Americans Fired Since Oct. 7—What They Really Said. Is TikTok Censoring for China or the US? And: CNN’s Pulitzer Prize-Worthy Scoop: Liz Cheney’s Book | SYSTEM UPDATE #188
Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET: https://rumble.com/c/GGreenwald
Become part of our Locals community: https://greenwald.locals.com/
- - -
Follow Glenn:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ggreenwald
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/glenn.11.greenwald/
Follow System Update:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/SystemUpdate_
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/systemupdate__/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@systemupdate__
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/systemupdate.tv/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/systemupdate/
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our 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, since the October 7th attack by Hamas in Israel and Joe Biden's immediate announcement that the U.S.
would support Israel and fund its new war in Gaza, many American citizens have been punished in various ways for expressing their views on this new war.
Some have been fired, others have been placed on no higher blacklists.
Others have had their student groups banned because of the views they expressed, while still others have been deplatformed, censored, or publicly vilified with trucks that ride around with their face on it.
Now, for years, many journalists and pundits built their careers, very lucrative careers, by denouncing exactly these sorts of recriminations that were intended as reprisals for political speech.
They railed against what they called a cancel culture, warned of the dangers of censorship, and in general insisted that society is far healthier when people are rationally engaged with rather than fired or censored or publicly strung up for their disagreeable views.
And yet many of those very same people Who quite lucratively branded themselves champions of free speech and the right to express your controversial views without being fired from your job and the need to toughen up and hear views that make you uncomfortable.
Have strangely become some of the leading voices not just endorsing but demanding these very various punishments for these political views about this war.
And the way they have justified all of that is by using the same exact left liberal censorship theories that they spent years railing against.
They claim that what is being punished is not free speech but hate speech.
And not just hate speech, but advocacy of genocide against a minority group that the people who have been fired or otherwise punished have all called for the murder of all Jews.
But is that true?
We'll take a look at some of the highest profile cases of Americans who have been fired or otherwise punished for their views in the United States since October 7th, and we'll examine what they actually did and did not say.
And I think the results might be somewhat surprising.
Then, it has become gospel in U.S.
political discourse that TikTok is a weapon of the Chinese Communist Party designed to propagandize young Americans that they're hating the United States.
That was one of the core claims that Democratic Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut made on CNN in a segment we covered last night where he argued that more social media censorship is needed in the wake of this new war in Israel.
But is that claim true?
TikTok just recently banned all videos discussing the 2002 Osama bin Laden letter.
The letter that explained to Americans the grievances of the Muslim world against the United States government.
Why would TikTok, if it's trying to sow division and make Americans hate their own government, censor a letter that the American government itself tried to censor?
We'll dig a little deeper to ask on whose behalf is TikTok actually censoring in the United States.
And then finally, CNN today announced what it clearly regards as a groundbreaking journalistic achievement.
The scoop of historic proportions it quote, obtained.
That's the self-glorifying verb it used.
It obtained Liz Cheney's new book.
One where she rants and raves against the Republican Party and Donald Trump and Kevin McCarthy and new Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson.
Exactly what you'd expect.
And in CNN, not only obtained the book, but they're bravely showing us some of the excerpts where she shockingly bashes Trump and the Republican Party.
We'll pay homage to our colleagues and to their intrepid and courageous reporting.
People who incurred unimaginable dangers to break the story, provoking the wrath of power centers all throughout the world.
And we'll examine what the implications of this earth-shattering reporting from CNN are.
Before we do, a couple of reminders of programming notes.
First of all, System Update is available in podcast version as well.
You can listen to every episode on Spotify, Apple, and all the major podcasting platforms 12 hours after each episode is first broadcast live here on Rumble.
And if you follow and rate and review the program on those platforms, it really helps spread the visibility Of the show.
And then finally, every Tuesday and Thursday night, once we're done with our live show here on Rumble, we move to Locals, which is part of the Rumble platform, for our live interactive aftershow.
Tonight is Tuesday, so we will have that aftershow tonight, where we take your questions, comment on your feedback and your critiques, hear your suggestions for future shows.
That aftershow is available exclusively to our subscribers to the Locals community.
And if you want to become a subscriber to the Locals community, which, in addition to giving you access to those twice a week shows, Also gives you access to the daily transcripts of every program that we produce in highly professionalized form.
Also the original journalism we intend to publish there as well as it just really supports and helps the independent journalism that we're trying to do here.
Simply click the join button right below the video player on the homepage and it will take you to the Localist community.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
Twice in the last six years, first when the Me Too movement really emerged in the wake of the indictment, the criminal indictment brought against Harvey Weinstein, and then first when the Me Too movement really emerged in the wake of the indictment, the criminal indictment brought against Harvey Weinstein, and then again in
recent history where the climate became very intolerant of dissent and where large numbers of people were fired or had their reputations destroyed for, in retrospect, what turned out to be quite trivial things.
The Me Too climate was a bit different but certainly it involved not just the prosecution and firing of people who deserved it for hardcore serial sexual violence and menacing against women but it also Involved the career destruction of people with no due process for quite trivial allegations that people were acting strange on dates or had sent DMs that made other people uncomfortable.
No due process to stringing people up, firing them, destroying their reputations and throwing them away.
And then the same thing happened again in the wake of the George Floyd murder, where there was a complete overnight radical change in the way we had to speak about race and policing and all sorts of matters related to American history.
And if anybody deviated in any way from that script, they were often vilified and many of them were fired.
It happened to my friend and my colleague at the Intercept, Lee Fong.
He was one of the first people to whom it happened, where in the two or three days after the George Floyd killing, when there were Black Lives Matter protests all over the country, he went to a Black Lives Matter protest like the journalist that he is to interview people who were there.
And he posted the interviews that he conducted with many of the participants, one of whom A black man named Max said that he supported Black Lives Matter and its belief that there's too much police brutality, that racist police brutality in particular needs to be reined in.
But he was also extremely angry that people who say Black Lives Matter don't really seem to believe it because they only seem to show up and yell when a white person takes a black life, but not when a black person takes a black life, as often happens, he said, in his neighborhood.
And for the crime of simply posting that interview With a participant in a Black Lives Matter protest, a black person in America.
Who is slightly off key, Lee Fong came very close to being fired.
One of the Intercept reporters who no one knew was black, but she says she's half black, Alexa Lacey, went to Twitter and said, you're a racist, Lee.
Stop being a racist.
And the entire media piled on.
People who didn't even know Lee were liking and retweeting it and calling Lee a racist.
He came very, very close to losing his job at the Intercept and getting fired over that.
He had to apologize publicly.
And that was the climate.
All sorts of people lost their job.
And in the wake of those two closely related events that happened in temporal proximity to one another, the Me Too movement was 2018, the George Floyd killing was 2020, there emerged an entire new part of the media ecosystem devoted to denouncing cancel culture of this type.
That's what they meant by cancel culture, the idea that if you sound an off key idea, or you express some dissent from what the majority believes, or you advocate a view that people think is offensive or that you expressed in an offensive way, that your life is over, that you get fired, that you get expelled from decent society, that you get put on blacklists.
And a lot of people, prominent people, built very lucrative media empires and careers primarily off of that value, that we need free speech.
And I largely agreed with that perspective.
People like Barry Weiss.
Left the New York Times denouncing the paper for their illiberal attitudes for firing two editors at the New York Times who were responsible for publishing an op-ed by a Republican Senator Tom Cotton that called for the military to be deployed to quell the Black Lives Matter protests.
And Barry Weiss left with great fanfare and denounced this kind of cancel culture.
