Nov. 25, 2022 - David Icke
15:18
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| We're about to face the biggest drop in living standards since records began. | |
| That's according to the UK's spending watchdog. | |
| They predict that a further 500,000 will be pushed into unemployment in the next 12 months. | |
| Now, add that to the vast numbers of people that were already there and all the people that were thrust there in just the last two years. | |
| Restaurants in the UK, they're going bust at a rate 60% above the already insane rate of closures that lockdowns caused. | |
| Lockdowns meant that hospitality lost an astronomical amount of money. | |
| But on top of that, they changed the behaviour of the public. | |
| People got used to staying in. | |
| It became their new normal. | |
| And so even when the pubs and clubs reopened, the numbers weren't anything like they were. | |
| And that's led to even more closures. | |
| That's even more people losing their jobs. | |
| These are very Very difficult times. | |
| But it isn't surprising we all called it in March 2020. | |
| You can't close down the economy, print skip loads of stay-at-home bribery money and expect it not to blow up further down the line. | |
| Now, of course, the media is pushing Russia and Brexit as alternative causes for the chaos. | |
| But the only people that actually believe that are those that have a vested interest in rejoining the EU or quite enjoy fluffing Zelensky. | |
| They're the same people. | |
| You've seen them on social media, I'm sure. | |
| The Ukraine flag and the mask emoji is normally a giveaway. | |
| That and a completely unearned sense of self-importance. | |
| Europe is on its arse too, but that doesn't fit the narrative so they just shout racist at a pensioner. | |
| The reality is we're living through a cost of lockdowns crisis and it begs the question, where were all the economists in 2020? | |
| Now, I'm not an economist, and I knew it was a terrible idea. | |
| I was just a regular bloke getting tinfoil hat memes thrown at me, and I could see it, and I vocalised it, as did many of you. | |
| This is a very, very bad idea, we said. | |
| Granny killer! | |
| They cried. | |
| How's Granny now? | |
| She's freezing her arse off, watching Bargain Hunt through her neighbour's window. | |
| So either those advising the government were idiots who didn't see this coming or they did see this coming and they chose to carry on regardless. | |
| Maybe, now hear me out, maybe this was all done by design to crush the economy, destroy private businesses, drive up unemployment and desperation so an alternative economic model could be introduced in place of the current one. | |
| Now, maybe this new model would be so unpalatable at first glance that they could only sell it to the masses when the people were on their knees, seemingly without any other options on the table. | |
| After all, you'd trade your Harvey Davidson for a bag of potatoes if you were hungry enough. | |
| But then, I'm just a conspiracy theorist. | |
| And this is Right Now. | |
| We talk about freedom of speech all the time, and our opening guest knows more than most about it, or rather, the erosion of it. | |
| Bill Ottman is the CEO of the social network Minds. | |
| He set up the site to counteract the mass censorship that was emerging across the internet, and that was even before the Rona. | |
| Bill, welcome to Right Now. | |
| Just how crazy has internet censorship got now? | |
| Oh, I mean, there's this contagion flowing through big tech, essentially, where, you know, some sort of social virus is spreading where people think and feel entitled to free speech to such a degree that they don't even want it anymore. | |
| I think that we've lost touch with our freedoms in the West and you know people struggling in authoritarian nations | |
| would yearn for the rights which you know people are basically trampling on around here, so | |
| You know we need to hold strong Absolutely. | |
| When it comes to Elon Musk and Twitter, I'll be honest, I'll put my cards on the table, I don't trust Elon Musk, I never have done, but a lot of people, even in the alternative sphere, they do, they see him as some kind of saviour. | |
| What are your thoughts on Elon and the Twitter takeover? | |
| You know, it seems that these arbitrary reinstatements are causing confusion in honestly a similar way to the arbitrary censorship. | |
| So, you know, people are being let back on, you know, Trump was let back on, Jordan Peterson, Babylon B, these types. | |
| But then, you know, he's saying no to, for instance, Alex Jones, regardless of whether or not you like Alex Jones or, um, Or whoever it is, to be honest. | |
| I mean, there are still active terrorist accounts on Twitter. | |
| So the inconsistency is a little bit frustrating. | |
| And I just feel like there needs to be a clear process. | |
| Like also, what about all of the Countless users who don't have huge platforms who were banned during the COVID epidemic for posting some study. | |
