Tim Pool critiques Twitter’s ideological bans—permanently removing users like Megan Murphy for "men aren’t women" while ignoring Kathy Griffin’s violent rhetoric—highlighting inconsistencies tied to intersectional bias. He warns of algorithm-driven radicalization, citing CGP Grey’s This Video Will Make You Angry and Charlottesville clashes, and questions whether platforms like Gab or Subscribestar will fragment discourse into unstable digital economies. Pool opposes race-based policies like Harvard’s anti-Asian admissions standards and "racial equity" clauses in the Green New Deal, calling them impractical, while advocating for UBI only if funded by futuristic tech like replicators. Rogan agrees on risks of censorship and automation’s societal impact, stressing the need for regulation over corporate speech control. [Automatically generated summary]
I definitely drank too much coffee before we get here.
So if I appear like cracked out, I swear to God, I'm not in pills.
Glad to hear it.
So we had a nice conversation on the phone.
About de-platforming and social media.
And what was very obvious to me in talking to you was that you're way more schooled on this than I am.
So that's why I wanted to have this conversation with you.
Because part of what was...
I re-listened to my podcast with Jack.
And you had a good criticism of it.
I agree with a lot of what you said.
First of all, I agree that it was kind of boring.
And it was...
I think for many reasons it was my fault.
I don't think I prepared enough for it, and I also don't think I understood the magnitude of how other people felt about deplatforming on Twitter and all social media, YouTube and all these different things, and what the ramifications are and how...
How much this means to people to have very clear and obvious free speech outside of very egregious examples of threats and doxing and things like that, which I think we can all agree, right?
And I think going into that conversation with him, well, that's what I wanted it to be.
That's why I don't really interview people.
I mean, I kind of have conversations with them.
Occasionally we have disagreements and we talk about things and, you know, But I don't have a mandate.
And the only thing I wanted to get out of the conversation is I wanted to find out what it was like to start that organization and to have no idea when you were doing it that it was going to be essentially like one of the most important distribution avenues for information.
Jack says things like, he said to you, he said to Congress, I believe he said to Congress, we don't ban people based on the content, we ban people based on their conduct.
They tend to be trans-inclusive, meaning they believe that someone who's born biologically male can compete with those biologically female if they transition, if they take hormones and things like that.
Yeah, I've seen some of the stuff you've talked about.
The trans-exclusionary group think they shouldn't, and they've said things that are considered to be – I say considered to be offensive.
I'm not trying to assert who's offended by it, but – There's one recent story where a radical feminist said that the trans rights movement is a men's rights movement, right?
They say things like that.
In the case of Meghan Murphy, she responded to someone.
You know, the funny thing about it is I got my start during Occupy Wall Street and conservatives called me far left because I was reporting on the protests, what they were doing, police brutality, the arrests.
They said this is a far left activist.
Now that I'm – I've always been critical of the more extreme factions.
Like I've got interviews from six, seven years ago where I'm critical of these people.
now all of a sudden they're accusing me of being alt-right for being critical of extremists and masks you know starting fires and things like that or alt-right adjacent that's my new favorite yeah bootlicker alt-right adjacent well bootlicker bootlicker that's that's you know there's a lot of phrases that people use that mean literally nothing bootlicking um one of my favorites is to keep in the context of twitter they say freedom of speech freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequence that literally doesn't mean anything it literally means nothing
But it's almost – it's just like you can predict when someone will say it and it's usually when a specific person is banned.
They'll say freedom of speech, freedom of consequence, all that stuff.
They don't say it when it's their people.
They say – But this is true too.
In talking about Twitter censorship, there are people on the left who have been banned unjustly and this is where it gets actually scarier in my opinion.
I guess it depends on how conspiratorial you want to get, but Julian Assange, they've labeled him, like the intelligence agencies, I can't remember, I think it may have been James Clapper, said that he is acting as a private intelligence adversary of the US or something to that effect.
Even if you don't like her, you've got to admit she knows how to get press.
She knows how to generate that buzz, and she's really good at it.
But here's the thing.
She got banned permanently because she tweeted to, I believe it was Ilan Omar, criticism about Sharia law.
She accused, you know, you can pull up the tweet, but I think she accused Ilan of promoting Sharia, which results in like all these horrific things, and they banned her for it.
Okay, disagree with her all you want, but that was her criticizing a politician.
You can't have a lawsuit against Donald Trump claiming you can't – Trump can't block somebody because it's a public forum.
But then when it comes to a congressperson, just permanently ban someone for saying something critical of their ideology.
I think what's really critical here is that there has to be some sort of clarification for what policies were violated and how they were violated.
That seems to be especially for public figures because- It's one thing if we don't know a person in the background, but when you know a person, whether it's a Laura Loomer or a Milo Yiannopoulos, and it's a public case, and then you get this feeling that they say, no, because we decide, and this is it.
So when coal miners were getting laid off, a bunch of articles emerged saying, teaching miners to code, can we teach miners how to code?
And they were showing videos about it.
I don't believe it was, it wasn't intended to be derogatory or insulting, but to a lot of people it came off as this bourgeois, let them eat cake.
Oh, your career has been destroyed.
You're a 50-year-old man with a family.
Go to Silicon Valley and do something you've never even thought about.
So it came off to a lot of people as just elitist.
So when these journalists are getting laid off...
I don't know exactly where it started, where they say, learn to code, to the journalists.
Well, an interesting thing happens.
John Levine, I think his name, from The Wrap, tweets, someone from Twitter told me, you can be banned for tweeting learn to code at a laid-off journalist.
Conservatives start tweeting it far and wide.
Like, here we go.
This is a reporter from The Rep who's confirmed this.
All of a sudden then other journalists come out and say, this is a lie.
This is not true.
This is fake news.
Conservatives are spreading fake news again.
And they say, we have a new statement from Twitter that said, we're only banning people who are engaging in a harassment campaign.
Well, now you've got a few problems.
Is tweeting a meme at somebody critical of them, a harassment campaign?
Now, people can fake screenshots, I understand that.
But I checked some people's Twitter accounts, I saw that they were tweeting this, and I believe, for the most part, this is what happened.
Someone tweeted something to a BuzzFeed journalist.
You know, oh, you guys believed X, Y, and Z, yeah, whatever, hashtag learn to code.
Criticizing them.
Suspension.
So then these journalists come out and say, this is not true.
It's just people engaging in a harassment campaign.
So I said, look at this guy's account.
He's got one tweet that says, learn to code.
Is that him harassing somebody?
And they said, oh, but you're taking it out of context.
Then John Levine from The Wrap says, update, Twitter spokesperson who was my source is now saying, clarifying it is about the harassment campaign.
And then another journalist comes out and says, his quote's fake, Twitter's denying ever saying it.
But here's the thing.
The editor-in-chief of The Daily Caller just a couple, I think a couple days ago, He took a tweet from The Daily Show, and it was from the State of the Union, and he tweeted, learn to code, and quote tweeted a video, suspended.
