Saagar Enjeti joins hosts to dissect Twitter's censorship of a New York Post story alleging Hunter Biden leveraged his father's vice presidency to secure Burisma meetings and a $1.5 billion loan via leaked emails from a water-damaged laptop. While debating nepotism versus corruption, the group critiques the platform's "hacked materials" policy for potentially shielding powerful figures and stifling journalism, even as they touch on Hunter's alleged addiction and theories of government surveillance or a deliberate setup. Ultimately, the discussion highlights how social media moderation can inadvertently protect political actors from damaging leaks, raising serious concerns about press freedom and accountability in the digital age. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
|
Time
Text
Flagrant Patreon Exclusive Clip00:02:56
What up people?
Sheltie here and you guys are about to listen to a clip from our weekly Patreon episode.
If you want to sign up to our Patreon, support the flagrancy support where we are doing completely uncensored, flagrant content.
You go to patreon.com slash flagrant two.
With no more interruptions, here is the exclusive clip.
Sager, can you explain what's going on with this whole situation?
I mean, okay.
Just break the whole thing down.
Where is Hunter?
Why is Hunter working in the Ukraine?
You don't have to go too far into it, but he was working in the Ukraine.
Do they got that good crystal out there?
What's going on exactly?
Let's start all the way at the beginning.
Okay.
2014, Joe Biden's vice president.
It's been vice president for like six years.
Okay.
Hunter, he's had a crack problem for a long time.
Decades, basically.
Pause real quick.
Has been real good.
Okay.
Why is Biden not leaning into this?
Is that not the most relatable quality of a president to have a kid who's an addict?
Like half of America is probably addicted to something.
Why hasn't Biden leaned into it?
Yes, I have a crackhead kid.
It's a struggle.
This is how you get through it.
Actual crack?
Yeah.
Yeah, no, actual crack.
And look, Andrew, I would agree with you, except most people's crackhead sons don't get to trade off of their daddy's name and make millions of dollars to fund their crack addiction.
Because they think that's the issue that we have here.
Okay, that's another thing important to discuss.
And I don't want to derail too much, but like once you get rich, you move away from crack, right?
Like, I mean, this guy... Decades long is blowing my mind.
Who's doing crack for decades?
You're getting 83 grand a month from the Ukraine and you haven't started smoking Coke like an adult?
Have you heard of Whitney Houston?
What did Whitney Houston do?
She's been on crack when she was rich.
Really?
Wow.
Hunter Biden's had an amazing run, though.
Sorry?
He's had an amazing crack run.
Talk to us.
He's been able to do crack for.
And he looks fine.
Is crack like Corona where it affects the black community disproportionately?
Because this white guy is living a great life doing crack for decades.
I don't believe it affects the black community disproportionately.
Concho looks great.
But does it really affect the black community disproportionately?
I mean, not crack, corona.
I was like, what?
Crack has affected disproportionately.
But I don't see Black Lives Matter people getting Corona at all, so it must not affect them.
I think the stats would show different.
Stats, Schmetz, guys.
Okay, so back to what we're talking about.
So Hunter's getting jobs because his daddy is wealthy, which is powerful.
No, vice president.
Vice president.
His daddy's vice powerful, which is quite normal.
I'm not that upset at that.
Maybe it's unethical, but it does happen.
Okay.
Sure.
That being said, if he's put in positions of power and he has a drug addiction, this man can be manipulated, can't he?
Yeah.
Okay.
So, okay.
Social Media Fake News Debate00:12:15
All right.
So let's go.
Like I said, 2014, Biden is America's point person on Ukraine policy.
And this matters a lot because this is all during the Crimea thing.
Russia takes over Crimea.
So Ukraine, there's a revolution going on.
Everyone's like, oh, what's going to happen?
Pro-Russia, all that.
So U.S. is very invested.
Obama is very invested.
So Hunter gets hired by this energy company called Burisma.
All right.
They're a Ukrainian natural gas company.
Hunter doesn't know jack shit about natural gas.
