#TwitterFiles Accountability: Former Twitter Execs Face Congress. Plus, Rogan's "Anti-Semitism" | SYSTEM UPDATE #37
#TwitterFiles Accountability: Former Twitter Execs Face Congress. Plus, Rogan's "Anti-Semitism" | SYSTEM UPDATE #37
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Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our new live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, we report on the hearings that took place all day today in the House Committee on Oversight and Reform.
As three former senior Twitter executives and one low-level pro-censorship whistleblower answered questions for more than eight hours on how that company decided what to censor, whether parts of the government attempted to influence those decisions and whether they succeeded, and why Twitter specifically decided to brute-censor reporting from the New York Post on Joe Biden's business activities in Ukraine and China,
And then proceeded to lock the nation's oldest newspaper out of its Twitter account for more than two weeks right as the 2020 presidential election was approaching.
We've covered that censorship decision multiple times on this show because in our view that specific act constitutes one of the gravest attempts yet to weaponize censorship to interfere in our presidential elections in decades if not ever.
We'll show you some of the key exchanges from today's hearing what we learned and what it all means moving forward.
Also tonight The nation's most popular podcast host, the comedian Joe Rogan, is the target of widespread denunciations this week, from many on the right and the left, due to a joke he told on his program that his critics believe expressed vicious anti-Semitism.
Notably, very notably, the anti-Rogan denunciations are being led by many people who have built their careers on opposing cancel culture and woke mobs and who they say, and we agree, people who often have hair trigger sensitivities to lurking bigotry.
We'll examine this illuminating controversy and ask whether consistent standards are being applied in general and to Rogan specifically.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
The House Committee on Oversight and Reform spent the day today grilling four former Twitter employees about the company's censorship policies and especially how those policies were applied in the weeks leading up to the 2020 presidential election.
For more than eight hours today, both Republican and Democratic members of that committee posed questions to former Chief Legal Counsel of Twitter Vijay Aghati, former Twitter Deputy Counsel James Baker, who before that notably worked as the FBI's chief lawyer,
Twitter's former head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, that cultural leftist caricature very familiar to viewers of this program, primarily for his starring role in the Twitter Files reporting, and former Twitter employee Anika Collier-Navarro, who Democrats were quite amusingly trying to herald as some sort of courageous whistleblower for her criticisms of Twitter that perfectly aligned with the standard left liberal desire for greater big tech censorship.
In other words, she was there, this brave whistleblower, to keep telling committee Democrats that the problem with Twitter is not that it censors too much, but that it doesn't censor conservatives aggressively or frequently enough.
Now, the context for this hearing, which we're so happy has finally arrived, is vital to understand.
Like I said a couple of minutes ago, I regard the decision, and it wasn't only by Twitter, but also by Facebook, to manipulate the ability of Americans to access critical reporting, not about Hunter Biden, but about Joe Biden, right before the 2020 election, was probably right before the 2020 election, was probably the single gravest example of weaponizing censorship in order to manipulate the outcome of elections, democratic elections, in at least the last several decades, if not ever.
And there's all sorts of reasons why this ended up being such a serious matter, in part because it's illustrative of broader trends to attempt to convert the internet, The promise of which early on was that it would liberate all of us from centralized state and corporate control and would enable us to communicate freely with one another without the need to have this arbiter or this mediator being centralized in corporate and state power in between us that we could
communicate freely with our fellow citizens.
Instead it has become probably the most potent weapon yet.
For propagandizing a population because instead of allowing this free and open inquiry that the internet was supposed to empower, instead it's now being used to censor any kind of views that are designed to challenge establishment orthodoxy.
It's this one-way battering ram of messaging that perfectly aligns virtually always with the US government, generally the US security state specifically, And the fact that this is a case of two of the most important social media platforms doing exactly that, censoring, reporting right before the presidential election, days before, weeks before, a very hotly contested election.
Joe Biden was certified as the winner of that election because he won three or four states by a very narrow margin of 70,000 or 80,000 votes going a different way and that election would have been certified differently.
We will never know whether or not this impediment that was put into place to prevent Americans from learning about what turned out, everyone now acknowledges except for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, everyone now acknowledges was true and authentic documents and true and authentic reporting, whether that would everyone now acknowledges was true and authentic documents and true and authentic reporting, whether
But whether it would have made the difference or not, the obvious attempt on the part of the intelligence community, then corporate media outlets, and then big tech to unite and keep this information away from American citizens,
or at the very least, lead them to believe that it should be seen as or at the very least, lead them to believe that it should be seen as discrediting based on the CIA lie that it was Russian disinformation was undeniably a major escalation in the use of censorship in this country, and it deserves, at the very least, a Even though Democrats spent much of the day whining today that this is some kind of a distraction from the things that really matter.
Free speech really matters.
A free press really matters.
And the role that big tech is playing in our lives and in our democracy, and it's not just increasing ability, but it's increasing willingness to use that power to manipulate what we're hearing and what we're thinking on behalf of the political factions that it serves most loyally, cannot be minimized or dismissed, as Democrats spent the day doing, for obvious reasons.
Namely that this censorship regime And one of the things that was real today, if you listen to any part of this hearing, let alone all of it as we did today, was that these four people who were brought before the committee to answer questions, three of them senior executives at Twitter, the other a low-level employee who is deemed to be a whistleblower, If you just listen to them at all, they're immediately recognizable.
James Baker, who was the second in command of Ajay Aghati as Deputy General Counsel of Twitter, who came from the FBI where he was the chief lawyer of the FBI, now then suddenly at Twitter making decisions about our elections.
He is very readily identifiable as someone who's from the U.S.
security state, who hated Donald Trump for the reasons they all did, that he brought instability to their orthodoxies.
And then Vijay Aghati and Yoel Roth and this fourth person who was brought in as the whistleblower are just very standard left liberals.
We've shown you Yoel Roth at length before, the way he speaks, the things he says, how he thinks.
It comes right out of left-wing academia.
Vajayagati is a little bit more sophisticated in her presentation, but there's no doubting the fact that she's just an establishment devotee to the Democratic Party.
And then this fourth person was kind of a caricature, even more so than Yoel Roth, of a pro-censorship leftist looking at free speech as violence, believing that free speech constantly has to be weighed against safety.
All of these new liberal left doctrines that have been invented in order to justify increasing control over the Internet.
Now, I think a timeline to remember here what happened is absolutely vital because what has been done, and this is often the case, is there's an attempt to tell you this is a really complex series of events, that it's filled with all kinds of detailed complexities that can't really be discerned, and trying to get you basically to look away, decide this is past history, there's no point in looking into this.
None of it can ever really be resolved, and the truth is exactly the opposite.
There's great clarity and simplicity to the timeline of what took place.
So let's review that.
First of all, the context for all of the 2020 election, and this isn't me saying this, this was a very lengthy article in Time Magazine that was remarkably candid in acknowledging that virtually the entire American establishment was united to ensure Donald Trump's defeat in the 2020 election.
They engage in all kinds of maneuvers and all kinds of tactics that previously would have been unthinkable.
The way in which they aligned across political ideologies and political parties to make sure that Donald Trump didn't get a second term was also highly unusual.
Essentially, all of American power and institutions of power were on the same side in this election, something that normally doesn't happen in American elections.
Time Magazine article was essentially describing what has now become the Sam Harris mentality.
As you recall, Sam Harris in a now notorious podcast said that he believes that the censorship of this story, of the New York Post reporting, And anything that was done to ensure Donald Trump's defeat was justified.