So it's very clearly not about a harassment campaign.
But why then were all of these journalists so ready to jump up and defend Twitter when Twitter – you know what I said?
Okay, if Twitter is claiming they're banning people who are engaging in a harassment campaign, you mean they've confirmed they're banning people for tweeting learn to code.
They just consider it harassment.
How is it that learn to code is harassment, but Kathy Griffin saying to all of her millions of fans, I want these kids' names several times, or another verified account I'm not going to name because it's not as famous, literally calling for the death of these kids and instructing people to kill them is not a bountiful offense.
And this brings back into journalism the big problem.
It's – for decades, I don't know how long, journalism has been dominated by self-identified liberals.
There's a ton of polls.
I think it was a 2015 poll showing republicans are like 7 percent of journalists or some ridiculously small number.
And there's a really simple reason for it.
News organizations are headquartered in big cities, the big ones.
Even Fox News is in New York.
So there's a lot of people who work at Fox News who are actually liberal.
People don't seem to know that.
You live in New York, you're probably not a staunch conservative.
So what happens then?
News breaks, you've got all these journalists, because I've worked with them.
You know, I worked for Vice, I worked for Fusion, and they sit around at tables, they meet up after work from different offices, and they talk about things, and they all tell each other the exact same thing.
And so this is why you see Covington happen.
These people all follow each other on Twitter, so when someone tweets, this MAGA kid got in the face of Nathan Phillips, They only see each other's tweets and they just write it.
And it's mind-blowing to me because the second video that came out from Covington, you literally watch Nathan Phillips walk up to the kid and get in his face.
Bill Maher, you know, what four or five days later, says the kid got in his face.
And I'm like, how are you...
You know...
Shame on Bill Maher for saying that.
That's not true.
But at the same time, we have a serious journalism problem.
And what's fascinating is following the story, an op-ed, I believe it was in the New York Times, said, stop tweeting.
Or it said, never tweet.
Brian Stelter from CNN then got a statement that...
I always say I believe because I don't have the sources pulled up, but someone from Twitter said journalists are the lifeblood of our platform.
And so that's why I think you've got these predominantly New York-based progressive writers.
They're fresh out of college.
They get hired for moderate salaries to work in a newsroom, sit around each other all day, sharing the same ideas, not exploring anything outside their bubble.
And Twitter supports them because they're the ones who drive traffic to Twitter.
They keep the conversation going.
I think that's where Twitter's bias partly comes from.
The other is that clearly you're in San Francisco.
You're going to have your staff, the people who are running content curation and banning people, they lean left.
Why Kathy Griffin wasn't banned?
Probably because she's very famous, but then I have to wonder why Alex Jones was.
So the only real differentiator there, I guess, is either mainstream notoriety or ideological tribe.
Well, Jamie, you pulled up why Alex was banned, too, which is, you know, it's not very clear.
When you think about the fact that they were saying that he had never done anything on their platform that was bannable, And then what was the one final thing?
He confronted Oliver Darcy of CNN in D.C. and for several minutes was yelling at him while they filmed.
And apparently, that's my understanding, was the justification for banning him that he was harassing a journalist or something to that effect, which is, in my opinion, absurd.
Someone with millions of followers led a harassment campaign.
I'm going to use their language.
If you're calling on your followers to do something, you're engaging in a campaign.
But Alex Jones confronting the journalist who advocated for his banning is a bannable offense.
Here's the important thing about Jones.
Oliver Darcy said on CNN, it wasn't that Jones broke the rules that got him banned because what Darcy said is he's been breaking the rules in the past.
They never cared.
It was only because of media pressure that took action against him.
Okay.
Well, we know many other people break the rules.
We know far left accounts have doxed law enforcement.
We know Kathy Griffin led a harassment campaign.
There's no media pressure.
That's one of the big problems.
Twitter knows conservatives aren't going to be able to level any kind of campaign against their platform.
They're just not scared of it.
But, you know, I often wonder why is it that as prominent and powerful as conservative groups can be, why they often lose these cultural battles.
And I'm not going to say this is the primary reason, but I will point out.
Does Twitter believe that, you know, I often use Sargon of Akata as an example, the liberalist anti-SJW character.
Do they believe he'll lead a group of liberalists and individualists to Twitter headquarters with crowbars and Maltzoff cocktails?
It has to get marked by someone saying this is inappropriate, and if enough people that follow a porn star don't think it's inappropriate, it doesn't then get flagged in the system.
We can ban them for their ideas, but just leave the porn alone.
Yeah.
You see Antifa at Berkeley.
$100,000 worth of damage, throwing Molotov cocktails, threatening people.
In Portland, you had a Bernie voter carrying an American flag.
These anti-fascists, the Antifa, tried stealing the flag from him, clubbed him over the head, gave him a concussion, put him in the hospital.
So when I see the ramifications ofire from the left or the right, what do conservatives do?
I mean the GOP couldn't even find a yearbook in the Virginia governor race.
I don't think they're considered to be that big of a cultural threat.
They react to things, they get upset about things that are unfair against them, but they don't go through the streets with clubs and bricks and smash windows like Antifa and other far leftists do.
There's a clip going around of Gavin McInnes where you can hear him saying these crazy things, and you're like, well, he said it.
But it turns out, some of the clips he was talking about dogs, you really can take the context out of things, and these clips are- I understand that, yeah.
So what happens if- I'm even afraid.
In my videos, I don't quote people anymore because people have taken me reading a quote from a newspaper and attribute it to me simply for reading someone else's quote, and they say, oh, but he said it, right?
I mean, you look at- The really funny instance of Count Dankula, the guy with the Nazi pug.
I don't know if you have this issue, but for the longest time, it's substantially harder to interview someone on the ideological left than anyone else, right?
So I recently reached out to, you know, I regularly reach out to people.
I'm not going to name drop because I don't want to drag people.
But, man, it takes weeks trying to organize a meeting with some, you know, these personalities who are progressives and on the left.
Even people who, like, I've gotten messages from people saying, yeah, man, I watch your stuff all the time, but hold on, let me think about it and talk to some people first.
And I'm not saying they're doing it because they're skittish or, it's just harder, it's a lot harder.
And there's a guy wearing a mask with a communist flag, full red gear.
So I go up to interview him and I'm like, you mind if I interview him?
He's like, yeah, yeah, of course.
And I was like, really?
Oh, that's surprising.
And then we start talking and I said, how do you feel about these people dressing all black and, you know, are fighting people and causing problems?
Oh, that's terrible.
And I was like, you think so?
Really?
It's actually, I'm surprised because often when I see people wearing, you know, fully masked up with communist stuff, they're typically in favor of The by any means necessary strategies.
And he was like, no way, man, that's wrong.
And so I'm like, you know what, man?
I don't care if you're a communist.
I don't care if you're whatever, as long as you're not an authoritarian who thinks you have the right to beat other people to instill your ideology on them.