He has never worked in the natural gas industry one time in his life.
This is according to him.
He even said he was interviewed by ABC News.
They're like, what were your qualifications?
He's like, well, you know, I'm not an expert in natural gas, but I was as qualified as everybody else on that board.
What does that mean?
This is a guy who sat on the Amtrak board.
And this is a quote for when he was nominated because he rides the trains a lot.
So nominate me, nominate you.
Now, I'm going to be honest, I ride the Amtrak train a lot, and I could tell you how to fix all that shit.
So me too, right?
But look, we're not time.
I just want to clarify, Sagar.
He doesn't ride it on top like an Indian.
He's inside the train, sitting in a seat.
We're in America now, baby.
We made it, Sagar.
It was really difficult the first time we had to do it.
I actually got to do that once in India.
I actually got to do that.
Train surf?
That's another story.
Yeah.
You were train surfing.
What happened?
I went up on the top.
It was just fucking rocket pockets traffic.
Is that like that arcade game Sunset Riders?
No, that's a cruise, baby.
That's a carnival cruise for us.
Okay.
Okay.
So then take us to this New York Post thing.
What's going on?
Okay.
So, all right.
So this New York Post story is a wild ride.
All right.
So Hunter is clearly in the middle of a drug binge during all this.
Let's go.
He has a lot of problems.
He loves apparently to take photos of himself with cigarettes in his mouth while doing crack.
That shit looks cool.
And so he has this photo or this laptop, which he apparently damaged with water.
So he drops it off in a Delaware computer shop.
So this guy claims, again, he claims this, that Hunter dropped it off and that he forgot about it.
He just never came back for the laptop.
And he kept trying to contact Hunter and couldn't get in contact with the guy, which might make sense because he did go to rehab around this time.
So it's possible that that is what coincided.
But eventually he's like, I need to get this laptop out of my shop.
And he keeps trying to contact journalists.
He's like, hey, I've got Hunter Biden's laptop.
Nobody's talking to him.
Eventually gets into contact with Rudy Giuliani.
So he gets Rudy's lawyer and the FBI asked for the laptop in December 2019.
That's what we know.
We also know that this guy copies over the contents of the laptop to a hard drive in December, gives it to Rudy.
As of Sunday, Rudy gave those, that hard drive to the New York Post.
So that's where we are currently.
Okay.
And on that hard drive are emails, which show a couple of things.
And this is the bombshell one the New York Times reported, which is that Hunter, at the very least, tried to arrange a meeting for a guy who was advising the Ukrainian energy company board with Joe Biden while his dad was vice president.
That's number one.
Number two, he was using his family name being like, hey, because of the connections to my guy, that's how he refers to his dad.
You guys should pay me 25K more per month.
That's number two.
Number three, which came out this morning or the morning that you and I are taping this, is that Hunter was again using his family name, being like, me and my family would love to do business with the largest private Chinese energy company.
Now, there's no such thing as private business in China.
Of course.
All private business is controlled by the government.
So, and like I said, I already mentioned the $1.5 billion loan.
This is just, I mean, it just proves what we knew, but it's like the emails are damning.
So why is this wrong?
Sorry, say that again.
So why is this wrong?
Why is it wrong that he's doing that?
Why would it be wrong to set up a meeting between his father, who is the sitting vice president, and this company?
What would be unethical about that?
Well, that's both nepotism and corruption, right?
So once again, Joe Biden's Ukraine policy, he's the head of Ukraine policy for the U.S. government at this time, should only be determined about what is good for this country, or at least what him, the State Department, believes is good for this country.
It should have nothing to do with who the Ukrainians are paying his son in order to set up meetings.
And look, you said this, and you're right.
This type of shit happens all the time.
I want to be really fair.
It's not like Republicans are like the bad.
I actually just read a story this morning.
Larry Kudlow held a private briefing in late February for a bunch of conservative donors about coronavirus.
One of those guys is a hedge fund guy, sold a bunch of stocks based on that information.