Censorship, lying, manipulation.
He was honest enough to acknowledge what he thinks, which is that in his mind Donald Trump is such a unique threat to the American way of life, such a singular evil.
That by definition, anything that's done for the noble cause of ensuring his defeat was morally justifiable.
Classic ends justify the means argument, even if the means in question are things like censorship, CIA interference in our elections, all things that are not supposed to happen in a healthy, normal democracy.
To Sam Harris, He was expressing the view quite overtly that all of it was justified as long as it was done to stop Trump and that was clearly the view of the establishment generally.
They spent all year laying their groundwork for this and in this specific case was an extension of that rotted mentality.
On October 14th, just a little bit, two weeks more than right before the 2020 election, the New York Post published an article that at least was relevant and interesting in assessing Joe Biden's integrity.
It described actions that his son Hunter Biden attempted to get him to take, and at least some of which Joe Biden did in fact take, To benefit the energy company in Ukraine, which was paying Hunter Biden $50,000 a month to sit on the board of, something they were doing quite clearly for only one reason.
It was not to tap into Hunter Biden's impressive expertise in the energy industry or in Eastern Europe.
He had no such expertise.
It was because the person running Ukraine since at least 2014 was his father, Joe Biden.
He was acting as kind of an imperial overseer or consul of Ukraine.
So if you were an energy company in Ukraine, like Burisma, facing the possibility of criminal charges and investigations, the person with whom you would want to wield influence most is not a Ukrainian politician, but the one who was actually running Ukraine, which was Joe Biden, when he was the Vice President of the United States.
And then In order to do that, you don't go and hire or pay the son of an American politician, you go and hire the son of the US politician, which is what Burisma did.
And Joe Biden was heavily involved in decision making about whether to fire certain Ukrainian prosecutors.
The micromanaging of Ukraine by the United States, right on the other side of the Russian border, It was so extensive that it went down to the level of which particular prosecutor they wanted replaced, which ones they wanted remaining, something that obviously had a direct effect on Burisma.
Now, the Biden defense is that the demand that this one particular prosecutor be fired or removed, that Biden demanded and threatened Ukraine to withhold a billion dollars in aid unless they did it, was the position not just of the US government, but also the EU.
But whatever else is true, when you have an American politician running a country, and then an energy company in that country is paying his son $50,000 a month blatantly for influence peddling,
That deserves a lot of investigative scrutiny, especially when Joe Biden becomes the presidential frontrunner, which is what he was on October 14th when the New York Post published emails that they said came from Hunter Biden's laptop, which happens to be true, shedding light on what Joe Biden was doing in Ukraine.
On October 15th, the following day, the New York Post published a second story based on the same set of documents from Hunter Biden's laptop, describing what Joe Biden and the Biden family were doing in pursuing profitable business ventures in China, trading on Joe Biden's name as somebody who wielded a great deal of influence as vice president, who very much might one day be the American president.
And whether or not there were elements in China seeking to funnel money to Joe Biden and his son and his family to garner influence.
We can go through all the details about the deal memo that was part of that laptop that described how 10% of the profits was reserved for the big guy, which Hunter Biden's business partner, Tony Bobulinski, said referred to Joe Biden But leaving that aside for now, there's no question but that these two stories, what Joe Biden was doing in Ukraine, what Joe Biden was doing in China, were of the utmost journalistic relevance.
That's exactly what you want the media doing.
And because those stories were incriminating of the Biden family and of Joe Biden, because they raised doubts about Joe Biden's integrity, And they played into a storyline that had already been emerging, which was that Joe Biden was trying to enrich his son by using his influence to benefit his family.
It was an alarming story to people who were desperate to ensure Donald Trump's defeat, which is basically most of the political establishment.
They were petrified by these stories for obvious reasons.
It's very high stakes two weeks out from a presidential election.
Anything and everything is taken very seriously, let alone an explosive archive that comes from Joe Biden's son, shedding all new light on what this family was doing.
So clearly this posed a danger to the number one priority goal of the American establishment and the US security state, which was Donald Trump's defeat.
And so when these two articles were published, The establishment immediately sprang into action.
There were instant claims that this was a repeat of the 2016 election in which Russia was trying to interfere in the outcome of the election to help Donald Trump get elected.
But remember, what happened in 2016, regardless of what you think of Russia's role, Was that similarly relevant and authentic documents were released about Hillary Clinton and the Clinton campaign, something that undoubtedly was of public interest.
This was the front runner back then in 2016 to the presidential election.
All of these documents that were published by WikiLeaks, that came from the email inbox of the Democratic National Committee and John Podesta, the Clinton campaign chairman, shed obvious light On what Hillary Clinton was thinking and doing, which is something you'd want to know as a journalist and as a citizen.
And the publication of that, those authentic documents by WikiLeaks, obviously played a role in the outcome of the election.
That's what journalism is for.
You tell the American public the secrets about the candidates they don't want known.
And oftentimes, that's how it's done, through huge archives.
So the establishment was petrified they were going to do that again.
And when they saw this reporting, they instantly blamed Russia, even though they had no evidence to do so.
And immediately, on October 14th and then 15th, the day the stories emerged, first Twitter announced that they were banning any attempt to link to the New York Post stories.
If you tried on Twitter to link to the New York Post stories, you got a message from Twitter before the tweet was posted saying, this is an unhealthy or a prohibited Link.
If you even tried to post it in your direct messages, in your private conversations on Twitter, the same thing happened.
The link was just banned.
You could not use any link to the New York Post reporting for either of those first two stories on Twitter's site.
People have forgotten that it wasn't just Twitter, but Facebook that also censored that story.
They announced through their director of communications, who coincidentally happened to be somebody who had spent his entire life working for the Democratic Party on Capitol Hill, Andy Stone is his name.
He worked for the committees, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the House Majority PAC.
These entities that are designed to ensure that the Democratic Party remains in power.
He worked for Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer.
He worked for a member of the House who was a Democrat.
He was a Democrat through and through.
That's what his whole life was before he got to Facebook.
And that's who Facebook had announced to the public that they were going to tinker with their algorithms to block spread of that New York Post story to ensure that many people, millions of Americans, would not get exposed to it on Facebook.
Until he said they could conduct a third-party fact check to determine whether the materials were or were not authentic.
And to this day, that fact check has never been provided, and the reason is obvious.
Facebook, it turns out, banned or algorithmically suppressed a story that turned out to be totally true.
So either that Facebook, that fact check didn't happen and they lied that it would, or it did happen and it concluded that the documents were real and Facebook ended up suppressing the story anyway.
But that is a major interference in our American elections.
And then on October 19th, Just five days after the New York Post began its reporting, 51 former members of the intelligence community, the CIA, Homeland Security, all the same people who are constantly interfering, James Clapper and John Brennan, that whole gang, issued a letter that asserted that whole gang, issued a letter that asserted that the publication of these documents from the New York Times had, quote, all of the trade hallmarks of Russian disinformation.
These 51 intelligence agents admitted they had no evidence to support that claim.
They said that explicitly in that letter.
And yet the very first reporter to trumpet it was Natasha Bertrand, then of Politico.
She's since been promoted to CNN for her role in spreading disinformation.
That's how you get hired at CNN.
Was the first to publish the screaming headline that the Hunter Biden laptop and the documents used by the New York Post to do that reporting was, quote, Russian disinformation.
And from there, virtually every major media outlet in the country Not all, but most ratified that lie over and over and over and over again.