She constantly wrote articles saying the proper response to people with bad ideas is to engage them and have more debate, not to fire them.
Or destroy their reputations or censor them.
Dave Rubin, same thing.
His entire media platform was based on that idea.
Ben Shapiro, very much similar.
He became a household name, practically, when he would go to colleges and be booted off colleges or not allowed to speak.
And he embraced the cause of free speech and the importance of free discourse.
All these people who embraced this idea.
And yet, since October 7th, When Hamas attacked Israel and the U.S.
made that our war by Joe Biden saying, this is our war.
We're standing with you in this war.
We're going to fund your war.
We're going to provide you the weapons that you drop on Gaza, where it became bipartisan consensus that the U.S.
should support Israel, even though a very significant portion of the United States did not agree with that and does not agree with that view.
In fact, majorities And the United States wanted a ceasefire early on, something that the White House called repugnant when a handful of members of the Democratic Party called for it.
So these are not fringe views when people are criticizing Israel for too many civilian killings.
This is a view that's extremely common all over the world, whether you agree with it or not.
It's a view represented by a lot of people in the United States, and yet many people lost their jobs or fired in politics and media and journalism.
for expressing criticism of Israel or expressing support for the Palestinian side rather than the Israeli side.
People had their student groups banned on campus if they were pro-Palestinian, including by an order of former Governor Ron DeSantis.
And then other university administrators banned groups like Students for Justice in Palestine.
And people were put on no blacklist.
We interviewed two Harvard students who not only were put on a blacklist led by the billionaire Bill Ackman and many of his corporate friends, but also have a truck paid for that drives around campus with their names and faces on it saying these people are anti-Semites.
And this is classic cancel culture.
This is what the right has meant by cancel culture.
Not just the right, but people like Barry White who built their careers, media empires, genuinely very lucrative media empires, largely based on that idea that doing that is wrong.
And yet many of those people, because they fanatically support Israel, they absolutely support Joe Biden's decision to make the Israeli war outroar, Not only have acquiesced to this pervasive, what they have been calling cancel culture, but in many cases led the way in demanding it, in cheering for it, in supporting it.
And every time I've brought this up, every time I've denounced this, and I brought it up many times on my own platform in interviews I did, in an interview I did with Tucker Carlson a few weeks ago where he agreed and said he's really worried that the American right was so willing to abandon their defense of free speech on a dime when it became about Israel.
Because if the American right now abandons free speech, who's going to defend it?
There have been people on the right standing up and objecting to this.
Candace Owens, Vivek Ramaswamy on our show last night did it.
Not for the first time.
The free speech group FIRE.org, which largely was repelled at first by conservative supporters because they were the only ones willing to defend conservative free speech when the ACLU wouldn't, vehemently condemned Ron DeSantis.
So there have been some consistent people on the right, but huge numbers who haven't been.
And whenever I've denounced that and called out people on the right for what I just explained, what I keep hearing is the same thing I've been hearing from the left for six years now.
When condemning their censorship.
Oh, no, no, you don't understand.
It's not free speech.
This is hate speech.
It's deeply hateful.
These people who got fired or who have trucks riding around campus with their faces and names on it or who got put on no higher blacklist by banks and hedge funds and corporations deserve it because They're not just engaging in free speech, they're inciting violence against a minority group.
Against American Jews.
They're advocating that all American Jews be murdered.
That's the claim.
Now, even if that were true, it would still clearly be protected speech.
Just like plenty of people have said, erase Gaza from the map.
Eradicate Gaza, kill them all.
There's no such thing as an innocent Palestinian.
I remember Congress said that.
It was the Congressman who wore his IDF uniform, an IDF uniform, to his job at work in Congress.
And then two days later gave a speech on the floor of the House saying there's no such thing as an innocent Palestinian.
Just like there was no such thing as an innocent Nazi.
Almost none of them lost their jobs because Even though it's repellent to say that, or maybe you agree with it, it's clearly protected speech to do so.
It's also protected speech to say, bomb Iran, kill all Iranians.
And so it is protected speech to say, I don't think Israel should exist as a state.
But many of the people, in fact, most of them who were fired, the highest profile cases who got fired in politics and media, didn't say anything remotely like, kill all Jews.
What they did was much milder than that.
And we have this string now of Americans who have lost their jobs, who have been punished for exercising their free speech as American citizens in the United States to protect a foreign country called Israel.
So I want to go through a few of these cases, have you meet maybe for the first time the people who have been fired since October 7th happened.
And let's take a look at what they really said.
So here's the first case.
This is from The Guardian on October 10th, so three days after the October 7th attack by Hamas in Israel.
Sports reporter in Philadelphia loses job over pro-Palestinian comments.
Quote, Jackson Frank was let go by phillyvoice.com after he responded, quote, solidarity with Palestine.
To a 76ers tweet condemning Hamas.
Quote, Jackson Frank.
I don't know if he's Jewish or not.
It's certainly possible.
Several of the people who were fired, by the way, for criticizing Israel are Jewish.
Jackson Frank, a writer who covered the Philadelphia 76ers professional basketball team, is quote, no longer employed by phillyvoice.com after he expressed support for the Palestinian cause on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.
Phillyvoice.com chief executive Hal Donnelly told the New York Post.
The Philadelphia 76ers, the basketball team, tweeted, quote, we stand with the people of Israel and join them in mourning the hundreds of innocent lives lost at the hands of Hamas, and then added the hashtag, quote, stand with Israel.
Frank responded to that tweet, or rather quote tweeted it, and then added, quote, this post sucks.
Solidarity with Palestine always.
Frank, who had only recently joined phillyvoice.com as a sports writer, has since deleted the tweet, but he no longer has a job.
He didn't call for Israel to be erased from the map.
He didn't call for all Jews to be murdered or any Jews to be murdered.
He said, I don't stand with Israel.
Palestine is the victim here.
I stand with Palestine.
And for that, as an American citizen, he got fired.
NBC News, October 26, firing of a science journal editor after a Gaza Post sparks free speech rift.
The board of the Biomedical and Life Sciences Journal, eLife, fired its editor-in-chief, Michael Eisen, after he posted a message on X about an article from The Onion.
I believe Michael Eisen is Jewish.
But the relevant point is that he's an American.
Quote, the board of the Biomedical and Life Sciences Journal, eLife, fired its editor-in-chief, Michael Eisen, after he posted on X on October 13th, quote, The Onion speaks with more courage, insight, and moral clarity than the leaders of every academic institution put together.
I wish there was The Onion University.
While quoting a post from the satirical website, The Onion, with the headline, quote, dying Gazans criticized for not using last words to condemn Hamas.
So it's clearly a satirical tweet that The Onion published, mocking the idea that Palestinians who are under an Israeli boot, who are being bombarded and killed, are constantly being told they have to condemn Hamas.
And this editor of this science journal said, I praise the moral courage of The Onion.
That was it.
Quote, the same day the journal released a statement from its board of directors saying Eisen had quote, been given clear feedback from the board that his approach to leadership, communication and social media has at times been detrimental to the cohesion of the community we are trying to build and hence to Elif's mission.
And that previous behavior influenced the board's decision.
Here you see the Onion tweet from October 13th that he was praising.
It's an onion headline, dying Gazans criticized for not using last words to condemn Hamas.
Nothing even close to calling for the murder of Jews or Israel to be wiped off the map or anything genocidal unless you think that any criticism of Israel or any expression of support for Palestinians is inherently genocidal.
In other words, that any criticism of Israel merits firing or any support for Palestinians does as well.