Okay.
So look, this happens all over.
This is the whole government.
But like, I don't, Biden doesn't get a pass just because he's a Democrat.
Right.
Okay, gotcha.
So this is everybody's doing this kind of pay-to-play situation.
A lot of people criticize the Clinton Foundation for this very reason, right?
It was kind of pay-to-play access.
Now it goes to this New York Post write-up.
So the New York Post, what?
They write an article about this and they write a story.
They write a story about this.
And then for whatever reason, big tech censors the sharing of the story.
Yes.
And that is where it gets really fucking crazy.
So the story gets published.
It's a legit story.
Biden campaign comes out.
They don't even deny the email.
They don't say the emails are fake, which means that they're real.
You know, if they're fake, they would say it.
If they're fake, Hunter would come out and say it, but they're not.
So that means it's real.
They also won't even rule out that such a meeting took place.
They're just like, it's not on the official schedule.
Immediately, and I'm really talking here within a matter of hours.
Communications officer at Facebook, his name's Andy Stone.
He broke the first mold.
He comes out and he goes, I'm not linking to this story.
This story is eligible for fact checks, whatever that means.
And in the meantime, Facebook will be slowing down its distribution on all our platforms.
We all know what that means.
That means Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook, they're going to start slowing that down.
They're not going to be four out of 10 Americans, Andrew, get news from Facebook, primary news.
Four out of 10, that's 40%.
All right.
So they're slowing down a story there.
But it actually gets crazier because they're at least not banning the piece from Facebook.
Then Twitter comes out and they just ban it.
You can't tweet a link.
You couldn't DM it.
And for those of us, people like me who had already tweeted it, if you tried to clink on my tweet linking to it, it would not let you go to that story.
The greatest act of censorship in modern American history.
It's not a joke.
It really is crazy because we're talking about hundreds of millions of users between Facebook and Twitter.
And I want to get to the justification of this.
Yeah, yeah.
What is their justification?
This is the part that scares me.
So Twitter says this is an accordance quote with their hacked materials policy.
In other words, material that's hacked should not be distributed.
Well, we have a big problem.
Like I'm a journalist.
Yep.
Yep.
So does that mean Edward Snowden's account is going to get hacked and every link to everything he's ever published is going to get hacked?
Does that mean we would not be able to publish the Pentagon papers today?
Does that mean that FBI's COIntel Pro program, which was through leaked documents, does that mean we wouldn't learn through that?
Does that mean the Trump tax return story, which the last time I was on here to talk about with you guys, which those were clearly illegally gotten by the New York Times?
I don't give a shit.
That's journalism, actually.
It's the law's job to go and find out who that is.
But journalism means we should be able to publish whatever we want as long as it's in the public interest.
That's Twitter just set a standard.
That's all.
That's all good.
Very scary.
Interesting.
So you're saying that the standard they're setting is if things are hacked, they are not allowed to be shared.
Yes.
So that there's a way where people could use that to protect themselves.
Did they just claim any story that got out was due to- Let me give you an example.
Yeah.
I want to give you an example.
I'm going to give a scenario of this.
Also, what about celeb nudes?
How are we going to see Cardi B's aerial laws?
Cardi would probably show us, but there are other celebs that aren't as willing to show us, and we'd still love to see them.
Yeah.
I mean, I want any Dem, because look, a lot of Dems are like, fuck Rudy Giuliani and fuck the New York Post and fuck all the story.
It's not even important.
That ain't okay.
Well, think about this.
Let's say one day you have a Democratic primary challenger going up against another Democrat and emails get leaked showing him coordinating with corporate lobbyists his message.
And then you want to fundraise off that information.
Under this standard, that guy could come and say, kill that story and kill that fundraising link.
Meaning that you, this always protects power.
This is the point I want to make about censorship and about all this.
You want to empower the U.S. government and people who are in power from not having their stuff leaked.
I want to live in a world where all of my Epstein reporting would not be possible without leaked information.
Zero.