And then that was what Big Tech used as well to justify the censorship decisions.
The Twitter executives said at the time that they were justifying this because it violated Twitter's policy against citing hacked materials.
They had no idea that these materials, whether they were hacked.
The Twitter files reporting that Elon Musk enabled that, Matt Taibbi and Barry Weiss, and other people, reporters who we've had on our show, Lee Fung and Michael Schellenberger and others, demonstrated that even at the time that James Baker, the former FBI General Counsel, was urging that Twitter block this story, They had to invent some rule.
They couldn't just censor it because they wanted Joe Biden to win.
They had to pretend they had some rule that was violated by the story.
They pointed to the ban on linking to hacked materials.
Even though inside Twitter they were admitting they had no evidence to make that conclusion that these materials were hacked.
And as it turned out, that was a falsehood.
That was a lie.
These stories, these materials were not hacked.
So Twitter had no basis for censoring.
Facebook to this day has never acknowledged they made a mistake in what they did.
Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg did go on Joe Rogan's program, and when asked about that by Joe Rogan, said the reason Facebook did that was because the FBI spent months warning them that something like this was probably going to happen and was going to come from Russia.
Which is why they ended up believing the claim that this was a Russian disinformation campaign because the FBI was telling them for months, were priming them for months to get ready to censor any information that could have helped Donald Trump win the election by shedding negative light on Joe Biden.
Twitter, though, has acknowledged the error.
Jack Dorsey, the CEO and founder, apologized.
And even today at these hearings, these senior Twitter executives repeatedly acknowledged that they made a mistake, not only in banning the link, to the New York Post stories but also been locking the New York Post out of their Twitter account for two weeks.
So all that reporting the New York Times was doing based on this archive the New York Post was not able to post on Twitter and get maximum circulation for it.
Because Twitter was demanding that they delete their original tweet that promoted their first story in the New York Post, justifiably was refusing to do so, saying, why should we delete our authentic reporting in order to get back onto Twitter?
We're not going to do that.
So Twitter's position, though, is that they made a mistake.
It's a pretty huge mistake, given that they ended up censoring genuine, authentic reporting about the person who would just two weeks later go on to become the President of the United States.
So that's why the House Republicans, the Democrats obviously had zero interest in finding out what happened here and investigating any of it.
They took a Republican majority to do that and they convened today their first oversight hearing where they subpoenaed the three senior executives who are responsible for that decision and many other censorship decisions, suppressing anti-establishment voices, particularly on the right but also on the left.
And then the Democrats called this whistleblower who was just there to voice her critique of Twitter that aligns perfectly with the left wing of the Democratic Party that Twitter should be censoring more, not less.
Especially should have been censoring Trump more, should have been protecting AOC better.
That's what she was there for.
Now, the big question That we didn't know for sure before this hearing was how much information were we going to learn about the role that the U.S.
government played in those decisions to censor.
We have a lot of information that the FBI was trying to sense to influence Twitter's decision making when it came to censorship and big techs in multiple ways.
Before the Twitter files, which became the most important evidence showing that, The Intercept, at the end of October, in a story by Ken Klippenstein and Lee Fong, obtained secret documents from Homeland Security that revealed the very extensive plan Homeland Security has to ensure they can play a vital role in telling these companies what they should and shouldn't Censor or allow.
That was what that whole disinformation czar was supposed to do inside Homeland Security was formalize and officialize the government's pronouncements about what is true and what is false with the expectation that big tech would almost be obligated to censor anything the government labels false.
That was a lot of evidence of big tech's involvement.
The Mark Zuckerberg admission on Joe Rogan was also serious evidence, as was the fact that the Twitter files revealed all new evidence showing how deeply involved the FBI was with Twitter.
If we bring this first one up, this is just one example from Michael Schellenberger on December 19th.
2022 that came from his installment of the Twitter files and what he shows here is that pressure had been growing inside the intelligence community for Twitter to censor in anticipation of the election.
Quote, we have seen a sustained of uncoordinated effort by the intelligence community to push us to share more information and change our API policies.
They are probing and pushing everywhere they can, including by whispering to Congressional staff.
This was Twitter Internally, lamenting the fact that there was so much pressure coming from the FBI and the CIA and Homeland Security trying to get them to censor in a way that would favor the Democratic Party.
And we can't review all the Twitter file revelations.
We spent many shows, we devoted many shows to those revelations.
We interviewed many of the reporters.
Go back and look at those.
What they established above all, the most important thing, was that these were not autonomous decisions by Twitter.
To censor the Hunter Biden story, to ban Donald Trump from Twitter even though he was sitting president of the United States, to ban Marjorie Taylor Greene despite being an elected representative.
Instead, this is constantly a tidal wave of attempted coercion and influence from obviously very powerful forces inside the government that if you're a big tech, And you know you have big contracts opportunities with the Pentagon as Amazon does, or the CIA as Amazon does, and Microsoft does, and Google does.
You're going to take seriously their insistence on what you should censor.
And if they tell you that they need you to censor it in the name of national security, you're going to listen even more closely.
So we know there was all kinds of Ties between Facebook and Twitter, and that's what these executives set out most of all to deny today.
So let's begin with a statement by Vijaya Gadi, the general counsel of Twitter, who has become identified as one of the key players in causing Twitter to censor right-wing voices.
And here's a taste of the kinds of things she had to say today.
At no point did Twitter otherwise prevent tweeting, reporting, discussing, or describing the contents of Mr. Biden's laptop.
People could and did talk about the contents of the laptop on Twitter or anywhere else, including other much larger platforms, but they were prevented from sharing the primary documents on Twitter.
Still, over the course of that day, it became clear that Twitter had not fully appreciated the impact of that policy on free press and others.
As Mr. Dorsey testified before Congress on multiple occasions, Twitter changed its policy within 24 hours and admitted its initial action was wrong.
This policy revision immediately allowed people to tweet the original articles with the embedded source materials.
Relying on its long-standing practice not to retroactively apply new policies, Twitter informed the New York Post that it could immediately begin tweeting when it deleted the original tweets, which would have freed them to retweet the same content again.
The New York Post chose not to delete its original tweets, so Twitter made an exception after two weeks to retroactively apply the new policy to the Post's tweets.
In hindsight, Twitter should have reinstated the Post account immediately.
So, they have thrown up to those mistakes.
Jack Dorsey did.
They can't sit there and justify what they did.
It's impossible.
Particularly because the claim that they invoked to justify the censorship turned out to be completely false.
It was a CIA lie.
But just note how significant just that admission is.
First of all, even though it's true that the Twitter ban on those links endured only 24 hours, it completely maligned the story in the eyes of the American voter.
That Twitter found it to be so fraudulent, and that it came from Russia, this is Twitter putting its institutional support behind these lies, that it shaped how the American public viewed these stories.
Joe Biden himself, every time he was asked about it by reporters or it was raised in the presidential debate with President Trump, immediately accused whoever asked him of spreading Russian disinformation.
These lies were weaponized over and over, and Twitter's support for it institutionally played a vital role in that.
Secondly, none of this accounts for the role Facebook played, a much, much larger platform, And we don't know to this day how long Facebook's algorithmic suppression lasted, what effect that had, how many people ended up being manipulated as a result of Facebook's doing that.
But also, again, Facebook joining Twitter for however long and endorsing this outright lie that this is Russian disinformation also manipulated the American public and how they thought about it.
Beyond that, this is what gave the media the opening that they took eagerly to ratify this lie over and over.