Now, let me just say one thing.
One of the things I've heard many times in the past seven weeks from people who support this sort of thing is, look, this is not state censorship.
This is just private corporations deciding that they don't want to be associated with certain views.
And that is true.
Nobody contests that media outlets have the right to fire people for expressing certain views that they don't want to be associated with.
Just like big tech firms are under no legal obligation To allow their platform to contain views that they don't want to be associated with either.
That's what the left has been saying for seven years in defense of all of this.
Oh, he wasn't put in prison, he was just fired.
That's not censorship.
Employers have the absolute right to fire people for expressing political views they feel uncomfortable with.
I thought it was cancel culture.
I thought that's what was being condemned all this time.
So yes, it's true and I'm happy to stipulate That employers, companies, media outlets have the absolute legal right to fire people for expressing views they don't want to be associated with.
But that is true as well of people in the aftermath of George Floyd who said things that made them uncomfortable.
People who stood up and said, I don't really think police brutality is a real problem.
I'm on the side of the police.
I don't think we should ban historical monuments or historical symbols like the Confederate flag or various statutes of white people who express white supremacy in history.
People like that got fired, too, and most people on the right said, no, that's cancel culture.
We shouldn't fire people for those views.
So you have to be consistent.
Private employers have the absolute right to fire whoever they want for political views, in which, of course, they do have that legal right, but, and no one can criticize them for it, or it actually is detrimental to a free society, to free discourse, to have people know that if they step out of line in any way on any political issue, they are going to lose their jobs, careers, and reputations, and their ability to support their family.
And the argument made all along, up until October 7th, was that this is toxic.
This creates a repressive environment.
NBC News, October 30th, city councilman fired from his job in the governor's office following Palestine support.
Quote, Sanchez attended a pro-Palestine rally in Providence on October 21st and wrote on X, quote, Providence did not disappoint.
Yesterday, it marched with thousands of people calling for an immediate ceasefire and an end to the occupation.
He called for a ceasefire?
Which 60 to 65 percent of Americans supported at the time.
That was not a fringe view and an end to the Israeli occupation, which is the position of the U.S.
government, that every government in the world, that the Israeli occupation of the West Bank is illegal.
On October 17th, Sanchez posted, quote, the U.S.
is actively eating in a genocide and they want us to look the other way.
We all need to be calling for immediate de-escalation and a ceasefire in Israel and occupied Palestine.
He said that after that explosion in Gaza, which originally people thought came from Israel, but likely turned out to have been a misfired rocket from a Palestinian group.
Why was he fired?
He didn't remotely express views that called for Jews to be murdered.
This is the claim.
Every time someone stands up to say, no, no, these people deserve to be fired, this doesn't cancel culture.
Here from the New York Times, October 26, Artforum fires its top editor after its open letter on Israel-Hamas war.
Quote, David Velasco was removed after the magazine's publishers said there was a flawed editorial process behind the publication of a letter that supported Palestinian liberation.
Thousands of artists, academic and cultural workers, including Velasco, signed the October 19th open letter, which supported Palestinian liberation and criticized the silence of cultural institutions about the Israeli bombing of residents in Gaza.
The letter initially omitted mention of Hamas' surprise attack on October 7th, which killed more than 1,400 Israelis.
Turned out it killed about 850 civilians, 1,200 Israelis total.
Information that was added up to criticism from subscribers and advertisers.
A preface was also added to say that the letter quote reflects the views of the undersigned individual parties and was not composed, directed, or initiated by Artforum or its staff.
The magazine's publishers did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In a post on the magazine's website Thursday evening, they criticized the decision as, quote, not consistent with Artforum's editorial process.
The letter was, quote, widely misinterpreted as a statement from the magazine about highly geopolitical, complex geopolitical circumstances, although they made no mention of Velasco's termination.
So he was fired for having signed that letter.
That was insufficiently Attentive to the October 7th attack, so another person fired for their job.
Now, even those Harvard students we had on the show, who were put on that no-fire list, blacklist, and had trucks driving around Harvard, signed a letter essentially saying the reason for the October 7th attack was the Israeli occupation and brutal treatment of the Palestinians, but they didn't praise Hamas or call for the murder of Jews either.
Almost nobody who lost their job in these high-profile cases did anything remotely like that.
Now, again, this sort of thing is exactly what has been condemned by people on the right for years.
Here is, as just one of many examples, a tweet by Christopher Ruffo, who I think is one of the most influential right-wing activists in December 20th, 2021.
Quote, outrageous.
This brave teacher stood against critical race theory indoctrination in his school district and they fired him for it.
And then here you see the quote from the teacher, Tony Kennett, Indianapolis Public Schools just fired me for, quote, sharing that IPS recorded children in required racial justice sessions, not sending IPS the personnel info, quoting Dr. Payne's racist comments to students, sharing public files.
So the idea was, know what I'm saying there?
Oh, school districts have the right to fire whoever they want, including teachers who express views on controversial issues.
No, the idea was, this is outrageous.
Here from the New York Post, June 4th, 2020, NBA voice Grant Nappier was unjustly fired over quote, all lives matter truth.
Grant Nappier, 32 years the TV voice of the Sacramento Kings, is a goner this week.
Fired from his gig as a Sacramento sports talk host as the TV voice of the Kings TV broadcast because he's a racist, perhaps.
There's no evidence, like Hillary Clinton and presumably millions before him, Napier was naive to the new presumption that, quote, all lives matter, is now considered by some to be a racist response to the Black Lives Matter movement.
But of course, millions of Americans do consider and did consider All Lives Matter as a response to the Black Lives Matter movement to be racist by denying that there's a particular need for black Americans to have attention called to the violence directed at them.
And there was no idea from the right, oh, well, people are entitled to fire him if they want for a phrase that many people now consider racist.
No, it was outrageous.
It was indicative of the repression we face.
And again, I largely agreed with the people critiquing that.
It's just I didn't change my mind on October 7th when it came to Israel.
Here from the Daily Wire, February 12th, 2021, Ben Shapiro says Gina Carano firing, part of a movement to, quote, expel half of America.
Daily Wire editor Emeritus Ben Shapiro ripped the mass media company Disney and the quote hard left on Thursday after actress Gina Carano was fired from her role on the Star Wars TV series The Mandalorian.
I'm sure there's going to be fanatical fans of Star Wars angry that I didn't know that series.
Apologies in advance.
Disney fired Carano on Wednesday over an image the actress posted to her Instagram depicting a Jewish woman running from Nazi guards with the caption, Jews were beaten in the streets, not by Nazi soldiers, but by their neighbors, even by children.
Because history is edited, most people today don't realize that to get to the point where Nazi soldiers can easily round up thousands of Jews, the government first made their own neighbors hate them simply for being Jews.
How is that any different from hating someone for their political views?
Shapiro highlighted the incident on his podcast, The Ben Shapiro Show, on Thursday as an example of the cancel culture that is infecting leading institutions in the United States.
He said that Keranos firing is, quote, indicative of where we are in the culture, and it is a terrible moment for American culture.
Quote, social movements have consequences and we are now in the middle of a mass social movement to expel half the American population from the body politics, Shapiro said.
So do you see here how there was this very pervasive sense that getting people fired for political views that many people in the United States consider to be offensive was dangerous for the United States.
It was toxic and unhealthy.
Where is all that?
Where are all those people?
Now that so many people are losing their jobs for calling for a ceasefire of a war or deciding that they think the United States is supporting the wrong side or that they support Palestinians and don't want to fund the Israeli war, where are all the cancel culture articles about how terrible this is for America that people lose their jobs if they express views contrary to the US government and its policies?