Or use manipulative force or coercion or extortion.
So let me talk about why I think what we're seeing with Twitter might be one of the biggest problems ever.
Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, these platforms are where we exist, socially, politically.
It's where our ideas are exchanged.
It's where we learn about who we're going to vote for or why we won't vote for somebody.
When you ban somebody, you exile them.
They're no longer a part of that conversation.
So they're very much so told, you're outside the city walls, right?
You can't come in, you can't talk to us, and there's nothing you can do about it.
But then when you realize the rules are actually bent, they're slanted in a certain direction, you can then predict where things are going.
Did you see the Green New Deal, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?
No.
So she publishes, it's a non-binding resolution, which means even if it passes, they can't enforce anything.
But my God, The fact sheet they released alongside it literally said they want to provide economic security for people who are unwilling to work.
The reason I bring this up is there's a chart from The Economist.
I frequently show this in the content I make where you can see the conservatives are coalescing around common ideologies.
For a while, there was some upset in the party because people didn't like Trump, but now they've pretty much, you know, they say it's the party of Trump.
they say it's the party of Trump.
People agree with him.
People agree with him.
Ted Cruz even stands and gives him a standing ovation at the State of the Union.
Ted Cruz even stands and gives him a standing ovation at the State of the Union.
But the left has been spreading out.
But the left has been spreading out.
And again, this is from a chart put together by The Economist.
And again, this is from a chart put together by The Economist.
The Democrats are very clearly being spread from far left to center.
And it's kind of making it very difficult for the Democrats to, you know, put forward something that makes sense.
If Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, you know, she puts out the Green New Deal.
But in the bill, it talks about equity, racial justice, the gender pay gap, things that have nothing to do with the environment.
And then Nancy Pelosi says it's green dreams, you know, and she derides this, you can see that there's a new faction of the Democrats that have, you know, wholly ideological drive.
And I think one of the reasons for this is what we see on social media, right?
The ideological bent of the platforms then lead to the mass followings of specific individuals who then use specific tactics to get elected.
And when these platforms only allow certain ideas to form, those ideas will naturally rise to the top of our political space.
And then you get crazy stuff, like if you're unwilling to work, we'll provide you economic security, which, you know, I don't know necessarily what that means other than some people who choose not to work will get paid, I guess, from taxpayer money, but...
Andrew Cuomo said, God forbid if the rich leave New York, because I believe 1% of New York, the top 1%, pay 46% of their taxes, of the revenue they use.
And so they just had a big budget shortfall.
I believe it was something Trump did that caused a shortfall, and they were asked if they would tax the rich, and he was like, no, God forbid, they'll leave, and they're already leaving.
So, you know, incoming a million people saying I'm conservative for bringing that up, but, you know, facts are facts, I suppose.
Well, facts are facts, and that's what's really important about this.
And when you suppress any ideology, if you are on the left and you suppress the right, it is just going to shore up their defenses, and they're just going to harden their line.
You're right, and a lot of people might say I'm a little alarmist when I mention a potential civil war, but let me clarify.
I'm not saying, because I've brought this up before, I'm not saying it's going to be like 1800s, two big battlefields, but at the same time, what people don't seem to realize when it comes to history is that when you read about World War II, we've condensed all the highlights into a very short paragraph or a series of paragraphs, and you don't realize the war was several years.
There were periods where nothing happened.
I was in Egypt during the Second Revolution.
You could look down and you could see Tahrir Square, people screaming, laser pointers, helicopters, Apaches, and they announce in the news, we've deposed the president.
Two blocks away, a dude's eating a cheeseburger at McDonald's watching a football match, as if nothing's happening.
So when you look at these street battles, the political violence, when you look at the biased bannings, you look at the dude, there was a guy who fired a couple rounds at a police officer in Eugene, Oregon, and some bombs got planted at the police department, or somebody planted bombs at a statue in Houston.
It starts to feel like there's some kind of political violence that is bubbling up that can't be mended at this point.
And a lot of this comes from the suppression that we're talking about where people don't feel like they have a voice or that voice is being suppressed by an opposing ideology.
You know, yes, but it is really complicated and it's – I can't claim to know how everything happens, but what I will say is I believe social media is responsible for the political violence.
I believe it's – and it's not just about suppression.
It's – you look at the systems that were built, Facebook, right?
What content can make it to the front page of your Facebook profile when you're looking at your newsfeed?
Well, Facebook has to build an algorithm to determine what matters most.
Companies then figure out how to manipulate that algorithm to get that content in front of you because at most you can see, what, three posts on Facebook?
So what happens is early on, companies quickly found out that anger drives the most shares of any emotion.
All of a sudden, we see a wave of police brutality videos.
There was one website that posted almost exclusively police brutality content, and it was like Alexa 400 in the world.
Some ridiculously high number.
It blew my mind.
I knew someone claims that they were making six figures writing police brutality articles because it was pure rage bait, right?
Content that just shares really easily.
But that content, constantly being put in front of somebody, breeds an ideology.
You then tell someone, did you know that white supremacy is on the rise and there are 11 million white supremacists in the U.S.? And they go, I can believe it.
But that's nonsense.
It's just not the case.
You know, the Anti-Defamation League and the SPLC say that rough estimates are maybe like 10 or 12,000.
But people really believe that there is like, that the president is secretly a Nazi, and that he's being propped up by the secret cabal, or there's an alternative influence network on YouTube where you and me are somehow trying to convince people to, you know, it's just ridiculous.
And I'm reaching out to these journalists like, hey, why did you guys write that?
That's just completely fake.
It's got my name, like my name in the middle.
You know me.
You can call me to quote you.
They don't do it.
They just uncritically report it.
And there's a couple reasons for it.
Facebook recently changed their algorithm.
I don't know.
This was a while ago.
They may have changed it again.
But it was a huge hit to the incomes of a lot of these companies when all of a sudden news articles stopped appearing as much because Facebook wanted friends and family to be more connected and less so news organizations.
So these news organizations who write this viral clickbait and rage content weren't getting as much traffic.
So they have to go crazy.
And so it's a downward spiral of where...
These journalists all follow each other.
They start producing.
I don't think it's a conspiracy they produce this stuff.
I think they're hired specifically because the content they produce is viral.
And it's viral for a reason, right?
And so the more they produce it, the more they eat their own, you know, excrement, essentially.
And then it's a game of telephone where they're sitting in a circle constantly telling each other the craziest things and it gets crazier and crazier.
But another aspect of it is when they write an article saying, you know, Trump is racist, right?
It goes viral.
The next day, they can't write the same article, so they write, Trump is the most racist.
I don't know how you get approved, but there's a lot of articles that just get written about the new video game today, so it's like a clickbait title to just get some ads.
It's just like-minded people who are only ever around each other.
Sharing the same things among each other, believing all the same things.
And so you'll notice that certain words emerge specifically among certain groups.