You can go, we've showed you many times before on every news network from NBC and CBS to CNN.
They were bringing one member of the U.S.
security state on after the next to repeat the lie that this was Russian disinformation, which not only Minimize the importance of the story, but played into the Democrats narrative, the number one narrative of the Democrats in the media for four years, that somehow Trump was a tool of the Kremlin.
That's what this was really designed to do as well.
Twitter jumping on board with that just demonstrated how these people who were called before Congress today, who ran Twitter for all those years, were clearly operatives of the Democratic Party and were using censorship, brute censorship, in order to do it.
And then that game playing that she noted at the end where it was kind of a game of chicken, Twitter was saying to the New York Post, well, you can come on back onto the platform as long as you delete your tweet that we've decreed to be in violation of rule.
And the New York Post said we're not going to accept that condition.
I respect the New York Post for doing that.
I would do that too if I were a journalist.
I knew I had reported a story accurately and the only way I could use a platform is if I deleted my own reporting.
An acknowledgment that I had done something wrong is a condition to being used to get back on.
It took Twitter two weeks To relent and tell the New York Post you can come back onto our platform even without deleting that tweet.
And of course, that was two weeks of reporting the New York Post was doing at the critical moment with exclusive access to this laptop to report on the Biden family and Joe Biden that Twitter users, and therefore millions of people, especially journalists who use Twitter all the time, could not see and were not impacted by.
These were mistakes that they made, and it's nice they're acknowledging that.
But what's critical to remember is how inconsequential this was.
And anyone who tells you that it had no effect on the election is not telling the truth.
They have no way of knowing that, especially with such a close election.
Here is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and she said several things during this hearing.
One of the things she did was try to commandeer the hearing to make it about herself.
She out of nowhere began complaining and screaming and whining about how Twitter didn't censor enough tweets about her.
I know you'll be shocked to learn that she tried to turn it into a hearing about herself.
In her own victimhood, claiming that Donald Trump's tweets inspired hatred against her, and demanding to know why Twitter didn't do more to delete them.
In other words, she wanted more censorship from Twitter.
That was her anger, was that they allowed the sitting President of the United States to speak too freely, and they should have protected AOC more from the President's comments.
She also, I think she was the only one on either side of the aisle in this committee hearing who kept asserting that the authenticity of these materials remains in doubt to this very day.
Nobody thinks that.
The New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, CBS have all acknowledged, now that the election is safely over, that they could fully authenticate these materials.
It takes a level of audacity or maybe it's just ignorance.
I actually think that's what it was.
She has no idea what she's talking about.
She shows up for these hearings looking for dramatic moments that will viralize on social media.
I don't think she knows that every major media outlet has authenticated these materials.
The reality is I authenticated them.
Many media outlets authenticated them before the election.
But the ones she trusts have now come out and said there's no question, not only are they authentic, but the story about how they made their way to first to the FBI and then to the Rudy Giuliani in the New York Post was entirely true, which is that Hunter Biden took the laptop in to have it repaired and never came back to pick it up.
And after 90 days, the laptop owner, under his poor policy, it becomes his.
He gave it to the FBI when he realized it was Hunter Biden's and then to Rudy Giuliani's.
That's actually what happened.
Russia had no involvement in it.
And she spent the day, either out of ignorance or malice, Continuously insinuating that this whole thing is still in doubt.
And that's why Twitter did the right thing.
But what she's really angry about is any of this is even being looked into at all.
Watch what she said.
Washington Post article now warning about Hunter Biden laptop disinformation.
The guy who leaked it.
Here's the deal.
Before I even get into my questions, I think that the story here with the Washington Post reporting is that, they're saying right here, when the New York Post first reported in October 2020 that it had obtained contents of a laptop computer allegedly owned by Joe Biden's son Hunter, there was an immediate roadblock faced by other news outlets that hoped to corroborate reporting, as many did.
The newspaper wasn't sharing what it obtained.
Okay, let me just stop there and say, She's trying to act like this is something that justifies suspicion about the authenticity of this archive.
This is how journalism works all the time.
When we got the Snowden reporting, And we began reporting on its contents.
We didn't run around handing it to any media outlet that asked.
That would be a violation of our source obligations to keep the materials under the framework that we had agreed with our source as how it would be reported.
You don't just give away your exclusive material that a source has trusted you with to other outlets just because they ask.
And if you say you won't, which most papers, you think the New York Times, when they get an exclusive story, We'll give it away to Fox News just because Fox News asked and said, we want to verify that what you're saying is actually true.
The New York Times is going to say, this is our story.
There's nothing suspicious about that.
That's how newspapers generally behave.
Beyond that, there were all kinds of indicia to know right away that the material was authentic.
There were all kinds of ways to authenticate it, and I've talked about those before, about how I was able to, and that's why I was willing to put my name on the story, and let the intercept over their refusal to do so.
And Fox News, and the New York Post, and the Daily Caller, many of them produced concrete evidence verifying and authenticating the material.
It's just that they didn't want to hear that.
So, this argument that she's making, that because the New York Post wasn't willing to make it available to Ben Collins at NBC News, justifies the suspicion of where his authenticity is moronic.
That's, though, what she's doing, is the whole day was spent trying to justify Twitter's censorship.
Let's listen to the rest.
New York Post had this alleged information and was trying to publish it without any corroboration, without any backup information.
They were trying to publish it to Twitter.
Twitter did not let them and now they were upset.
I believe that political operatives who sought to inject explosive disinformation with the Washington Post couldn't get away with it.
And now they're livid.
Do you see she continues to call This authentic archive, disinformation.
I mean, she's just a blatant liar.
I'm really asking that.
Even a lot of the Democrats on the committee were willing to acknowledge that the materials are authentic.
And they'll say, well, at the time it was unclear and Twitter was grappling with, no one to this day calls that disinformation anymore except her.
She's essentially lying and saying that these materials that we all know are true were disinformation.
Do what again?
What are they trying to do again?
Get accurate information about the most powerful politicians in the country and then inform the American people about what they revealed?
I hope they're trying to do that again.
again.
A whole hearing.
Do what again?
What are they trying to do again?
Get accurate information about the most powerful politicians in the country and then inform the American people about what they revealed?
I hope they're trying to do that again.
That's what journalists are supposed to be doing.
But instead, the journalists, most of them in the United States, had a much different mission in mind before the They weren't interested in reporting on Joe Biden.
Just like in 2016, so many of them remained angry that a few of us reported on those WikiLeaks documents and what they reflected.
They don't want accurate information about Democratic Party leaders being disclosed to the American people.
They want them hidden.
That's exactly what she's saying.
She's angry.
She considers, to this day, what the New York Post did to be immoral, even though it was accurate reporting, because the only moral metric they recognize, as Sam Harris said, is whether or not it helps defeat Donald Trump.
About a 24-hour hiccup in a right-wing political operation.
That is why we are here right now.
And it is, it's just an abuse of public resources, an abuse of public time.
We could be talking about healthcare, we could be talking about bringing down the cost of prescription drugs, we could be talking about abortion rights, civil rights, voting rights, but instead we're talking about Hunter Biden's half-fake laptop story.
I mean, this is an embarrassment.
But I'll go into it.
Ms.
Navarro.
What does that mean?
Half-fake?
How is it half-fake?
What does that even mean?
The whole thing is real.
There are other committees that are talking about prescription drug costs and inflation and abortion and whatever else she thinks is more important.
