Minnesota Shooting Exploited to Impose AI Mass Surveillance; Taylor Lorenz on Dark Money Group Paying Dem Influencers, and the Online Safety Act
A former Israeli special forces agent promotes his AI mass surveillance program on Fox News in the wake of the Minnesota shooting, exploiting Americans' fears. Plus: journalist Taylor Lorenz discusses her WIRED article exposing the dark money group paying Dem influencers. Taylor and Glenn also discuss the dangers of the UK's Online Safety Act and the threat of censorship worldwide. ------------------ Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Become part of our Locals community Follow System Update: Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook Read Taylor Lorenz's article here Watch Taylor Lorenz on YouTube
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, the ramifications of yesterday's Minneapolis school shooting and the exploitations of it continue to grow.
On last night's program, we reviewed the transparently opportunistic efforts by people across the political spectrum to immediately proclaim that they knew exactly what caused this murderer to go and shoot people.
And as it turned out, the murderer was motivated by whatever party or ideology, religion, or social belief that they most hate.
Always a huge coincidence and a great gift for those who claim that.
Now, while that happens in the wake of virtually every such tragedy, people instantly try to exploit it to advance their political agenda.
There's an even more common and actually far more sinister manner of exploiting such shootings, namely by immediately playing on people's anger and fear to tell them that they must submit to greater and greater forms of mass surveillance and other authoritarian powers in order to avoid such events in the future.
As they did after the 9-11 attack, which ushered in the full-scale online surveillance system under which we all live, Fox News is back to push a comprehensive Israel-developed AI mass surveillance program in the name of stopping violent events in the future.
We'll tell you all about it.
Then we have a very special guest, a surprise guest for tonight.
She is Taylor Lorenz, who reported for years for the New York Times and the Washington Post on internet culture, trends, and online discoursese and social media platforms.
She's here in part to talk about her new story that appeared in Wired magazine today that details a dark money program that secretly shovels money to pro-democratic party podcasters and content creators, including ones with large audiences, and yet they are prohibited to disclose even to their viewership that they're being paid in this way.
We'll talk about this program and its implications.
And while she's here, we'll also discuss her reporting on and warnings about new online censorship schemes that masquerade as child protection laws, namely by requiring users to submit proof of their identity in order to access various sites, all in the name of protecting children, but in the process destroying the key value of online anonymity.
We'll talk to her about several other related issues as well.
Before we get to that.
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Now, welcome to a new episode of System Update starting right now.
There have been a lot of revelations over the last 25 years since the 9-11 attack of all sorts of secretive programs that were implemented in the dark that many people, I think correctly, view as un-American in the sense that they run a foul and constitute a direct assault on the rights and protections and guarantees that we all think define what it means to be un-American.
A lot of that happened.
In fact, much of it, one could say most of it happened because of the fears and emotions that were generated quite predictably by the 9-11 attack in 2001 and also the anthrax attack, which followed along just about a month later,
six weeks later, which we've done an entire show on before because of its importance in escalating the fear level in the United States in the wake of 9-11, even though it's extremely mysterious, the whole thing, how it happened, how it was resolved.
But the point is that the fear levels increased, the anger increased, the sadness over the victims increased.
And into that breach, into that highly emotional state stepped both the government and their partners in the media, which essentially included all major media outlets at the time, to tell people they essentially have to give up their rights if they want to be safe from future terrorist attacks.
And in the wake of that came the Patriot Act that still everybody as much is in existence as it was back then, even though it was promised to be very temporary.
Also came things like the warrantless eavesdropping program where the government decided to have the right to spy an American to have the warrants required by law.
And then ultimately the full-scale mass surveillance system that we know the NSA implemented under both President Bush and President Obama, thanks to the reporting enabled by the documents furnished by Edward Snowden.
And I had thought one of the lessons of all of that would be that we have to be very careful not to allow fear monkering and exploitation of our emotions to get us to submit to or acquiesce to or even cheer for.
What would otherwise be creepy and authoritarian developments because the government is playing in our fears.
That's always how authoritarianism arises.
The government puts you in fear of something, some internal threat, some external threat, and then tells you you'll be unsafe unless you give to the government much more power than you ever thought it ought otherwise have.
And if you're in a state of fear, which is a very important human instinct, it's a very important part of our survival but if your fear is manipulated and exaggerated by external forces through propaganda and the like then you're going to agree to submit to a whole variety of things out of fear that maybe a year later or two days later when it's too late you will come to realize was something you never should have allowed to happen that is really the story of post 9-11 america and now we see it happening with events that are far
less in significance and magnitude than 9-11, but still very much create a sort of vortex of emotion and fear that people inside the government, people adjacent to the government, people in the private sector for surveillance technology are very adept and very quick to exploit in order to get the population to accept even greater forms of surveillance and related types of authoritarianism.
One excellent example, which is why we wanted to cover it, very illustrative, but also on its own very significant example of how this works is what happened on Fox News last night.
where on the program hosted by the Fox News host Trace Gallagher, someone named Aaron Cohen, who is a former Israeli military operative, he went on to Fox News, he's a regular on Fox News,
and this is what he told the Fox News audience, and it seemed to get a very positive reception on Fox, not just last night, but other times as well, that he and various colleagues of his have developed a new AI-driven system of even more invasive and even more ubiquitous mass surveillance, which he claims will avert.
events like this in the future by constantly reporting to the government anyone that they decide is being in some way dangerous or threatening.
And that might sound good in principle if it's only confined to people saying, hey, I'm getting guns and I'm going to go shoot up a school.
But as we know, we were told that all these programs like the Patriot Act were going to be used solely for people plotting terrorist attacks.
and overwhelmingly it's been used for all sorts of things unrelated to terrorism.
These are the kinds of pretexts used to impose such kind of programs, but almost never the actual So let's listen to Aaron Cohen talking to Trace Gallagher on Fox News last night about this Minneapolis shooter.
Correct.
I am now about to launch Gideon America's first ever AI threat detection platform built on the screen.
And then you see on the screen he's identified as an Israeli special ops veteran.
So let's listen to this.
I am now about to launch Gideon America's first ever AI threat detection platform built specifically for law enforcement.
It scrapes the internet 24/7 using an Israeli grade ontology to pull specific threat language and then routes it to local law enforcement.
So 24/7 to By the way, he said that this is an AI program that's constantly sweeping and scraping the internet and reporting to the government what it finds and he said it's israeli grade ontology if anyone can tell me what that means i'd be very appreciative i studied philosophy i understand the word ontology i don't understand it it's basically an investigation into the nature of being i don't understand what
it means to describe a ai mass surveillance system as being of israeli grade ontology it doesn't sound good at all I'm not sure what the meaning is or even has a meaning, but if any of you are enlightened as to what that could possibly indicate, as I said, I'm sure it's quite sinister, please let us know.
24-7 using an Israeli-grade ontology to pull specific threat language and then routes it to local law enforcement.
It's a 24-7 detective.
It never sleeps and it's going to get us in front of these attacks.
Would it have picked up on this, do you think?
100%.
I wish my program would already be up.
All right, so let me just interject here.
And so This person just described an extremely creepy, alarming, invasive, ubiquitous form of mass surveillance driven by artificial intelligence.
Whether he's exaggerating or hyping up its capabilities because he has a financial interest in the company, that is how he's pitching it.