Here in 2021 in Commentary Magazine, Barry Weiss, another person who was one of the leaders and still is, when it comes to some issues of the importance of free speech and free debate, here was her Magnus Opum on this question where she said, we got here because of cowardice.
We get out with courage.
Say no to the woke revolution.
And it was a long article on how one of the worst things you can do as a country is create a climate where certain views are off limits to the point where you get fired and have your reputation destroyed and you're socially vilified for expressing them.
And this is what she wrote when describing how terrible this environment is in 2021.
Quote, so the tools themselves are not just replaced but repudiated and in doing so persuasion the purpose of argument is replaced with public shaming.
Moral complexity is replaced with moral certainty.
Facts are replaced with feelings.
Ideas are replaced with identity.
Forgiveness is replaced with punishment.
Debate is replaced with de-platforming.
Diversity is replaced with homogeneity of thought, inclusion with exclusion.
As Douglas Murray has put it, quote, the problem is not that the sacrificial victim is selected.
The problem is that the people who destroy his reputation are permitted to do so by the complicity, silence, and slinking away of everyone else.
I agree with that paragraph.
I believe a healthier society is one where people are engaged when they express views that many find offensive, not when they're fired and have their reputations destroyed for it.
And I thought that before October 7th, and I also thought that after October 7th.
Here is another person, Dave Rubin.
You may remember the case of James Damore.
This actually occurred before Me Too, before the Black Lives Matter movement.
One of the people who was a big cause celeb was David Shore.
He was a Democratic Party consultant who worked at a think tank, and he said he thinks nonviolent protests are more effective than protests that use violence, starting the civil rights movement.
And it was interpreted as a criticism of the Black Lives Matter movement.
He was fired, and he was turned into a complete martyr.
Oh my God!
This shows America is ruined!
If someone like David Shore gets fired for expressing his opinion just because millions of people find it offensive.
David Shore turned out perfectly fine.
He has a very thriving career.
More so than ever, just like most of these people who built their careers based on this platform, based on this cause.
But that was the idea was there's nothing worse than a country that fires people for expressing their dissident views.
But the case that was one of the first was the case of James Damore.
He was a employee at Google and he sent an internal post and a message board that was deemed misogynistic about why women can't succeed in certain fields.
And he became the symbol of everything wrong with America.
How can you fire somebody for expressing a view because you consider it misogynistic?
You should debate him and engage with him, not fire him.
No one was saying, oh, Google's a private company.
They have the right to fire him if they want.
They were saying, this is dangerous.
We have to stop this.
And here was Dave Rubin putting James Damore on his show so they could commiserate on the injustice of all of this.
Look at it.
It's harmful.
Don't look at it.
That's what executives were saying.
I mean, that's incredible.
And also, there were a ton of memes within the company just talking about, you know, how horrible this was and just blasting me as a person.
Now, was there any retribution on those people?
We'll get to you actually getting fired and called into the office, but you, as far as everything that I read in this document, which I did read, you didn't attack anyone personally.
You go out of your way not to stereotype.
People can argue with, you know, your conclusions or all that, but you were being attacked personally by people then within the company.
Was there any retribution from the... Oh my God!
People didn't even want to debate him.
They just wanted him gone.
They wanted him fired.
They wanted him disciplined.
And the people who should have been disciplined, according to Dave Rubin, were the people trying to stifle free debate inside Google.
Can't people getting fired for expressing offensive views just because other people are offended?
Toughen up!
We need free speech and free debate in this country, not people getting fired for their offensive views.
And now you have this pile of careers destroyed since October 7th for people who criticize Israel.
And one of the things I heard from Dave Rubin, the same exact Dave Rubin, Was when France issued a nationwide ban on pro-Palestinian protests while allowing pro-Israel protests to continue.
Meaning, you're allowed to go out on the street and protest in favor of French policy, which is to support Israel.
What you're barred criminally from doing is going out on the street and protesting against the French position by having a pro-Palestinian protest.
Dave Rubin said in a tweet, maybe there's hope for the West after all.
Somebody who built his career saying the reason why the West is collapsing is because we don't allow free debate.
We fire people when they express offensive views.
He was very angry about it when it came to people he agreed with, or felt an affinity for, like James Damore.
But Israel critics who get fired?
That's the salvation of the West.
Now I should note, we invited Dave Rubin on our show.
Early on, to come on and talk about all this, he unfortunately couldn't.
He's been on several other shows where the hosts were much more agreeable with his views.
Hopefully, he will come on.
He said once the scheduling issues pass, he would be happy to do it.
So far, that hasn't happened.
He's welcome on the show anytime.
I'd love to have him on to explore this, try and reconcile all this.
But just to show you how repressive things have gotten, let me show you this.
Here is David Jacobs, and he's very angry about the following.
About a question on an exam at Toronto Metropolitan University.
So, just to be clear, it's not an elementary school, it's not a junior high, it's not a high school for children.
It's a university for adults, for adult college students, where you go to learn about the world, to debate issues that are difficult.
It's one of the things you go to college to learn how to do.
Remember all that?
No safetyism at college.
College students don't have the right to be shielded from ideas that make them uncomfortable.
They have to confront those.
That's what learning to be an adult is all about.
How many times have you heard that?
And yet, look at this.
A Jewish student, not a child, an adult, took a picture of this anti-Semitic bio.
In today's upside-down world, the student will likely be reprimanded and the professor will get tenure.
Here's the thing that is apparently anti-Semitic.
Bile.
The question is, the term pinkwashing refers to.
So the point of the question is, you're at college and there's this term pinkwashing that gets used in political debates all the time about Israel.
There's been op-eds in the New York Times with the headline pinkwashing in the title.
It's a common term that pro-Palestinian Activist use?
So the point of this question is to be able to prove that you know the definition of pinkwashing.
You don't have to agree with the term, you don't have to agree with the meaning of it, you just have to prove that you know what it means.
I think, like, going to college, one of the things you want to do is learn and prove that you're able to explain other people's views, even if you don't agree with them.
Like, go in, summarize, The political perspective of this political scientist or this philosopher.
You don't get to say, I'm not going to do that because I don't agree with this view that you're asking me to summarize.
No, you summarize the view to prove that you understand the argument and then you're free to disagree with it or agree with it just because you're asked to summarize it and prove you understand the argument doesn't mean you have to agree with it or that you're forced to agree with it.
So the question is, what is pinkwashing referred to?
And you see there the highlighted answer, which is the correct definition of this term as people use it.
Quote, the state of Israel uses gay rights as a distraction from Palestinian human rights questions.
And that's exactly what pinkwashing means.
If you say, and trust me, this happens to me every day, hey look, the Israelis are killing a historically high amount of civilians in this bombing campaign, people will come and say, what about the fact that they have gay bars in Tel Aviv but not in Gaza?
The ultimate non sequitur.
Oh, I know you're angry that we're killing all these people and we're illegally occupying their land, but we're better on LGBT issues than they are.
That's called pinkwashing.
You don't have to agree that Israel does that.
You don't have to agree with the critique.
You just have to be able to summarize the argument.
That's what college is for.
That is what has these people worked up.
How is this anti-Semitic?
Even if you don't agree with it, it's a criticism of the Israeli government.
It doesn't mention Jews.
Criticizing the Israeli government is not anti-Semitic.
Jews do it all the time.
I do it all the time.
Israelis do it all the time.
They want to get this person fired.