But again, it's hard to think of things more important than whether Americans have the ability to speak freely on the internet or whether a union of Security state agencies and the intelligence community will unite with the largest media corporations and big tech to manipulate what Americans can and can't hear based on lies, outright lies that came from the CIA, in order to manipulate an election.
If that isn't relevant for Congress to do, I don't know what is.
Many of the Democrats on the committee actually did spend the day justifying their pro-censorship views.
There were at least three new members of the Democratic Party who were on this committee, and all three of them rose in defense of censorship, arguing that censorship of political views is justifiable.
I keep saying this and I feel like sometimes people think I'm being hyperbolic deliberately when I do, but I'm not.
I'm just being literal.
A major plank of the Democratic Party is to increase the amount of censorship Big Tech does in order to prevent voices the Democratic Party dislikes or viewpoints the Democratic Party dislikes from being heard.
That is a major tactic of theirs.
It should be surprising to hear members of Congress explicitly defend censorship.
But it's not anymore.
They really don't believe in the First Amendment.
They don't believe in the values of free speech.
They're not bothered to hear that the government is trying to intervene with Big Tech's censorship decision.
And again, this is based on total ignorance.
This is what you heard over and over as they did it, which is this The only thing that censorship advocates know, you wind them up and they say it, they'll say, you can't yell fire in a crowded theater.
Listen to watch them say that.
Here is this whistleblower at Twitter.
This is how she said it to defend censorship.
Or President Trump tweeted something controversial.
It was sent to my team's desk.
Every day, we had to decide whether a particular piece of content equated to yelling fire in a crowded theater.
My work at Twitter and subsequently at Twitch put me in the middle of key events in history.
Put her in the middle of key events in history.
Like whether to censor or not by determining whether or not someone was yelling fire in a crowded movie theater.
Here is one of the new members of the Democratic Party, Summer Lee.
She's a little bit squaddish.
I don't think she's joining the squad officially, but she's expressed support for them.
She was supported by that same kind of Democratic Party, liberal left infrastructure like DSA and Justice Democrats as this new, exciting, progressive.
Here's what she had to say in defense of censorship.
I'm not the only lawyer in the room.
So, you all know that while the Constitution does provide us the right to free speech, there are, of course, limitations.
As Ms.
Navarroli pointed out, we cannot yell fire in a crowded theater.
Compromising freedom of speech.
This is 102 years old now, this yelling fire in a crowded movie theater thing.
And it's how the people who are least informed about constitutional law and the First Amendment and free speech try to justify censorship.
And it's all over the world.
I'm constantly involved in debates and controversies in Brazil about free speech.
I've done reporting on this show about the escalating regime of censorship in Brazil through their judiciary, and you hear this over there as well, over here as well, to justify censorship.
You can't yell, fire in a crowded movie theater.
So let me just take a minute to explain why this is such a worthless and ignorant invocation And it's very ironic as well.
This you-can't-yell-fire-in-a-crowded-movie-theater justification for censorship came from a 1919 Supreme Court case by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes.
And it was part of a trilogy of cases where people in the United States, American citizens, were being prosecuted under the Espionage Act of 1917 One of the most repressive laws in the history of the United States.
It's the law that they use to prosecute Julian Assange and Daniel Ellsberg and Edward Snowden and whoever decides to blow the whistle on the government.
The purpose of the Espionage Act of 1917, 1917 was an important year in U.S.
history because that was when Woodrow Wilson was trying to involve the country in World War I and there were many people, especially on the left, opposed to that involvement.
And it was really designed to criminalize left-wing dissent to America's involvement in World War I. There were people on the right also on isolationist grounds opposed to involvement in that war.
And they used that Espionage Act to prosecute several leftist leaders Including Eugene Debs, and that's what this case is, this Schenck case.
Mr. Schenck was an American citizen who had published a petition arguing for the repeal of the draft of conscription, and the state charged him with felonies just for advocating that the draft should be reversed.
And their theory was, in this case, that by arguing against conscription, he was in fact obstructing it.
That his words weren't just words, but actions.
Does that sound familiar?
That's the standard left-wing attempt to criminalize speech.
Ironically, it was first used to criminalize and prosecute leftists who were opposed to the US role in World War I.
And the opinion by Justice Holmes in which he said, "Well, you can't scream fire in a crowded movie theater to justify this prosecution that the court upheld," was in that context.
Ultimately, Holmes himself recanted it.
Throughout the rest of his life, he was writing dissents saying, "Free speech is too valuable to sacrifice it at the altar of an emergency.
Even that Schenck case said that the only reason we're allowing this speech to be criminalized is because the war makes it justified and necessary to do so.
In peacetime, this would be perfectly acceptable speech, but just because of the war, we think the government needs more powers to censor.
And then ultimately, it was effectively overruled, this case was, by the Brandenburg decision in 1967, which said that all speech, all political opinions, are constitutionally protected, even advocating violence explicitly, as long as you're not doing something to imminently create violence.
And so the entire context of this case, the fact that it was recanted by the person who wrote it, the fact that it's not even good law anymore, and the fact that no one's talking about people yelling fire in a crowded theater.
They're talking about people who are expressing political opinions.
That's the nature of the First Amendment.
There's no political content to yelling fire in a crowded theater.
That's why it was such a good example to justify censorship with.
What we're talking about here is political opinions.
Joe Biden being corrupt because his attempts to benefit and profit with his son in Ukraine or in China, that has nothing to do with screaming fire in a crowded movie theater.
It's the simple-minded way that they've given people, like we just showed you, to justify censorship.
So whenever you hear anyone using that example, that is a hallmark of somebody who doesn't know what they're talking about.
The entire hearing today revealed not just that the security state attempted to influence Twitter's decisions, that Twitter had a systematic regime of censoring conservative voices because the people running Twitter under Jack Dorsey were all left liberal caricatures, but it also revealed, most that Twitter had a systematic regime of censoring conservative voices because the people running Twitter under Jack Dorsey were all left liberal
That this version of the Democratic Party believes in censorship, wants more of it, and intends on an ongoing basis to use their union with the corporate media and with the U.S.
security state to demand greater and greater levels of internet censorship.
That's what they want.
They're saying all day, we don't think Twitter's problem was that it's censored too little.
We think Twitter's problem is that it's censored too much.
So now we're going to shift gears a little bit.
There is a pretty intense controversy, one I find very interesting, that has swirled and it continues to swirl around the nation's most popular podcaster, the comedian Joe Rogan.
It was due to comments that we're about to show you.
Four or five days ago when he was speaking about the decision by the House Republicans to remove Ilhan Omar from the House Foreign Affairs Committee as a result of comments she made that many House Republicans and many House Democrats believed were anti-Semitic, he was essentially defending Ilhan Omar, saying he thought it was unnecessary to remove her or unjustified to remove her, and his guests who agreed with him on that
It was Crystal Ball, the longtime Democratic Party commentator who is now much more independent.
She hosts a very popular podcast called Breaking Point with Sagar and Jetty.
That was his guest.
And what Joe Rogan said offended huge numbers of people, including people who have made their careers, built their careers by opposing cancel culture and by arguing that comedians should be allowed to tell jokes without having their reputations destroyed over it, even if those jokes offend minority groups.
Now, just to underscore the point before we get to the Rogan video, I want to show you A part of the Netflix special that the comedian Dave Chappelle did that you may recall caused a great deal of controversy as well.
He wasn't accused of being anti-Semitic, although he was absolutely accused of that because of a recent monologue that he did on Saturday Night Live.
But on this Netflix special in 2021, the allegation was that the jokes he told were transphobic.
