurally neutralized this by proposing within the Constitution, without having to change anything structural, that we draft somebody from the center left and somebody from the center right under the agreement that they would flip a coin to figure out who was running that we draft somebody from the center left and somebody from the center right under the agreement that they would flip a coin to figure out who was running for
president and who was running for vice president, that if elected, that they would govern as a team, that they would discuss everything that they would govern as a team, that they would discuss everything and reach a consensus between the two, and only in cases where they could not reach a consensus on what was in the interest of the American people, or in the case that there wasn't time, a decision that And And then, after four years, the roles would flip.
And the idea was that that was just a way of neutralizing the game-theoretic problems with a third party.
Now, the fascinating thing is, this was a small effort.
But it definitely got the attention of people in power to the point that I was thrown off Facebook, even though I wasn't using Facebook.
The Twitter account of Unity2020 was suspended on false pretenses.
It has recently been reinstated by Musk, but the previous management of Twitter absolutely refused to reinstate it.
So the point is, power understood what kind of threat this was.
It never got to a position where it was of a magnitude that could be that threat, but somehow power realized That if you neutralized the lesser evil problem, that actually people would listen and that basically the only argument for the duopoly is that you don't have an alternative.
As soon as you do, people will flee in droves.
Yeah, I mean, I noticed the same, obviously, there was the same fear over, there's always the same fear over third parties.
But in 2016, in particular, you know, Jill Stein was, and, you know, Kerry Johnson to another degree too, were seen as threats.
And I, and they, you know, you mentioned being censored, your third party project being censored.
I had a video exposing PBS's censorship of Jill Stein, and that was censored, removed without any notification.
So this is before they would even give you a notification, or maybe they were supposed to and they didn't.
I mean, it was super sketchy.
like the situation with Unity 2020 being censored.
It's just so sketchy.
And the only way I found out, I mean, I guess I could have gone to my page and seen that it was no longer there.
But all the people whose walls, Facebook walls, it had been removed from, they had a had a notification from where it was that it had been a violation of community standards.
It didn't violate any community standards, none whatsoever.
But anyway, and I, you know, made sure to document that because you know, it sounds crazy, just totally removed, no explanation, And then when an explanation was given to other people, that didn't make any sense.
But I got all the screenshots from dozens and dozens of people who shared it.
Well, I think most people do not, because most people never initiate something that violates one of the unwritten sacred rules.
Most people have no idea that yes, they are free, but they are free in the sense that animals in a zoo are free, right?
Like a chimpanzee can decide how to spend its time in the zoo, but it can't decide to leave the zoo.
And what we have is a political system in which we get to choose our leaders, as long as they are from a slate that has been vetted by something that knows it will be taken care of.
Right?
That's not the democracy that was envisioned at all.
In fact, it's the inverse of it.
Right?
It feels, it's almost worse than an authoritarian structure that is inherited or won through military force.
And the reason is because the false sense of security that our leaders are the ones we chose and we chose them on the basis of what they will do for us, that false impression
is uh it is slowly choking the life out of the west right we are now at a point where we are actually sabotaging the essential functions at the core of our civilization and we don't really realize it nor do we realize that we are condemned to stay on this trajectory because we feel like well in principle
Somebody who's good at governing could arise at any moment, and they could be very popular because they would say things that would resonate with people, and they would rise to the head of one of these parties, and then they would ascend to the office, and then they would do things.
No, no, no, no.
That's all impossible.
You don't know... Hey, weren't you telling me that it does not be apathetic, Brent?
No, no.
Well, I'm not telling you to be apathetic.
I'm telling you, do not spend your... Somebody is playing rope-a-dope with us.
Yeah.
And they are spending our energy on a horse race in which we don't have a horse.
Right.
We are all involved in this horse race.
But the point is, our our horses have all been barred or shot or whatever.
And so, no, I'm not telling you to be apathetic, but I am telling you.
Well, you just say it's impossible to, you know, work your way through the you know, for a good Person representing the people to rise up through politics, basically.
Well, I should probably say it slightly more carefully.
I should say... Nearly impossible.
No, I believe it is functionally impossible to do it through the parties.
I believe Trump demonstrated you could go around the party, you could decapitate a party temporarily.
And that's plausible, apparently.
I wouldn't have said so, but it is apparently plausible.