And he's saying it's ready for release next week.
And obviously, if you're a journalist and you hear someone saying this, your first question ought to be like, wait a minute.
Who decides what is threatening enough to report to the government?
Who gets reported to the government?
What does it mean that you're an Israeli trained career special ops person and this is of Israeli grade ontology?
Is it related to Israel?
Does Israel have access to it, control of it?
Are they the ones who define what's dangerous?
How will threats be determined?
What's the role of AI?
Like all sorts of alarming things.
And instead, it's almost like an infomercial.
Trace Gallagher interjects and doesn't ask any of the questions about the obvious dangers in this announcement, but instead says, would this have averted this Minneapolis shooting?
Like, what do you think the guy's going to say?
No, no, it wouldn't have stopped it.
He's there to exploit this shooting in order to say, hey, we have this program that's launching next week that will solve all these things because it'll be 24-7 scraping of the internet and then reporting whatever we think should be reported to the U.S. government and local law enforcement.
Front of these attacks.
Would it have picked up on this, do you think?
100%.
I wish this program would already be up.
We're not launching until next week.
I've got a dozen agencies on board, Trace.
I just onloaded a major Northeast agency with over 2,700 sworn.
This is America's early warning system.
All right, so I hope that's comforting.
This is an Israeli trained career special ops veteran, intelligence veteran and he is claiming on Fox News that already he has dozens of American agencies who have signed on to buying and implementing this Israeli-grade ontology AI-driven 24-7 scraping of the internet at all times mass surveillance system that will report whatever content it decides needs to be reported to the U.S. government.
I know that's very comforting to me.
I've always said what we need in this society is our Israelis who come from special operations and intelligence agencies in Israel developing AI-driven 24-7 ubiquitous mass surveillance technology that feeds to the government anyone or any person or group who's saying something that this Israeli AI-driven surveillance machine decides ought to be reported to the government.
So I'm personally very relieved, but I do think it's important to note that there are some potential downsides in the fact that he's on Fox News and not just permitted, but kind of induced, like provoked.
into claiming that this system is, you don't have to worry about it.
In fact, you should be very comfortable about it because it's coming and it will prevent not just things like this, but all bad and dangerous things.
It'll predict it in advance by finding it and alerting the government.
Who is this Aaron Cohen?
As I said, he's a very frequent guest on Fox News.
This is how he identifies himself, operations veteran and counter-terrorism expert.
And then here's the text of his self-constructed biography.
Quote, Aaron Cohen is an Israeli trained career special operations and intelligence veteran who has served in the counter-terrorism space for over two decades.
Cohen began his counterterrorism service in Israel's Mista Aravim or Arabist unit, which is the name given to Israel's elite counterterrorism units that operate undercover.
This sounds, I mean, does it get more trustworthy than this?
Someone who's operating in elite counterterrorism units of the Israeli government?
in the Arabist desk?
I mean, is there anybody you would trust more to operate full scale 24-7?
ubiquitous mass surveillance and reporting to the government than this person?
Quote, these units where he worked are specifically trained to assimilate among the local Arab population and are tasked with performing high-risk terrorist arrests, intelligence gathering, and targeted assassination, and to use disguise and surprise as their main weapon.
Please, I know he's in the private sector.
I know he...
But that's not, the millions that he might make from this, that's not his goal.
His goal is to keep Americans safe.
He's an Israeli special veterans operator, operative.
So I think, I hope the Trump administration keeps him as one of the key personnel in this private company and also make him the head of the NSA.
Just combine the U.S.'s own mass surveillance system as run by the NSA and this new AI-driven Israeli great ontology program.
program that is run by whatever Israeli operative veterans.
What could be better than that?
Now, apparently he has his own YouTube show.
He doesn't just go on Fox.
And he called it the Aaron Cohen Show.
And that's what kind of creativity emerges when you work for two decades and...
It's called the Aaron Cohen Show.
And this was him promoting just a couple months ago this program that he calls Gideon, this system that stops the next attack before it starts.
I want to take a minute and talk to you about something serious that I've been working on behind the scenes.
I'm building something called Gideon, or in Hebrew we call it Gidon.
And this is the first real-time AI-powered threat detection system for law enforcement and schools.
It's a system that scans the open web, social media, Reddit, Discord, gaming chats, and flags real behavioral signals before someone picks up.
The always on, never turns off, always on surveillance AI for digital threat behavior.
It crawls public school media, forums, the deep dark web, and gaming chats.
It flags radicalization.
Gee, I wonder what this individual and the people behind him would regard as radicalization.
Do you think they would regard it as radicalization that Nancy Spear reported to the government if someone says, yeah, I want to commit genocide in Gaza and drive all the Palestinians out, either murder them, starve them to death, or force them out.
Would that be radical?
Or might radicalization be, I think the U.S. should stop funding the Israeli military and let them pay for their own wars?
I don't know.
Who knows?
Big mystery.
Flag radicalization, martyrdom language, grooming, and tactical signals.
Ooh, I wonder who this might be targeting.
It also scores threats based on behavioral signatures, and then it alerts schools, sheriffs, SROs, and fusion centers.
all right let's let's see what else this does that i've been seeing for years before every major attack now flagged before it happens and i've already got law enforcement agencies on board ready to pilot it but to get this fully live and to bring it to the engineers and finish the platform i need your help
I'm raising funds directly from my audience, from Cohen's commandos, the people who actually care to bring Gideon to life.
And if you've ever asked yourself, why didn't someone catch this before it happens this is the answer hit the link down below in the description and donate what you can and all right so i don't want to exaggerate this guy's importance because he has a gigantic grifter vibe to him i mean he's begging for donate does he have investors i don't know but he's begging for money to be sent by viewers of the
widely popular uh what is it aaron cohen the aaron cohen show on youtube so i'm not trying to exaggerate his importance but what i am saying is that fox news has him on and had him on last night and specifically encouraged its audience to believe that whether it comes from him or not, we need more AI-driven mass surveillance of Israeli great ontology.
This is what Fox News' role is, but a lot of other media outlets as well.
It's what the government does also.
It's how we get greater authoritarianism, a loss of rights, through fear-mongering every time an incident like this happens.
I mean, that's just basic.
And the fact that he was on Fox News last night and made the claim that, oh, yes, U.S. government agencies, many of them, local.
them local state and federal have already signed on to this program we're releasing it next week is at least a claim that deserves journalistic scrutiny and we'll do what we can to verify that but i think the most important part of this is just how fox news how journalists in general immediately fall into this role of encouraging everybody to submit to and even beg for greater amounts of authoritarianism,
surveillance, police power every time one of these events happens.
Now, this, I say, is, you know, when he, when someone goes on Fox News, especially Fox News prime time, they often are speaking directly to the president.
He watches Fox News every day, comments on it constantly.
He was angry about someone yesterday on, oh, I know, about Carl Rove.
Karl Rowe went on Fox and Friends, the morning show, and President Trump was watching, and
watching cable news, favorite shows, and then tweeting about what he hears in anger.
But for sure, the prime time shows he watches religiously, and a lot of these people are talking directly to him.
And this is an administration that has already proven to be extremely receptive to implementing all new forms of mass surveillance.
Here from the New York Times in May 30th, Trump taps Palantir to compile data on Americans.