They made him transphobic.
There were all kinds of demands that Netflix pulled this special.
There was a walkout by Netflix employees.
And I want to remind you of what he said, the jokes he told, how aggressive they were in mocking the LGBT community and the trans community.
Let's listen to what he said.
They've cancelled people that are more powerful than me.
They cancelled J.K.
Rowling.
My God, J.K.
Rowling wrote all the Harry Potter books by herself.
She sold so many books the Bible worries about her.
And I cancelled it because she said in an interview, and this is not exactly what she said, but effectually, she said, gender was a fact.
And then the trans community got mad as shit, they started calling her a TERF.
I didn't even know what the fuck that was.
But I know that trans people make up words to win arguments.
So I looked it up.
TERF is an acronym.
Stands for Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist.
This is a real thing.
This is a group of women that hate transgender.
They don't hate transgender women, but they look at trans women the way we blacks might look at blackface.
It offends them.
Like, ooh, this bitch is doing an impression of me.
Now I shouldn't speak on this, because I am not a woman, nor am I a trans.
But as we've established, I am a feminist.
That's right.
I'm team TERF.
I agree.
I agree, man.
Gender is a fact.
You have to look at it from a woman's perspective.
Look at it like this.
Caitlyn Jenner, whom I've met, wonderful person, Caitlyn Jenner was voted Woman of the Year.
Her first year as a woman.
Ain't that something?
Beat every bitch in Detroit, she's better than all of you.
Never even had a period.
Ain't that something?
Oh, I'd be mad as shit if I was a woman.
So, in that 1 minute and 22 second clip, Dave Chappelle packed pretty much every trope there is about the trans community.
And he even went further.
He said, trans people like to make up terms, invent terms, to victimize themselves.
He said, essentially, there's really no such thing as a trans woman.
It's kind of a construct because gender is a fact.
It's more like blackface, men pretending to be women.
I mean, every single possible thing that he could have said That from the trans perspective, the perspective of trans people, not all of them, but their loudest advocates, that constitutes transphobia, he said, not just in this 1 minute 22 second clip, but throughout the show.
And there was a big controversy about that.
Is Dave Chappelle bigoted?
Is he transphobic?
And there were a lot of people who rose to his defense, including people on the American right, people who defined themselves as free speech advocates, who said, essentially, you have to give comedians broad leeway to be able to make jokes, including at other people's expense.
That it's okay for them to poke fun at particular groups, that's what comedy is.
And that when it comes to hotly debated topics like gender ideology, you have to allow people the right to say things that offend other people.
These are the prongs of the anti-cancel culture ideology, which I largely support.
That was my reaction to hearing these things as well from Dave Chappelle.
Not necessarily that I agreed with everything that he said, that I agreed with every view he expressed there.
That's a separate issue, but that He's not somebody who needs to be now effectively removed from political life.
He doesn't need to be forced to apologize.
He doesn't need to have his Netflix show canceled or other ways of punishing him activated because we want to foster free inquiry and the ability to speak freely, even if it was offensive to the trans community, which absolutely it was.
There's no question.
Most if not all of that was highly offensive to the trans community and a lot of people Defend Dave Chappelle because they're associated with that faction that says we're against cancel culture.
We want comedians to speak freely.
Now, I'm going to show you the clip that got Joe Rogan into hot water.
It was very similar, the reaction, that he made a joke at the expense of a minority group.
He said things that played into longstanding tropes about that group.
People in that group got offended and angry, as they often do when you say these things.
And yet, the group, though, that he made jokes about and spoke about using tropes and that made them angry, the minority group, was not trans people, but Jewish people.
And the reaction was much different from a lot of people.
Especially people who have long defended Dave Chappelle and others accused of other kinds of bigotry, But who suddenly switch, it seems to me, how they think about these things when the minority group being mocked is not other people's groups but their own.
So let's listen to what Joe Rogan had to say.
And again, the context was that they were talking about whether it was justifiable to remove Ilya Nomar from her position on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
And this is what he said.
Sitting next to Ilyan Omar, where she's apologizing for talking about it's all about the Benjamins.
Yeah.
Which is just about money.
She's talking about money.
She shouldn't have apologized.
I mean, I'll go ahead and say it.
That's not an anti-Semitic statement.
I don't think that is.
It's about, the Benjamins are money.
You know, the idea that Jewish people are not into money is ridiculous.
Listen.
That's like saying Italians aren't into pizza.
Okay, so Cristobal spent about a minute.
Maybe we can pull this up.
I think it's helpful to hear what she has to say if we can load that in.
So I want to play the part of Cristobal that comes.
I don't think we have that.
Maybe we can get that in there.
But what Joe Reagan is saying here is he's using an age-old trope about Jewish people Namely that Jewish people like money.
They like to make money.
They're motivated by a desire to make money.
Similar to Dave Chappelle's using tropes about trans people.
Now, I absolutely understand if you're a trans person, you're going to find what Dave Chappelle said more offensive.
Because they're talking about your community.
They're talking about you.
And I also understand why, if you're a Jewish person, as I am, you would find Joe Rogan's comments more offensive, because he's making a joke not at other people's expense, but at your expense.
But on some level, there have to be standards for how we think about these issues, regardless of which particular group is the one being ridiculed or mocked.
In some way.
Unless you want to say, and I haven't heard anybody say this, although I have a feeling this is at the heart of some people's reactions, that mocking Jewish people is something way more dangerous than mocking other kinds of groups, other certain groups.
Because mocking Jewish people with anti-Jewish tropes has proven throughout history to be far more dangerous than mocking other groups.
I'm not really sure that's a viable case.
Clearly, black people throughout history have suffered extreme amounts of injustice and degradation.
I don't know how you can start measuring that, that kind of oppression.
Gay men have as well.
Other ethnic minorities have.
Religious minorities have.
Not just in terms of social stigma, but violence being used against them.
So, I think you're on very thorny territory when you start trying to distinguish it that way.
Well, it's okay to mock the hell out of these groups, but not this one.
So, maybe that's not what was at play, but one of the arguments Crystal Ball was making that I want to show you, if we can get that up in time, but if not, I'll describe it, was that We'll probably have it for you.
What she was basically saying was the following, and I think this is a very important point, was that what Ilhan Omar said that Joe Rogan was defending here, that got her kicked off the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and remember, I was heavily involved in that incident because it was my comment to which she was referring, to which she was responding when she said it's all about the Benjamins, was that
I had remarked on the fact that Kevin McCarthy had just threatened Ilhan Omar as well as Rashida Tlaib because of their comments on Israel, particularly that they had recently Defended the boycott movement against Israel as a way of opposing Israeli settlements in the West Bank and their attacks on Gaza.
Now you may not agree with that opinion, you may agree with it, but it's certainly the right of the American citizen to support a boycott of a foreign country, especially since you're allowed to boycott your own citizens in American states, as is often done to Indiana and North Carolina over their trans bathroom bill, as is done to Georgia over their voting rights bill.
Boycotts are a legitimate weapon even if you don't disagree with it.
Now, the argument was that Ilhan Omar had raised an anti-Semitic trope, the same one Joe Rogan raised in those comments, Because when I had said I find it odd that many political leaders in Washington spent so much of their time not on the American people or on the United States, but on this foreign country, Israel, it's odd, isn't it?
much that takes up of our time, how much of our foreign leaders go around trying to limit the discourse around this foreign country.