Like the left will use certain words and then – like learn to code doesn't appear that much in left-wing rhetoric, but the conservatives and the anti-identitarian types understand what it is.
There was a lot of Venezuelan accounts that were banned, and a lot of people were very critical.
I saw Abby Martin was criticizing this because they accused them of being government actors because they were pro-Venezuelan government.
But the one thing...
There are some Occupy Wall Street activists who absolutely detest me.
They lie about me.
I do not like them for doing this.
They were banned abruptly for literally no reason.
And this is what's more worrisome to me is that no one defended them.
No one defended them because conservatives certainly won't, but neither will the mainstream, you know, ideological left.
These are activists for class issues, for international issues.
They're on the left squarely.
And they were accused, I guess, of being bots or something.
It was just an abrupt purge of like 50 accounts.
And some of them were like independent citizen journalists just wiped out.
And with no recourse, no recourse, none whatsoever.
So, I mean, at some point you have to realize how important Twitter is when the president is on it.
Could you imagine if there was a physical space where everyone was talking and the president shows up and everyone keeps yelling at him and they're all talking because you had that lawsuit where they said it was a public forum.
Imagine that happens.
And then a private, private individual bars you from hearing what the president has to say.
This was one of the things that Jack and I discussed post-podcast.
I said, you know, when we were going back and forth about doing this again, you know, I told him I would really like to see if there's some sort of a path to redemption.
For example, for Milo.
We talked yesterday about Christian Piccolini who was a white supremacist who realized the error of his ways and then became this activist against racism.
And now he gives these TED speeches and he's accepted by everyone as being this guy who's achieved redemption and really understands the error of his ways.
If Milo's banned for life, Milo's only like 34 years old, right?
When you're not on Twitter, the journalists who make up a huge core of their verified users, who apparently, according to CNN article, are the lifeblood of their platform, aren't talking about you.
My brother was pointing out, because Law& Order SVU is basically on 24-7, it's like 98% of the episodes are only ever about women, never about men being victims.
So there was a rally put on by some constitutional libertarians.
I don't know exactly what it was all about.
Antifa shows up in protests.
Some Marines apparently are just walking by because there was a Marine event.
Antifa sees them and yells, are you proud?
They said, he says, I'm a Marine.
He said, are you a proud boy?
And he said, you know, I don't know.
They beat him up.
They arrested several people, charged him with multiple felonies.
Marines got beat up.
They didn't know what proud boy was.
So to assume that these guys know anything about what's going on in cultural politics, it's, you know, when you're in the know, when you're on Twitter, when you're reading the news all day, you look at that and say they knew what they were doing.
What city are these guys from, even?
Do they watch the news all day?
Do they go on 4chan?
Do they go on Vox.com and read and know what this is about?
When they take photos and you see someone like Cassandra Fairbanks, who is a Trump-supporting writer, she's notable because she stood at the podium, made the OK hand sign, and then this writer from Splinter News, which used to be called Fusion – I worked there, full disclosure – claimed it was a white power hand gesture.
And she got Cassandra's suit over it.
She ultimately lost because it's like free slander is hard to sue for.
But she did it because it was a Trump sign, not because it's white power.
So the people who are even white supremacists aren't signifying white power, they're signaling to other Trump supporters too, right?
saying oh tim's bootlicker and all that stuff you're white supremacist listen man like i'm not i i do not i'm not a big fan of conspiracy theories i'm not a big fan of making assumptions about the intentions of other people if you can prove it i'm willing to hear it but people in this country are innocent until proven guilty what do we have we have a photo of some cops doing something dumb right do i think it was ill-advised it was wrong they shouldn't have done it of course absolutely shouldn't have done it do i think it means they're white supremacists no they're cops Look, I am no fan of police.
I grew up as a far-left anarchist skateboarder.
Cops screw with me all the time.
I've had cops kick my door and guns drawn.
I was in Chicago and cops pulled me over, me and my buddies, this is all on video, at gunpoint, screaming at us.
It was the craziest experience I've ever had.
I am no fan.
But if you don't have evidence, I'm not just going to...
This is the thing about how these biases function.
You get people who will see all these videos, all these experiences, and they'll immediately assume the worst about these guys.
I don't know anything about these guys.
I know they did something dumb, but I don't know why.
So I can't really go beyond that.
Other than, I believe their official statement was they were playing the game.
But I could be wrong.
But to make assumptions about their character or what they believe simply because they made an okay sign on their leg, it's like you can't convict somebody in a court.
You know what I mean?
And I'm a big fan of the presumption of innocence and Blackstone's formulation and how we air on the side of protecting the innocent.
I think you got a good point also in the fact that this is an extremely recent hand gesture that's being associated with white supremacy and clearly came from pranksters.
But the point is, this dude, you know, why is he being fired?
Right?
Even people came to his defense.
Are you going to assume nasty things about him?
Like, are we really getting to the point where we're going to look at a photo, we don't know the context, we don't know who these people are, we don't know their names, and we're going to be like, burn him at the stake.
Not only was he absolutely amazing, but people don't have to...
You almost have to have lived during the time where he was getting arrested, much like Lenny Bruce before him, but to understand how significant he was.
When he was doing that seven dirty words you can't say on television, back then, people were like, what the fuck is this guy doing?
Everyone laughed because they understood his intent.
They understood that he didn't actually disrespect them.
They understood that he didn't mean anything bad about it.
He was making a point about the racist asshole behind the words.
And it's funny to me.
This is the thing, man.
When I was younger, I was far left, man.
Skin tight, black shirts, the virus.
The virus?
Punk rock bands, anti-flag, things like that.
I was trying to think of – it's been so long.
I was trying to think of some of the band shirts we used to have.
And, man, we were angry and pissed off all the time.
I grew up like that.
And then over time, I went through a ton of really important life lessons.
One of the first and most important was I was a young skateboarder in Chicago.
Really looked up to some of these older guys who were really good.
I went to Catholic school when I was younger.
Ended up becoming this punk rocker, guitar playing, far left, skin tight, you know, skateboarding, angry, yeah, and no flags, you know, fuck the government.
And then I go to this dude's house who's this really great skateboarder.
He's got a picture of Jesus on the wall.
And I immediately scoff.
Like, I'm, you know, high and mighty.
I was like, would you like a Christian or something?
And he goes, no.
And I was like, then why do you have a picture of Jesus?
And he goes, oh, I just thought like a story about a dude traveling around helping people was kind of cool.
And I went...
Oh, that's a good point.
Wow.
I was like, wow, maybe I don't really understand.
Maybe this means something different to other people than what it means to me.
But this, for me, like, I bring this up because it was kind of a formative moment where all of a sudden I realized, was my ideology predicated on assumptions?
Like, was I holding these views because other people told me to hold them?
Did I actually understand that there were some positive things on the other side?
And then I slowly moved over to more of a center-left position.
And, you know, now what—the reason I bring this up is— I watched that video.
I tweeted this, the video of George Carlin, because, man, George Carlin was a—I used to watch his videos.
