Trump Administration Claims to Save Hundreds of Millions of Lives by Blowing Up Drug Boats; Ethan Klein's Unhinged Vengeance & Lawsuits Against Other YouTubers: With Taylor Lorenz
The Trump administration continues to spread lies in order to sell its regime-change war in Venezuela, even claiming that blowing up drug boats is saving hundreds of millions of lives. Then: Taylor Lorenz discusses streamer Ethan Klein's unhinged lawsuit against another creator and warns of other threats to free speech online. ---------------------------------- Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Become part of our Locals community Follow System Update: Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook
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.
Just one quick note.
I don't know why, but last night, whatever method we were using for me to connect remotely, you can see I'm not at the normal studio, enabled me or rather forced me to see the ongoing live chat, which I don't often see.
Sometimes I look at it, but I don't actually just see it in front of my face.
And a couple of you successfully baited me into stopping what I was doing and commenting on it, but it's going to be much more difficult for you this evening because I don't have that live chat directly in front of my face.
I'm going to have a much more substantive show.
I'm going to stay much more focused and not be distracted by people in the chat, though.
I will be checking in on you occasionally.
So don't act as though you're, it's a free-for-all, like the cat's away.
No, it's not time for the mice to play.
I will be seeing you just not quite as much as last night.
All right.
So with that clarified tonight, it's actually bizarre to watch a regime change war propaganda show unfold in real time, especially one that had never been previously featured.
The idea of attacking Venezuela or changing the government of Venezuela or bombing boats in Venezuela was never even mentioned in the 2021 2024 campaign.
This is just coming out of nowhere.
And as a result, it's very difficult to try and convince Americans with no groundwork laid that somehow Venezuela is important to their lives.
The question of who governs Venezuela is important to their lives, just like it's been very difficult to try and convince Americans that who governs various provinces in eastern Ukraine matters to them.
As a result, the rhetoric is becoming increasingly histrionic.
The claims that are coming from the administration to justify the war are becoming increasingly unhinged to the point where they're so wild now.
They're so completely disconnected from any reality that the claims that are coming from the White House would be laughable if the matter weren't so serious just in terms of how not just exaggerated they are, but just how made up some of the claims are.
And I do think whatever views of the Trump administration are or even the war are, it's my job as a journalist, and I think it's all of our jobs as citizens when the government's making false claims, even in support of a policy that we agree with, to dissect those claims and to point out the ways in which they're deceitful and misleading.
So that's part of what we're going to do tonight.
And then we often cover on this show threats to free speech in general, but particularly a free internet and free speech online.
The reason I'm on Rumble is because of the commitment that it made and has maintained to preserve a space for free speech online, whether people are on the right or the left or anything in between.
It's the place, for example, where Nick Fuentes has his show.
Very few other platforms would have allowed him to have one here.
There are people who are far leftist who have been kicked off YouTube, far rightist, and everything in between.
That's how important that cause is to me.
But there are things other than the things we cover, which we typically cover things like inventing a new disinformation industry and concocting a disinformation expertise to make it seem like political censorship is really scientific expertise.
We cover laws that are being enacted to regulate speech on the internet.
We cover laws that are enacted to censor speech off the internet as well.
And in general, the attempt by big tech to censor the ways that governments can influence that, but there are other ways that are actually starting to threaten free speech on the internet.
One is that people who are extremely wealthy, who have gotten extremely wealthy as a result of being streamers or content creators or just political commentators online, are starting to use their wealth to financially suffocate and destroy their critics by dragging them into court.
It doesn't matter if the case is meritorious or frivolous, and make an example of them by threatening them with financial ruination unless they humiliate themselves and withdraw the criticisms.
It's really sinister.
There's a Zionist pro-Israel preposterous person named Ethan Klein who had built a large audience before October 7th, presenting himself like a comedian or some kind of like edgy person willing to say things that nobody else was, this type of adolescent bravada.
And he built a very large audience, got extremely rich doing so.
And he's now suing very small streamers who criticize him often, who are opposed to his politics, especially on Israel.
And he just forced one of them to record one of the most humiliating videos you'll ever see as a condition for her being able to get out of the lawsuit because she couldn't financially sustain it anymore.
And at the same time, there's now ongoing attempts in the name of protecting children to require as a condition of social media, Australia just passed a law like this is now in effect, to upload your government-issued ID to social media on the grounds that they just want to make sure you're above 16 or 18.
But of course, you're giving social media and therefore the government proof of your identity.
They're eliminating anonymity online slowly.
And one person who covers these things, both of these things, this Twitter, this rather streamer world in which Ethan Klein and this kind of, well, these lawsuits are percolating, as well as, and she has covered it quite well to her credit, the attempt to use concerns over the impact of the internet on children as a way of getting these laws passed that are designed to destroy internet anonymity and therefore free speed is the independent journalist Taylor Renz, previously for the Washington Post, New York Times.
Long time, we were long time enemies.
I interviewed her maybe about three months ago about some good reporting she did in Wired about a bunch of Democratic Party influencers who are being covertly paid to support the Democratic Party without disclosing it to their audience.
That was the first time we actually communicated face-to-face.
She's back tonight.
We recorded an interview with her a little bit ago because she had some conflicting obligations.
She couldn't do it live.
But I found it to be a really interesting, good interview on both of these topics and threats posed to free speech.
So I've been able to exhale and kind of let go of whatever previous conceptions I had of her.
Life is about evolving.
Maybe people evolve.
Maybe you evolve.
Maybe you both evolve.
Maybe at some point there's a good reason to be in conflict and then you can become in more enlightenment.
Anyway, just listen with an open mind, see what you think.
I think it's actually quite enlightening.
All right, before we get to all that, a couple of quick programming notes.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
All right, so I want to start.
I don't want to do a whole segment on Venezuela.
We devoted the entire show on Monday night to Venezuela.
Talked about the war in Venezuela last night when the government starts using 2001 war on terror legislative frameworks to declare whoever they want terrorists and then just bomb them out of the water with no evidence presented without even knowing who they are.
That's going to be something I'm talking about.
And especially it's going to be something I'm talking about when the government is threatening to bring regime change to a country that a lot of deocons have long wanted to get a hold of and control.
I'm certainly going to talk about that as well.
Not going to talk about it every night in depth because it just gets repetitive, but I do want to highlight some of the statements that have been coming from the administration because they're just, it's almost like they kind of feel like they're having a hard time selling this war for the reason that I said they've never laid the groundwork for it.
This wasn't a rock that was a long time in the making, right after 9-11.
There was anthrax tax.
People like John McCain immediately pinned it on Iraq.
There was a whole buildup.
This came out of nowhere.
Like all of a sudden, people are supposed to believe all these struggles that I'm having in my life, my inability to pay to get a home, to start a family, to have health insurance, the falling apart of my communities.
Somehow, this is all the fault of Nicolas Maduro.
Maduro, and if we get rid of Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela, a country I don't think about, I don't even know where it is on the map.
It doesn't have any effect back to my life.
That's now somehow going to be the thing that makes my life better.
This is why I voted for Donald Trump.
I'm sure there are some hardcore warmongers and MAGA people who are like, yeah, I voted for Donald Trump to kill the bad guys.
But I don't think most American citizens are thinking about Nicolas Maduro.
That's why I always said I thought Russia Gate was such a loser for Democrats because people don't wake up and worry about Vladimir Putin.
They just don't think because they have common sense and aren't submerged in propaganda the way media and political professionals are that their problems emanate from the Kremlin.
And they couldn't get worked up over Trump and Russia.
It just didn't have any impact on their lives.
And there's been a lot of frustration with Trump.
His polling numbers are quite poor because the perception that, A, he's violating his promises, all the things people associated with him in his campaign.
Release the Epstein files is the most obvious because that was a promise that many of his most important associates made, including JD Vance and his own son, Donald Trump Jr., and Dan Valgino and Kash Patel and so many others.
Yeah, we kind of released, and now they get on top of it.
We don't want to release the Epstein files.
The Epstein files are a joke.
They're a hoax.
We're going to find every when you do that, people lose faith and trust that what you said means anything.
And they feel tripped in having voted for you.
And the same thing with no new wars.
On the day of the election, the GOP, official GOP Twitter site, tweeted, vote for the peace party, JD, Donald Trump, and JD Vance.
And then Trump's not even in office a month and he resumes bombing Yemen and the Houthis.