We did a whole hour and a half long show on the role that Palantir is playing, the unprecedentedly powerful role Palantir is playing in the Trump administration, where the Trump administration issued executive orders assigning to Palantir the sole umbrella role to gather all data collected by all these agencies,
data about your finances from the IRS and Treasury Department, data about your health from the CDC, data about every one of your whereabouts and your conversations from the NSA and Homeland Security to centralize it all, not keep it segregated anymore, but to centralize it all under the control of Palantir.
One of whose founder is Peter Thiel, you know about him, but the other is someone who's the Alex Carp, who's still the CEO and if you just go watch a random interview with Alex Carp and you'll see what a maniacal warmonger he is.
And that's who the Trump administration is empowering to expand government surveillance after pledging for eight years to go to war against the deep state.
It's just a deep state on steroids run by Palantir, which has been wanting to run.
the U.S. deep state and the surveillance state since 9-11.
It was founded by Peter Thiel and Alex Carp in 2002 and tried to get John Poindexter, who at the time time was in charge of what they called the Total Information Awareness Office, to allow Palantir to run that, to run the ubiquitous mass surveillance.
John Pointexter thought they were a little too new, a little too young, a little too hasty to do that, but they did start playing a role.
They got their foot in the door, and now they're probably the most important surveillance contractor, certainly in the Trump administration, and they've been increasing radically, not decreasing.
the amount of surveillance collected.
So it's the kind of message that appeals to Trump and his administration.
Quote, the Trump administration has expanded Palantir's work with the government, spreading the company's technology, which could easily merge data on Americans throughout agencies.
And again, we did a program, I think it was in late May, about Palantir, which I encourage you to watch if you missed it, because it is one of the most important developments taking place inside of the government.
Now, the fact that it's linked to Israel, this new technology Fox News is pitching, but Alex Karp is...
Here from CTEC in January 2022, and CTEC is an Israeli news outlet.
The title was exclusive.
Israel police use NSO's Pegasus to spy on citizens.
Quote, mayors, leaders of political protests against former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former government employees were among those tracked by police without a search or bugging warrant authorizing the surveillance.
Pegasus has been sold to the Saudi government.
It was used to hack into Jeff Bezos's WhatsApp.
That's what found the messages that were intimate messages with him and Lauren Sanchez at the time that he was still married that broke up his marriage.
It is an incredibly potent technology of mass surveillance.
And there, in fact, is a huge trend of former Israeli intelligence officers like this, Aaron Cohen, working inside a big tech, developing all the technology that tracks what you do, that controls what you say.
Not inside Israel, but inside the United States.
Here from DropSight News, just a few days ago, just a couple weeks ago, August 13th, the title., hundreds of former Israeli spies are working in big tech database shows a $25 billion deal is the latest acquisition to strengthen the link between the U.S. tech sector and Israeli intelligence quote as of June 2025 over 1400 veterans of Israeli intelligence are now working in U.S. tech with 900 of those coming from unit 8200
alone that's the notorious unit of intelligence inside is the the Mossad and Israeli intelligence, military intelligence units.
That's the unit where Barack Ravid, who somehow overnight became the most influential reporter.
He works for Axios.
to bring forth the messaging of the Israeli government.
He's an Israeli citizen.
He was in the IDF.
He worked in Unit 8200, that very infamous and notorious surveillance unit.
Now huge numbers of them are migrating to the United States to work inside big tech.
Quote, that number comes from a database of people who publicly identify themselves as both former Israeli intelligence officers and holding a job in U.S. tech on their LinkedIn profiles.
The database was assembled by an independent researcher who is remaining anonymous for personal security.
Who can blame him?
And has dubbed the database, quote, the Eagle Mission, Influence Network.
The 1,400 people are self-identified veterans.
or active reserve members of Unit 8200 Israeli military intelligence and the IDF cyber defense director at working in senior and mid-level engineering and security roles at major U.S. tech firms with offices in Europe, the U.S. and Israel.
with Israel, the United States, and Europe.
DropSight cross-checked many of the records in the database for accuracy.
Quote, this does not mean that every person who served in Unit 8200 is an Israeli spy looking to send classified data back to Tel Aviv, the researcher emphasized.
So that's important.
Not every one of these former operatives with Unit 8200 of Israel working now in the United States of big tech.
Not every one of them is an Israeli spy looking to send classified data back to Tel Aviv.
Not all, quote, but it does create a serious vulnerability.
Oh, you think?
No other country has this kind of access to the American tech sector.
We obsess over Chinese involvement in the tech industry and worry about corporate espionage, but Israeli penetration rarely gets mentioned.
Indeed, Israeli penetration of all types in the United States rarely gets mentioned, at least in most sectors.
gets mentioned quite often here and in a growing number of places, thankfully.
We just reported a couple weeks ago that TikTok, which is desperate to remain in the United States, despite the fact that you may remember a bipartisan Congress came together to enact a bill, which I opposed, but they still voted for it despite my opposition, to ban TikTok from operating in the United States or forcing it to sell to a company that was American that the government could control.
And even though they claim that national security interest urgently compelled this bill to pass and the Biden White House advocated for it and signed it into law and they made it effective the day after the election so that neither party paid for a darkened, closed, shuttered TikTok that huge numbers of Americans use, especially young Americans, but also all types of Americans.
President Trump just decided, I know it's law, but like, I'm just going to, we're eight months into 2025.
And it just not, TikTok is up and running.
It's operated by Skydance and the same group of entrepreneurs and owners with the same links to China as it had before.
And Trump just said, I don't know.
I'm not going to implement this law quite yet.
And all the people who claimed it was such a threat to national security for it to remain open in the hands of its current owners, I don't know where they are.
They don't seem to mind.
And I think one of the reasons is that TikTok has made so many concessions, including hiring huge numbers of former CIA and FBI operatives away from Facebook, Meta.
Meta's Facebook and Instagram and Google to operate their quote-unquote content moderation, meaning their censorship.
And they also recently just hired an American woman, a very young American woman, who went to Israel and joined the IDF and fought with the IDF.
And the ADL told TikTok, we think you're allowing way too much criticism of Israel on your platform.
And one of the demands we have for you is that you hire at a very high salary a person who will be in charge of censoring criticism of Israel that is anti-Semitic, meaning all criticism of Israel.
And they announced her hiring.
She's like 27.
She's a lot of different videos talking about her love of Israel, her devotion to Israel, how her Judaism compels Zionism.
She went and fought a foreign army.
And now they hired her, I think it's like $380,000 a year to be the head of censorship for anti-Semitism and Israel-related issues at TikTok.
So this is the kind of thing TikTok is having to do in order to remain in the United States.
Here's the gray zone, which reported in April of this year, 100 plus meta employees, including the head of AI policy, are confirmed as X-IDF.
So they're just infiltrating it all over the place in big tech in the United States.
Now, the next thing I want to show you is just a couple of similar highly disturbing issues that relate to all of this.
One of them is a bill that the Beverly Hills public school system just enacted as reported by the LA Times.
It's a bill that requires all public schools in the Beverly Hill District to display an Israeli flag.
The schools and public schools in the United States are required to fly the flag of a foreign country, specifically Israel.
And of course, they justify it as a bid to fight anti-Semitism, but it's fostering loyalty to this foreign country.
Obviously, that's what you fly a flag for, a flag of a foreign country.