I wouldn't be able to do any of it.
All of the stuff that the Panama papers on how oligarchs conduct financial transactions, not possible.
The Finn CEN files, something I've been recently obsessed with.
Same thing.
This is bad.
This is bad for journalism.
But worse, it's fucking partisan because we all know Snowden's account's never going to get hacked or it's never going to get locked.
They're only going to lock it when it appears that it'd be bad for Joe Biden.
So look, in my view, this is an in-kind donation from Facebook and Twitter to the Biden campaign for hundreds of millions of dollars.
Hundreds of millions.
Here's a question I have about that.
Does this help Trump?
Does this hurt Trump?
Does this help Biden?
Does it hurt Biden?
Or is this just the flavor of the week and nobody cares?
Andrew, I don't think anybody gives a shit.
A lot of people are voting on one thing, Corona.
And, you know, I don't blame them.
It rules our whole life.
Corona, the economy, stimulus has way more to do with it.
This ain't 2016, which is, again, the great irony.
If the tech people just left it alone, it would probably be dead by now.
Well, here's what I think.
I can't fully form the thought.
I can't complete the thought, but I'm thinking this whole time.
2016, what a big thing that seems to get Trump elected is a lack of censorship.
And it could be very ironic if in 2020, over-censorship also helps Trump get elected.
What was the lack of censorship?
I think, like, from what I understand, a lot of the actual fake news, and I think Robbie said this, the vast majority of Facebook news where you said 40% of people get their news is far right-wing, not exactly valid, extreme right-wing, bright bark, et cetera.
And that's where.
Oh, come on, man.
I don't know.
This is bull.
This is left-wing bullshit.
Okay.
Call Robbie on it.
He's out there.
I can't really call it.
Go ahead.
So why do you think that's bullshit?
Okay, look, I mean, just because something is on the right.
First of all, I come from conservative media and a lot of our stuff was way more accurate than the New York Times.
Okay, number one.
But number two, like the idea that, look, does misinformation go viral on Facebook?
Yes.
Does conservative stuff also go viral on Facebook?
Yes.
But do you know why?
And Andrew, you'll understand this.
Why does conservative stuff go viral on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter?
It's the only thing.
Because they don't have any other place to go.
There's no mainstream media.
There's no corporate media.
So of course the Daily Wire and the Daily Caller go more viral.
I don't know Facebook.
I don't argue with that.
I don't want to waste a ton of time on this, but I will say I don't believe extreme left thing.
I just sent them a hype, what's it called, Daily Beast article.
And I was like, this is probably bullshit, right?
I know they're bullshit.
But because, like you said, there's only one outlet for right-wing news, and it's these fucking WhatsApp threads where our mom and dads are sending any Indian news story, regardless of how true it is.
That ends up influencing a lot more people than extreme left news because the left-wing moderates have a news source, which is every other news source.
You see what I'm saying?
Well, definitely somewhat viable.
I can't let this stand because, again, man, left-wing moderate like MSNBC will have you believe that Trump peed on Russian hookers in Moscow.
And I fully believe that it's not that big.
Does it make it better?
I fully believe that and I fully support it.
Yeah.
And you have to understand.
You have to understand it is freezing in Moscow and they will do anything for heat in a cold winter.
Reddit Expert Interrupts Segment00:02:39
And urine is warm.
I don't know about your Pakistani urine sager, but my warm-blooded American urine will heat up a hooker in a heartbeat.
Also, everybody keeps saying he's like a, you know, he's a Russian puppet.
No, he's not.
He's pissing on Russian women.
Exactly.
He's not got Russia, yo.
Exactly.
He got him.
Honestly, I don't know why we criticize him.
He's pissing on him.
But also, that's progress.
Like, why are we pee shaming?
Maybe girls like to get peed on.
No, dude.
No.
There's definitely no girls like getting peed on.
No girls like to get peed on.
None.
Last time you're like, what makes you conservative?
Chicks should not be getting peed.
Hey, listen.