We're feeding Israel all kinds of weapons.
We're focused on Israel constantly, supporting Israel, still feeding the war in Ukraine.
And now we're going to go to war.
And right away, it was, oh, we're going to take Greenland and the Panama Canal and Canada.
And now we're going to go do a regime change war, which is exactly the kind of war that Trump promised that he wouldn't pursue any longer.
And now suddenly we're going to do a regime change war in Venezuela.
So it's been very difficult.
I think they censors a lot of resistance.
And so it's almost like every day they escalate their claims to scare people about why they need to support this war.
And they're starting to say things that are deeply irresponsible and just so removed from anything that's remotely accurate or truthful.
So when we did their show on Monday night, we put a clip on a bit on YouTube where I was talking about the inaccuracies and false claims being made by the government to support this war, which happens in every American war going back to at least Vietnam and certainly before.
And there you can see my dog.
She's just one of the many that are here.
Her name is Kira.
Where is she?
I don't know how to, which there she is.
You'll notice that she's wearing no shot collar.
She's sitting there voluntarily, perfectly placed in front of the camera.
She might pop her head up and make appearances.
In any event, there's a lot of claims being made.
And one of the claims we featured was Donald Trump saying to justify the blowing up these boats and the war in Venezuela.
He said last year, 330 million people died of drug overdose.
And I talked about how utterly preposterous that claim is 330 million people is basically the entire American population.
And then you can say, okay, well, maybe he meant the world, but then why is he trying to solve the global overdose problem?
But even there, it's not even in the same universe.
That number is in the entire United States, even with fentanyl and the crisis it's causing, the number of people it's killing, the total number of people who died of overdose drugs, of all kinds of drugs, total, as we showed you before, is 70 to 80,000.
Maybe at the peak of fentanyl, it was close to 100,000.
Obviously, 300 million doesn't get you anywhere near, it is just, it's a completely bizarre made-up number.
So when we put this clip on YouTube, and we had a lot of other fakes and false statements coming from other people in the government or other supporters of the war, but because the YouTube clip only featured this one from Trump, a lot of people said, hey, it seems like you might be taking advantage of a misstatement.
He didn't really mean to say 330 million.
Maybe he meant to say 330,000.
So here's that clip where he said that.
Are you going with us?
Are you going with us, Maggie?
I'm with you.
Good.
On Lamore, Venezuela, the Pennsylvania Venezuela strike on the boat illegal.
I'm concerned that Majora might escalate something.
And what's illegal are the drugs that were on the boat and the drugs that are being sent into our country.
And the fact that 300 million people died last year from drugs.
That's what's illegal.
Do you think he's not telling the truth when he's so 300 million people died last year of drugs?
That's what he said.
That's obviously a joke.
It's laughable.
So a couple of people who are viewers of the show in the comment section on YouTube and also on Rumble said things like this.
We can just put a couple of them up.
There were many of these like this, representative of these comments here.
The first one, it says, obviously he meant 300,000 people.
300 million people would be most of the population.
The problem with that is twofold.
One is it's not 300,000 either.
That's not even close to the number.
In fact, that's five times the number of people who actually died, or four to five times the number of people who actually died.
So even if he meant 300,000 people in the United States, that would still be wildly exaggerated.
And on top of that, I think it is important when a politician like a president is selling a new war to the American public that he be very careful about the statements he's making to make sure that they're accurate.
So even if he had misspoken meant 300,000 people in the United States, that's still false.
That's not the number of people who died last year of drugs.
It's an exaggeration by about five times.
Here's another YouTube comment.
We can just put one more up just to give you a sense of what people are saying.
He possibly means worldwide.
Okay, but as I said, if only 70 to 80,000 people are dying in the United States, there's not 330 million people that are dying worldwide of drug overdoses.
And I don't think Donald Trump is claiming that he is going to solve the overdose problem for the whole world.
I think he's trying to pitch to Americans, we're going to prevent overdose deaths and solve the drug problem in the United States.
So I was willing to say, okay, you know, Trump is not the most precise speaker.
He is sometimes prone to exaggeration, although it does seem to me the kind of construction that he's capable of when he's trying to, you know, that's how he New York real estate works, like, this is the greatest building on the world.
It's actually a piece of crap that's very common to wildly exaggerate the value of things in the New York real estate world, which he comes out of.
And when that translates on politics, it can be sort of benign.
But when you're selling a war, I think it's actually very important, even if he did misspeak, to call attention to that.
But now there's a lot of other clips that make clear that he was not misspeaking.
This is a talking point of the administration to claim, not just that hundreds of millions of people die of drug overdose every year, which is laughably false, but also that Trump blowing up the boats that he's blown up have saved hundreds of millions of lives.
Even though only 70,000 people a year, and when I say only, I mean in relationship to the numbers being claimed.
You can think 70,000 people dying of overdose deaths or 80,000 people in the United States is horrific.
And I do think that I'm just not in favor of blowing up boats or changing the regime in Venezuela because I don't think it's going to help that at all.
Does anyone actually believe that blowing up these votes has stymied the flow of drugs or the availability of drugs in the United States?
The war on drugs has been being fought for 70 years.
It's an absolute abject failure.
You can't militarize your way out of the drug problem.
All you can do is address why there's so much demand.
But they're trying to inflate these numbers wildly.
And by the way, I think actually engineering regime change in Venezuela would actually make the problem worse.
You put that woman in who just won the Nobel Peace Prize or some other government that you want to put in.
And even if they're more popular, even if they have more people on their side, you have people who have been supporting the Chavez government than the Maduro government in Venezuela, millions upon millions of them for many years.
They can be a minority, but they're not going to just swallow the United States walting in and putting some government in place that's imposed from the international community.
No people take well to that.
They're heavily armed.
They're believers in the ideology of the government.
There's going to be a lot of fighting, huge amounts of instability.
And when there's instability and fighting in that climate is when drug cartels thrive.
That's why most drugs have not come from Venezuela, but from Colombia, which has been plagued by a civil war, by lawless parts of Colombia.
And that's why the Colombian drug trade has been so potent and why we could never stop it, even though we fought a war for years with the right-wing government that was our allies in Colombia and it completely failed.
Anyway, as I said, I've shown you all this data on Monday.
So I just want to show you now something that Pam Bondi said back in April at one of those cabinet meetings that Trump summons and has all of his cabinet ministers heap the most effusive praise on him as the greatest leader ever.
This was in April.
Listen to what Pam Bondi said in case you think Trump misspoke.
400 kilos of fentanyl since you've been your last 100 days, which saved, are you ready for this media?
258 million lives.
Kids are dying every day because they're taking this junk laced with something else.
They don't know what they're taking.
They think they're buying a Tylenol or an Adderall and a Xanax and it's laced with fentanyl and they're dropping dead and no longer because of you, what you've done.
So she said back in April that Trump has already saved 258 million lives, million, 258 million lives without even blowing up those votes.
I wish that were true.
If that were true, it'd mean we'd have no overdope death for the next thousand years.
And we wouldn't have to go do a regime change war in Venezuela or blow up random votes.
So this idea that Trump is saving hundreds of millions of lives by stopping the flow of fentanyl is something that is circulating in the administration.
It's in the bloodstream.
He didn't misspeak.
This is something he's been hearing and that they've been saying for a long time.
I think I understand the rationale for it.
It's beyond deceitful and propagandistic, but I just want you to hear that this is what they're trying to convince people of.
Here's the genuinely dumb.
I'm sorry to say, I really don't like saying it, but as I explained before, when talking about people with great power, part of the problem with them is that they're genuinely dumb.
You have a responsibility to say it, even though it's not nice.
I'm not somebody who says that about anybody I disagree with.
I've talked before about all the people I have vehement disagrees with who I regard as quite smart.
Liz and Dick Cheney, for example, I think they're both quite smart.
Hillary Clinton, I think, is quite smart.
I would never say they're dumb.
That's not the problem with them.
But Christy Noam is, I mean, she is really incapacitated.
It's like you could do one of those fundraising commercials off of her.
And she's in charge of homeowner.
And this is what she said today.
Deployed hundreds of miles of border already.
You have cut the fentanyl over the southern border by over 56%.
You've saved hundreds of millions of lives with the cocaine you've blown up in the Caribbean.
And Christy Noam told Trump in front of cameras that you have saved hundreds of millions of lives with the cocaine that you blew up in the Caribbean.