And then Yesterday, the House Oversight Committee, which is chaired by James Comer, and this is issued by a subcommittee on cybersecurity chaired by Nancy Mace, the Republican from South Carolina, who's currently running for governor, clearly wants and needs APAC money, so is working very hard to do as many things as she can for Israel, announced an investigation into Wikipedia and bias on the platform.
And I'm certainly somebody who thinks Wikipedia has had a bias, a very liberal kind of anti-populist bias.
And you can see it in so many articles, but I never wanted the government to fix that.
Fix meaning to control it.
But the committee here announced that they were launching an investigation demanding all sorts of documents from Wikipedia as part of this investigation.
And the investigation, you will be shocked to learn, overwhelmingly focuses on Israel.
And the documents they seek are documents that would enable them to uncover, to dox the identity of editors at WikiLeaks or computers.
contributors to WikiLeaks who in the eyes of, I'm sorry, Wikipedia, it's Wikipedia, I think I might have said WikiLeaks once or twice, but they wanna dox the identity, uncover the identity, destroy the anonymity of editors at Wikipedia or contributors to Wikipedia who in the view of the ADL or I guess this subcommittee led by Nancy Mace are permitting
anti-Israel information, that's the phrase they use, anti-Israel information to circulate on, They pretend they're interested in other types of activities including foreign government related activities but the whole thing focuses clearly on Israel.
And they say we seek your assistance in obtaining documents and communications regarding individuals or specific accounts serving as Wikipedia volunteer editors who violated Wikipedia platform policies, as well as your own efforts to thwart intentional organized effort to inject bias into important and sensitive areas.
They say one recent report raised troubling questions about potentially systematic efforts to advance anti-Semitic and anti-Israel information in Wikipedia articles related to conflicts with the State of Israel.
And there's a footnote that links to a report by the Anti-Defamation League that purports to document, quote, how anti-Israel and anti-Jewish bias undermines Wikipedia's neutrality.
What law says Wikipedia has to be neutral?
Why does the government have the power to regulate Wikipedia and to make sure that in the government's eyes, They're being neutral or fair about a foreign country, about Israel again.
And it's not just that they want to regulate the content.
Here's the list of the documents that they're demanding a Wikipedia turnover.
It includes records, communications, or analysis pertaining to possible coordination within academic institutions or other organized efforts to edit or influence content identified as possibly violating Wikipedia's standards.
Also records showing identifying a unique characteristic of accounts, including names, IP addresses, registration dates, user activity logs for editors subject to action.
And then any analysis conducted or reviewed by the Wikipedia Foundation or any third party acting on its behalf of patterns of manipulation or bias relating to anti-Semitism and conflicts of the state of Israel.
In sum, they're trying to find the identity of the people who are contributing to Wikipedia or the editors who are making decisions about what the articles will say that in their mind are too critical of Israel.
Every week, literally, I'm not even exaggerating, every week there's some new censorship campaign sponsored by Primarily the Republican Party, which is in control of the Senate, the House, and the White House, that has no purpose other than to shield and protect Israel from criticism,
trying clamp down on the ability of Israel criticism to be heard in the United States as polls increasingly show that Americans are rapidly turning against it for the obvious reason that they've been watching Israel blow up entire families and children for 22 months now, starving them to death.
And in response to that polling, they're increasingly trying to control the flow of information.
So we're talking here about control of a new AI 24-7 surveillance system that scrapes the internet and reports to the government what it thinks shouldn't be said.
accompanied by a school district forcing every public school to fly an Israeli flag and yet another committee investigation, this one led by Nancy Mace, who's running for governor once Apex money, to try and uncover the identity, destroy the anonymity for Wikipedia contributors if they are contributing what she or people in the government regard as anti-Israel information.
I don't think I need to explain the trend.
It kind of explains itself.
And in just a second, right after the break, we're going to be talking to Taylor Renz, who has a new article out on a dark money group that has been secretly funding a lot of pro-democratic party or liberal content creators and forcing them, among other things, to keep it secret, including from their own audience, which is...
But she's also been warning of some of the trends legislatively and in terms of its application of trying to destroy online anonymity by forcing people to submit their identity and documents if they want to access or participate in certain sites under the pretext of protecting children, which relates to all of this.
So many of these things are obviously tied together and the fact that they didn't even wait 24 hours to start exploiting this Minneapolis school shooting to push this new AI mass surveillance system I hope indicates the need to keep your guard up very high and vigilantly against these kind of efforts to exploit fearmongering for greater authoritarianism.
*music*
You're going to like this one.
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Taylor Renz is an American journalist who reports on internet culture mainly through her substack right now, User Magazine, although she writes for many other media outlets.
She also does reporting on her YouTube channel titled Taylor Renz.
She has previously been a staff reporter for The Washington Post and The New York Times and has written and reported for numerous media outlets.
She has a new exclusive story that she reported in Wired magazine today entitled, quote, a dark money group is secretly funding high-profile Democratic influencers.
We want to talk to her in depth about that, as well as the work she's been doing in warning of and reporting on the dangers to free speech by new online censorship provisions, such as the UK's Online Safety Act and particularly the growing movement to, under the guise of age verification and protecting children, requiring your identity be submitted before allowing you to participate in multiple platforms on the internet.
Taylor, it is great to see you.
Really appreciate you're taking the time to talk to us tonight.
Glenn, I'm surprised you would say it's great to see me.
It is great to see you.
You know, I have had that experience many times where you have arguments based on differences with somebody.
And then I think when you talk personally, especially about reporting that I think is important, you know, you can have more constructive conversations.
So I am glad to see you.
Thank you for coming on.
Yeah, I wish you had given me this benefit of the doubt years ago because I've been covering these issues for years.
No, I know.
I mean, for years.
I know.
And maybe I could say the same.
You have your own show.
You could have invited me on as well.
But anyway, we'll get to some of that, I think.
You're welcome anytime.
Glad.
All right.
I'll definitely invite myself on.
But since you're here, and I do want to get into a couple of those kind of past differences in a very civil way, but only as they relate to things we want to talk to you about tonight.
So you have this article in Wired, and it basically narrates how this dark money group is paying Democratic Party influencers, content creators, podcasters who generally support the Democratic Party, money in secret, meaning requiring them to keep it secret.
Explain what this group is, kind of who funds it and how it's functioning.
Yeah, so the 1630 Fund is this massive, powerful, liberal dark money group that sprung up in the wake of Citizens United.
And this is when dark money really started to.
like become a big thing in politics really i mean i think citizens united was 2009 but it was really in the 2010s that these groups started to emerge and start doing a funding now they're mostly on the right a lot of dark money is on the right but this specific dark money group uh funds liberal causes so they raised i think, something like 400 million they distributed in according to Politico in 2022, I think it was.
They do a lot of work in this space.
And what they're doing recently, which I uncovered in my story, is that they're running this influencer program.
There's been all of this talk since the Democrats lost so spectacularly last fall about finding like the liberal Joe Rogan.
They discovered the internet exists and now they're trying to figure out what to do with it.
And this is the strategy that they've come up with is essentially funneling this stark money to influencers through Chorus, which is this content creator, you know, liberal content creator kind of network.