My mom would put him on, and my mom's been a hippie, liberal, far-left, all that stuff.
And you'd probably consider a conservative by today's measures, the way things have been going.
Now, they look at Kevin Hart.
He said a bad joke 10 years ago.
Get him out.
Like, could you imagine, God forbid, what would happen with George Carlin's routines today?
They would be running all of his old routines saying, no, you have to ban him from the show.
He literally called these people the N-word.
Why was it that George Carlin could go on stage and talk about how Republicans were dumb and how religion is crazy?
He was clearly on the left his whole life and he said these things that, by today's standards, would be considered conservative.
And so for me, it's a weird thing to go from being on the far left as a young person.
It was around like 19 or 20. I started to become more moderate.
And then to see them today being extremely offended like people used to be in the 50s and 60s.
Like, that's regressive.
That's trying to bring things back to the way they used to be with offensive, you know, nothing like puritanism and all these things.
And now I feel like...
I guess the cliche is the modern left, whatever people call it, like the, you know, capital L, tribal left, seems to be being indoctrinated not by left-wing policy ideas.
It's not about necessarily socialism.
It's about identitarianism.
It's about policy based on your immutable characteristics and how, you know, like going back to the Green New Deal, like in the bill, it talks about racial equity.
Two people are allowed to try, and if one succeeds, congratulations.
Equity would be, well, let's determine whether or not you are advantaged or privileged and then hold you back or push you forward based on these certain metrics, I suppose.
The problem I have with it is that it's not quantifiable.
So this was actually something that was really shocking to me.
I was sitting with my niece and my sister, my niece, and my mom, and I showed this image that people like to share.
It's three people standing up by a baseball fence, and there's a baseball game.
There's a really short person who can't see, there's a medium-sized person who can see a little bit, and a very tall person who just stands right up above the fence.
It says this is equality.
Each of them gets one crate.
Well, one crate isn't enough for the short guy, and the two guys can already see.
It says this is equity, and it shows the short guy getting, you know, three crates so they can all see now.
And I said the problem is when it comes to someone's height, sure, we can understand.
Let's give the crates to the short guy so he can see along with us.
But how do you determine equity based on the color of someone's skin or their, you know, like characteristics that can't necessarily be quantified?
So when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pushes a bill forward that's purporting to be about the environment but includes racial equity clauses, are we to assume that her ideology states that if you are not white, you are poor by – like it's a guarantee?
Or do we have to assume that each individual has different advantages, different cards to play, and some are born wealthy, some aren't?
And yes, there's historic racism, but we can't make those assumptions, right?
So this is to me one of the biggest problems I've been having as a lifelong left-leaning individual is, who do I vote for?
I was a big fan of Bernie Sanders for a while, but then Bernie Sanders gets up on stage at the debates and says, white people don't know what it's like to be poor.
But here's what I think a lot of people on the right miss.
He said, pay equity, not pay equality.
I think perhaps we should stop assuming they don't know what they're saying.
Because a lot of people assume what they're saying is the gender earnings gap.
Is real, but the gender pay gap, you know, it's not.
If a man and a woman are both offered the exact same job, exact same experience in education, women tend to get, I think it's like 3-5% less, and many people believe that's because they're less likely to negotiate.
Which is why you have like lean in, tell women to be more, you know, trying to be more assertive.
But it's not this 77% number that's – but there is an earnings gap, right?
The median salaries of men and women are different.
So when Bernie says white men make X more than these other demographics, he said in his tweet, pay equity, not equality.
He doesn't want fair pay for everyone based on job.
He's actually saying it doesn't matter what job you have.
But then you see what Cortez releases on her website, if you're unwilling to work, they'll provide economic security.
They actually, I believe they took it off the site, right?
But I think when they include it in the bill, that they want equity, not equality, when they include on their website, if you're unwilling, they'll pay you.
And when Bernie says equity as well, I think they're not talking about equality.
Like, I don't think, you know, the average American understands what they're actually saying is you should be paid a flat rate period.
And when you're talking about the pay gap being different from men and women, we should clarify that what you're saying essentially is that men choose different jobs and they work more hours and that's the reason why they make that much more money where it's 77 cents on the dollar.
There was another study came out recently that said that hours worked was almost the 100% of the reason why men and women earn different at a median salary.
I do it because, you know, I see things on- So for the most part, on my main YouTube channel, I do one video every day at 4 p.m., which tends to be just like a news analysis piece, but I'm not perfect.
Sometimes I, you know, get all hyperbolic and stuff.
My second channel is me just ranting and, you know- Not really swearing, but still just like heavy opinion stuff.
I do it because it's fun.
You know, I see something, I want to explore it.
I used to travel all the time.
You know, when I worked at Vice, I was in all these different countries and all these dangerous places, not because I wanted to have a name for myself, not because I wanted to make money.
I wanted to watch a revolution.
I wanted to know why it was happening and I want to talk to the people who are experiencing it.
So I can relate to people who say money isn't a motivator for sure, but I've also talked to people in Scandinavia who have told me they sort of give up at a certain point because I can't remember which country it was.
It may have been Sweden or Norway, but these two women told me that after like $77,000 per year, they tax like 80% of your income, so people just stop.
I don't know, but I will say we need more progressive brackets.
We need to keep going.
And I got to say maybe at $10 million, 70% does make sense, but I kind of lean towards not really because it seems like, man, that's a lot of money.
That's a lot.
That's a ridiculous amount.
I think Steve Bannon said something like a five in front of it or something.
But I don't know.
I'm not an economist.
But I do believe a progressive tax makes the most sense.
And I can explain it to you if you want to hear it.
So there was a study, I believe it was from Harvard, you need $77,000 per year, this may have been 10 years ago, in order to be middle class median in the United States.
That means if you make $77,000, you'll have vacation, you'll have insurance, you'll have a car, you can raise a family, you can send them to school, all that stuff.
But you have nothing left over for savings, you have nothing left over for investments.
So If you make $100,000 a year, you're going to have $23,000 left over for investing.
Eventually, at a certain point, if you only need $77,000, if you're making $10 million, you've got $9,990,000 that you can invest and just be independently wealthy and be rich forever.
Now, I have no problem with being wealthy.
I have no problem with other people being wealthy and living off of their investments and all that.
But there is a point where you have to realize the coalescing of power, the monopolizing of power is a really dangerous thing for any society.
Too few individuals holding too much power can destabilize an economy, can destabilize a country.
The problem with communism, you snap your fingers and you put a centralized authority in place.
At least that's how it's been every single time.
And then they hold all the cards and they can oppress whoever they want.
The problem with laissez-faire capitalism is over time, which is why it's better in a lot of ways, over time, it eventually becomes a centralized oligopoly of a few corporations controlling everything, which we're kind of seeing now.
So all the progressive tax can really do is slow that process down, which I think is a good thing.
But ultimately, I think just looking at the system, eventually you end up kind of where we are, where six media companies control everything.