I mean, she's not even pretending, and I think this is an important point.
I think this is an important concession because it's something I've been talking about for a long time.
When we've been hearing about all of these overdose deaths, we've been hearing about fentanyl and the crucial role it's played.
Obviously, there were drug overdose deaths forever in the United States from accelerated it.
What a crisis.
What made the numbers skyrocket?
And we've shown you all this data is fentanyl.
And the whole disconnect, one of the many disconnects with this idea that we're going to blow up votes off the coast of Venezuela, we're going to go regime change Maduro in Venezuela in order to stop the drug crisis, America, and protect American kids and communities that are being wracked with drug overdose and drug crises is that Venezuela has nothing to do with fentanyl.
If you want to stop fentanyl, Venezuela is not a place where you even look, there is no fentanyl coming from Venezuela.
Every government report says that, including under Donald Trump, fentanyl comes from China and it comes into the United States through Mexico, which is why the 2024 Trump campaign was about bombing drug cartels in Mexico, not bombing them in Venezuela.
So, all of this is under propaganda, but at least Christy Noam had the maybe it was because she's too dumb to cling to the script, or maybe I don't know.
She just had like a weird moment of candor, maybe like something in the matrix broke.
But she was saying, she didn't say you're blowing up fentanyl boats, she said you're blowing up cocaine boats.
And she said you have saved hundreds of millions of lives as a result of the cocaine boats you've blown up.
We've blown up like 13 boats.
How is it possible to have saved hundreds of millions of lives?
That means without blowing up those boats, hundreds of millions of people would be dead now who are now saved.
Who are these people?
That's the population of the United States, basically, just a little bit under.
And of course, when I pointed this out today, I had a bunch of people saying, Oh, so what?
You think 70,000 deaths is no big deal?
No, no, I'm not remotely saying that.
I think 70,000 deaths is a big deal, or 80,000 deaths is a big deal.
It's one of the reasons why I think we should stop spending tens of billions of dollars on foreign wars and regime change wars and instead invest that money in the United States for the benefit of the American people so people aren't facing financial deprivation and spiritual deprivation and hopelessness that feeds the drug crisis.
The fact that there's so much demand for people for drugs inside the United States is a good reason not to keep spending billions and billions and billions of dollars on Raytheon and Palantir and the deployment of American troops to go fight wars all over the world and instead invest it at home for like some kind of community renewal, give people an economic future they can believe in, so they're not drowning in hopelessness and spiritual pathologies.
That's what leads people into drug addiction and the use of drugs.
But Chrissy Noam is now saying, oh, you just by blowing up these boats, you've saved hundreds of millions of lives.
And Trump himself has said, beyond what I showed you, he said, for every boat that we kill, we bow up, we save 25,000 lives.
So if they've blown up 10 boats, that means that he saved 250,000 lives.
We've blown up 13.
So by his calculations, it means we've saved 325,000 lives just by blowing up the 13 boats we've so far blown up.
How is that possible when there's 70 to 80,000 overdose deaths all year for every drug in the United States?
These numbers are completely made up.
Now, I heard people trying to justify this by saying something like, if you look at the amount of drugs on a boat and pretend that it's all laced with fentanyl and then pretend that every person in the United States is going to take whatever fentanyl is on that boat,
that fentanyl that we don't even know is on the boat, and it probably is no fentanyl because it doesn't come from Venezuela, but just say cocaine has the potential, the power to kill hundreds of millions of people if it were all distributed evenly with enough of a fatal dose to all Americans and somehow all Americans were convinced to just like snort cocaine laced with fentanyl.
And it's like the cocaine isn't even what's laced with fentanyl.
It's heroin and opioid.
You know, I was trying to think of an example, and actually, the analog for how pathetic this reasoning is, how deceitful it is.
And the example I thought of is actually didn't even do justice to how, because the example I thought of is actually more illogical than what's being used.
It would be like saying, and this is what I thought of maybe there's a better analogy to illustrate just how deceitful this all is.
But let's imagine that I am in charge of the nuclear arsenal of the United States.
And I know that every nuclear warhead can kill 10 million people, has the potential to kill 10 million people if you detonate it.
So I go and I dismantle one nuclear warhead because kind of old, it's like the type that we don't really need anymore.
There's still like 2,000 nuclear warheads left, but I dismantled one.
And because that one nuclear warhead has the capacity to kill 10 million people, now I get to go around saying, I just saved 10 million lives.
How does that make any sense?
It didn't have any effect on anything.
This nuclear warhead wasn't going to be used.
And even if you dismantle it, it doesn't affect the ability to kill all those people with all the other nuclear warheads.
It's a completely abstract, pointless statistic.
And everyone looked at me like I was insane.
Like, I saved 10 million lives.
What did you do?
I dismantled one nuclear warhead, even though we have enough to destroy the entire world.
Even if these boats have cocaine, even if they're laced with fentanyl, even though that would be contradicting everything we said, we know about where fentanyl comes from, but let's just pretend.
Does anybody actually think that this has affected even minutely the availability of cocaine or fentanyl inside the United States?
The fact that these boats are blown up, do you think it actually has saved a single life?
Do you actually think that if we blow up a thousand boats off the coast of Venezuela or change the government of Venezuela, people in the United States are going to be like, hmm, I used to be able to get cocaine whenever I wanted, and now I can't find it.
It's really hard to find.
Anyone actually think that's going to happen?
As I said before, something very similar happened in the late 1980s under George H.W. Bush.
We were told Manuel Noriega is this mastermind, dangerous drug, international drug trafficker drowning the United States in drugs.
So Bush needed a war to prove he wasn't a quote-unquote wimp, which is the word being used for him.
So he invaded Panama, captured Manuel Noriega, who was a longtime CIA ally ally of the United States, brought him back to Miami, put him on trial, convicted him, imprisoned him, changed the government of Panama, killed a bunch of Panamanians and American soldiers.
For those of you who didn't live through the 80s or 90s, have you ever heard anyone saying, hey, you know, what really characterized the 80s and 90s was this like great difficulty in getting cocaine?
Like you just, in the 80s, you couldn't get cocaine in the 90s, no cocaine, because Manuel Noriega was removed.
These are, these should be insulting to your intelligence, these claims.
If there's a case to be made about why we want to go and commandeer the oil resources of Venezuela, Venezuela has the largest oil reserves of any country in the world.
It's probably not a coincidence about why we chose to engage in regime change in Venezuela.
And you want to somehow make the case, which I think is even harder to make, which is why they're not making it, that if you allow Exxon and Mobile and Chevron to profit even more so than they already do out Venezuelan oil, somehow that'll benefit the ordinary people who Trump said he was running to defend.
I think anyone's going to believe that.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Make your oil companies richer.
That always helps us.
This war just, it makes no sense.
It has no rationale.
And that's why I think you're seeing this increasing desperation in their rhetoric.
And if you don't want journalists pointing out when government officials are lying and making things up when it comes to selling a new word to the American population, it's hard to think what a journalist should be doing.
All right, there's been a lot of draw- Oh, I actually have a message to give you from one of our important sponsors.
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All right, so there's a lot of drama going on in the world of streaming, and this is generally true.
And I think a lot of times people, especially who are older than, say, 35, look at the world of streaming and think that it's just a wasteland, doesn't deserve any attention, there's nothing important happening there.
And I understand that view.
And in a sense, it's actually not untrue.
But the reality is that huge numbers of Americans listen to streamers.
When the internet first evolved, it was bloggers.
Then it became just independent journalists using things like podcasts and studios.
But streaming, people who stream on platforms like Twitch, which is owned by Amazon or Kik, which is owned by this creepy company that pays people to big streamers to encourage young people to gamble.
We actually did a segment on this once.
There's millions and millions of people listening to them.
And I think after the 2024 election, the New York Times suddenly discovered this whole new world of influencers that they just had ignored entirely, even though obviously they were getting way more views and had way more poll with huge numbers of people than legacy media outlets did.
And you see all these profiles in the New York Times like, hey, we just discovered this new world.
We're going to tell you about here's this guy named Theo Vaughn.
We're going to tell you about him.
And here's Hassan Piker.
And here's Andrew Schultz.
And let's talk what, and so people are always very slow when you're accustomed to the world being a certain way to detect changes and important that you pay attention.
And so I certainly don't do a lot of reporting on it, but I have been paying attention.
I do pay attention to the streaming world.