Well, he didn't go around it, he went through it.
He took it over, right?
Yeah, I would say he went around it and, you know, stepped in front of it and became its head.
Which, you know, The thing is, Bernie was in a position to do the same thing to the Democratic Party.
To do the same thing, same thing, but he held back a bit.
Trump went all out, Sanders held back a bit.
Well, you know, I don't know either, man, but I would say the difference is that Trump is the kind of player who understands everything to be a legitimate move in the game.
And Sanders is constrained by... His morals.
Some moral code that limits what moves he can make, which allowed Hillary Clinton, who I believe is much more Trump-like, will play any move as a legitimate move in the game.
It allowed her to drive him into irrelevance, and frankly, to paint people like you and me as Bernie Bros.
Remember that?
Yeah, yeah.
Crazy.
It just came out of nowhere.
I was just like, wait, suddenly this is about being a dude?
I thought this was about like working people getting the shaft and somebody wants to fix that.
They had to paint a working class movement as sexist, I mean, and racist and so bad.
And the funny thing is, and it's, you know, it's reused, it's used every cycle practically.
I mean, Apparently, in 2018, sorry, 2008, Hillary Clinton campaign pushed this narrative of the Obama boys online.
Yeah, that's, that's gross.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, so, but okay, this this actually then is right back in, in your area of expertise, because it looks to me.
Like, there's a set of epithets that are so terrifying to people, they're socially terrifying.
Things that if you are accused of them cause most people to buckle because they do not know how to field the accusation, right?
The thing that captured people's attention about my confrontation at Evergreen was that the student said I was a racist, these are students I'd never met by the way, These students that I'd never met said I was a racist.
And I said, no, I'm not.
And most people couldn't imagine how a white professor was going to survive just simply saying no, that's not true.
Right?
So the point is, there was a question about can you figure out how to stare down a bad accusation?
Right?
And that bad accusation can be conspiracy theorist.
It can be anti-vaxxer.
It can be racist.
It can be transphobe.
It can be Bernie bro.
It can be apparently Obama boy, right?
Um, so I guess the point is at some point does this, it's a single trick.
There's an epithet.
It sounds like the end of your social life if it gets appended to you.
And so everybody is bending over backwards to make sure it doesn't get directed at them.
Right?
If they keep doing this, and then it turns out that A, a certain number of us figure out how to stare it down, and that B, the people who stare it down turn out to be safer or insulate themselves from some kind of authoritarian oppression, then at some point people are going to realize, eh, they're epithets, they don't mean anything.
Right?
They've robbed these, I mean, some of these things We need to be able to accuse racists of racism, right?
How dare you burn that one up, accusing people who aren't guilty of it, of being racist?
You've just let all the racists off the hook, right?
How could you, right?
You want to abuse Nazi?
You want to let Nazis off the hook?
Because that's what you're doing, right?
So, I don't know, what do you think?
Are the epithets eventually going to lose their power when one after another turns out to be political garbage?
I think they are losing their power, but it might just be, you know, I worry that it's just, you know, my network, my, right, recognizes that it's bullshit, but there's still huge bubbles of the population that, you know, the, you know, one of the bigger ones, the Democratic Party bubble, a lot of anybody that's still a part of that party, they still believe that stuff that, you know,
They take the bait every time, otherwise they wouldn't be in the Democratic Party cult anymore.
I mean, I understand you're registered, but we're not really in, you know, you don't identify as Democrats.
That's the question.
When I hear that my concern over mRNA vaccines is going to make me an untouchable from the point of view of New York Times reading NPR listening Democrats.
My feeling is that's a zero cost, right?
With the exception of some very old people who have read the New York Times, who read it back when it was a newspaper, who listened to NPR back when it was public broadcasting, before these things were pure propaganda outlets.
All right, there's some people, you know, some very old folks Who can't seem to get over the loss of those properties, and they still believe in them.
But in terms of one's interactions in life generally, apart from their older relatives, I don't I don't need to make sense to New York Times readers.
Those people are inherently confused.
In fact, if I'm running my life around trying to make sense to a New York Times reader, then I'm going to end up like Bernie Sanders, where suddenly I'm useless.
Yeah.
Right?