And then some companies are the biggest funders of certain politicians and corporations.
They just have too much power.
I remember reading a report or a story about how wealthy people have three or four times more ability to influence a politician than the majority of the people in the country simply because paying for expensive dinners and lobbying earns you favors.
You know, super PACs paying, you know, guaranteeing funding for a politician earns your favors.
So it's, you know, look, if a million people tell me they want, you know, X, but the people who are paying me, like funding my campaign are paying me more, well, who am I going to provide favors to?
And then once I'm done with my campaign run, I can go to a job at their company?
Yeah, these are problems.
So without going on too big of a rant, I think ultimately a progressive tax can help slow the process down of special interests acquiring too much power.
Eventually it happens anyway.
But with a flat tax, you're basically saying, at a certain point, you can just keep dumping more and more money into different investments, making more and more money, and increasing your power exponentially, and other people can't catch up to you, and then power becomes too quick.
Yeah, I think in this country, we try to look at success and achievement as something that everyone's striving for, and we don't want to put any restrictions on that.
We look at capitalism as the reason why everything's going so great over here.
This is America, land of the free, home of the brave.
Go out there and kick ass.
We're not going to saddle you down with debt.
But it makes sense that after a while, as we're seeing today, but I don't mean, what's the best way to do it?
We're more than willing to pump money into different countries, especially if they have natural resources.
But in our own country, we're not – I mean the greatest resource is, of course, human beings – And the best way to make America great or stronger would be to have less losers.
Well, what's the best way to have less losers?
To have more people succeed?
What's the best way to have more people succeed?
Give them more opportunity and chance to not be stuck in a quagmire, not be trapped in a ghetto.
There are some neighborhoods that are really bad, some neighborhoods that are really good.
Well, if we take excess from the really great neighborhoods and use that to fix roads, pay for schools in poor neighborhoods, crime is – one of the biggest correlations for crime is poverty.
So if we can get better schools, we need to reform the school system straight up.
If we can get better hospitals, if we can fix the roads, then we're doing a lot to reduce crime and reduce poverty and a rising tide lifts all ships.
So that's why I – That's why I like Bernie Sanders.
Although, I make sure I tell people, he is a little too left for me.
He is.
But when we were looking at who we had in 2016, I was like, yeah, Bernie's my guy.
And so it's like a dude carrying water pails gets blown up and they're like, he's a combatant, you know, right.
And so, you know, when it comes to Trump, what did he do?
Missile strike in Syria, weapons deal with Saudi Arabia, commando raids in Yemen, a little girl got killed.
And I've been, for the most part, very, very critical of him and any other administration who engages in regime change, foreign wars.
And look, I got to say, you know, when it comes to domestic issues, I'm not, that's not my wheelhouse.
When it comes to foreign policy stuff, only a little bit.
I've been to some countries, I've experienced this stuff, but really, on the ground, cultural, between people is more my thing.
But I know more about foreign policy than domestic.
And when I see Trump's foreign policy, I was very critical of it.
But I will point out withdrawing from Syria, I'm a fan.
I understand a lot more than probably the average person does some of the issues surrounding Syria, Russia, the Qatar-Turkey pipeline and things.
But typically, I think it's usually a bad idea when the US involves itself in foreign interests and tries engaging in these regime change strategies to build allies.
But one of the things that really blew my mind is...
I saw a survey, at least it was going around on social media, so who knows if it's true, that claimed the Democrats have a favorable opinion of George W. Bush.
They pulled him and they're like, oh, he was good.
And there's a video of him like giving a piece of candy to Michelle Obama and everyone was like, it was going viral and people were laughing about him.
And then when Trump announces he's going to pull troops out of Syria, everybody opposes it, like the media saying it's wrong, and you've got a lot of mainstream people on the left saying it's wrong, and I'm like, it is?
What do you mean?
That's crazy to me.
All of my activist friends, we've never been in favor of that stuff.
We've always opposed it.
That's always been the left's position.
And now I'm seeing people who claim to be on the left support multinational businesses as private businesses doing whatever they want.
And so it's like, there have been a series of people who have gotten letters that they violated Pakistani law.
I mean, they send screenshots, you know, screenshots can be faked, but there have been a couple people who have been like, for some reason, Twitter decided to inform me of this.
And then...
It's a multinational – let's talk about the algorithmic apocalypse.
Let's segue into that.
You've got a platform where our public discourse is happening, where the left has repeatedly said that Russians used it to manipulate our elections, where one of its biggest investors is a Saudi prince or something to that effect, and they're banning people who oppose a certain ideological bent.
That sounds like a democratic crisis.
Right?
This is where the public sphere is.
You said Milo's no longer in the conversation.
He's banned from Twitter, even though he's got millions of followers.
They don't talk about him anymore.
He's off Twitter.
Twitter really is important.
The president is there.
So if you start removing people, you've got foreign interests who have a stake in what Twitter is doing.
Yeah, they can seriously influence our elections.
Yeah.
They are.
But I'll move into what's really crazy.
New York Times reported there's a group that false flagged the Republicans in Alabama with fake Twitter accounts they made to convince the media Russians were propping up the campaign of Roy Moore.
So, basically, this, according to the New York Times, is all fact.
They've seen the documents.
They've reported it.
That Democratic operatives engaged in a false flag campaign to make it appear like the Russians were popping up Republicans and the national media in the U.S. ran with it.
How that's not a crime is beyond me.
That's interfering in elections and we know it.
And this group is still being cited.
They're smearing Tulsi Gabbard, right?
An NBC News article came out saying that Russians have taken notice of her campaign and are promoting it.
Same group.
Still running the story.
Damn How that's not a crime is mind-blowing to me.
But the New York Times reported it, so at this point it's like...
And what's hilarious is that people look at what's going on with Russian troll factories and the way they're trying to influence our elections, that it's particularly egregious.
So I think it'd be fair to point out YouTube criticism, too, because in talking about censorship, I think a lot of people immediately assumed I'd come on here and start waving my arms in the air screaming they're biased against conservatives, which I think to an extent I kind of did.
But YouTube is a bit different.
YouTube does.
It has demonetized LGBT content, and YouTube has said that these topics are not suitable for all advertisers because it deals with sexuality.
They have target many left-wing channels.
There are a lot of non-mainstream left-wing And when you say target, what you mean is demonetize.
I think YouTube's done a bunch of really bad things.
I'm going to give a very important shout-out to Mumkey Jones who was wrongly terminated from YouTube for highly dubious reasons.
He is a dark comic.
He had hundreds of thousands of followers.
He made jokes about things like school shootings.
Very dark stuff.
But he was clearly mocking some of these people.
He was mocking Elliot Rodger.
He was making jokes about it.
And in fact, some of his videos were approved manually for monetization.
But for some reason, YouTube just wiped him out.
One day.
Gone.
So he set up a new channel and said, okay, you know, we're not going to do that anymore.