I've talked about it before, some of the, especially the political streamers, the personalities there.
And one of, but I don't really get involved in the drama or the conflicts because it's not really my world, thankfully.
And I don't want it to be.
But what happens there can be important.
It can have important implications.
And there's a streamer named Ethan Klein who gained a lot of popularity, kind of was this sort of very banal, like comedian type, but he was somebody who gained a big audience by saying the, I think, I'm not sure if he said the N-word, but he certainly like was just that kind of adolescent transgression, like, oh, look, I say the things that you're not allowed to say, even though there were no consequences for it, but posturing as someone brave because of it, just being like very edgy,
but in a very vapid and cliched way, but he built a huge audience.
He was one of the early adapters of Twitch streaming.
And a lot of times that can build an audience, even if you're utterly mediocre.
And he became very, very rich, very wealthy as a result of building that big audience.
And then he kind of had this like entire brand and personality change where he gave up his edge lord behavior and became like a very standard liberal.
Like, I'm against racism and I'm against misogyny and became like a Democrat and a liberal.
And that was for a while his little shtick.
Like he became like a lot of them become political.
Like that's where destiny comes from, who I've debated on this show.
You know, a lot of them start out as like video game players and they get a big audience that way and then they want to be more important.
So they start talking about politics.
And he was like kind of like a destiny.
You know, like I'm a Democrat, I'm a liberal.
I'm opposed to like racism.
He like rode the woke wave after getting very rich and building audience by being essentially anti-woke.
So he's just like a chameleon, whatever.
He's very interested in money, loves money and has made a lot of it.
And he formed a new show, I think right before October 7th, maybe, or at least like in mid-2023, with another very popular political streamer who's, I guess you could say on the left, although really he's a Democrat, Hassan Piker.
He's become kind of mainstreamed.
And a lot of people are like, wow, it's so weird that Hassan Piker is being mainstreamed because he's such a radical.
He's like a Marxist and identifies as a communist and says it's like America deserves 9-11.
Why is he mainstream?
The reason is because every two years he pops up and tells his audience to go vote for Democrats.
And he like loves AOC and Bernie and Zarwan Mandani.
So Democrats love him.
You can be as radical as you want.
You can say whatever you want.
As long as you come into your young people who want to feel radical, but then tell them the way to be radical is to go vote for the Democratic Party every two years.
You're going to be very mainstream.
So he's being mainstream.
And he and Ethan Klein came together.
They were supposed to have the show that was going to be like exploring differences.
But after October 7th, when Hassan became very outspoken in criticism of Israel and what Israel was doing in Gaza, and Ethan Klein, who is not just Jewish, but is married to an Israeli woman who served in the IDF.
They lived in Israel together before.
He talks about wanting to show how beautiful Israel is and was very pro-Israel.
Kind of giving lip service sometimes to saying, oh, what Israel is doing is terrible, but really overall defending Israel.
And that became his main identity.
He lost a lot of his audience because of it, became an object of hate.
And basically for the last few years, he's just been sort of like devoted to these vendettas, like avenging people who he thinks do him wrong on the internet.
I'm talking about like people with tiny platforms and therefore with very little money.
And he initiated, he's been threatening to find the identity of people on Reddit who say bad things about him.
And look, I just want to say, I know what it's like to be wronged on the internet.
I've been working as a journalist 20 years.
I basically have been online.
That's the foundation of my work.
I mean, obviously I've worked with corporate media outlets occasionally, but basically I began online and that's the world in which that I've always inhabited.
And I have been at war with pretty much every political faction, not just in the United States, but in Europe and Brazil over the years or various things, including this left-wing faction that Ethan Klein feels like is the root of all evil or whatever.
I understand there are a lot of horrible people in there.
So I have had that temptation too.
Somebody says something totally false about you, like, hey, Glenn Greenwald's a pedophile, or he has sex with his kids, or he is paid by Russia, or paid by guitar.
You just feel like no one should be allowed to say obviously false and hurtful things about me.
I could use my money and just destroy them.
And then you realize that's not a very productive use of your time and energy.
It's just, it's, it's just vindictive.
I worked as a litigator for 10 years.
I know how ugly and just soul-destructing litigation is for people who do it.
There's never any winner.
But he's decided that he's going to try and create a climate of fear.
And he's not the only one.
There are a lot of major corporations that do this.
That if you provoke his anger, if you criticize him, if you attack him, he's going to use his money to drag you into litigation.
He has a very aggressive Israeli lawyer who now is, I guess, an American citizen, but used to live in the West Bank, like a settler.
And he just wants to sue everybody and they drive up litigation costs.
And if you can't afford it, you're going to capitulate.
And he sued these three women, all of whom are pro-Palestinian, who I'm sure have done awful things.
I know these types of people.
I don't know enough about the merits to say one way or the other.
I don't really care.
It's not the point.
But he sued them all for copyright infringement because he produced his major hit piece on Hassan Piker.
They played it on their channels in order to react to it.
He says they didn't react enough.
Even if it's true, like I said, people have defamed me.
People have taken my material all the time.
I just don't want to spend my life and my energy going after people who don't have any influence.
It's a very petty way to live.
It's a very bullying way to live.
It's a terrible way to get your self-esteem.
So he's dragged these three women who have no financial resources, who are very small streamers, into these litigations, all in federal court, claiming copyright infringement.
And one of them apparently is responsible for financially taking care of three different disabled people.
You know, I don't know, that's just left-wing discourse.
Who knows what the reality is, but apparently she supports three people.
She's young woman, doesn't make a lot of money.
And so it doesn't matter if she did anything wrong or not.
If you're suing a big corporation, you can find a lawyer who will represent you for free as on contingency.
Meaning, if you sue them and you win money or you settle, they take a portion of your winnings.
It is easy to get a lawyer for free, even if you can't afford one, if you're suing some big corporation or some deep pocket.
But if you're being sued, no lawyer is going to represent you for free, or at least it's very difficult to find somebody who will.
They might do it as a sort of support of your cause.
But absolutely that, you have to pay the lawyer.
And most people cannot afford to pay legal fees in a federal court for an entire proceeding.
They will go bankrupt and just be destroyed before they will even get to a resolution.
And knowing that, he's dragged these women into it.
One of them just settled.
And in order to settle, meaning getting out of the case, he forced her, he and his wife forced her to read a completely humiliating statement designed to renounce her own political views, to claim that pro-Palestinian movement and the left is filled with anti-Semitism.
Just going to show it to you, just give you a sense of what this sort of thing can lead to.
Let's listen.
I want to begin by stating I take responsibility for infringing the content nuke.
The lawsuit was not frivolous.
When I said the lawsuit was frivolous and based on misogyny, it was to garner sympathy, protect my own reputation, and retaliate against the clients.
This lawsuit has given me a greater understanding of copyright protection, people's copyrights, and the importance of protecting copyrights in the online content creation community.
It is important for the entire content creation community to respect the intellectual property rights of other creators, and I will adhere to the lessons I've learned throughout this process going forward.
I also want to make clear that I did not receive any support, financial or otherwise, from Hassan Piker.
Hassan never even reached out to me privately to offer words of support.
Speaking honestly, I found his indifference to my suffering hurtful, especially after he hinted he might help me behind the scenes.
It felt like he wanted to receive credit from the public from helping me without providing any.
As to the GoFundMe money, to the extent there are any remaining funds after I pay my attorney's fees, I have agreed to pay the remaining funds to the clients.
The funds will not go to anyone else, including Denims or Frogan, to defend their lawsuits.
For the record, I have agreed to cooperate with the clients in their litigation against the H3 snark mods for promoting my live stream to the extent that I am able.
I will offer my support, including testifying under oath to everything I have just stated to help their cause.
I also want to take the opportunity to acknowledge other misconduct and bad behavior I have exhibited online.
For example, weaponizing the death of the death of Asmund Gold's mother was inexcusable.
I should know better because I have three disabled people that rely on me.
Moving forward, I will do better.
I also want to apologize to the crew of the H3 podcast, particularly A.B. and Olivia.
I apologize for calling them cowards for not quitting their jobs.
That was a shameful attack on two people who deeply care about Palestine and Palestinian people.
A.B., along with his wife Lena, have done more than I have ever done for the Palestinian people, including raising over $100,000 in charity.
I recognize that they have actually made Palestinian lives better, and my online antagonism and trolling has not.
I apologize to Ethan and Gila personally.