So I guess the point is, I think a lot of the threat Is in people's minds that the cost of actually confronting these epithets is small, because frankly, a lot more people are aware that these are nonsense than you are led to believe.
Yeah, yeah.
And I mean, honestly, it almost gives you more credibility now, because it shows that you are perceived as a threat to the establishment.
And I mean, I'll say, you know, when I was canceled, you know, it did seem like I was being, you know, shamed and attacked by more people than it actually was.
Because I mean, privately, many people knew it was bullshit and they sympathized with me privately.
So that was, I mean, it's a shame more people couldn't say it publicly, but that did at least show me that this is just appearance on the surface.
Most people, or at least a lot of people, can see through this.
And I guess every time someone just responds rationally, calmly, like you did, and just asking, you know, basic questions, you know, then they go on to expose themselves as, you know, often the ones who are bigoted.
It's funny, like, I mean, that that's the the way hatred is expressed now.
is by accusing the hated of being hateful.
And when, yeah, like I said, when you respond as you did, just like calmly and clearly, it really exposes the scam.
Yeah, you know, the more I think about it, when I was confronted by students, again, people I had never met, Leveling an accusation that I personally knew had no merit.
The thing that... Well, A, the first thing is they confronted me with my class, people I did know.
And I think, it took me months to realize this, but I think they were expecting my class to defect on video, right?
Because, of course, students accusing a white professor of racism, you know, in 2017, Surely you're going to find people saying, yeah, and you know, you're going to have lots of disgruntled students or whatever.
And of course, not a single one of my students defected because they knew me and they knew it was garbage too.
And all of the students that I had had in years prior didn't defect either for the same reason.
But it was also true that In class we were talking about racism and where it comes from and what it has to do with evolution and what needs to be true in order for it never to rear its ugly head again, you know?
And I also had my own history.
I could look back at my own history and I could check, you know, do they have a point?
No, they don't have a point.
I can prove they don't have a point.
So what I'm getting at is I was in a very unusual position when they leveled that accusation at me, which was that I knew no matter how many rounds we went, there was nothing for them to find.
They weren't going to find a shred of evidence that this was true.
And I had a whole lot of evidence that they knew nothing about from my earlier history that I could have brought to bear if need be to establish that their accusation was nonsense.
But who has that?
That's rare.
Yeah.
And what they're doing by effectively Creating hyper-awareness of race at every moment is preventing people from living a life that could generate that evidence.
I was lucky to generate lots of interracial interactions, you know, in a context where everybody knew that the objective was to make race less important.
Right?
Everybody, every good person understood that race had been too important, and that it needed to become unimportant.
And that although you can debate where we are relative to a colorblind society, that that's where we should be headed.
Right?
So in that world, I had lots of experiences that I could point to.
Somebody who grew up 20 years later would have had Experiences in a world where race was always charged, right?
And so the point is part of the diabolical aspect of the strategy here is that it prevents people from living a life that would tell them that what they were being accused of was nonsense.
So I think lots of people have self-doubt.
Maybe people are shouting that I'm a racist, then maybe I am.
That's what they think.
Yeah, no, really.
I mean, it's, yeah, especially people who are, you know, open minded, which is, I think, a good, important type of person to have.
And, you know, be like, oh, like you said, oh, did I do something wrong?
And and honestly, like I, you know, asked myself that when I was being all these accusations were being hurled against me.
Um, and it happened so fast, fast, Brett.
Like I was given no time to even defend myself.
Like, um, and I mean, I, I had drafted an apology.
The Sanders campaign leaked it to a report.
I said, I said, this is for you to say, yes, I'm, I'm happy to resign because you know, I don't want to work with, I already explained why I had my like reservations about working for them when they were really going to give me creative control.
But anyway, So the apology, which I said was still just a draft, gets leaked to the press.
But anyway, that was all within like an hour of being pressured to resign.
And within an hour, I had no time.
I looked back at the videos.
I was like, that ain't bad.
That really ain't bad.
And so it is kind of maddening anyway.
What makes it so diabolic, as you were saying, in addition to what you were saying, is that it is so, like you can't prove a negative, right?
Or it's very difficult to.
Yep.
It's very difficult to, which is part of what they count on.
And they also count on the game theory, which is They point this super weapon at you, and the idea is, we'll pull the trigger unless you demonstrate your subordination to us, in which case we'll move on to somebody else.