Here is Jonathan Kay, he's a writer at Quillette, which is a magazine in the UK that's almost about nothing other than defending the virtues of free discourse, free thought, and free speech, they claim.
And here's what Jonathan Kay wrote, who's a local supporter of Israel, quote, a source from TMU, the university has sent me the identity of the lecturer who did this.
A complaint has been launched against him with the administration.
I mean, that is the ultimate tattletale behavior.
This is a PhD student teaching a course.
He wanted to make sure his students understood the term pinkwashing in the context of this new war, this Israel-Gaza war, where that term is used a lot.
You don't have to agree with the term.
You just have to show you understand what it means.
And they're trying to get the guy fired on the grounds that it's somehow anti-Semitic to ask adult college students to summarize what is meant by the term pinkwashing.
Not just to object to the question, but to want the person fired.
These people, whatever they are, have nothing to do with free speech as I've ever understood that concept.
Now, there have been people, I should note, not many, but it has spilled over into the pro-Israel side as well.
Here from the LA Times, a Jewish professor at USC Confronted pro-Palestinian students.
He's now barred from campus.
I saw the video.
There was a group of students, Palestinian students.
This professor is Jewish.
He's a vocal supporter of Israel, and he went over to them and was offended by their protest, and here's what happened.
Quote, the economics professor's interaction with students that day ended with the 72-year-old Strauss, who was Jewish, declaring, quote, Hamas are murderers.
That's all they are.
Everyone should be killed, and I hope they are all killed.
That's a perfectly legal, free speech sentiment to express on a college campus.
No violence involved, no threats.
Within hours, Strauss' comments were posted online, shared and re-shared on X, Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok.
Within a day, an associate dean told Strauss that he was on paid administrative leave barred from campus and that he would no longer teach his undergraduates this semester.
Within the week, a petition demanding that USC fire Strauss for his, quote, racism, xenophobic behavior, and comments that, quote, promote and incite violence had collected more than 6,500 signatures.
I have no problem vehemently condemning the notion that he should be punished for that, especially at a college campus, an academic setting that is the part of society we set aside where we say, this is the part of society where you're supposed to question everything.
That's why professors have tenure.
They can't be fired.
They have academic freedom.
It's the place in society where we specifically want every taboo to be questioned, every claim to be debated or debatable.
So no, I don't think this professor at USC should be fired or punished for having said, I think all Hamas terrorists are evil and they all should be murdered and I hope they are killed.
But I have credibility to object to that because they object to that in every case, not just where it's my views being attacked or targeted.
And if you aren't willing to stand up and object to this spate of firings since October 7th by Israel critics in the United States, if you believe the free speech rights of Americans should be eroded to protect this foreign country, Benjamin Netanyahu told Elon Musk in September, we need a balancing of free speech and the protection against hate speech, not in Israel, but in the United States.
There are people who want to erode free speech in the West, in the United States, in defense of this foreign country.
I'm not one of them.
I want to preserve free speech.
I don't want people to be fired for criticizing Israel.
I don't want people being fired for telling pro-Palestinian protesters they think all Hamas terrorists should be killed.
These are all adults.
We are a much healthier society when we can freely debate and express our views without fear of being fired.
That's what Dave Rubin built his career on.
That's what Barry Weiss built her career on.
That's what Ben Shapiro built his career on.
That's what so many rich political pundits and journalists claim they believed in until October 7th happened and everything changed.
And now there's all these people who got fired, not because they said, I want Israel off the map or I want all Jews murdered, as they all claim.
And even if they were saying that, that would obviously be protected free speech, no question about it.
But that isn't what they said.
They said things like, I want to cease fire, I believe Israel is the wrongful party here.
I don't believe the United States should give weapons to and finance Israel's wars.
And if you're not willing to stand up and defend the rights of people to think that and to say that without having their careers destroyed or their reputations vilified, please, please just don't ever pretend again for the rest of your life that you believe in free thought, free discourse, that you oppose cancel culture or anything else like that because you have zero credibility to make that claim.
TikTok is the most popular social media platform for American citizens who are 25 years and younger, and it's an extremely popular platform for Americans of all ages.
Tens of millions of Americans voluntarily go to TikTok to use it.
No one forces them to.
No one requires them to.
No one coerces them to.
They go there freely to choose, to find communities, to express their views, to hear other people's views.
And it has become gospel in the United States among Democratic and Republican leaders both That this should not be allowed, that TikTok should not be allowed in the United States because it is in reality not a social media site at all, but a weapon of the Chinese Communist Party to contaminate and corrupt American youth.
Here is Nikki Haley expressing a version of that view on Fox News just six days ago.
Well, I think what we need to do is we need to be honest with them.
You know, you don't tell them this is what we're going to do and not explain why.
The reason we want to ban TikTok, and yes, I think we need to ban it, is because it's an app that actually goes and has access to your contacts, to your financial information, to your camera, to your recorder, to everything.
It's infiltration, we know that.
It's also, if you look at the fact that the Bin Laden letter was just put on TikTok that he wrote a week after 9-11.
And it justifies why they did what they did on 9-11, that's trying to influence young voters.
I think young voters, when you tell them the truth, they will understand.
There's a reason India banned TikTok.
There's a reason Nepal, just this past week, banned TikTok, because they saw the social disruption that was happening by foreign actors.
I mean, if you want the United States to be India, where dissidents are put into prison, where no dissent is permitted, I don't want to exaggerate that, but it is an authoritarian country in many ways.
Then I guess you should vote for Nikki Haley since she's justifying what she wants to do on the grounds that India and Nepal do it.
But, yes, the bin Laden letter is something that adult Americans should be able to read for reasons we covered extensively.
We just went over this in the first segment.
This is the idea of free speech, remember?
People get to read what they want and think what they want.
And express what they want without politicians telling them what they can and can't say and placing limits on what they can hear, the information they can access like they do in India?
For sure?
I thought this was everything we were against.
Let's listen to the rest.
What did I tell you?
do that.
What we want social media to do is be a force where they can have freedom of speech, but not have foreign intrusion.
What did I tell you?
I believe it was yesterday when we were examining the CNN segment where Dana Bash and the Democratic Senator Chris Murphy, I'm about to show you.
We're talking about the need to censor social media more in the wake of this war to protect people from hearing anti-Israel propaganda, just like we needed censorship to prevent people from hearing anti-Israel propaganda.
Anti-vaccine propaganda, and election denialism, and anti-Ukraine propaganda, and pro-Russian propaganda.
There's always a reason to censor.
The latest is we need to protect people from censoring.
I said the hallmark of a censor and authoritarian is someone who says, I believe in free speech, but the what comes after the but, which is the real idea, is always the view that is a denial of free speech.
That's why they preface it by saying, I believe in free speech, but because what follows is a negation Of the affirmation that they believe in free speech.
So let's listen to Nikki Haley's formulation of that.
force where they can have freedom of speech, but not have foreign intrusion in the process.
And what we're seeing is a lot of foreign intrusion that's trying to cause distractions, divisions and chaos in America.
That's the part we're trying to stop.
And so we want them to have, you know, the ability to do that, but we don't want it on dangerous apps.
It's actually going to hurt them as opposed to allowing them to do what they want to do, which is communicate and get their views out.
All right.
So that's the Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley.
Here is Senator Marco Rubio expressing the same view, November 20th, same day.
TikTok is a funnel for China to manipulate information going to young Americans.
This is all about the Bin Laden letter.
They were so upset.
The young Americans had found out That Al Qaeda did not actually attack the United States on 9-11 because they hate us for our freedom.