You know, one of the things that I don't understand about and never have understood about, and it is true, it's like Democrats had no interest in going on these massive podcasts during the 2024 election or even before in anyone paying attention to the internet understood the massive audience and reach that these podcasts had.
I mean, much larger than the cable shows that the or Face the Nation or Meet the Press that these Democratic officeholders would love to go grow on.
It was kind of this massive thing growing under the nose of a lot of people in media who just don't pay attention to anything new.
And I know you've been reporting on this kind of internet culture for a long time.
But it strikes me that the way these shows that they're so worried about, like Joe Rogan, like Theo Vaughn, Andrew Schultz, a lot of these.
kind of biggest programs that became pro-Trump influencers, they really emerged organically.
It's not like they had dark money funding them.
These were people who went online, started having just like normal conversations, often comedians.
And in the course of that, they started attracting you kind of normies who weren't that interested in politics.
And then they became political to the extent it related to their specific concerns, things like censorship or woke suppression, things that they perceived were harming them.
I don't understand how Democrats think that they're going to compete with that by taking either people who are already having an audience full of liberal and democrats and just shuffling money to them or trying to create it in some artificial way where they're kind of forced to just do political content like what do they think is their goal here Yeah, well, I want to be clear.
There is tons of money on the right in terms of dark money.
The Republican ecosystem is flush with dark money.
But the difference is that it's more bottom up in terms of their media strategy than top down.
So you're right, especially the comedians that you mentioned.
I've never heard of those people taking dark money at all.
But there are a lot of conservative influencers, Benny Johnson, Tim Poole, others that have taken dark money or have taken money where they don't exactly know.
100% where it's coming from, who the funder is.
And that's not great.
But usually the way it works and what I've seen from my reporting is that these Republican groups will sort of notice someone online.
They might not even have interaction with that person online.
And they'll just sort of start pumping.
They'll start boosting them in the feed.
They'll start doing paid media for them, like just sort of organically, like testing things and boosting things and trying a lot.
The Democrats are obsessed with control.
We know that they love this like top-down sort of.
structure of media because they're such institutionalists.
And so with the influencer industry, not only did they sort of malign the influencer industry for years, but now they're sort of seeking to gatekeep it in various ways and sort of like, you know, have this more top-down control over it, not some sort of organic thing.
And I think it's very notable too that the content creators that they want to fund don't have any organic traction.
Most of them are just these sort of centrist, neoliberal, you know, people that frankly will never call, you know, a genocide a genocide.
They'll never speak out against Israel.
They'll never speak out against, you know, all of the censorship stuff.
They're not rocking the boat, basically.
They're happy to tow the Democratic Party line.
And I think that's a problem because those are not the people that have cultural currency online.
If the Democrats want to win, they need to start working with people that frankly don't agree.
Like, honestly, they just need to change their policies and so many things.
But yeah, it's a very different strategy.
It's more of a top-down strategy where the Republican, even though there's also a lot of dark money in the Republican world, it's more bottom-up.
Totally.
I mean, like, and yet you can, you know, kind of plant your flag either in, like, any faction or party.
You can say, I'm a Democrat.
I'm here to, like, you know, promote Democrats, defend Democrats, cheer for Democrats and criticize Republicans.
You can say, I'm in MAGA.
I'm here to mock liberals and the Democratic Party and even, like, parts of the anti-Trump Republican establishment.
And you can build a big audience that way, big in terms of the number of people watching, the amount of money you're making.
But I really question how much influence you actually have because the people who are in the United States are in the United States.
the people who are going to gravitate toward those shows are people who already love the Democratic Party and want to hear validation, right?
And the problem with the Democrats is not the people who love the Democratic Party.
As you say, it's even younger people, people on the left who I think either stayed home or in some cases even voted for Trump because of their anger over the Biden-Harris support for the genocide in Gaza by arming and funding Israel.
Yeah, there are some significant constraints.
And certainly there are restrictions in these contracts that I myself, as a journalist would never feel comfortable agreeing to.
There are parts of the contract that talk about that you cannot speak, you cannot ever disclose the name of the funder who's funding you.
You can't disclose that you're part of this program.
You have to funnel your bookings.
When you get a political booking, say I get to interview Zoran, one creator said, you have to then potentially funnel that through Chorus.
Chorus and the 1635, they're trying to act as these sort of middlemen and kind of control access to certain politicians, control who gets a voice online.
And yeah, that's a problem.
I think that there's concerns about editorial independence.
Also, there are restrictions on the type of content that can be created with using chorus funds.
So if you use chorus funds, which some of these creators are getting $8,000 a month, it's pretty much probably most of their budget for that month, they can only sort of, they can't talk about specific candidates or causes without approval from chorus.
And I think that alone is enough of a restriction for anybody that considers themselves a journalist, I would say, to not do it.
And the fact that they can't disclose it.
All these content creators are coming out now and they're like, well, what's the problem?
We're getting paid.
And it's like, well, the problem is, is that if my article didn't come out, no one, you guys would have kept taking this dark money and no one knows where your money is coming from.
That's the problem.
Yeah, to me, as journalists, that is by far the most obviously ethically offensive provision.
I don't think journalists are required to publish all their tax returns and say every source of money.
But if someone is paying you specifically to influence what you're reporting or what you're analyzing and what you're saying, and you don't disclose that to your audience, you keep that a secret, that's a huge betrayal.
between yourself and the people who think that you're telling them the unvarnished truth.
And Glenn, these people had to attend daily messaging check-ins, according to, I can't remember if that was in the Zoom call or the contract, it was a Zoom call.
They talked about the daily messaging check-ins.
I just, you know, I don't think that journalists should have to go to messaging check-ins, actually.
I don't think that we should promote specific messaging.
You know, I just, there's a lot of things in here that to me, you know, maybe are fine with a pro-Democrat influencer.
But if you are presenting yourself as a journalist or presenting yourself as like fact-based sort of like news.
cover cover person, which a lot of these creators are, I just think it's not ethical.
And yeah, I mean, I agree.
Like, of course, look, no one's asking every journalist to post every single tax receipt or, you know, every single thing, but this is a significant amount of funding and this is an ongoing.
program that is frankly operating in a very high interest space.
So I think that they should have disclosed it just the way that I disclose things.
I'm in a reporting fellowship right now.
I disclose that.
It's not that hard.
Yeah.
I mean, there's a big controversy in Brazil over Rumble.
Rumble is banned in Brazil.
And I write about the free speech implications of that.
And at the end of every article, there's a note that says, I have a program on Rumble and have a relationship with Rumble.
I would never dream of not disclosing that while talking about the very entity that is part of my income stream.
But the specific sentence you wrote in the article about the content restriction which is incredibly creepy quote the creators who are part of this program join the incubator and who join the incubator are expected to attend regular advocacy trainings and daily messaging check-ins now on the list of the people you've identified are some i think pretty recognizable names david pakman is a pretty widely watched YouTube host.
There's Olivia Giuliana, that young abortion activist who got a lot of notoriety for speaking out about abortion.
I think has attended, has been to the White House several times when Biden was president.
And then I think Brian Taylor Greene, is that his name?
Brian?
Brian, Brian Tyler Cohen.
Tyler Cohen is one of the, I guess, co-founders of this.
I presume he's making money from it as well.
And I saw the response of some of these people today, and nobody justified the fact that they were actually getting money and then duty bound not to disclose it.