And so, staring it down is terrifying.
Not staring it down causes it to spread.
It becomes effectively contagious because each person capitulates and drives them on to the next person.
And at some level, You just gotta stand up and say, no, that's nonsense, right?
Yeah.
So if you had it to do over, if I understand your story correctly, it was the ironic re-editing of the Martin Luther King dream speech that caused the campaign to go after you.
They're all these comedy videos.
I mean, which like which I mean, like a word like, oh, I used I called myself retarded, Brett.
Oh, dear God.
You know, I I used the word gay.
Oh, so sacrilegious.
Like so all of it was, you know, nothing burgers.
And the campaign didn't even specify like what it was.
They just saw that some anonymous Twitter account Was smearing me and that just made him go crazy.
Now until they had, you know, sounded the alarm to me, I was very calmly responding with, you know, to these accusations.
I did do have, you know, if someone wanted to frame that, oh, I'm racist and hate Martin Luther King.
I mean, it's very easy for me to disprove that, luckily, because I've made a dozen videos celebrating Martin Luther King's life.
So I was just able to show, you know, that it's like, yeah, really racist.
Here's some videos of my racism, you know, celebrating Martin Luther King.
So I was doing that calmly, but then when I get that call, like that really alarmed me too.
And if I could do it over again, I think I should have pushed back on the Sanders campaign.
I felt at the time, like I said, I had my reservations of working for them because I had been given all these hints that they weren't actually going to let me do my thing and be creative.
So that might, that's part of why I gave in without a fight.
Cause I was like, F, you know, screw this.
But also it's like, who am I to, you know,
say no you need to work with you need to hire me it's like I can't you know I'm not in the position of power to do that but still I should have tried to push back but he wasn't even having it like he wasn't open to it um like he literally meant he said he thought I should resign like before he even heard my cider like my response to to this I mean all right well I
Nevertheless, I still should have pushed back.
I have thought about this, so I can be actually specific in how I would have pushed back.
Okay, so he calls me.
This is the campaign manager of the Sanders campaign.
He says he's got three reporters hounding him about these old videos.
First of all, have you seen the videos, Faz?
What is wrong with them?
And also, point out the irony that the video that I had made that finally got them to contact me personally and try to bring me on was a video exposing how the media is smearing Bernie Sanders.
So I would juxtapose the smears from MSNBC and CNN about, you know, suggesting that he's racist and sexist.
And I would juxtapose that to stuff that obviously showed that that was bullshit.
Him at like a women's, women's march.
I mean, his history, you know, protesting civil rights.
Okay.
So I'm like, hold on.
Like, so why wouldn't you, let's see.
So I would just say, hold on.
You want more people to see this video.
Why don't you uh oh he he mentioned that it was he was worried because one of the reporters from NBC So if they did that, what do you do Faz?
You would just say, uh, no, it's a ridiculous smear.
And in fact, I recommend everybody go see the video he just made.
And that's why I hired him to be on the campaign.
to try and smear some people.
So if they did that, what do you do, Faz?
You would just say, no, it's a ridiculous smear.
And in fact, I recommend everybody go see the video he just made.
And that's why I hired him to be on the campaign.
So you use it to your benefit.
If they want to give you more attention, fine, take advantage of it.
And And Trump did that.
Bernie Sanders' campaign failed to do that in this case.
I would also bring up something which I was not aware of at the time, which I think is a very interesting, relevant story.
And that is that during the previous campaign in 2016, there was a Bernie Sanders staffer, maybe senior advisor, His name was Chuck Rosa.
He was actually convicted of a crime.
Union embezzlement.
So he was, you know, stealing money from a union that he represented.
It's like, and how did the campaign manager defend him?
It's so interesting, Brett, because you look at the article and the campaign manager was like, he's a great person that was in the past.
You know, he's a valuable part of the team.
We're going to move forward with him.
And I would just say, how could you?
Come on, what I did was a joke.
This was an actual crime that contradicts your entire, you know, political messaging.
Say you're representing unions.
You're against corruption.
And this is a guy who has a crime where he was stealing.
You know, he was a corrupt union leader.
And I think that would be worth poison to him.
I would love to hear his reaction to that.
How do you explain that inconsistency?
And that brings up a whole, an interesting subject.