Instead they had a long list of grievances relating to American involvement in interference and in violence toward and bombing of their part of the world.
They hadn't known that because they were propagandized into thinking that we were just minding our own business one day and a bunch of Islamist radicals attacked because they hate the fact that we allow gay marriage and women to be in bikinis.
They hate us for our freedoms.
And then they discovered, actually, there is this other side of the story.
And Marco Rubio and Nikki Haley were very angry that they got to learn that.
Here is Marco Rubio in another statement the same day, quote, the Marxist bias on TikTok reflects more than left-wing thought among millennials in Gen Z. It reflects the absorptions to the world's most powerful Marxist regime, the Chinese Communist Party.
Now, if you want censorship on the grounds that Nikki Haley and Marco Rubio need to protect our youth from hearing things they don't want them to hear, by all means, jump on board with this.
Remember what happened when they first started talking about the need to ban TikTok?
The legislation that actually got introduced was legislation that would allow the U.S.
government to ban any social media platform that had foreign ownership that it deemed to be a national security threat, not just TikTok.
Here's Jesse Watters.
Catching Lindsey Graham not even knowing that the bill he was supporting that they called the Restrict Act is, as even Fox News said, Patriot Act on steroids.
Watch what happened.
I don't think I support the Restrict Act.
You don't support this because you were named as one of the supporters, because this is garbage.
Is this the one with John?
There's two bills out there.
One allows a review of businesses that are connected to China, gives the Secretary the ability to protect their data.
Is that the restrict act?
We got S-686.
Right here.
March 7th.
And we got a bunch of Republicans supporting it.
Because this thing is crazy town.
You don't want the government looking into your private phone.
No, I don't.
If they have a hunch you're colluding with the Russians, we remember how that turned out.
Yeah, no.
Well, the Constitution trumps a statute, so let me come back and, you know, give you a better explanation.
Here's the problem as I see it.
China is the parent company of TikTok, and my nieces like TikTok.
I don't mind them using TikTok.
I just don't want the Chinese government to seize all their data and manipulate the information America sees for political purposes.
China is helping drug cartels in Mexico.
China is not a friend.
The Chinese espionage is at an all time high against American business interests.
So I want to push back against China, but within a constitutional framework.
You're right about that.
So, you made these allegations and I'll come answer better next time.
I mean, because on congress.gov you're listed as one of the co-sponsors of this thing.
Maybe it's like Fetterman when your chief of staff does all your work for you.
But Senator, you've got to go back and talk to these other senators about this.
Alright, so that's what happens.
They work people up.
The Chinese are coming to contaminate your children.
Lindsey Graham, of course, doesn't have children.
He referred to his nieces.
He hasn't been married and doesn't have children.
But there are a lot of politicians who do.
And they are saying you should be scared and give us the power to control what social media apps they can use.
And that is how you get these bills like the Restrict Act that pretend it's about one app, so it's TikTok, and instead it gives the government the power to ban any social media as long as it declares that it's a national security danger, which means they have enormous power over the information we can access.
Now, just to show you how bipartisan this is, here is the Chris Murphy discussion with Dana Bash about how more social media censorship is needed to protect Israel from anti-Israel propaganda And here's where he talks about the need to, in particular, control TikTok.
speech happening on our campus and threats of violence to synagogues and to Jewish communities.
I ultimately think we need to sort of think really hard about the way in which our young people are receiving information about this conflict.
We need to hold accountable the social media sites, in particular TikTok, which is just full of virulent pro-Hamas and anti-Semitic material.
The college campuses need to have a better means of accountability for this kind of hate speech.
But we also have to recognize that these young people are getting their information from somewhere, often from a Chinese-controlled social media platform that has in its interest trying to turn America against each other.
And one of the means they may be doing that is trying to promote a lot of pretty hateful and divisive material about the conflict in Gaza.
Now, I'd be willing to bet a lot of money That there are a lot of you who believe this, who believe that TikTok is controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, that the censorship or content moderation decisions they make are designed to manipulate young American people, young Americans, into hating their government, into fighting with one another, just like we were told the Russians do.
We're constantly told the Russians are trying to infiltrate social media, to turn us against each other, to create division.
That was for a long time the reason More social media censorship was needed to prevent the scary Russians from dividing us.
Now, they've added China to it.
Knowing that a lot of people aren't afraid of Russia, that the Russiagate hoax proved to be a fraud, they've now switched the fear-mongering to China.
And I know there are a lot of people who oppose the war in Ukraine, the U.S.
role in the war in Ukraine, who know Russiagate is a fraud, who say, no, Russia's not afraid of China.
That's who we really have to be afraid of.
Now, what happened was I actually did a lot of investigation and research into this because I wrote about it here in December of 2022 when I was still at Substack.
Reflecting new U.S.
control of TikTok censorship, our report criticizing Zelensky was deleted.
What happened was we produced a segment on our show here that was very critical of President Zelensky and of the Ukrainian government.
and the war effort of the United States in Ukraine.
And it got, went pretty viral.
A lot of people were spreading it around and watching it.
And then suddenly, very quickly, it got banned, taken down by TikTok that sent us a note saying, "This video is a violation of our terms of service." And of course, I thought to myself, okay, I kept hearing that China censors to propagandize Americans against their government.
So why would they want to delete my video?
Critical of the US government.
Why would they want to protect the US government from my criticism of it?
Why would they want to protect the US government's war effort in Ukraine by banning critiques of it?
That doesn't make any sense, does it?
Just like it doesn't make sense that TikTok banned mention of the bin Laden letter and We went and investigated what actually was going on and it turns out that what's really going on, and I'm going to show you the evidence and you can make your own decision, is that the CIA and the FBI have taken the position they want TikTok banned.
The people who own TikTok, who are the founders of TikTok, the main founder in particular, is someone who was born in Singapore.
He went to the London School of Economics.
He then went to Harvard Business School.
He's a capitalist.
He's trying to get wealthy.
He's getting rich.
He's the founder of TikTok.
And the U.S.
is an incredibly lucrative market for TikTok that they don't want to lose access to because it would cost them billions of dollars in valuation in their company.
They're now trying to compete with Amazon and have e-commerce on that site.
It's a gold mine.
And so they're desperate not to get banned from the United States.
And so they've told the CIA and the FBI, look, we don't care about political censorship.
We'll turn that over to you.
We'll let you tell us what you want censored in order for us to stay in the United States.
And that is what's been happening.
The U.S.
security state has been gradually commandeering the ability to content moderate on TikTok.
As a condition for allowing TikTok to remain in the United States.
So here is the article we wrote.
For years, U.S.
officials and their media allies accused Russia, China, and Iran of tyranny for demanding censorship as a condition for big tech access.
That's what China and Iran and Russia do.
They say, hey, Google and Facebook, you can only come in our country if you agree to censor as we command.
That's what Brazil is doing as well to Facebook and Google and Twitter.
We'll let you be in our country but only if you censor as we demand in Facebook, Google, and Twitter want access to the Brazilian market.
It's a huge market.
And so they censor as the Brazilian government tells them to.
Elon Musk had a controversy because right before the Indian election, the Indian government told Twitter, we want all these accounts banned and Elon Musk banned them.
And when he was criticized over it, he said, "Well, look, I'm not gonna lose access to India, "a gigantic democracy.
"Of course I'm gonna censor as the government tells me to.
"If the threat is, if I don't, "I'll be banned from their market." That's what the United States is doing to TikTok.