I have said extremely mean and cruel things about both of them, particularly my misogynistic attacks against Gila that never should have been said.
I also want to acknowledge the pervasive problem of anti-Semitism in leftist spaces.
It should concern all of us.
I condemn it and will not participate in it.
To that end, I wish the client success in enforcing TED Entertainment's copyright and protecting the legal rights of online content creators.
Just sort of make a very underdog people.
And very important of that.
The reason I talk about it is because there actually is a trend of very powerful corporations and very rich people abusing the court system to not just destroy their own critics, but to set an example, to send a signal, you can't criticize me.
You can't anger me because I'm so much richer than you that if you do, I can destroy you.
And I just showed you that I will do that, not just that I can, but that I will.
I'll force you into like public humiliation, submission, just going bankrupt if you refuse.
I'll force you to renounce your own political views, to attack your political allies, to like give me credit for things.
It's really a sick abuse of, as somebody who went to law school who actually believes in the just system and the concept of it, in practice, this is a really sick abuse of it.
And as I talk about in the interview that we're about to show you, there are a lot of cases similar to this where people are losing their free speech online because of the ability to do this.
Now, there are laws like anti-Slap suit laws that are designed to let people sue if the legal system is being used this way.
The problem is that if you get into federal court, which is where you go if you sue somebody for copyright infringement, there's no federal anti-slaps lawsuit.
Those are laws in certain states that say if somebody is trying to, if somebody's suing you as a way of silencing your political expression or criticism of them because they have more money, you can sue them for that.
That becomes a violation.
It's very difficult to use that in federal law.
But again, in federal court, it's inconsistent and federal courts will apply it.
Only some states have it.
And again, it costs a ton of money and you're gambling with your life.
If you don't have a lot of resources and you don't win, you're going to be destroyed forever.
And a lot of people are going to see that and say, you know what?
I probably should just keep my mouth shut.
Better not to criticize people.
Their lawyers will concoct something.
They didn't even sue for defamation.
They knew he couldn't, he knew he couldn't win.
So he sued for copyright infringement.
It's like, we've had small channels take our entire show and upload them to their YouTube channel before.
Yeah, I don't like it.
We all work hard.
We spend a lot of money to produce our show.
It's the product of my brain and the brains of my colleagues.
And someone just grabs the internet and puts it on their own channel.
But they're small enough channels.
It doesn't have an impact.
Maybe 3,000 people watch it, probably 3,000 people that wouldn't have watched me, or maybe a small portion of what I'm not going to go around, spending my time talking to lawyers, suing people.
You know, the most we've ever done is to write to them and say, like, hey, if you're going to do that, you should at least like contribute something original.
Sometimes they do and they're like, no problem.
You know, and they comment on it.
Sometimes they kind of ignore you.
Sometimes they pretend.
I'm not going to spend my life chasing down powerless people who wrong me and defame me.
In part because it is a very soul destructive way to live.
It's very poisonous to just live on these vendettas like this.
But also because I don't want to create a world where people who have more wealth can destroy people who have less simply because of that reason, not because of whether they did anything right or wrong.
I certainly don't want to do that when it comes to political speech.
Again, I'm human.
I've had that thought cross my mind when I see something defamatory or whatever.
It's like, I want to go.
I'm going to sue them.
I'm going to ruin them.
And then you realize that it's just not a constructive use of your time on earth and of the life force that you have and the energy to say nothing of money.
So I do think there are broader implications to this, which is why I wanted to cover it, to free speech.
And at the same time, there are some laws that are now being, that are now proliferating in the name of protecting children.
We actually talked to Taylor Renz the last time she was on our show about these laws that say social media platforms cannot allow anyone under 16 or 18 to use YouTube or use Reddit.
Now, how do these social media sites verify that, comply with the law?
They now require that you upload state-issued identification with your date of birth and obviously your name so that they can, in the name of protecting children,
but what it's actually doing is creating a massive database connecting every internet user to your actual name, destroying the ability to be anonymous on the internet, to speak freely at the same time that all these censorship laws are being passed that can imprison people for things you say on the internet at the time that these very kind of piggish rich people like Ethan Klein are using their financial wealth to destroy people who speak critically of them or who in some way provoke their anger.
The ability to speak anonymously has always been very valuable.
It's what allows people to confront powerful people and powerful factions without fear of retribution.
And it's incredibly important in this world, and yet it is being slowly, not really slowly, rapidly eroded under this propagandistic guise of protecting children and making sure children aren't exposed to things that they shouldn't see on the internet.
So, you know, love her or hate her in terms of past things she's done.
Taylor Renz has built a career covering internet culture and streaming world.
And she understands a lot about this Ethan Klein case.
And she has become, and again, we've had a lot of battles and conflicts and wars in the past over things like censorship.
Last time she was on my show, she said, I misunderstood.
She wasn't really a censorship advocate.
Whatever.
It doesn't matter how we resolve that.
People can go back and look at my critiques of her if they want.
She is now speaking out in defense of free speech and not just for her own views, but in general and warning of the dangers of these laws that aren't getting nearly enough attention.
And so we decided to sit down with Taylor today.
I knew she was the person who could talk most about this Ethan Klein case and the implications of it.
But also I wanted to use her presence here to bring some attention to these age laws on the internet that seem very noble and benign and benevolent, but are actually just a means of allowing the government to track everyone who's using the internet and the things you say.
So here's the interview we conducted with Taylor just about an hour ago before we started the show.
Taylor Renz, welcome back to the show.
It's nice to see you.
Thanks for taking the time to talk to us.
Thanks for having me.
Absolutely.
All right.
I don't know why I have to have that exchange first, even though it's so cursory, but I don't know.
I just need to, I can't start without it.
All right.
Let's dive right into what we were just talking about, which is this lawsuit or these series of lawsuits brought by an extremely wealthy streamer.
He became very wealthy as a result of what had been the popularity of his show, Ethan Klein.
And I think he lost a lot of his audience over the last couple of years because he was identified as kind of a hardcore Zionist, which isn't a good way to keep a younger online audience.
But also it just kind of, he seemed to become just, the whole show seems to be out his vendettas.
And one of the ways he expressed these vendettas is that he searched out three, I wouldn't call them tiny, but certainly not at all large streamers, younger women, and sued them for copyright infringement, but for putting a video, for putting a video on of his on their channel and kind of commenting on their reacting to it.
And it's like, even if they did the copywriting, he made it clear that the rationale, the motive for it was that he has a ton of money and knows that they have none and therefore can destroy them simply by bankrupting them or forcing them to settle.
And last night, one of them read a script that was designed to humiliate her as much as possible.
Can you tell us a little bit about like where he is and kind of the ecosystem of how information is being consumed in that world, but also this tactic of bullying people who don't have financial resources to force them into submission?
Yeah, so let's be clear.
Ethan Klein is a multi-millionaire YouTuber.
He's one of the richest YouTubers out there.
He's consistently in YouTube's top earners in terms of their podcast charts that they have.
His podcast, the H3H3 podcast, has been going, I think, for a decade, if not longer.
He's sort of an OG YouTuber.
So he really got famous in the 2010s by covering drama and kind of being like an edge lord on the internet.
He famously had a show with Hassan Piker called The Leftovers.
October 7th happened.
They had this messy breakup because as you mentioned, Ethan's a hardcore Zionist.
His wife, Ela, was in the IDF, has continued to defend the IDF.
And he's used his millions and millions of dollars to essentially.
Right.
She's Israeli.
She's Israel.
Yes.
And they lived in Israel, I think, too, right?
Yes.
Yes.
Yeah.
So these are Israel defenders here.
You know, he's talked about wanting to go back to Israel, show everyone how beautiful Israel is.
He's denied the genocide.
He's, you know, it's just, it's disgusting with the stuff that he's doing in terms of that.
So he lost, you know, a faction of his audience, but he, again, is this multi-multi-millionaire, lives in this mansion, a gated community in one of the nicest, richest areas of Los Angeles.
He uses his vast amount of money and the attention that he gets from monetizing these hate campaigns to financially abuse these women.
As you mentioned, these women have no audience compared to Ethan Klein.
These are three very small Twitch streamers with a couple, you know, a few thousand watchers or whatever viewers.
And they reacted to a video of his, something that he encouraged people to do.
He encouraged people to react to his videos.
This is very common in Twitch culture.
They reacted, they criticized him, and he didn't like that.