Doesn't matter.
They got rid of him.
He's effectively off of YouTube.
And he's a well-known funny guy.
He wasn't breaking the rules.
He wasn't.
But they still deleted his channel.
So I bring him up because I think it's worrisome that, yes, without an alternative, your career is wiped out in a second with no recourse and no reason why.
And the response they give you is, it's our platform.
And you'll hear people say, oh, but they're a private business.
Sorry, I have a question to ask here because I've had this conversation with some friends of mine and this came up and this is, I guess, the devil's advocate to this question because this happened with MySpace.
MySpace still exists and there are people that had millions of followers on that platform.
Are they owed something by MySpace because MySpace failed and their accounts no longer have the clout that they once had?
In the Twitter account, they're not banning someone's IP address from using twitter.com and going to see slash real Donald Trump and see what he's saying.
And it was really weird because, and it's been a little while since I went over the story, but there was a video he posted that was like a music video making fun of Elliot Rodger.
He's that school, that mass shooter guy.
It existed on different channels.
On other prominent channels, it existed, and they banned him.
And then he brought up, like, why was it banned on mine, but this one was approved, and then a day later, they banned the other one.
They copyright struck it.
The issue here is, if there was an alternative to YouTube where you can operate, I'd be on it, right?
So one of the things I'll give a shout-out, I've been using Mines, M-I-N-D-S.com.
If you look at their Wikipedia page, it's simple sourcing.
There was a study done on Gab that found – I think they only have like 5% of the posts are considered to be hate speech, whereas Twitter is like 2.3 or something.
So Gab is predominantly not hate speech, not much more than Twitter.
And when you consider that we're looking at percentages, you can actually see that Twitter's hate speech is in the millions and Gab's is in the tens of thousands.
But can we talk about the bias on Twitter with Sarah Jung, who for three years was posting anti-white, racist, like mean-spirited, awful things, and the excuse was she was using the language of her oppressors.
Yeah, I think what they're trying to do, and I don't want to speak for him, but I think they're trying to engineer the conversation to be more polite and civil.
Well, it's also you don't recognize the consequences of telling people what they can and can't do and that this is a very slippery slope.
You're running up a greased hill and people don't like it.
They don't like it and – well, the thing is like – When you see something like, if everything was just open, what would the conversation be like?
If there was no banning, if there was nothing, it was just everything, real free speech.
I mean, if it was impossible, let's put it this way, if it was impossible to ban someone from any social media platform, whether it's YouTube or Twitter or Instagram, what would the conversations look like?
How much different would they be?
And would we maybe have a healthier way of adjusting?
But then, look, Alex Jones can say a bunch of really awful things.
It's his right to do so.
Should he be banned?
He shouldn't.
Does Alex Jones, I don't want to directly accuse him because I don't watch his show, but if he goes on Twitter and he says something that's deemed to be false, should he be banned for that?
The thing is, if you ban them and then someone opposes them, but then someone opposes the people who oppose them and they want them banned, and then you have this fucking war back and forth, and instead of fighting bad ideas or incorrect ideas with correct or good ideas, now you just have people pressing ban hammers left and right.
If the people on the left want to argue that he is making the platform worse and horrible, I understand that and I recognize, well, that's unfortunate, right?
This is the real world and sometimes people say things you don't like.
But more importantly, a lot of people argued that when he said something about Sandy Hook, which, again, I haven't seen the videos, but he's been sued.
They said that Sandy Hook never happened.
So, so what?
Is fake news to be banned?
Well, many people were saying, yes, Facebook needs to ban fake news, but think about what that means.
It means you're not allowed to be wrong, okay?
Because fake news doesn't mean you did it on purpose.
More importantly, you're not allowed to be stupid.
So basically, you had Donald Trump say last night in Sweden.
As soon as he says this, the media goes wild.
My friend and I, my friend Emily, who works with me on and off, we're like, we should just go to Sweden and just like walk around film stuff and make a video about what we experience.
We decided to go.
Almost immediately, it's reported, we found nothing.
We found the neighborhoods were actually very nice, substantially nicer than Chicago, but we did find there was an increase in crime.
It was very tepid.
For some reason, now people are claiming that I'm pushing conspiracies or something.
I was going to go somewhere, but I kind of lost my train of thought.
Oh, okay, here we go.
When I was there, Joey Salads, who's a big YouTuber...
Reached out to me on Twitter saying, hey, I'm here too.
Let's meet up.
I got really angry because Joey Salads made a video, I think a couple years ago, where he staged a bunch of black guys destroying a car to make it seem like these neighborhoods, black people were going to destroy a Trump car, and it was just very racist, just awful, horrible.
Yeah, he's a big YouTuber.
And so he reached out to me and I got really pissed.
Like, dude, you're fake news.
You're a racist.
And I was like, and I started cussing at him.
I was like, and that's not normal for me.
But afterwards, I kind of realized something.
Joey made a mistake.
He reached out to me.
It was polite.
He was honest.
I think he did something really, really bad.
If I tell him, if I cuss him out, if I just be mean to him, what's he going to do?
The only people who will accept him?
If the only people are going to be nice to him are the actual racists, well, then he's going to go to the racists.
He needs a path to redemption.
So I apologized.
And I said, that was wrong.
I shouldn't have done that.
I should be willing to hear you out, and I should give you an opportunity to better yourself.
Otherwise, you won't.
And then I met up with him and talked to him, and I think he made a huge mistake.
I think what he did was wrong.
I think it was self-motivated.
I think it was money-motivated.
But I think none of that matters.
All that matters is you tell him, you do this one more time, you're out.
You're out with the wolves.
But if you agree to do the right thing, and you're sincere, then okay.
I think that's got to be a part of the conversation.
I mean, we...
I think this idea of just banning people for life, but letting people out of jail after they commit murder, and they can reenter society, it's kind of crazy.
But I will recognize right now that at this point, Gab is – yeah, if you're going to go on there, the media is going to accuse you of every single name in the book.
He said that he was the dean at the University of Sydney or something like that who was dating pop star Meghan Trainor, just the most ridiculous thing, and that he said, we need to find a female plant.
So far, this is what we have.
It's groundbreaking.
So he did this very clever thing.
He bought a domain name that was something like com-guest.info.
That's the URL. He then created a subdomain.
So it's like, you know, just hypothetically, CNN.com-guest.
The average person just sees CNN.com.
They assume it's real.
I don't know how he shared it, but he makes this whole...
It's so ridiculous, man.
I gotta say, if you thought it was real, I got a bridge to sell you.
High Times picked it up.
It got 50,000 shares.
Breakthrough.
New strain of marijuana discovered.
My brother was just laughing the whole time.
And I was like, what did you do?
My brother's like my opposite.
I try to be honest to the best of my ability.
I think people accuse me of being a liar.
That's not fair.
I could be wrong for sure, but I try my best to be rational.
My brother, on the other hand, is like...
Editing videos, making them ridiculous as possible.