It's telling them, "We're gonna ban you from our country unless "you censor the way we want." We know that the United States government is very interested in controlling the flow of information on big tech.
That's what the Twitter files were about.
They were doing that with Facebook and Google and Twitter.
And of course, they're doing that with TikTok as well.
And so here's what we wrote.
Quote, concerns over China's ability to manipulate US public opinion were based on claims that China was banning content on TikTok that was contrary to Beijing's interest.
Western media outlets were specifically alleging that the Chinese government itself was censoring TikTok to ban any content that the CCP regarded as threatening to its national security and internal order.
Rather than ban TikTok from the U.S., the U.S.
security state is now doing exactly that which China does to the U.S., to U.S.
tech companies, namely requiring that, as a condition to maintaining access to the American market, TikTok must now censor content That undermines what those agencies view, the CIA, the FBI, the DHS, as undermining American national security interests.
TikTok, desperate not to lose access to hundreds of millions of Americans, has been making a series of significant concessions to appease the Pentagon, CIA, and FBI, the agencies most opposed to deals that allow TikTok to stay in the US.
Among those concessions, Is that TikTok is now outsourcing what the U.S.
government calls content moderation, a pleasant sounding euphemism for political censorship, to groups controlled by the U.S.
government.
And this is a report from Reuters.
Quote, TikTok has already unveiled several measures aimed at appeasing the U.S.
government, including an agreement for Oracle Corporation to store the data of the apps users in the United States and a United States data security division, part of the U.S. government, to oversee data protection and content moderation decisions.
It has spent $1.5 billion on hiring and reorganization costs to build up that unit, according to a source familiar with the matter.
TikTok has been hiring away from Facebook, from Instagram, all their security state executives who had overseen censorship for Facebook and for Google and putting them in charge of content moderation and TikTok to show the U.S. government, we're going to censor the way you want, just like Facebook and Google do, as a condition to allowing we're going to censor the way you want, just like Facebook and Google do, as it.
Keep an open mind on this.
Whenever government officials start trying to scare you, and then in conjunction with it, say, now that we put you in fear of China and what they're doing on TikTok, give us the power to censor what your kids can and can't hear, or what adults can and can't hear, be open-minded to what actually is happening, at least.
It was the White House that first demanded TikTok be banned.
It was Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House Press Secretary, who did so in March of this year.
And when she did, a TikTok user named Luke David Johnson produced a video.
He's a prominent TikTok user.
He's not a child.
He's not a young adult.
He looks to be in his 30s or 40s.
He produced a video explaining Why it's so dangerous to allow the Biden White House to try and ban TikTok.
And I'm going to show you this video because he lays out the argument very clearly and very persuasively.
And I hope it'll just at least have people keep an open mind. - A question on TikTok.
Over a hundred million people now use this app.
What is your message to them about why you're so concerned? - The way she casually thumbs through her notebook without even looking at the pages, knowing there's nothing in there that's gonna help her with probably the most important question anyone has asked her in weeks.
As she tries to act like it's just some run-of-the-mill question.
Oh, by the way, TikTok.
You're the press secretary.
You're all things media.
You're obsessed with the media.
TikTok has a hundred million users that use it for 90 minutes a day.
You know this is huge.
She tries to play it down like it's practically nothing.
He wasn't sure if the U.S. should ban TikTok when he was asked about this.
Now the administration seems to be hardening its stance.
You're backing this legislation, as you mentioned.
We've learned now warning that a possible ban could be at risk here.
The key part of that, like it usually is, what changed?
I I'll tell you what changed.
TikTok didn't start collecting any kind of data that it wasn't already collecting before.
It's also not collecting data that a million other companies don't harvest and sell in nice, tight, neat little packages to all kinds of people around the world, which are freely available.
I don't think that China went out of its way to create an app in order to track and monitor stuff that's widely available on the market already.
It would have been a lot more cost effective for them to just go buy it.
But what they did do was give Americans the ability to communicate with each other.
And what has been happening, as she mentioned, there's a hundred million users now, 90 minutes a day.
Using this platform to communicate with each other.
That is a huge threat.
And not to the Americans, not to the individuals who are communicating their ideas to one another, but to the administration in power.
And that's why this is a bipartisan bill that she's so proud to keep pointing out.
It's bipartisan because both parties in power agree that it's dangerous for the American people to communicate their ideas to one another without Their control.
See, it's fine when it's the mainstream media that they have control over.
It's fine when it's Twitter and Facebook and other companies that they have control over.
But it's not fine when it's a company they don't have control over.
Twitter was okay before, now Twitter's a problem.
Because it's no longer controlled by the U.S.
government.
See how this works?
This is probably the biggest question she's ever been asked in her career.
And she has to know it.
She's a press secretary of the United States of America.
Tick tock is a really big deal.
It's way bigger than any conversation that I've ever had from that podium about anything.
Do you see what he's saying?
He's saying the United States government has worked very hard to make sure it controls all important means of communication.
It obviously has the U.S.
media in the palm of its hands.
The U.S.
media reports what the CIA and the FBI tell it to and doesn't report what they tell it not to say.
The big tech platforms Facebook and Google and Twitter before Elon Musk, as we know, were subject to constant orders from the government about what to censor and they did it.
And the reason they're so fixated on Elon Musk and the reason they hate Rumble and any other site that doesn't obey them is because they can't stand the notion that Americans can go on a platform and communicate ideas that they can't stop.
And this is what the ban, the threats to ban TikTok are about, is about trying to have the American government be able to commandeer those censorship decisions so that critical videos of Zelensky and the war in Ukraine or topic videos about the Bin Laden letter get censored because the U.S.
government wants it to and they can easily get Google and Facebook to censor it.
It's a little harder with TikTok.
And TikTok has had to agree more and more because they don't care about political censorship.
They care about profit.
These are capitalists.
They don't care about giving the U.S.
government control over content moderation.
They're happy to do it if that's the condition they have to meet in order to keep access to the very lucrative U.S.
market.
Here is TikTok constantly reassuring the United States and the U.S.
government TikTok's commitment to U.S.
national security.
They are saying here that their commitment is to U.S.
national security.
Put simply, Project Texas, which is the TikTok project, to hand over control of data and content moderation to American agencies and companies, This is the thing about this idea that the Chinese are spying on us with TikTok.
feel safe with confidence their data is secure and the platform is free from outside influence.
This is the thing about this idea that the Chinese are spying on us with TikTok.
As Luke Johnson said, leaving aside how much Facebook and Google spy on us, how much data they have about you and me and everybody, we covered before about how the CIA and the FBI buy on the open market enormous amounts of data about Americans that are we covered before about how the CIA and the FBI buy on the open market enormous That they would be prohibited constitutionally from collecting on their own, but they buy it commercially instead.
And if the goal of the Chinese government was to spy on Americans and gather data about Americans, it would be much more cost effective to just go buy it on the open market rather than having to create this whole entire app and attract Americans to use it. it would be much more cost effective to just go But the condition for TikTok to remain in America has been to hand over control of content moderation decisions and data to the US government and that's exactly what they're doing.
Here's more from TikTok.
Our content moderation systems and processes, both machine and human, will always be subject to outside review to ensure that moderation is taking place only in accordance with our published community guidelines.
The USDS will implement these rules.
And the TTP, American-based trusted technology provider, will have full visibility, guaranteeing that there are no expected changes to our system.
So, all promotional decisions will be as transparent and audible to the third-party monitors and U.S.
Content Advisory Council.
Here is Bloomberg, or rather Reuters, in June of 2023.
I'm sorry, yeah, it was Bloomberg in May of 2023.