They basically, So I think you have a clip from David Pakman responding to you that I just want to show, a short clip, and then ask you to respond.
This kind of support for creators is exactly what I've been advocating for.
Now, the article is riddled with inaccuracies, and they're not minor inaccuracies.
First and foremost, this group has nothing to do with the DNC.
People writing saying the Democratic Party is telling people what to say.
At its base, the group has nothing to do with the DNC period.
Number two, I do not get I do not run interview questions by anyone at Chorus.
Now, tell her, I read your article this morning when it came out, and then I read it again, preparing to speak to you about it.
And a lot of people on my stock did as well.
We're all like, where in the article did you say this was the DNC funding it?
Where in the article do you say that they have to submit what they want to say every day first and get approval?
Like he's denying things that you didn't say and ignoring the things that you actually did.
But what, I mean, this thing, like this is not a DNC arm.
Like, right.
Technically, it's not an arm of the DNC, but these are people who are active in Democratic Party and liberal politics.
That's who they're funding.
And also, Corus.
Go ahead.
I'm sorry to interrupt.
It drives me insane, Glenn, because Chorus was funded...
I think Ken Bensinger wrote it.
A piece on Chorus after they launched the election that Brian Tyler Cohn is talking specifically about solving the Democrats' messaging problem.
Their pitch decks have all this stuff about how the Democrats' messaging problem is broken and they're here to fix it and all this stuff.
So yes, they are not the DNC, but they serve the Democratic establishment.
And that is what they exist to do.
And to sort of act like they don't or they're some like neutral party is just absurd.
Yeah, I didn't check.
So I can't say definitively, but I will bet any amount of money that when those disclosures came out about tenant media, which was linked to Russians in some sketchy way paying people like Tim Poole and Dave Rubin and Benny Johnson.
I'll bet any amount of money that David Pakman and probably some of the other people on the list were expressing all kinds of outrage and indignation at the ethical transgressions of not having disclosed this and not knowing where their sources came from.
What can you tell us though about who is providing the funding?
Like is this just grassroots funding or are there big donors particularly behind it?
This is not, this is the opposite of grassroots funding.
You cannot get more opposite.
Like the 1630 Fund, again, is this powerful, powerful dark money group that allocates hundreds of millions of dollars.
I think it was 2023 or 2024, their largest donor gave $50 million, one donor.
Second largest donor, I believe, was $30 million or $40 million.
It sort of went down from there down to like $13 million.
Like these are people with massive amounts of money and massive amounts of influence.
You cannot give $50 million to a dark money organization and not expect something or not expect to have your policy agenda realized.
And I put all of these questions to the 1630 fund and to Chorus.
I asked them, you know, who is this?
Like do you know, you know, does it make you nervous?
Also, what role did 1630 have in picking the specific influencers.
You know, for all we know, the person that gave $50 million to 1630 could have had some sort of input on the ideology expressed, you know, that creators were allowed, ideology of the creators allowed in this program.
It's just shocking to me.
And I just think that we need a lot more transparency.
And then you see the liberals double down and say, oh, no, well, this is what the Republicans do.
Again, as you mentioned, they criticize the Republicans for that constantly.
And as they should, rightfully so.
I criticize Tim Poole.
I criticize all those people that took that dark money.
You should never take a significant amount of money from people that you don't know where it's coming from, especially a shady group like that.
So I can't remember the original question.
I'm on a tangent.
But it's very hypocritical overall.
But the question is, like, who are these big donors?
But precisely because it's a dark money group, we don't know, right?
That's what it means to have the dark money.
Exactly.
And that's the problem.
If you give $50 million, we should know who you are.
All right.
Let me ask you this, Taylor, because I want to ask this question in a delicate way because I don't want to be misunderstood.
$8,000 a month is...
I mean, it's a $96,000 a year salary for basically just being an influencer.
Most people would love to have that, either as their main job or as supplemental income.
But I understand pretty well the economics of online content creating because it's something I do and have done for a few years now.
And just let's stick with David Pakman for a second.
I'd be willing to also bet an enormous amount of money that he's making well over seven figures.
Like for sure, a million dollars a year between his income from YouTube, between his sponsors on his show, and between his patrons paying money into that Patreon account every month.
I would say it's well over a million dollars, probably over two.
I don't want to speculate any further, but it's a lot of money.
Why would somebody be willing to jeopardize their integrity for in the context of what he's making, I don't mean for most people, but in the context of what he's making, kind of a relatively small amount of money.
Absolutely.
I know this is something that I was curious about too.
And I asked these questions of the creators that I tried to get in touch with, like the higher profile ones I sort of tried to ask, even the creators that were lower profile, like the creators that I did ultimately speak to in the program.
I was like.
this is not the vast amount of money in the grand scheme of things.
But I think it's this desire to be close to the establishment.
I think it's access.
Chorus, again, provides access to lawmakers and the Democratic establishment.
And I don't know.
I mean, I think they just want to be part of a group.
And I empathize with that.
Like, listen, not everything, you know, sometimes you do want to be part of a cohort.
These creators are clearly some sort of a clique where they're all defending each other, you know, in the comment section and stuff.
But I don't know.
I think it's kind of shocking that they are willing to make such compromises for.
such a low amount of money in their in their sort of world because you're right 96 000 i mean look that's a huge amount of money for journalists even but like in their world these are people that that have these giant revenue streams um and it is revealing that they're willing to sell out for so little right i'm not saying i'd be more empathetic if they were getting huge amounts of money to do something as unethical as this.
But just from their own self-interest, I don't understand why they'd risk its disclosure for what for them is a relatively small amount of money.
All right.
Congratulations on that article.
I think it's very good reporting.
I think it's important reporting as well.
Let me switch gears a little bit to, in general, the topic that I think probably gave rise to some of the disagreements and acrimony that you and I have had over the years, which is the question of online censorship.
And I want to leave that aside, at least for the moment, because I do think a lot of the issues that you've been raising, that I've been watching you raise, are ones that we cover a lot on this show as well.
We cover in detail things like the Digital Services Act of the EU and the Online Safety Act in the UK and the C11 and 12 bills in Canada and ones in Australia and Brazil that are just outright state censorship and state control over the content of political speech on the Internet.
But one of the issues that you have been focused on that not many other people have is there's this, you know, there's been this concern and I think in some ways this concern is legitimate and valid about the ability of children to access content online that is not appropriate age appropriate for them there's no barrier if a kid is online and I have three kids so I know very well the difficulty of controlling what they consume to be able to go to sites that you may not want them to go to
And so into this concern, this parental concern, this societal concern, the government in the UK and now others is stepping into this and saying, oh, we'll protect your kids.
What we're gonna have is age verification.
And the way we're gonna accomplish that, because there's been age verification that's just kind of self-reporting, and that doesn't work, is we're gonna just require everybody who wants to use this site or this platform to upload documentation, identity cards, proving their date of birth, WHICH BASICALLY MEANS
turning over your identity to the government in order to use sites meaning there's no more online anonymity um you have this article in the guardian you've written about it several times we'll just put that on the screen uh that you wrote uh a little bit uh it says the online the UK's Online Safety Act is a license for censorship and the rest of the world is following suit.
Explain this trend and why you consider it so dangerous.
I am horrified by this.
I have been reporting on the rise of this sort of online censorship for years.