And so he used his money to essentially financially destroy them.
And none of this is about copyright, as you mentioned.
It's all about sort of just dominating them and destroying their lives.
And he's a vindictive psychopath.
You know, here's the thing, though.
I don't know a lot about the substance of the dispute.
I didn't really follow it, but let's just assume for the sake of argument that they did technically violate copyright or maybe even intentionally did so.
I mean, there are like YouTube programs who just keep my show wholesale and they just upload it to their channel and maybe they're like, we're going to comment on this.
And then they barely comment.
And obviously I could sue them and I know that, but I don't want to use, like, I don't want to spend my life trying.
You know, it reminds me of like, you go to the gym every day, you're super strong.
You happen to be born like 6'3.
And then you go out in the street like booking for people who are like 5'6 and really skinny to beat up so that you can feel good about yourself.
Like that's not what psychologically healthy people do.
You know, so I've been, I feel like I've been wronged on the internet in all sorts of ways, but maybe like I have a fleeting sense of like, God, I could destroy that person if I wanted using a tactic like this, but I just would never do it because it's so corrosive to the soul.
But it's also kind of threatening to free speech, right?
Like if this becomes a tactic that people come and use, you can destroy anybody you want and intimidate them out of criticizing you.
Like talk about that more specific feature of just like being so addictive, but also the broader implications of this.
Yeah.
I mean, what Ethan is doing is so gross on so many levels.
Obviously, he's just personally destroying these women's lives and he's a crybully throughout the whole thing.
He's trying, you know, he's doing the Israel move of just like, you know, abusing others and then playing the victim.
So that's just a porridge.
What I think is also just so corrosive is that YouTube and Twitch and all of the social media is built on building and critiquing the ideas of others.
If you're going to put out some long video and people are going to critique it, maybe they are going to hate it.
Maybe they are going to, you know, thwart you in some way.
Maybe they will technically that technically violates some copyright law if you were to find it.
But the spirit of YouTube has always been that you don't sue people over that type of stuff.
You engage, right?
Or you allow people to comment on your work.
YouTube as a, and I've reported on this extensively in my book about the negative associations a lot of the YouTube community had with the copyright system generally, because most YouTubers are getting copy strikes from big, you know, reacting to like the Marvel movies or these big entertainment franchises.
So copyright has copyright law has always been very intertwined with speech and speech law, obviously.
And, you know, Ethan knows that he can't pursue any sort of defamation case against these women.
He knows that there's anti-Slap protections, thank God, in California and other states.
So he's trying to use copyright law to sort of set these, you know, to punish these women.
I don't even think he wants to set any sort of precedent here because he doesn't actually seem to care about winning these cases.
He just cares about humiliating these women and financially destroying them.
But I do think it's set this really nervous tone among YouTubers where a lot of YouTubers are nervous to respond or react or create their own reaction videos or engage in discourse that they would otherwise engage in because there's this looming threat of litigation where if you're a richer YouTuber and you're more powerful and you have more subscribers, you can destroy the person with less money.
And that's just a horrible, horrible system.
We don't want to live in that world where if you're rich, you can do whatever you want and say whatever you want.
And if you're not, you're not, you know, like that.
And that's what Ethan does.
Ethan is a bully.
And he goes around, he's threatened to sue me.
He's threatened to sue literally everyone that, you know, lightly criticizes him while the entire time claiming to be the victim.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
I mean, it's exactly what you said: it's the Israel complex.
Like, we're going to bomb you and kill you and destroy you and like amass all this money and weapons, but we're going to then simultaneously claim that we're the victims and you're bullying us.
Just, you know, just to be clear on this precedent issue, like I didn't mean like a legal precedent.
I meant, I'll just tell you this quickly, culturally, which is why this bothers me so much.
Yeah.
There's this journalist, Alex Quadras, and he's like a very well-regarded, accomplished journalist, has reported for like major political magazines all throughout the West, including like the New Yorker and the New York Times.
And he wrote a book on Brazilian oligarchs.
He was based in Brazil for a while.
He's an American journalist, but he was based in Brazil called Brazilianaires.
And it was about like Brazilian billionaires and how they corrupt the political culture and dominate the country and subvert democracy.
He could not get this book published in Brazil, despite his pedigree of journalism, because every publisher was petrified that they would just be vendetta sued into the ground by these billionaires who could obviously sue them forever.
And it only got published in English in the U.S. where, you know, it didn't sell very much.
It didn't make an impact because it was about Brazil.
It was supposed to be published in Brazil.
And he literally couldn't get it published there because exactly because of this idea that if I have enough money and you criticize me or you report on me or you challenge me in any way, I can find, I can have the best lawyers find some way to just destroy you, even if you've done nothing wrong.
And we talk about the threats to online free speech and a free internet.
This seems to be a really significant one to me.
And as you said, you know, big corporations use it all the time.
And now we have someone who's involved in political disputes, a big defender of Israel.
You know, I think they do give lip service to maybe it is a genocide in Gaza, but clearly they're there to defend the IDF and Zionism.
Basically sending the same thing.
They're liberal Zionists.
If they criticize us, we'll destroy you.
Yeah, they're liberal Zionists.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Yeah.
And they can say, oh, Israel commits a genocide.
And then they're retweeting the people that are saying that there's no such thing as a genocide.
I mean, they're just, Ian, or my gosh, Ethan, Ethan makes these comments, but you have to look at the totality of his behavior.
And yeah, he's just a liberal Zionist.
But I mean, you mentioned about this idea of this.
First of all, that's horrible.
What happened to that journalist in Brazil?
But we're seeing this happen so much in America.
I think of actually David Enrich's fantastic book, New York Times journalist who reports a lot on, you know, these horrible lawsuits against the press, has a book called Murder the Truth.
It's about the fight to overturn New York Times for Sullivan, which is this seminal sort of free speech lawsuit in the U.S.
But he talks about how increasingly there's these law firms that go out and sort of recruit targets or they work with sometimes influencers, sometimes anyone that sort of like has a grievance, and they'll just fund these lawsuits.
They get wealthy donors to fund these lawsuits and destroy, you know, the target.
And this is happening a lot to local journalists.
This is happening increasingly to influencers.
A lot of content creators that call out wrongdoing, citizen journalists, whatever you want to call these people, like a lot of them are calling, they're challenging people in power.
They're covering the stuff that the mainstream media is not willing to cover.
They're speaking up about Palestine, whatever.
And they have these powerful interests, these powerful legal firms, these powerful billionaires, whatever, suing them into the ground.
And now you have, you know, then now you have Ethan Klein, who's also a powerful millionaire and has also aligned himself with other powerful rich Zionists like Ryan Kavanaugh.
Ryan Kavanaugh, who co-founded Triller, he's like an entertainment guy with millions of dollars.
He previously sued Ethan Klein for defamation.
Ethan lost.
And then they sort of aligned now because they're both Israel supporters to, you know, I guess to have this sort of stance towards their critics where they don't think they don't think anybody that has less money than them should be allowed to speak freely on the internet.
Yeah, just for people who don't know, New York Times v. Sullivan is a 1964 Supreme Court case, three or I think four, 1964 Supreme Court case where basically people know that it's very difficult to sue.
for defamation if you're a public figure.
It's almost, it's designed to be almost impossible.
It's not quite impossible.
I mean, if you can prove that the person knew what they said about you was false and they did it deliberately to harm you, that's a very narrow exception.
But otherwise, if you're make yourself a public figure, if you're a politician, you have a big platform, you're a streamer, it's extremely difficult, even if someone says something false about you, to win a defamation suit.
Whereas if you're a private citizen who hasn't made yourself a public figure, it's actually not that hard, which I think is exactly how it should be because it creates a climate where you're free to criticize people with a lot of power.
And actually, one of the people trying to erode that is Trump with these massive lawsuits that he brings against media companies, including ones that need things from the government, who then pay him $50 million or more in order to settle the lawsuit so they get rid of the problem with the U.S. government.
And this is, I think, one of the issues.
But this last point you said, I just want to drill into this a little bit because I think I became aware of Ethan Klein because he had this show with Hassan Piker.
And it was supposed to be the show, like the idea of it kind of like Crystal Ball and Sager with breaking points, like, oh, we don't agree on a lot, but we do agree on some things that we're going to be able to talk civilly.
And then October 7th happened.