We recently showed you how laws get passed in many red states that bar people who want contracts with the states from supporting the boycott of Israel or have to affirmatively vow that they don't support a boycott of Israel in order to be qualified for government contracts.
Laws that, thankfully, every court that's looked at has said is a violation of the First Amendment, free speech clause.
But it's notable that American politicians spend their time banning American citizens from criticizing Israel.
It obviously occupies a major place in our politics in a way that's treated much differently than other countries.
And when I noted that, Ilhan Omar said, it's all about the Benjamins, baby.
That was the comment that really launched the argument that she was anti-Semitic.
And the argument was the same one used against Joe Rogan, which is that she is invoking an anti-Semitic trope, namely that Jews are aligned with money.
Now the reality is what she was actually doing was simply saying the reason That the reason that so many American politicians are deferential to Israel is because there's a very powerful lobby in Washington, the Israeli lobby, that is well-financed.
And there's many other lobbies that are well-financed, the pro-abortion lobby, Wall Street, big tech, the NRA.
They all have a lot of money behind them.
And in Washington, money speaks.
That's a very common observation to make.
It cannot be the case that you're allowed to talk about the influence all of those lobbies wield, but then suddenly you're not allowed to talk about this one specific lobby, the Israel lobby, even though it's clearly very powerful, AIPAC and the rest.
Because somehow you're relying on anti-Semitic tropes to do that.
It's very common to talk about that.
You cannot place off limits one lobby by saying that it's automatically anti-Semitic to talk about the power that lobby wields as a result of its financing.
So let's show the crystal ball response to when Joe Reagan said that where she makes that argument as well.
well let's bring that up apologize that's not an anti-semitic statement I don't think that is.
Benjamins are money.
The idea that Jewish people are not into money is ridiculous.
That's like saying Italians aren't into pizza.
It's fucking stupid.
I understand that the way she phrased it, like she could have phrased it a different way so that people would have less of a freakout, but can you not talk about the influence of Money in DC?
Of course!
I mean, this is very obvious.
There's a very obvious reason why, for my entire life, there's been a uniparty consensus around our policy vis-a-vis the Israeli government and a total inability or unwillingness to criticize the Israeli government.
It has everything to do with organization and, yes, money, just like every other fucking interest in DC.
And so, yeah, the fact that she said that and she got kicked off the Foreign Affairs Committee, look, I have Issues and disagreements with Ilhan Omar, but she actually is one of the more courageous voices on foreign policy, who's willing to call out some of the hypocrisy and bullshit in U.S.
foreign policy.
Extremely rare in terms of United States Congressmen, so it's actually kind of a real loss that she got kicked off that committee.
So that's the argument I was just making.
That's the one Crystal made, I thought, quite effectively, which is that, of course, if you're being even minimally honest, a major reason why so many politicians in both parties are so aggressively defensive of Israel is because there's a lot of money behind that cause in Washington, just like there's a lot of money behind a million other causes.
And it's legal to have well-financed lobbies.
There's nothing criminal about it.
There's nothing immoral about it.
There's nothing wrong about it.
The system is wrong.
We shouldn't have a political system in which money wields so much power over our politicians.
But that is the system that we have.
And so those who work within it to maximize their power by using well-financed lobbies, and there are many people who do, are doing something they're entitled to do.
But we're entitled to talk about that and observe that without having bigotry accusations wielded against us as a way of suppressing debate, as a way of preventing an honest discussion of that Israel lobby.
Now, let me just show you one example.
There's so many of how common it is for this argument to be raised in other contexts.
Here is an article from November of 2022 in the American Prospect.
It's a liberal magazine, but it's talking about how Sam Bankman freed the Bernie Madoff figure, the fraud who raised the law.
He ruled this Ponzi scheme called FTX for several years and used massive amounts of political donations to prevent his company and the industry from being subjected to regulatory scrutiny, how he wielded his money.
And it's an article that describes how eight members of Congress, four Democrats, four Republicans, who received large amounts of donations from FTX ...intervened in an investigation launched by the Securities and Exchange Commission, the SEC, in order to see whether or not there was fraud in the cryptocurrency industry, and particularly FTX.
And lo and behold, the people who were financially benefiting from FTX, the eight members of Congress, happened to be eight members who signed onto this letter trying to interfere in the SEC investigation against the FTX.
That's how Washington works.
We talk about it all the time.
So why can we talk about the role that money plays when it comes to Sam Bankman Freed wielding political power through money, or the NRA wielding political power through money, or the Wall Street wielding political power through money?
And then suddenly this one lobby is off limits to speak about.
You're not allowed to mention it.
The fact that there's a big, powerful lobby in DC that operates under similar frameworks.
And this is the whole point, is that the critique against cancel culture, the critique by the intellectual dark web, the faction that was led by Sam Harris and Barry Weiss and all those people, that I actually agree with, agreed with and still agree with, is that oftentimes bigotry accusations are on a hair-trigger
That they'll look for anything lurking implicitly in your statements to be able to call you a racist or a misogynist or an Islamophobe or a homophobe or a transphobe to make you essentially radioactive and to suppress debate.
So if you want to say you don't think the police are as racist systematically as they say you think there should be more police you get accused of racism.
Or if you say, I think Me Too went too far and ruined people's reputations with no due process, you get accused of misogyny.
Or you say what Dave Chappelle said and you get accused of transphobia.
That's the whole point of this anti-cancel culture movement, to say we need more space in our discourse to be able to speak and a less hair trigger about accusing people of bigotry to prevent debate.
And so many people agree with this when it comes to racism, misogyny, xenophobia, Islamophobia, and then it all switches on a dime when it comes to anti-Semitism accusations.
So let's look at a few of the reactions to what Joe Rogan said.
Here is Ted Deutch, the CEO of the American Jewish Committee, who wrote, Joe Rogan, in defending Representative Omar's past anti-Semitic comments, you invoke the same tropes that have been used to persecute Jews for centuries.
With an audience of millions, it's dangerous to be so flippant and trafficking in anti-Semitic stereotypes.
Happy to explain on your pod.
By the way, this became, you'll see, a notable feature of those denouncing Joe Rogan.
There's at least six or seven people denouncing him and then offering to be the person to go and explain to him on his podcast in front of millions of people why he was wrong and accept his apology that may or may not be forthcoming on behalf of the Jewish community.
He was one of the people who very generously offered to go on Joe Rogan's own podcast to re-educate him.
Here from the Israel War Room, From using the Holocaust footage, to promoting an anti-vax agenda, to giving a platform to anti-Semite Roger Waters, Joe Rogan is no stranger to anti-Semitism.
The latest, defending Ilhan Omar's quote, all about the Benjamins comment, while echoing anti-Semitic tropes about Jews and money.
Here is Mark Levin, a very popular conservative politician, who in almost every case, when the left accuses somebody of racism, or misogyny, or transphobia, he mocks it.
Or minimizes it, or dismisses it, and says, often correctly, these are invented accusations.
These people see racism and misogyny everywhere, and transphobia everywhere.
They just do it to destroy people's reputations, to close off debate.
Here he is, jumping on this bandwagon, and he just picks a Newsweek column, which says, Joe Rogan slammed for saying Jews are, quote, into money, and said, Joe Rogan said what?
Fueling this campaign against Joe Rogan to condemn him as an anti-Semite.
Here is Barry Weiss.
You know what?
I'm going to leave that tweet aside because that actually isn't about this.
But I'm going to come back to it.
Here's Joel Petlin, who is a pretty right-wing commentator, saying, I can't believe that I'm agreeing with Mehdi Hassan on anything, let alone anti-Semitism.