All right, we'll leave it on that.
Sager, thank you so much, bro.
We appreciate you.
Love you, Mick.
Make sure you check out the realignment podcast.
I just did an episode with Sager.
I had a great time.
And your boy Marshall, your black Jewish friend Marshall.
And that's right.
Yeah, it's so funny because when you just hear him, he's so Jewish.
He's so white.
No, no, he sounds super Jewish, but he's black.
Was he adopted?
Obviously.
He was.
He was adopted.
Yeah, or somebody's lying in that family for sure.
But check it out.
And make sure you check out The Rising with Sager and Crystal on YouTube.
You check it out, man.
Thank you so much, Sager.
Appreciate you, buddy.
Thanks, guys.
Guys, I'm interrupting this clip to save your life, okay?
You got to stop smoking.
I don't care if it's cigarettes, vape, any of that other stuff.
You got to cut it out.
Obviously, we know corona out here.
Anybody with shitty lungs is just going to get bodied real quick.
We can't keep adding to this body count because we got enough already dead.
And we're never going to open a country or the world up again.
So this is what we're going to do.
We're going to get back to the gum.
We're going to get back to the lozenges.
That's right.
Lucy.co.
Lucy has put out the best new gum.
I'm telling you, it's gum.
It's got the nicotine you need.
It's going to give you that fix, but it's not going to kill you.
And it's not going to keep the rest of us in this crazy pandemic with everything locked down.
So you're going with the gum.
You're going to get the lozenges.
They got honestly the best flavors.
Cut out all the other stuff.
Cut out the vape.
Cut out the cigarettes.
Go with the lozenges.
Go with the gum.
Treat yourself right.
Don't end up in the hospital.
Lucy.
Co, okay?
And you know what you're going to do?
You're going to use the promo code Flakrin.
You're going to get 20% off.
20% off to save your life.
Have you smelling better?
Have everyone happier and make sure that the country cracks open again?
That's an incredible deal.
Listen, I got to give you this disclaimer.
Okay.
This product contains nicotine.
Obviously, that's what you want.
All right.
And it's derived from tobacco.
Nicotine is an addictive chemical, and that's why I use it in the first place.
Now, let's get back to the clip.
All right, man.
Quit Vaping With Gum Lozenges00:05:11
Always great talking to Sager.
I love that motherfucker, man.
He's great.
Mark, tell us what the conspiracy world is, what is Reddit talking?
Mark is our Reddit expert, though.
Mark, really, you understand Reddit, man.
It's unbelievable.
It's unbelievable your ability to understand Reddit.
Well, it's unbelievable.
He's so old.
That's how you don't understand Reddit.
I don't understand.
It's like our parents are like, man, that kid just gets the internet.
Son, that's how I feel, bro.
Internet whiz kid over here.
I get the links, but it doesn't make sense.
I go to it.
I try to click.
Sometimes you got to click on the picture.
Sometimes you got to click on the links.
And then all these things start opening up.
It's too confusing for me.
I don't need to know about it.
But you can tell me about it.
Yeah.
So what is Reddit saying?
So basically, he gets his waterlogged laptop, doesn't know.
I think he says in the article that he has some condition where he didn't know or he wasn't able to tell who dropped off the laptop.
But then he was able to deduce it from a sticker that was on the last laptop, like for the Bo Biden foundation or some shit.
And then from there, starts going through, seeing all this crazy shit, seeing pictures of say what you really think, bro.
Say what you really think.
Say what you really think, bro.
Talk from your dick.
I know what I'm thinking right now.
What are you thinking?
You know how Trump was talking about how Obama tapped his phones?
Oh, we.
I think the administration tapped Biden's laptop.
I think the administration knows that Biden's a crackhead.
I mean, if I was in that position, right?
That's what you do.
That's who you go after.
The crackhead.
You go after the crackhead.
That's the first thing you do.
So you go tap that laptop.
You go tap those phones.
I bet they tapped everybody's phones.
100% you could do it with the crackhead.