I'm curious if you have any thoughts on it, but is society, just that experience, and maybe recognize and worry, is society recognizing now jokes as more toxic than actual crime?
It seems like that in some cases, and that's very scary.
What do you think?
I think a couple things.
One, I hear a theme in a couple of your stories in not voting in the last election and in this case where you felt there was no hope in fighting back against this bad accusation.
And now you wish you had said some things to the person who was going after you.
And I wanted to tell you something that I learned before the.
Well, sorry to cut you off.
I did, you know, respond to the people, you know, making an accusation, but this was the my employer at the time, you know.
Right.
A little different.
No, no.
I'm not saying you didn't respond.
But but I hear a kind of you say you wish you had done something different.
You wish.
I wish I had pushed back more from inside.
Yeah.
OK, so.
What I wanted to point out to you is something that I learned actually from Jordan Peterson before, before Evergreen melted down.
I learned, I didn't know Jordan, I just was watching what was happening to him.
And because the storm was gathering around me, it resonated because I saw somebody behave admirably in a situation that I thought I might find myself in.
What I learned, there's a famous video, maybe it's the first famous video for Jordan, where he is being confronted by a mob at the University of Toronto, I guess.
I've seen it.
You've seen it, and he's sitting in the front of the room, supposed to give a speech, and people are using air horns and shouting, and you can't hear anything.
He can't give his speech, right?
Is that the video you've seen?
I was thinking outside where like a mob of people.
It's the same same incident, but.
Earlier, I guess.
But OK.
What I realized was that Jordan.
Was absolutely defeated in that room.
He could not say a syllable that anybody could understand.
However, what happened in that room did not matter.
That the room is not the room.
The real room was the internet, where we looked in and watched this man retain his composure in the face of this absolutely atrocious treatment.
And so I started using the phrase, the room is not the room.
Do not mistake the room that you are in for the important context of what's happening to you.
And so in your story, what I hear is probably there wasn't much you could have done that would have changed your fate at the Sanders campaign.
On the other hand, if you thought of that as part of your history that would end up mattering, that you would end up talking about it on a podcast like this one, then you might have, um,
Behaved in a way that would not have changed the outcome, but would have allowed you to utilize it to greater and more positive effect by virtue of it demonstrating the hypocrisy inside.
And you know, if the essential point is, look, you know, I wanted to go work for the Bernie Sanders campaign because I believed In Bernie Sanders, and when I got there, here's what I encountered, and this is what I learned from it, right?
Then that's very worthwhile, even if it's not technically productive in the moment.
Just like voting for somebody who can't win, if it says, hey, my vote's on offer, if you guys can figure out how to, you know, create a party that is worth voting for, that also In the moment it looks futile, but in the end I don't think it is because, you know, a majority of us are either not voting because we're pissed off or voting reluctantly and very eager to have something better to vote for, right?
That is a political revolution if anybody can figure out how to deliver something.
The room is not the room.
Yeah.
I do recognize and agree.
I feel like I could have done something more, yeah, taken a bigger stand, but I still hoped that maybe they would come to their senses, that Bernie Sanders was still the The same guy who stood up against the Iraq War in both Democrats and Republicans.
So I still had that hope, but that should have been, I mean... I mean, that was a huge wake-up call.
And I explicitly told him, the campaign manager, don't publish this.
I want to think about this more, because I knew it was an opportunity to, you know, say something important.
And maybe that he knew what I had in mind, and that's why he leaked it to the press, which is so screwed up.
Well, here's the thing.
Yeah.
You know, as I said, I'm a bunch older.
Maybe I get to be a little bit wiser, but I feel confident, Matt, that this is not the last dumb accusation you will have to stare down.
Oh, sure.
Yeah.
I've had lots of rodeos since then.
Yeah.
That's the thing, is you just keep honing your skills and, you know, keep going after Goliath.
Yeah.
All right.
Where do you see yourself headed?
Do the mashups grow into something else, or is this effectively a permanent mode of attack against the ever-morphing propaganda machine?
I would like to take my mashups to a higher Class, which would be a feature documentary, and I am working on that.
It's a video about the Kenosha 2020 unrest, or a documentary about that.
And I mean, the concept's really simple.
I mean, it's shocking to me, concerning to me, how many people don't understand what actually happened While at the same time, there's probably never been a point in human history when an event was documented, which was so many video recordings.