Shame on you, Joe Rogan.
And Mehdi Hassan, as I said, it came from the right and the left.
The right because they have a hair trigger for anti-semitism the way the left does for racism, misogyny, xenophobia.
And then the left because they hate Joe Rogan.
We're united in doing this.
So Mehdi Hassan said, to say that Jews as a whole, as a people, are, quote, into money is one of the oldest and heartiest anti-Semitic smears of all.
I can't believe anyone has to explain that.
It is in 2023.
Sheesh.
So you'd see these people uniting.
There's the Mehdi tweet that was praised by... Now here's a really interesting one.
Here's from Abigail Shrier, who became kind of a symbol of cancel culture because her book That was designed to question why there's been this gigantic explosion in the number of trans men, biologically born women who are now transitioning to men, why there has been a gigantic explosion in those numbers and essentially worrying about it, expressing negative concerns about it as a societal trend.
She wrote a very good book, very thoughtful book, that was denounced widely as transphobia.
It ended up getting banned from Amazon.
One of the lawyers at the ACLU, the lead lawyer, one of the lead lawyers, Chase Strangio, who is a trans man, actually said, this is a cause I'm willing to die on, namely getting her book censored from Amazon.
An ACLU lawyer was saying, I want this book censored so badly that I'm willing to go to war for this and die on this hill.
An ACLU lawyer demanding censorship.
And I wrote about that at the time.
So Abigail Shire became kind of a leading voice denouncing those kinds of campaigns to smear people as bigots, to close off debate, and here she is saying, quote, Ilyan Omar didn't say, quote, Jews love money.
She accused Jews of a crime, paying off US politicians to support Israel.
That is preposterous.
And I say that with respect to Abigail, who I know some and have liked in terms of her work and still do.
But Ilyan Omar wasn't accusing Jews of a crime.
That's preposterous.
She was pointing out that there's a legal lobby, not a criminal one, a legal lobby in Washington behind the Israel cause, not the Jewish cause, the Israel cause.
Remember, a lot of critics of Israel are themselves Jewish.
And conflating Israel and Jewish people, I would suggest, its own form of anti-Semitic inflation.
But whatever is true, Ilhan Omar wasn't accusing Jews of committing crime.
She was saying, observing, that indisputable truth That one of the powerful lobbies in Washington is the Israel lobby.
She went on, Now it's unclear if she's defending Joe Rogan or linking him to Ilhan Omar, but what she's clearly doing, ironically, is doing the same thing to Ilhan Omar as was done to her.
If you express this idea as part of a public debate over a major policy debate such as trans issues and gender ideology on the one hand or US support for Israel on the other, then you're a radical bigot whose views don't need to be engaged.
You need to be banished from good society.
It's interesting to see how many of the same people who have been leading that cause come out in front of the bigotry denunciations when it's their group The target of it, I would submit it's quite easy to be dismissive of jokes at the expense of other groups, comments that are designed to be amusing or being provocative, like the ones we saw of Dave Chappelle that are aimed at other groups.
It's really easy to do that because you're not personally implicated.
It's much harder to do it when the group in question is your own.
And I really would encourage a lot of these people, Mark Levin, Abigail Schreier.
Here we see a Democratic congressman from New Jersey, Josh Gottheimer.
It's despicable language like this that leads to attacks and threats against Jewish people.
Joe Rogan has a massive platform, and it's infuriating to watch him and Crystal Ball promote blatant, dangerous, anti-Semitic tropes, including those masquerading as anti-Israel sentiments.
So he's saying not only did Joe Rogan Express anti-Semitic views, but so did Crystal Ball.
I showed you what she said.
I don't think there's anything anti-Semitic about either, but certainly nothing Crystal Ball says.
This is the same thing that people are constantly doing that are provoking the anger of the anti-cancel culture crowd.
And I would suggest that people like Joth Gottheimer and Abigail Shire and Barry Weiss
And others that we looked at here, Mark Levin, who are very eloquent often when it comes to the importance of allowing wide open discourse and inquiry and debate on important issues, question whether or not they are more sensitive when it comes to anti-Semitism than they are to other forms of bigotry because they feel personally implicated by it.
Because they've been inculcated from birth to learn and believe that their group is specifically and uniquely victimized and whether they're adjusting or changing their standards as a result of that sense of personal implication.
And I say that not as criticism of them.
I think it's true for human beings generally.
We are tribal creatures by definition.
We're constructed that way.
We evolved that way.
5,000 years ago, if we were expelled by our tribe, we would go off on our own and die.
We couldn't survive.
We needed tribal acceptance.
And that's why we've evolved to see the world through tribalism.
And what we're taught from childhood forms a major Is a major factor in how we start viewing events in adulthood.
And I don't think human beings can ever escape our subjectivity.
I think we're destined to be subjective animals until the day we die.
We will never emerge from subjectivity and arise, ascend to the level of objectivity.
But I think that one of the really interesting things that we're...
We should expect of ourselves is to question how the extent to which our views right now are formed by things that we were taught at birth as opposed to our own independent faculties.
I often talk about this when it comes to free speech that the reason I seek out the most repugnant ideas to defend from a free speech perspective is because it's very easy to defend free speech when the views that are being censored are views that you like and agree with.
It only matters Your defense of free speech does.
If you're defending the free speech rights of people who not just disagree with you, but who express views you find repugnant.
I'll give you an example.
Just this week there was a Republican senator who posted onto Twitter a photo of him and his wife having slaughtered this majestic animal.
I think it was in Africa.
I'm not sure where.
But they had slaughtered it.
It was legal hunting, but I personally find it repellent.
It's just my own personal view.
I understand it's part of the culture.
I understand that it's legal.
I'm just telling you how I personally react to going and shooting a defenseless animal, killing it for your own amusement, and then picking up the corpse and posing for it in a selfie to put on your Instagram account or onto Twitter.
I find it physically repulsive.
And the senator posted that photo and Twitter removed the post, banned him from entering his account.
That was a hard test case for me.
I had to find within myself the willingness to defend his free speech rights even though the content he posted was something that sickens me viscerally and morally.
And all I'm suggesting is that that is a hard thing to do.
That is something that we all are duty-bound to do, to figure out whether or not we're reacting to things instinctively and emotionally and through our own personal experience, or whether or not we're applying the same standards consistently in every case, including ones where we're not implicated and ones that we are.
And I definitely, and I've talked about this before, see an inconsistency in how many conservative commentators, many people who are sort of decentrists, who have built a career waving the banner of free speech and free inquiry, seem to change radically their posture when it comes to all kinds of bigotry accusations or when it's anti-Semitism.
And that's why you saw them defending Dave Chappelle with such vigor and spirit Even though if you contrast what he said with Joe Rogan, I would argue Joe Rogan's comments are much more playful, much lighter in playing with these tropes.
Comedians often make fun of ethnic groups based on stereotypes and tropes, and it's a very common way that comedians have made people laugh forever.
And the idea that we need to have a freer, looser license to speak freely, to make jokes, even to air without being permanently canceled or denounced as the bigot is a noble one.
But it's only noble if it's being applied in all cases, including to those cases in which you yourself feel personally implicated.
In fact, I would argue that it's most important to apply it exactly in those cases.
So that concludes our show for this evening.
I think that we delved into two really important topics in a serious and in-depth manner which is what we're trying to do with this show.
We will be back tomorrow night at 7 p.m.
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Thank you so much for watching.
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