| And, you know, now they lost their outlet to the world. | |
| So I'm a little bit frustrated with the lack of a process. | |
| And it sort of seems like a lot of these more celebrity de-platformed accounts are getting brought back. | |
| But I just I worry that others are going to get left in the dust. | |
| I think for me, it's interesting, you mentioned Alex Jones there, and my dad goes in it as well. | |
| We appealed his account, just to kind of test Elon Musk a little bit, and immediately got a message back saying, no chance, it's never coming back. | |
| And so you say, I don't see how you can promote freedom of speech, but then all not for him. | |
| It's like, this is someone who's never broken a law, committed a crime. | |
| It doesn't add up to me. | |
| I didn't realize that with David that was also the case. | |
| So you actually received a message back recently saying that it would never happen? | |
| Yeah. | |
| And what's interesting is before I received that message back, what I did is I appealed the count and I put a tweet out saying that I'd appealed his ban just to see how free the bird was. | |
| You know, it was kind of a bit of a test really. | |
| And then a friend messaged me who used to work for Twitter and he said, They will kick that into the long grass, I imagine. | |
| They'll kick the can down the road and ignore it. | |
| So what you're better off doing, if you really want to test him, is start a new account. | |
| So I started a new account for my dad and just tweeted, hello. | |
| And he got like 20,000 followers in about six hours and then was immediately nuked. | |
| Like they nuked his new channel. | |
| And then I got the message refusing the reinstatement of the old one. | |
| So you're like, okay, there's no freedom of speech there then. | |
| Yeah, we're certainly not there yet. | |
| And I think people are celebrating a little bit too early. | |
| You know, I'm also maintaining skepticism in terms of, you know, he made commitments about open sourcing the algorithm, disclosing if there was algorithmic bias, making messages end to end encrypted, which is absolutely essential. | |
| The fact that Twitter has access to everybody's personal messages is just unbelievable. | |
| And that needs to be fixed. | |
| And he said he was going to. | |
| So, you know, At this point, we know very little. | |
| And the thing is that Elon and the new Twitter management, they do know what the skeletons in the closet are. | |
| They've seen it. | |
| They've looked at the code. | |
| They've been auditing the code for weeks. | |
| So if there has been shadow banning and you know, the sort of soft censorship happening with | |
| political bias. They know and they're not saying anything. The only little thing that they admitted | |
| was that there was, you know, people were paying 15k for verification and whatnot. So, | |
| you know, I am willing to be somewhat patient with it. But, you know, if after a few | |
| months, we're not seeing a process for redemption for all, you know, the accounts that have been | |
| banned, you know, people like David Icke, people like Alex Jones, like what big tech needs to realize | |
| is that there's a massive body of peer-reviewed research. | |
| That actually proves censorship causes increased radicalization, polarization, division, isolation, and all of this sort of metastasization of the problem. | |
| So when they think that by banning these accounts, they're making a safer internet, they're actually making a much less safe internet. | |
| So we wrote a whole paper on this with a whole team of PhDs studying Setting the effects. | |
| It's called The Censorship Effect. | |
| Daryl Davis and I talked about it on the Joe Rogan Experience. | |
| Recommend people go check that out. | |
| So the whole logic of deplatforming, and Elon knows this, this is why he's letting some people back, but I absolutely agree with you and disagree with sort of the arbitrary nature of it. | |
| I think what frightened me as well, and it kind of proved the fact... I mean, maybe I'd already made a decision in my mind on the fact that I didn't trust Musk, but at the same time I can have my mind changed, like I'm not one of those people that's just like, no, this is my fixed view. | |
| I'm happy to be proved wrong. | |
| But then when he came out and he said, you're entitled to freedom of speech, but you're not entitled to freedom of reach. | |
| And it made me think, like, that's a direct quote from the ADL. | |
| And so that in itself was kind of alarming, the fact that he was using a quote from an organisation that basically prides itself on shutting people up. | |
| And it was also fascinating. | |
| I think yesterday he came out and people were calling him out because he had originally said, we're not going to let anyone back on until we form this Content Moderation Council. | |
| And that was with all of these social activist groups, including places like the ADL. | |
| However, yesterday people were asking him, well, why have you started letting people on before this Content Moderation Council came about? | |