And I think for a lot of people who felt like what Israel was doing is genocide, it was very difficult to maintain civility with people who were continuing to defend Israel.
And that show broke up with a lot of bitterness, a lot of warfare.
Can you talk about, because it certainly has affected me and my audience as well, and I'm sure most people's, how the issue of me genociding Gaza and Israel and October 7th have affected the political streaming world?
Yeah, I think, I mean, there's a few things that have happened.
I think, first of all, a lot of people, October 7th happened.
And, you know, we live in America where you're just, you're fed a lot of pro-Israel propaganda constantly in American culture.
And I think that October 7th was this moment where suddenly a lot of that started to break and people started to be like, well, what really is going on?
And they started turning to social media and content creators and videos directly from the ground in Gaza to see what was happening.
And they learned, wow, actually, I've been fed a lot of propaganda bullshit.
And, you know, not only is Israel committing a genocide, but they've illegally occupied Palestinian land for years.
They've terrorized local population.
Like they've, you know, it's been this ongoing ethnic cleansing, et cetera.
And very quickly, you saw this split where you started to see these pro-Israel content creators, tons of money.
I wrote about this for the Washington Post, the amount of money, the pro-Israel kind of lobby money that started to fund a lot of these influencers in the space, taking them on trips to Israel, organizing these meetings with Netanyahu, boosting them up sort of artificially.
And then you saw the deplatforming attempts of anybody who spoke out about Gaza.
So obviously the TikTok ban is an example of this.
The TikTok ban was never about China.
It was about censorship of pro-Palestinian speech.
As by the way, Warner and Gallagher, who co-wrote the bill, basically admitted back in February when it was the Munich Security Conference.
They were asked about sort of the ban and they said there was no appetite for this ban until after October 7th.
So they successfully banned TikTok through this.
And then they've sought to crack down aggressively on online speech ever since by manufacturing this moral panic around online safety.
And we can get into that later.
But yeah, it's really affected the content creator landscape.
Hassan Piker has been the target of tons of deplatforming efforts.
There's been an effort to remove the CEO of Twitch because he's seen as too sympathetic to pro-Palestinian content creators.
And then you've just seen the sort of mass expulsion of speech online.
And I think that I think a lot of leftists started to wake up and realize that they completely dropped the ball, hopefully, although a lot of them are not waking up, but hopefully I think some of them have woken up and realized like we really do need to fight for free speech online because when you don't, it's very easy to de-platform people and de-platform these content creators.
I just saw another big TikToker literally just this week got their account deleted for pro-Palestine content.
So I think it's really skewed the influencer landscape.
Yeah, you have no idea.
And I don't, I don't like being viticated in this, but I spent so many years when that censorship regime was being created, aimed at the right, saying, I promise you, this is going to be used against the left in some way, probably when it comes to Israel.
That has always been one of the primary targets of corporate and state censorship in the United States or people who criticize Israel.
It was so predictable.
And I guess sometimes people just need to see it happen in order to kind of wake up to it.
But let me ask you about that because I do think the most underappreciated, undercovered story is the fact that the most popular social media app in the United States, that especially among young people, but competing with just the general population for most use in the U.S., TikTok was banned or a sale forced, not because of the original claim of, oh,
this is China controlling this social media app and they're going to use it to spy on us and propagandize our youth, as you alluded to.
That lingered for years.
It never got anywhere close to the votes.
It only got the votes.
And Hillary Clinton, I don't know if you saw this, but last night was at some Marianne Adelson conference.
And she said she thinks the reason why so many young Americans turned against Israel is not because they watch young babies getting blown up or incinerated in tents or star-up people starving to death or the true face of Israel and the U.S. relationship to it.
No, no, it has nothing to do with that.
It was because they were deceived and manipulated by TikTok.
And thankfully, Netanyahu said the same thing.
It's now been put into the hands of Larry Ellison, the single largest private donor to the friends of the IDF.
And then at the same time, you have Larry Ellison's son, David Ellison, who just bought Paramount and CBS.
They're now trying to buy Warner Brothers and Discovery and CNN.
There's clearly this kind of panic looking at all the same polls that we see about the unraveling of support for Israel, not just on the left, but also on the right, especially among young conservatives.
And this effort to kind of recommandeer the media in a way that almost fits this stereotype.
You know, like we're going to control all the media and not allow any Israel criticism.
The solution is, if there is one, is, well, don't worry, there's this free and open internet.
Independent media is where people get their news from.
They're not getting it from CBS or Paramount anymore, although certainly TikTok they were getting it from, and it's now in the hands of people who are censoring.
How do you see the kind of battle for information dominance?
Will a free and open internet continue to be a viable alternative to what had been this centralized control now that they're looking at taking over things like TikTok and the internet in general?
I think, no, no, we're not going to have a free and open internet.
Our internet is about to look like China and Russia and all these countries that the U.S. criticized for years and years as authoritarian.
We are about to lose freedom on the internet.
Look at, I think there's 11 states currently that have identity verification laws in the books.
I talked about this moment.
The most chilling, horrifying moment of my career, I'll never get over it, was last 2024.
Yeah, like what year is it?
Last year, last August, I was at this content creators summit that the Biden administration had.
And Biden, I don't even know if he knew what room he was in, but he was up there talking to the content creators with Mira Tandon, Biden official.
She said to all these hundreds of content creators, don't you wish you could unmask every troll?
Don't you wish you could remove anonymity from the internet?
That's what we're going to do.
And these stupid content creators were like cheering.
And I thought, remove anonymity from the internet.
That is horrifying.
And that is the goal of both the Democrats and Republicans.
And they have been incredibly aligned on that for years.
And they're Nikki Haley advocating the same thing.
Remember, I don't know if you remember, but during the 2024 presidential campaign in the primary, she advocated that no more anonymity on the internet.
We need a government-issued ID for allow you on.
And a lot of people on the right freaked out about that.
Like people on the left freaked out about it, but it is sort of going on under the guise of something else.
So I know we talked about this last time you were on.
I know there have been updates.
So where are we with that?
Well, there was a terrifying hearing yesterday in the House where they're basically, they have, I think it was about like 19 different bills, but the Kids Online Safety Act, the worst censorship law I would say of my entire life that I've ever seen is up again, sort of for review.
We have the Screen Act.
We have, again, these age verification laws, identity verification.
Essentially, all of this stuff is this moral panic about children's safety.
And you're not just seeing it here.
You're seeing it in the EU.
This is being used to manufacture consent for the, you know, the their sort of chat control system where they want to scan everyone's like chat systems, just crazy.
The Online Safety Act, which passed actually back in 2023 in the UK, but went into effect recently.
And we saw the mass censorship that it's leading to.
Australia just banned kids under the age of 16 from using the internet, which I just want people to understand.
You know, when you, when you put these age restrictions in, you need to identify everybody.
You can't like, you need to identify everyone and know how old they are.
That requires collecting biometric data or knowing or their like physical government ID.
Do you think that you should have to scan your face and upload your government ID to read and access information online or to post online?
No, that's horrible.
That's it.
It has a huge chilling effect on free speech.
And yet that is what our government is trying to do right now while Democrats and Republicans push it through.
And I don't even, there is no meaningful coalition against it.
It's like, I feel like it's the most terrifying thing because it will cement, it will cement the power of people like Ethan Klein.
It will cement the power of people, these sort of bad reactionary figures.
Like they're never, the government's never going to crack down on them because they're not fundamentally challenging the government.
We've seen from Palestine, right?
Like we know what sort of speech the government cracks down on.
And we're seeing it in the UK, by the way, who passed a version of this law in the UK already.
We've seen it's just weaponized against people who challenge the government.
So I just, all this bullshit about online safety, it's, it's, it's incredibly dangerous.
And we need the media and these bad actors to stop feeding into it.
The media has been horrible.
The New York Times has done some of the worst coverage I've ever seen on this topic.
Well, I think a lot of corporate media has long viewed a free and open internet as a major threat to it for obvious reasons.
It's taken away their readership, it's taken away their power.
And so they just instinctively or institutionally almost side with attempts to cripple the internet, at least as a free and open competitor to what they've been doing.
But I want to talk about this a little bit because, you know, it's the more you watch how propaganda works, the scarier it gets because you realize how potent it actually is.
You know, usually something like what's happening in Venezuela now, we were supposed to be done with regime change wars.
We're not going to go around the world anymore changing governments.