What you mentioned is there's this sort of moral panic.
Like after Trump's election around 2016, we started to see this flip and ironically also when algorithmic feeds sort of started to become pervasive we saw this flip where um i think people who had drunk the kool aid on big tech throughout the for early 2010 started to realize like okay maybe some of these um platforms aren't as great as we thought right like maybe they're doing some bad things and they deserve more oversight okay that's all well and good but what it sort of morphed into is a moral panic about the content and uh oh kids are consuming too much short form video or a kid might access a porn site
or whatever and the their response to this is not like okay we're going to do more to help parents we're going to provide more user controls we're going to you know for for users to set their own boundaries we're going to like educate people whatever.
Also, we're also going to acknowledge that children, you know, do need to grow up and that they need to eventually access some sort of information to become, you know, uh, health, healthy citizens in the world.
Instead, we're saying exactly what you mentioned.
This is this rollout of mass censorship, this crackdown, which is, uh, Now you have to face scan yourself to, you know, to use Spotify.
And it's all done under the guise of child safety.
None of this is about child safety.
In fact, we know that these laws actually endanger children.
It cuts them off from valuable resources.
And it, there is no way to ethically do age vary.
There's no effective age verification system on the internet, but it cuts adults.
It inevitably cuts adults off from content.
And what I think is so scary, I'll just say one more thing, Glenn, is that what we're seeing now in the US, because we haven't passed COSA yet, thank God, terrible legislation.
We have 11 states right now that have age verification laws sort of up for discussion, but we're seeing pre-compliance.
So we're seeing platforms like Meta and YouTube just say, well, look, now that this regulatory environment is a way where we can actually just roll out mass age verification, we're going to go ahead and do that.
We will harvest even more data.
Seems like we can sell it as this safety thing.
And so it's so scary because we're getting censorship without even passing the laws.
I guess there's two issues to me here.
One is the issue of censorship of political content, the ability of big tech companies working in companies.
in conjunction with the government to control the content of political content but then there's also the question to me of online anonymity which you know and i guess by the way i also wanted to say you know This is not a new problem.
I grew up in the 70s and 80s.
This is what was said about television, about music, that there's no control.
This is famously Al Gore's wife, Tipper Gore wanted various warnings on music and to have a kind of regulator on music.
kids would go into their parents' room and find pornography when they became of age and passed puberty.
So none of this is new.
And every time there's a new technology, kind of the same excuses are hauled out to give government control.
So there's the control over the content, but then there's also the importance of online anonymity, which has been absolutely fundamental to why the internet is an important innovation.
The fact that you can do things and say things online or look at things or explore things without being tracked by the government knowing exactly who you're doing.
And this seems to be on this trend now to require to basically eliminate online anonymity to say if you want to use platforms you're going to have to submit you know your driver's license or birth certificate to us first i have talked about this a few times in interviews but it remains the most disturbing moment in my career and i've seen a lot of disturbing stuff over the years um I was at a big meeting,
it was a big event last year for the White House Content Creators Day under the Biden administration.
This was like last August or something.
They had hundreds of content creators there in the room and they had Jackie Ayana, a big YouTube up, and it was her and Nera Tanden in conversation talking about online harassment which i'm very sympathetic to i deal with a lot of it sucks but she said she near a tandem at the end of it goes to the crowd, like, raise your hand if you wish you could like unmask every troll and we like remove anonymity from the internet.
And all of these idiot content creators raised their hand.
Yeah, yeah.
She said, that's what we're going to do.
That's what the Biden administration, we are going to remove anonymity from the internet.
And I was in this little pool of journalists upstairs.
And I. turned to them and I was just so shocked, so shocked.
And none of them even seem to care either, which is frustrating.
They're not tech reporters, but this is a, this is something that is a bipartisan effort and it is something that we need to fight tooth and nail to preserve because without anonymity on the internet there is no free speech on the internet and um you know this this ridiculous moral panic about censorship is so corrosive and so dangerous and it yeah i am scared that we are going to gonna lose free speech online Yeah,
I remember Nikki Haley when running in the GOP primary made a big controversy when she said we're going to end anonymity online and require identity for you to participate in social media.
I get the impulse as well.
I've been around for a long time.
I've been attacked by all sorts of people and falsehoods circulate about me by anonymous people.
And it's frustrating because you can't get at them.
There's no accountability.
But I also understand that most people, if they want to critique powerful institutions or question prevailing orthodoxies, can't do it under their own name because they're rightly worried about ramifications.
And anonymity online, of course, that was used during the debates over the Federalist papers, it has a very long and noble history of people using pen names or fake names in writing.
absolutely crucial to enabling most people to participate in an honest and free way in discourse.
And I do think that large parts of the media and political elite care more about what they regard as the supreme harm of being criticized in an unreasonable or false or harassing way than they do about the importance of anonymity for most people and being able to participate in a line.
That's why it's hard to get people to be upset.
All right, let me just ask you, because I would be remiss if I did, my audience would be disappointed.
Maybe you would be too.
You mentioned the history of censorship, and you described, I think quite accurately, how it was particularly in the wake of Donald Trump's election over Hillary Clinton, which was incredibly unexpected but also traumatizing to major power centers around the world.
It was preceded four months earlier by Brexit, which had a similar effect, kind of shocking, and indicated this very anti-establishment movement that was growing.
The nature of establishments is they see an anti-establishment movement, and they want to kind of control it or crush it.
And for me, that was when online censorship began in earnest, when disinformation groups started to get funded.
by billionaires when governments saw that and said oh look we can we can jump into this breach and and start demanding content moderation of things that are false or harassing My understanding of your posture, and this is definitely what I think caused us to first start having less than civil exchanges, is that you were part of that media faction.
and maybe I'm wrong, but that believed that it was important for Twitter to do that, that kicking Donald Trump off Twitter and Facebook was something that was important in the wake of January 6, that preventing misinformation about COVID, the way to handle that was by suppressing it because it was too dangerous to allow questioning of vaccines or masks.
You tell me what your views of all of those things have been, and if I'm wrong, we can clarify it.
I would say look at the receipts.
I wrote about COVID information being censored.
You know that they blocked the word long COVID.
And I'm sorry to report to people that don't want to believe it, but COVID is a real and damaging virus and long COVID just means damage from the COVID virus, which is very real.
I think, listen, I am not for top-down censorship in any form.
And you can go back and listen to my interviews talking about this for a long time.
I, first of all, I was in the room at the Hilton when Trump won.
I covered that 2016 election and I remember it very well.
I am 100% for more user controls, but I think that when we have this top-down moderation, and I understand there has to be some level of top-down moderation, otherwise there would just be like CSAM and like crypto scams like all over the internet.
We don't want that.
Right.
We want to have viewpoint-based moderation.
Exactly, which is, in my opinion, Glenn, And this is something that I have always felt strongly about is that I think that you need to give users control.
I don't think I think that like, for instance, when I'm getting an obscene amount of online harassment and stuff, I want to be able to go on the platforms and.
limit my replies.
I don't know, go on private, whatever, mass block people if I want to.
And none of these platforms ever invested in any technology to give users more control over their online experience.
Instead, they just call, you know, mommy and daddy, CEO of the tech company and say, well, can't you take all this down because I don't like it or because whatever?
It is very unproductive.
and ultimately not even very effective.