So I was like, how is that possible?
That's crazy.
And my style is, in the mashups and in this documentary, is just show you what's happening.
I don't want to narrate.
I don't want to opine.
I don't want to interview other people after the fact to get their opinions of what happened years ago.
No, just show people what frickin' happened.
Um, and it's really eye opening.
It's an intense cinematic experience, and it just doesn't need the the sit down interviews that are so standard with documentaries nowadays.
Actually, I'll go you one better.
I mean, this is the thing maybe that I like most about your approach.
is that you do not tell your audience what to think about these things, and that is not because you see them and it's just obvious.
The answer is, it is thought-provoking to see these things juxtapose.
What could possibly be true that this juxtaposition would be available?
So anyway, I love that about your stuff.
You are Basically, honoring the intelligence of your audience by not summing it up for them, by putting the thing in front of them and letting them connect dots and think about what those implications might be.
It's really, I think, I don't want to say it's your greatest strength because I have no idea, but it is certainly a great one.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Yeah, because as you know, I mean, God, we're in more and more polarized society.
And it's just so easy to, unfortunately, in common for people to dismiss something just because of the person delivering it.
And so I take, you know, like, oh, oh, he made a video 10 years ago that I heard was terrible.
Or, oh, he's conservative.
He's liberal.
So, yeah, I feel like if I just take myself out of it, I don't make myself a character.
It's me.
Whoever made it is irrelevant.
It's not.
Just look at what's being shown, like you said, and draw your own conclusions.
Yep.
It is.
It is a very beautiful way of ruling out the possibility that you are just simply A super persuasive human hypnotizing people into whatever, right?
It's like, look, these are just... these are facts.
These things happened in front of a video camera, and here I'm going to string them together in a way that is going to force you to recognize there's more here than meets the eye.
It's powerful, to be sure.
Thanks.
Are you in need of a slogan?
Because I realized early in our conversation that there's one that might fit you.
Sure, sure.
Matt Orfalea, out of creative control.
Ha!
I'll take it.
Yeah, not bad.
One slogan I came up with was like, less group think, more you think.
It's not so great, though.
I don't know.
Yeah, yeah.
I don't know that you need to stick with just one.
Yeah, yeah.
Anyway, if out of creative control works for you in any context, you're welcome to it.
Thank you.
Appreciate it.
All right.
What else?
You know, when I was a professor, I used to have this experience where I would ask students a question, and I would get back answers that weren't satisfying, and then 20 minutes later, in the context of some other conversation, they would say something that I wish they had said when I'd asked them, and I would say, Why didn't you say that?
And they'd say, you didn't ask us that.
So I started saying, would you please answer the question I should have asked you rather than the one I did ask you?
So is there anything I should have asked you that I have failed to?
No, I think you've asked some good questions.
It's been a good conversation.
It's, you know, awesome to speak with you.
Finally, as I said, I've admired you since I saw how you handled that awful attack on you in Evergreen.
Thanks.
You also asked me if I could hear you and if you could hear me about a hundred times for technical reasons.
But yeah, the other questions were better.
Yeah, that question is very to the point.
Can I ask?
Yeah, go ahead.
I mean, I'm really curious.
Is it true?
I told you, I was wondering.
It seems like I'm seeing society make a bigger deal about jokes than actual crime.
Is that accurate?
Do you see that?
I would put it differently.
For one thing, we may be in a better phase than we were a couple years ago, but there was a while there where we were killing off the ability to make jokes.
Right?
And this is terrifying to me because as an evolutionary biologist who thinks a lot about humans, I know that jokes are a vital mechanism by which we navigate difficult topics.
And by killing off the ability to make jokes, what we do is we rob ourselves of exactly the tool that you want to deal with the difficult stuff.
Right?
So to the extent that we have a problem, like Race or gender or economic concentration of wealth.
You want people to be able to joke their way to discoveries about what the nature of these things is, right?
Those jokes are serious business as it is.
So anyway, that impulse to kill off the jokes is one thing.
And then there's a separate impulse that I think you're recognizing, which is to excuse virtually anything as long as it seems to be contributing to your team.
Right?
Both of these are terrible instincts.
And so the one question I have about your formulation is, is it really that we are, you know, taking the one thing more seriously than the other?