The crackhead, bro.
You could probably tell him whatever.
Be like, hey, here's $10.
Buy yourself some crack.
Not to mention, have you seen the pictures of him asleep with a crack pipe in his mouth?
I mean, that makes up stars.
What kind of crack makes you go to sleep, bro?
You're getting horrible crack.
What kind of Delaware crack is this?
Crack keeps you up.
Crack does not make you go to sleep.
This is a crackhead.
See how much of a crack ahead you got to be?
Like, Indians love chai.
I know some Indians that drink so much, they sleep because of it.
Okay.
Like, I need this caffeine to go to sleep.
Right.
I need this crack to get my eight hours.
That's how much.
I'd be absolutely furious if I smoked some crack and I just fell asleep the entire goddamn time.
Yo, you smoke enough of it.
You ain't really even been high no more.
Right.
It's probably comforting.
It's comforting at this point.
This shit is 30 years of crack.
But who took a picture of this guy sleep with crack pipe in his mouth?
That's perfect.
The whores.
Hookers, probably.
That's actually what it is.
But why would they put it on his laptop?
And then they upload to his laptop.
Why does he keep it?
He's putting pictures of him compromised on his laptop.
Yeah, this is a setup, huh?
Yeah, it's a little bit of a setup.
It's a setup.
Guess what?
The biggest thing.
The thing is, this: it's a setup, but Biden and them can't say it's a setup because they know he needs a crackhead.
He is a crackhead, but this is a little bit too serendipitous.
You want to have sleeping pictures with a crack pipe between your lips?
There's no way.
You could say that's you could be like, yo, he just fell asleep.
Somebody took a picture of him.
This is a prank.
And they do the exact same thing.
Who falls asleep with crack?
He was just asleep.
Somebody took this prank picture.
If you took a picture of yourself on your phone, would it upload to the same cloud?
And then you can access those pictures from the cloud.
Yes.
From your laptop.
So maybe these pictures are not on the laptop.
They're from the cloud.
And you can access the cloud via the laptop.
That could be true.
Yep.
Yeah.
He says that he has a medical condition that prevented him from actually seeing who dropped off the laptop.
What does that even mean?
He believed it to be Hunter Biden's because of a sticker related to Bo Biden Foundation was on it.
Oh, this is bad.
That's completely.
So the guy himself is like super weird.
Like he's not weird, bro.
He's mad.
He's mad at right-wing, and that's what a left-wing person would do.
So I'm not knocking him, but like, that's what he's doing.
You know what I'm saying, Al?
I think he got paid off.
Keep going.
I think if Biden came to the actual shop to drop off the laptop, dude knew like, oh, shit, this could get me a lot of money.
So he starts.
Who calls around to the news trying to get rid of a laptop?
No, you're calling around to the news, like, yo, I got a laptop.
How much are you going to pay?
Also, I'm never dropping my laptop at your stupid shop anymore.
You got to pay him enough that it don't matter.
Exactly.
Like, think about it.
If you are giving away the stuff that you're supposed to, one, keep safe and two, fix, why would I ever drop my laptop off at your office at your shop?
You have to get your laptop fixed.
You're going to drop it off with a guy who just calls up the news organizations and shares all your shit with them and makes a backup hard drive.
That's like a therapist calling up the cops and being like, yo, this guy's abusing his wife or something.
Well, you probably shouldn't.
Not the best example, but yeah.
Yeah, he's running out of examples.
Yeah, maybe kleptomaniac is better.
He loves petty theft.
That's his thing.
Be ready for him.
Yeah.
And the takeaway from this is that crack is back, baby.
Crack is back.
Crack is back.
New York is back.
Yo, 2020 is going to be the 80s over again, baby.
Go.
All right, guys.
You just listened to a clip from our weekly Patreon episode.
If you want to continue to listen to that episode, subscribe, join the asshole Army Patreon.
Keep it tight and keep it flagrant with us.
You can do that at patreon.com/slash flagrant to Indulge