But did you ever do that?
Did you ever have a contact at Twitter or call Twitter or email Twitter and ask for material to be taken down the way a lot of journalists did?
And like the pre-must Twitter?
My address.
I think it was my address.
I think my address because I was getting swatted.
But nothing else?
No, I don't believe in that.
Like, I don't believe in that sort of thing.
Like, I wasn't ever an advocate for that.
And you can go back and listen to my interview that I did years ago with Hamish McKenzie of Substack, who I've been on Substack, by the way, since 2018, okay?
which is something else that i think that you maybe were confused about but i have been there since 2018 and and one thing i've always supported about um substack and other just more open source platforms as well, is just that they give users more control.
And I just think that that is the answer to the online experience.
Now, I am concerned by Substack like amplifying weird things in their algorithms, but I think they could be more responsible in some ways.
But I just reject this idea that we need top-down censorship because nobody can agree on that.
I'm a journalist and I parse facts for a living.
I don't think that any of the people in charge of these tech companies, much less the...
And here's an example too.
I talk about OnlyFans.
I cover the platform OnlyFans a lot.
And sex workers have been talking about this for years.
You cannot talk about that platform without getting censored.
You can't say, you know, and I just, it's not even just political speech.
It's all speech.
It's the fact that we have to say like nip knobs instead of nipples or unalive instead of dead.
Like it's just, it's ridiculous.
We should be able to speak freely online about controversial and difficult topics.
And that doesn't mean that the platform shouldn't be more responsible.
I'm all for platforms, again, being responsible with their algorithms, being responsible with their recommendation algorithms, sure.
But I, yeah, I don't, I don't support.
And you know what's so ironic too Glenn because I think you were really coming from me when I was reporting on Clubhouse.
I actually wrote this piece that was so positive about Clubhouse and I actually was saying it was such a good thing that on Clubhouse you could go and have as I described unfettered conversations meaning you could have these free-willing conversations where you could speak with all different sorts of people and you know you didn't have to worry about kind of like that sort of content moderation issue.
And instead, people took that word unfettered and tried to argue that I was saying the opposite.
You can go back and read that article and I encourage people to go back and read it.
I think it was 2021 and see what I said.
I've been very consistent on this issue and it's very frustrating.
Speaking of correct.ing misinformation, to see people misrepresent my views.
I've always been very explicit about my views.
Yeah, I mean, I think we also had an issue because one time you misattributed someone saying the word retarded to the wrong person.
No, no, no.
I confused two.
Let me just be clear.
There are two bald rich people.
Two old bald white guys.
And I said one said it and the other.
And by the way, if you go back and see that tweet, I'm defending, I'm not defending him saying it.
I don't like that he said it.
But what I said in that tweet is that there were like 10 people up on that stage.
And if people were going to get outraged, which they were very outraged at that time that he said that word, I said, if you're going to get outraged you should have that similar outrage for everyone up on stage because no one else on stage said anything which is i don't even know if that's fair to characterize as a defense but i just found that it was like a little bit ridiculous that these people were getting so mad at him for saying it and no one else for like not even stepping in uh you know and saying like hey don't say that or whatever and i'm sorry you know at the time i don't cover venture capital honestly i don't know who a lot of these old men are until they start ranting
about me on the internet and yeah i didn't know even today i if you put their pictures together i think now i know who mark andreessen is but i don't know they both that him and the other one they look so much alike and they have the same that the whatever and their partners but you know, journalism.
Yeah.
It's not about, you know, It's just an error, right?
It's an error.
Yeah.
I got it.
That I corrected immediately.
That I corrected immediately.
I wasn't trying to drudge that up.
Look, you know, I'm happy to have agreements with someone.
beyond what I realized we did.
So I'm not trying to insist that you are in another camp.
And to the extent that, you know, as I said, I've followed your work over the last couple of years on these issues, I've, you know, we've been very much in agreement.
You've been very outspoken about censorship of criticism of Israel, which has become a major cause of mine, whether by the government or big tech.
And you were so outspoken about Joe Biden's support for genocide that it caused a big controversy with your employer and I was definitely on your side with that.
So the more we are, the better.
But let me just ask you one last question just to clarify where you are with this.
So like one of the reasons why I came to Rumble is because it is a free speech platform.
It allows there's some really far leftists.
There's communists and socialists.
And then also like Nick Fuentes has a show and he couldn't put a show on any other platform.
Substack is the same way.
I believe, I'm sure Nick Fuentes could go on Substack.
There's a lot of, you know, far left, what most people regard as extremism and very far right extremism, too.
I understand the issue with algorithmically promoting things, but is that the model that you believe in that as long as someone's basically not breaking the law, that we want platforms to kind of be hands off and neutral about who gets to speak and who doesn't?
Yeah, I mean, I came up as a blogger and not a little bit after you.
I know you're sort of the original blogger, but I love the open web.
And I grew up on sites like Geocities and, you know, just a free and open internet.
And of course, that means you encounter some bad stuff, but also it was so formative because it was so open and free and I could learn about the world.
And I think that that is so valuable and we need to preserve that.
And so I support these like distributed open source platforms, like, you know, all sorts, I mean, like Ghost and things like that as well as Substack.
I think Substack is leaning more and more to being a social platform and I don't love that just as a user.
But I generally have a very permissive view of speech because I don't, I've seen how it gets.
you know, how it goes wrong.
And I think that that is hard for people to understand because I think if you've never experienced online censorship or, you know, you don't speak to sex workers or you don't speak to, I don't know, Palestinian people who are getting censored constantly.
Like I actually think the Palestinian stuff has sort of woken a lot of people up to this issue.
You don't really understand like how these laws can be used against you.
And this is how all these speech laws are.
It's like everybody thinks it's good as long as it's censoring their side.
And that's the problem.
That's also why we don't want these like federal laws because we know that the government, like the government is not going to act in anyone's best interest.
And so yeah, I mean, I just.
I would love a more open and free internet.
And I know that that means allowing for some hard, you know, harmful views, but I think that it's better to err on the side of permissiveness because as a journalist i've seen the opposite and as a journalist i especially a journalist on youtube i i experience censorship and it is and it is something that that i am you know i'm not even like the worst of it right like these sex workers and these other marginalized people get it 10 times worse yeah i mean i think personally the greatest threat to free speech in the united states is
zionism and and the defenders of it inside the united states where we just went over there's like committee in congress now led by nancy mays demanding user data about people who post anti-israel information which is you know completely insane and not even close to the worst of what the trump administration and its allies in Congress have done in the last seven months with regards to free speech.
All right, well, Taylor, you know, we've talked about each other a lot.
I'm glad that we decided tonight to talk to each other.
That's generally more constructive.
I want to congratulate you on the Wired article.
I think it's, like I said, an important piece of reporting.
And, you know, to the extent that we are allied on this free speech issue and online free speech, all the better.
Like, I'm happy.
I hope people can care about it.
It's so important.
There are no issues.
This is the biggest issue.
You will not have the right to speak out about other issues if you don't fight for free speech online right now.
I couldn't agree more.
I've often said that free speech on the internet is my number one cause because nothing else can come without it.
So we are in definite agreement on that.
All right.
Thank you so much, Taylor.
It was, as I said at the beginning, nice to see you, and I appreciate you taking the time and coming on.