Or is this just two separate bad phenomena that You happen to encounter at the same moment and it looks as if they are, you know.
Well, I mean, given what you do, that you juxtapose things and it causes people to think, it's not surprising that the juxtaposition in time of those two bad instincts would cause your mind to erupt with concerns.
But I also I also wouldn't rule out your formulation.
I just don't think Yes, something like that is happening, but not because the two things are necessarily connected.
Related, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, like I see Sam Bankman-Freed, like he gets softball coverage.
But Joe Rogan gets hounded, you know, for for a comedy podcast.
It's crazy.
It's crazy.
One of these people is obviously fundamentally decent and, you know, contributing to the world and the other person.
He evaporated a tremendous amount of wealth, lied through his teeth, represented himself as decent as a cloak for someone else.
It's amazing.
They are inverse of each other.
But you're right.
The treatment has been swapped.
Yeah, I just see that over and over again, it seems like.
And I mean, in Canada, I forget the guy's name, but you know, somebody being fined like $30,000 for a joke.
Which was do you hear this story?
No.
I wish I could remember remember the guy's name, but can you just tell me what?
Sure, sure.
He was the joke.
So terrible.
Or was it just the timing?
It wasn't terrible at all.
It was just it's just that the subject of the joke was a kid with a disability.
Hmm.
But the joke was actually about how People were pretending that he could... The joke was about the comedian's frustration with this kid getting so much media attention for his singing, which wasn't that great, because allegedly he was so disabled that he was so frail he was going to die.
And so the comedian's like, he just won't die, as if he wanted him to die.
He's making a joke.
He's like, the guy is not as weak as everyone makes him out to be.
He was supposed to die, you know, five years ago.
He's not weak.
And so it's really, you know, he's not really making fun of the person so much.
He's making fun of how people perceive this kid as so weak.
It was anyway.
And so, yeah, which is insane.
I mean, you know, again, I'm not saying I didn't hear the joke.
I don't know that it was delivered well.
I don't know that it was a joke that didn't reveal some sort of failing on the part of the comedian.
But the point is, you don't get To persecute people for crossing the line.
The joke is about finding out where the line is.
Right?
It doesn't mean you can't say, I think there's something wrong with that guy that he would make that joke.
Right?
That's fair.
But the idea that the law belongs in here, a fine?
What the hell?
Right?
Yeah.
And, you know, in the hands of a really good comedian, Right?
Uh, Louis C.K.
with his, uh, you know, what is it, Of Course But Maybe?
Right?
The whole, you know, the, of course, but maybe, uh... Isn't that the name of one of his specials?
Or is that a specific... Oh, I don't know if it's the name of one of his specials.
Yeah, but it's a sort of a formulation that he puts together, where he sort of goes through the argument that we all accept for something, and then he says, but maybe, and then he gives the really outlandish thing that nobody's allowed to think, and the point is, You know, are we going to forbid Louis C.K.
from doing that?
Or are we going to recognize?
I mean, the reason you laugh is because there's a truth in it that you recognize in the same moment as everybody else who's watching.
Oh, we are so dumb.
The comedian's name is Mike Ward.
Mike Ward.
Yeah.
He's ordered to pay $42,000.
Um, and I think it was by like a Canadian, like a human rights council.
It's like, what?
So why do they have, why do they have, uh, jurisdiction is the wrong word, but why, under what, uh, law is he required to pay anybody who says he's finable?
Some, I guess, some indecency law or discrimination.
Yeah, so it's like a human rights tribunal.
Luckily, he did, I think he did ultimately, you know, he appealed and eventually won.
He won, okay.
Yeah, but it cost more money, you know, it cost him a ton of money to do that and time and of course, I mean, it's a good thing he did, but like how many people could can can do that?
I mean, he was already a successful comedian, at least in Canada, so he could afford to do that.
But anyway.
Yeah.
Fascinating.
All right.
Well, I had not heard that story.
That's very disturbing.
I will look into it.
Mike Ward, you said.
Yeah.
Rogan interviewed him about that and other stuff.
And yeah, like I said, I think he came out on top, thankfully.
Good.
I'm glad to hear that.
May we all be so lucky.
May we all be so lucky.
I would drink to that, but I have only water.
Drink some water.