TikTok will soon grant Oracle full access to their code and algorithm.
TikTok will soon grant Oracle Corporation full access to its source code, algorithm, and content moderation material as part of efforts to alleviate national security concerns about the app.
Here from Reuters, TikTok moves U.S.
user data to Oracle servers.
TikTok had previously been storing its U.S.
user data at its own data centers in Virginia with a backup in Singapore.
It will now delete private data on U.S.
users from its own data centers and rely fully on Oracle's U.S.
servers, it said.
TikTok has also set up a dedicated U.S.
data security team known as USDS as a gatekeeper for U.S.
user information and ring-fencing it from ByteDance, a company spokesman told Reuters.
I understand that if you are just somebody who thinks China is the only threat, the biggest threat, even bigger than Hamas, and everything connected to China, where the Chinese mentioned you get very scared and you're ready to give the government all power.
I know this all seems with TikTok saying, oh, they're going to hand over content moderation decisions to the U.S.
security state.
Oh, I don't believe China.
China will say anything to get access to us.
But again, there's 100 million Americans, 100 million Americans, one of every three Americans that use this app voluntarily.
And the proof that TikTok is actually making decisions to censor in accordance with what the U.S.
government wants is very clear.
We just showed you some.
Dave Smith, who I think is one of the smartest commentators around, went on Joe Rogan's program last week.
To talk about the Israel-Gaza War.
And he brought up the controversy with the Bin Laden letter.
And watch this, what happened here.
Let's get this played, just one second.
In the same way, you know, like the other week that Osama Bin Laden's letter to America went, like, super viral on TikTok, and then they scrubbed it off of The Guardian as a response to it, which is just, number one, like, what is that?
Doesn't that just say everything about our society?
Is that that's the response?
To scrub it off The Guardian?
Take it down so people can't see it.
The Guardian being the newspaper covered it?
Yeah, they had published it, and it had been up there, I think, since...
And what were they they were concerned that it was encouraging people to support it?
Yeah, like a bunch of a bunch of tiktokers like young lefty tiktokters started like making these videos where they're like Osama bin Laden was right about everything and then they were getting heat for it So they just took it down I mean you can still find it like on the archives and so it's still a lot of people's videos are still up, right?
There's a lot.
Yeah, I don't know.
I don't know about that.
I'm not on tick-tock I kind of just saw on Twitter when people were sharing the tick-tock videos, so I don't know if they were taking them down I don't TikTok takes down stuff pretty quickly.
I don't know what they were doing with that.
Why would they take that down, though?
If I was a Chinese-run propaganda corporation.
TikTok removes hashtag for Osama Bin Laden's letter to America after viral videos circulate.
So it did just remove the hashtag.
The Guardian also pulled the text of the al-Qaeda founder.
Do you see what just happened there?
Joe Rogan had been hearing and got convinced that TikTok is this propaganda weapon of the Chinese Communist Party.
They use it to disseminate information that corrupts Americans.
And he's like, why would TikTok possibly ever ban the Osama bin Laden letter from being discussed?
They must love the Osama bin Laden letter.
It turns Americans against each other.
They would never ban it.
And then suddenly appears on the screen a news story that says TikTok banned The hashtag to the Bin Laden letter, which prevents people from seeing it.
Joe Rogan said, oh, I guess they did.
And then he tried to kind of minimize it and say, oh, they only ban the hashtag.
Banning the hashtag is a huge deal, because that's how people search for it, and then they can't find it.
But they went much further than that, TikTok did.
But you see, Joe Rogan, in his mind, has been told so many times, or absorbed, oh, there's a Chinese Communist Party site.
They're not going to ban the Bin Laden letter.
They would spread that.
They would love that.
But they did ban it.
Because the minute the U.S.
government tells TikTok, we don't like what you're allowing on the site, TikTok bans it as a condition to stay in the United States.
And the United States security state is gaining more and more control over what appears on TikTok and what doesn't.
And why would they want to ban it as long as that's the case?
And that's what that TikTok user was saying, was we have one platform left.
That the U.S.
government can't control, that's why they want to ban it.
And then as soon as Elon Musk says, we're not going to censor, or Rumble says, we're not going to censor on your command, those sites have to be destroyed.
That's what this is really about.
Here, just to show you, TikTok, this was where they removed our video.
Here you see the video details.
Ukrainian President Zelensky is a corrupt authoritarian oligarch, despite what Western media is now trying to tell you.
And here we got an account warning.
They took the video down.
The reasons was integrity and authenticity.
They warned us the next violation could result in more punishment.
Why would the Chinese Communist Party want to ban criticism of Zelensky in the U.S.
war effort in Ukraine?
Here is a video of ours that went very viral.
It was about the CIA interference in the Brazilian election that Lula won.
They wanted Bolsonaro to lose and Lula to win.
And the CIA flew down to Brazil.
They warned Brazil about election fraud claims.
And we did a video on this, on the way in which the CIA interfered in Brazil.
Here are the CIA's benevolent interference in Brazil.
This went very viral among Brazilians because it was subtitled in Portuguese.
It was an article about the CIA interference in their election.
Why would TikTok want to ban that?
It was about nefarious acts by the US government abroad.
They would love that video.
But they banned it.
They took down this very viral video of ours, video removed.
Your content is against our community guidelines.
So do you.
I just want you to at least question.
Whether this fear mongering around China, and this attempt to tell you that the most popular app that Americans voluntarily use to exchange ideas with one another to find communities to debate and participate, whether that really is because of a belief that the Chinese Communist Party is using that to contaminate our country, or whether it's just an attempt to gain control,
An apparently successful one to ensure that TikTok has to censor in accordance with the US security state's dictates in order to stay in the United States.
Now, we wanted to talk briefly about this hilarious CNN self glorification where they claim they obtained Liz Cheney's new book.
When of course what happened was Liz Cheney and her publisher gave it to CNN as a means of promoting it and CNN wants to promote this book because it's a book that just bashes Trump and the Republican Party and Liz Cheney knows she's going to get very rich by having liberals buy her book and if you want liberals to buy your book you go to CNN to promote it.
But because we have the locals show tonight, the after show that we're about to do with our subscribers and locals, where it's interactive in nature, we take your questions.
We're going to go ahead and postpone this for another night.
We've gone about 90 minutes so far.
We still have this local show to do.
So we're going to go ahead and save that for another night.
And so we're going to call it a wrap.
So that will conclude our show for this evening.
As a reminder, a system update is available in podcast form where you can listen to each episode in podcast version on Spotify, Apple, and all of the major podcasting platforms.
Each episode is posted there 12 hours after their first broadcast live here on Rumble.
And if you rate, review, and follow the program, it really helps spread the visibility.
Of the show.
And as a final reminder, every Tuesday and Thursday night, tonight being Tuesday, once we're done with our live show here on Rumble, we move to Locals, which is part of the Rumble platform, where we have our live interactive after show, where we take your questions and respond to your critiques and criticisms and hear your suggestions for future shows.
That show is available only for our subscribers to our Locals community, and if you want to become a subscriber, which gives you access to those twice a week after shows, As well as the transcripts we publish of every program we produce here in very professionalized form, as well as original journalism that we'll publish there.
And it really, really helps support the independent journalism that we're trying to do here, that Locals Community is fundamental to our ability to do this show.
Just click the Join button right below the video player on the Rumble page.
It will take you to the Locals Community.
For those of you who've been watching this show, we are, as always, very appreciative.
We hope to see you back tomorrow night and every night at 7 p.m.