| And he said that actually he abandoned the whole Content Moderation Council because those groups were essentially attacking Twitter and trying | |
| to get their advertisers to leave. | |
| So I think that he was trying to play ball with them and realized very quickly that you can't play ball with them | |
| because they're not willing to change their minds at all. | |
| So yeah, I mean, I'm maintaining skepticism. | |
| I will. | |
| Look, it's certainly a step in the right direction for big tech. | |
| This is the first time that big tech has ever had anything close to free speech. | |
| So it's not free speech yet. | |
| They haven't changed the policy at all. | |
| And they're not letting everyone back. | |
| So, I mean, obviously, David Icke, Alex Jones, regardless of whether you agree with them, they deserve a voice. | |
| What was the even original reason for David's ban? | |
| COVID misinformation. | |
| Which is hilarious, because most of the stuff he said has now been proved to be right. | |
| Most of the stuff that all of us said, you know, in terms of the damage lockdowns was gonna do, the fact that masks would do more harm than good, that the jabs were dangerous, it's all been proved correct, but these people are still banned. | |
| But, and this is the thing that people forget, is that the right to, regardless of whether the posts are accurate or, or not, people have the right to be wrong. | |
| You know, you can't, and I'm not saying, you know, what your dad posted was wrong. | |
| I have no idea. | |
| It was probably right. | |
| But the point is people do have the right to be wrong and you can't have this dystopian realm online where, you know, People can't be wrong. | |
| This is part of the human experience, is debating issues. | |
| You're right sometimes, you're wrong sometimes, as long as you're not intentionally maliciously wrong. | |
| It needs to be able to exist. | |
| So this whole misinformation complex that's been emerging is so convenient for these authoritarian executives because it means whatever they want it to mean. | |
| Coming away from Twitter to the wider internet, what can people do in terms of freedoms? | |
| Because everything's online now. | |
| Literally everything's online now. | |
| Here in the UK, even things like banks. | |
| The high street banks are just closing down, closing down, closing down. | |
| Everything's on the internet. | |
| And because the internet is so heavily regulated now, what do people do to get around it, to get away from it? | |
| Yeah, I mean, ultimately, people need to take their internet freedom into their own hands. | |
| And this ultimately comes with using more decentralized technologies and end-to-end encrypted technologies. | |
| So, you know, communication platforms like Signal is a fully encrypted, great open source app | |
| that I highly recommend people check out. | |
| On Minds, at minds.com, we've moved into the sovereign identity space. | |
| So the core issue with big tech platforms is that when they ban you, | |
| you lose all your followers, you lose all your content. | |
| Everything that you worked for a decade to build is just gone and it's locked away. | |
| Where we're moving towards is that you own your identity, you own your content, and you own your social graph and your followers so that you can actually leave Mines and go and sign into another app that interacts with this open decentralized relay protocol called Nostr, which | |
| is what we build on top of. | |
| So you can actually go into your settings on Mines. It sounds a little bit technical, but it's really not. | |
| You go to your settings, you download your private key. | |
| Your private key is your portable identity. | |
| We don't even have access to it. | |
| We can't take it away from you. | |
| So that is the world that we want to build, where no one is locked into any individual site, and that your identity is something that you own, and that you build, and that is interoperable between different networks. | |
| So there are some really exciting movements happening in this space, but I think people need to take more control of the apps that they use. | |
| And obviously, you can find David and Garrett on Mines, so you guys can go and do that. | |
| It's still primitive, but We're seeing massive investment in this space. | |
| We obviously saw a huge, it relates to the crypto realm. | |
| So if you have cryptocurrency and then you have cryptographically secured messaging systems, but you also have cryptographic identity. | |
| And it's all just about these key pairs, where your public key is basically the address where people can message you or send you money. | |
| And the private key is, you know, your access to the ownership of that account. | |
| And it's sort of a basic primitive that I do think society at large needs to grasp and educate themselves on, because this is what enables everyone to become their own bank. |
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