It's more healthy.
I drank to it.
Well, Matt, this has been delightful.
I'm very much looking forward to seeing what you produce in the future.
Hopefully you will find yourself starved of material because civilization will start functioning well and there will be less to juxtapose.
But I'm not going to hold my breath over that.
Yeah, that's funny.
I used to do more just comedy with Alone, I would be, you know, I'd get kind of pissed off.
Like, oh, damn, I was gonna, I had that idea.
I was gonna make that video.
But now if someone else, you know, makes a video, I was like, thank God someone already took care of it.
Yeah.
So where can people find you?
YouTube.com slash Orf Rumble.
Orf at Rumble.
ZeroRF on Twitter.
Mines.com.
Zero, the number zero RF on Twitter.
Yes.
Yeah, I kind of screwed myself with that, but I still have to make sure to tell people.
So, yeah, please check me out there, everyone.
And on Racket News, your pieces.
That's right there.
Yeah.
You'll see my work on Tybee's Racket News.
Your work on Tybee's Racket News, and actually Matt did a piece back when your uploaded test piece that included me caused your channel to get struck.
Matt wrote about it, am I right?
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, there's a Substack article.
His Substack is excellent, and that article is pretty eye-opening.
You know, tells you you're getting near the target.
Yeah, that was the first time I had heard of like the group thing, you know, deleting before publishing.
Since then, I saw one of your friends, Benjamin Boyce.
Same thing happened to him, apparently.
I'm sure it's happened to many people.
So, yeah.
It does tell you something.
I keep cutting you off as you try to wrap it up.
I'm sorry.
No, no, no, not at all.
Not at all.
That's a useful piece of information.
I had forgotten that Benjamin had had that phenomenon.
But yes, something is paying attention to the inert stuff on your channel.
It's not just the stuff that you publish.
All right.
Well, Matt, it's been a pleasure.
And what is your latest video?
Next one coming up.
Well, I did one on COVID kids.
That was the last one I put up on the fear mongering about how dangerous COVID is to children.
One of my favorite clips is some guy on CNN saying, the hospitals are filled with people dying and sick of COVID.
And then Jim Acosta cuts in, children too.
As if, you know, children aren't people, Jim.
It's like, uh, but just had to put in like, oh, children, it's affecting children, children, children, children.
Yeah.
Now that was in the morning memo.
And then Hamilton 68 is the one I'm, you know, kind of obsessing over now because it's such a big story and I want to do it right.
And it's also a little more complicated because there's, you know, a bunch of layers to it.
You remember, did you hear about that?
I did.
You want to give a brief synopsis?
Sure.
Well, you had this program under the German Marshall Fund, which claimed to be tracking Russian bots.
So you had this website called the Hamilton 68 Dashboard, and you saw all these bar graphs showing you allegedly what the Russian bots were promoting on Twitter.
Well, there were no Russian bots.
Who were they tracking?
They were tracking regular Americans.
And so it made this, it created this, um, system where the media could immediately dismiss anything being promoted and popularized by dissenting voices, American voices, and just dismiss it as a Russian propaganda.
And that's what happened for years.
It's crazy.
Until it was discovered to be a fraud in the Twitter files.
Somehow, I think all of those years of the Cold War caused there to be this circuit inside Americans of a certain age that means that we just, you know, want to dive under the desk anytime anybody mentions the Russians, and it's just become an excuse for everything.
So, when will that video come out?
God, as soon as I can finish it.
Next week.
Awesome, and it will be announced, presumably, on your Twitter?
Yeah, I'll upload it everywhere.
All right.
And hopefully good enough for Tayabi to write a bit on it.
Cool.
All right.
Well, I'm excited for that.
Really enjoyed this conversation.
And I will try again.
It is Matt Orfala.
You got it.
I got it?
Yeah.
Am I the first one ever?
No one gets it.
No one gets it at first.
But you say it enough, you eventually get it.
And But hey, that's why I go by Orf, everyone.
That's why I go by Orf.
You can just call me Orf.
Well, Orf, it's been great.
And I look forward to Hamilton 68.
Awesome.
Thank you, Brett.
It's been a real pleasure for me, too.
You know, it gets lonely just looking at my video editing bars and the editing program.
To actually get to speak with somebody such a great conversationalist as yourself.