And then immediately, you know, you just invent some like thing that's scary, like, oh, that's where all the drugs are coming from to kill your kids.
Everyone's like, oh, yeah, let's go change the government of Venezuela and put in the government we like and support that government and pay for the instability and keeping them in power in the civil war that's going to ensue.
It's just like overnight, it's just like the lizard brain clicks with propaganda.
Like, oh, this is where fentanyl is coming from and killing all your kids, which is a total lie.
So if you were to say, we want to eliminate anonymity on the internet and just make that the argument, everybody freaks out, like happened with Nikki Haley, as happened with any politician that would ever say that.
There'd be a huge backlash.
If you don't say that that's what you're actually up to, if you actually pretend that what you're really doing is trying to protect kids from sexually explicit material, and that's the only reason why everybody has to upload government data, then it's like if you oppose that, you must be a pedophile.
Like, who could possibly be against trying to keep kids off of social media and seeing things that they shouldn't see?
And yet, in this Australia law that has now gone into effect, Google is now just closing every account of every YouTube user who could not prove that they were under that they're older than 16 or people who had already submitted identification and they know they're not above 16.
And so, basically, to use YouTube in Australia, and obviously that's going to come to every country because these social media companies are preemptively going to want to do this.
It is, we're on the verge of having to be a requirement that in order to use social media, you have to upload government ID and proof of identity and date of birth under this totally fake pretext of protecting kids from the internet.
Why is that so much of a threat in your view?
Like, why is anonymity so important?
This is happening at a time when we have the government going around and arresting and jailing people for their speech about like Charlie Kirk, you know, or saying some dumb meme.
Like, we do, we should not have to have an internet where every single thing you do is tracked by the government and then can be used as a pretense to charge you for terrorism or put you in jail for, yeah, for incitement to violence, some trumped up, made up charge, right?
Usually it's terrorism.
That's the type of stuff that they claim, or yeah, danger, online harm, adult content.
Like these are all just like buzzwords.
It's censorship.
It's terrifying.
And we know, by the way, you know, none of this keeps kids safe.
In fact, it endangers kids.
We know that actually it makes it harder for kids to get information.
More kids are likely to be abused by people in power, you know, or by pedophiles because they're not able to seek out information and get help.
Reddit is another website that's banned, you know, for anybody under 16 in Australia.
And I'm sure they'd love to do it here too.
There are so many useful forums that were helping children navigate things, helping young girls, for instance, understand reproductive health, helping LGBTQ people understand their identity.
And that's what so much of this is rooted in.
It is controlling the media environment because they don't actually have a problem with children watching YouTube.
Let's not forget that they're literally integrating Prager U YouTube slot videos into our school systems in certain states.
Like they have no problem with people consuming content.
It just has to be content that's government approved.
And that's what's so terrifying.
And Glenn, as you mentioned, they're never going to come out and say, although Neera Tandon did, Nikki Haley did.
I think actually enough of them have, they're bold enough to say it now.
We just want to censor the internet.
But this whole moral panic about online safety is just such complete bullshit.
It's driven by these powerful big money interests, billionaire interests.
And it's against every single researcher.
You know, like all the researchers in this space have come out and issued these reports saying, by the way, none of this is going to protect kids.
And it doesn't matter because you've got the New York Times manufacturing consent and you've got all these stupid parents on board.
And they're not to call them stupid.
I'm sure they mean well, but they're buying into this horrible system.
Their good intentions are being manipulated.
Exactly.
Yeah.
You know, when the internet first emerged, I feel so old saying that, like, oh, when we first got the internet, like, I feel like some ancient relic saying that.
One of the things that did make it so exciting was it was like the Wild West.
There were no rules and everything you did was untraceable to what it is that you were saying.
And if you're people in power, like Nikki Haley or Nira Tandon or people like that or government of Australia, of course, it empowers the kind of peasants, like the mob, because they can say things about you and they can stand up to you and they can challenge you without fear because you don't know who they are.
And so it's like the, it's like exactly what they think.
I've seen them like threatening to uncover the identity of like Reddit commentators or moderators.
You know, this is like the, and I will confess, like, as I said before, like, I, you know, sometimes some like anonymous person says something like that total lie about you.
Like, oh, he's a pedophile or he gets money from the Russian government, whatever, whatever it is.
And you're like, I'm not, you can't say that about me.
That's totally false.
I'm going to find out who you are and crush you.
And then I realized like that is a really terrible impulse that I would criticize anybody else.
And so that's why I've never done it.
But it's an impulse that people in power who believe they're entitled to this kind of deference and respect.
It's a very status quo perpetuating framework.
And it's one that's designed to protect power.
And obviously, if you gut anonymity on the internet, which is what the surveillance state that, you know, the stone reporting we did was really about that was like creating a surveillance state kills not just privacy, but like every political right of the government's tracking you, knowing everything you're doing, saying how you're organizing, how you're speaking.
This is like the dream of this like panopticon is to be able to know who everybody is and what everyone's saying.
So if Nero Tandon is online and someone says something mean about her, she can pick up the phone and call like her friends in the FBI or, you know, when the Democratic Party is back in the White House and she can use her power there.
This is, and the fact that because it's dressed up as a child protection law, so few people understand that it's happening or don't feel threatened by it, that's the part that I find so alarming.
I just cannot imagine how these people can buy into it.
Like it's just, it's horrifying.
But as you said, you know, once you see how propaganda works and you see just the insanely bad media coverage of it.
And, you know, yesterday I was spending hours just trying to find anybody, any groups.
Are there any groups fighting against this?
Aside from FHIR, which does great work in the speech space and a couple random nonprofits, but these nonprofits are posting.
Yeah, they are.
Is that the current?
They're posting blog posts about it and that's great.
But and maybe they're filing some briefs, but there's no, well, you know, what you have on the other side, for instance, is, you know, Jonathan Haidt and these reactionary figures with millions and millions of dollars of funding and these massive PR team and these mainstream media journalists that are totally sympathetic to this messaging, you know, feeding this moral panic bullshit narrative.
And people and leftists go along with it.
I think that's what's so frustrating to me, Glenn, is that leftists are rightfully angry about the internet and the influence of big tech on their lives.
I get it.
Okay.
These companies are not great.
I would not defend like Meta or Google or anything like that.
But they think that forcing, you know, age verification or something is some crackdown on big tech because that's also how like these lawmakers like Blumenthal and Warner and stuff have tried to sell it.
It's not.
I wrote a piece about this recently for Zatayo.
It consolidates the power of big tech.
We see this happening again right now in the UK, where these big platforms, they have the money to institute, you know, identity verification, age verification.
All these smaller forums, all these support groups, alcoholists, anonymous groups, other groups for people with disabilities, young people with struggling to get out of abusive homes and stuff, those are all gone off the internet.
They don't have the resources to fight, you know, to fight these laws or to institute age verification systems.
And as you said, it's all feeding into the surveillance state.
And I just think anybody that purports, whether you're on the right or the left or whatever, if you care about civil liberties and you care about freedoms, you should be out in the streets every single day or on the internet every single day.
Should be all hands on deck where you are fighting these fighting these laws because we're so close.
They're so close to passing them.
And once we lose our rights, as you know, we're not going to get them back.
Oh, yeah, those rights never come back.
I know you have a heart out, so I'm going to let you go.
Just really two quick points.
So, just on two things you said, I think are so important.
Jack Dorsey, when he was on Twitter, used to talk about this.
Like, Google and Facebook were going around urging the government to regulate big tech.
And it seems counterintuitive.
Like, why would Google and Facebook want to have these massive regulations?
The reason is because they have so much money, they could comply with them easily.
But even mid-sized social media companies like Twitter would have a great deal of difficulty complying with them.
And so, the more regulations you impose on big tech, the more you consolidate power in the hands of big tech.
And look, as a parent, I get it.
Like, the internet can be harmful.
There's no doubt about that.
It's true of every innovation, every technology, every right, free speech can be harmful as well, for sure.
But we judge that we don't want to give up our liberties because certain things can be harmful.
There are other ways to mitigate those harms without turning the internet into something where it's the worst and most coercive tool of surveillance ever known to mankind.
All right, Taylor, thank you so much.
It was great to talk to you.
I'm so glad you are covering this.
We should probably cover it more than we do as well because I do get worked up about it every time I see you talking about it or somebody talking about it.
So, I'm glad you're out there doing that.
And I appreciate your coming on and talking to us.