He made another video where...
And it's crazy because he tries to make sure people...
It's over the top.
He made a video where it's a van getting pulled over.
It looks like a police dash cam.
And then the cop walks up to the car, checks the guy's license, walks back, and then the driver releases pot on a balloon.
And then an arrow points to it saying stash.
Like he's disposing of his drugs with helium balloons so they fly away.
They said, when they corrected the article and saying it was a hoax, they said, we wanted to call for a verification, but we thought the story was too hot to pass up.
That's a really good example.
But that's a really good example of Covington.
It's a really good example of what these news organizations do.
If you're going to discuss something and you're going to do it in a public forum like that and you know about it in advance, this is not like you're on a podcast ad-libbing and you say something and you misspeak.
So this NBC reporter, he goes on this big Twitter thread about how Twitter needs to take action against these harassment campaigns and they refuse to do it.
The next day, he writes an article citing an activist about how a far-right campaign is sending death threats to journalists and Twitter isn't doing anything about it.
A day after that, he starts posting about how he's getting death threats.
A day after that, Twitter announces they'll take action.
So what do we see here?
This guy called for action, couldn't get it done, wrote an article slanting it as a far-right campaign against journalists, Twitter decides to take action, now people are getting banned for tweeting Learn to Code.
So I'm not trying to be disrespectful to him because I know him somewhat in passing, but I will say there's a certain point where I think it's unfair to accuse a journalist of advocating for something simply for covering it.
it was media pressure that got him banned.
And I'm kind of like, okay, you have to realize at that point, you were the one who led that charge, you know?
But just saying it that way, too, it's like when Hunter S. Thompson spread the rumor about Ed Muskie being on Ibogaine, and then he went on the Dick Cavett show.
It's a hilarious clip.
And he goes, well, actually, there was a rumor.
There was a rumor about him being on Ibogaine, and I know because I started the rumor.
She did a protest action with, I believe it was Generation Identity, which are, I don't know how to describe them because, you know, people like to throw labels around, but they're like European nationalists.
And people have called them white nationalists, but again, I don't know enough about their group.
So I think it's fair to say that that might be the case.
Forgive me for being ignorant for the most part about their ideology.
I know people are going to tear me apart.
She gets in a boat.
They go up to one of these migrant vessels that does – they say it's a search and rescue vehicle, but that's been a point of debate.
And she, like, waves a flare in the air, and then she says on the stream, like, get in front of him, get in front of him.
But I believe she never did.
Jack Conte banned her, and they were like, what you're doing may have caused loss of life.
You're banned.
A lot of people then started to point out that there's a website called It's Going Down.
And this is a, you know, considered to be far left extremist site.
One of the articles was teaching people or advocating for pouring concrete on train tracks to disrupt, derail these trains.
It can cause loss of life.
So I saw this, and I thought, this is really fascinating.
I'd like to know why Patreon banned Southern and why they don't take action in this regard.
I reached out to Jack Conte.
I tweeted at him.
He said he'd call me on the phone, and I said, you know, I'd like to understand your decision-making, how this came to be, what brought you to the attention of Lauren, what about this?
He ended up banning It's Going Down.
And then they wrote an article titled, Tim Pool and the alt-right get, you know, it's going down banned from Patreon or something.
And that's been cited.
Jimmy Dore had it on his show.
And a bunch of people were like, just want you to know Tim Pool's not alt-right.
And I said, listen, man, I didn't advocate for them to be banned.
I don't want anyone banned.
I just wanted to know what their decision-making process was, and this was the thing that was going viral among people on Twitter who were asking about this.
And so now I get accused of campaigning to get them banned, just like Oliver Darcy was with Jones.
Well, and then immediately they slap that distinction on you.
As soon as, I mean, just calling someone alt-right today, it's so strange how, you know, I don't know if you know, but alt in the world of stand-up comedy used to be progressive, liberal, like weird coffee shop type rooms.
It was alt-comedy.
They don't even use that term anymore because it's so toxic.
Paul Joseph Watson of Infowars put out a call saying, I challenge any journalists to spend a weekend in Malmo and I'll cover your costs.
Everybody's bombarding him, saying, oh, pay me, pay me, and he's kind of just ignoring it.
People are threatening to sue him.
You better pay, you promised.
I had already set up a GoFundMe for the project before, I believe it was before he announced it, I made a video about it saying, Donald Trump said X, Y, and Z, we're going to go do the story.
When I saw he made this call, I think it was actually Emily who noticed it.
I said, hey, I'll do it.
And he was like, to be honest, I think he said something like, I was just taking the piss, but yeah, sure, I'll send you a donation.
And I laughed and I was like, hey, man, I'll take, you know, if he wants to throw money at my GoFundMe.
What ends up happening is people then claim I went there because Paul Joseph Washington challenged me.
Not true.
He donated about 9% of our total fund that we raised, and I was already planning on going there.
Wikipedia says, There was a challenge on my Wikipedia page where someone said, you wrote, Tim Pool went there because Paul Joseph Watson challenged him to.
That's not true.
What's your proof?
This YouTube video from Tim Pool where he says, we've already arranged this.
We are not going here because of Paul Joseph Watson.
The response?
That's not a reliable source.
Someone came back with a reliable source.
You know what it was?
A Huffington Post article that quoted my YouTube video.
How's that?
I don't understand.
Why couldn't you just take my word for it?
Why did you have to get Huffington Post to just quote me?
That's hilarious.
So, you know, that's enough, I guess.
So, the reason I bring this up is because what happens then if you're a conservative and a bunch of friends who work for various news organizations all at the same time write 10 articles saying Joe Rogan is all right.
Now, on Wikipedia, 10 articles pop up immediately saying this is a fact.
10 different organizations have written it.
And there it is in your page.
And the crazy thing is the UK does this all the time.
They call various personalities alt-right.
They call Sargon.
They call Dankula.
Just go to Wikipedia and look up the phrase.
It means white nationalist, neoconfederate.
It's like literally about a white ethnostate.
These people have denounced this.
And it's like with Sargon of Akkad, it was a really fascinating phenomenon on Patreon where all of a sudden these left-wing outlets said Sargon was banned for going after the alt-right And I'm like, but hold on.
But if it was on Medium, if someone said, like, look at these dummies with their terrible fucking recipes, it would still be almost as interesting, but it's flavored more by you're allowed to mock them because it's gab.
So, I mean, if you want to be a part of his movement, there are certain things that are attached to it.
And other alt-right people have written huge things about what it is.
So, the AP said, these are our guidelines, and I'll defer to the Associated Press.
I have a lot of respect for them.
There you go.
So, if these are news organizations...
There was a Willamette Weekly.
This is...
God, man, I just really...
I worked for Vice.
I was actually...
I'm one of the key reasons Vice News exists.
And I look back on it, and it makes me kind of sad how they've written some of these most ridiculous articles.
I'm really proud of a lot of stuff they've done.
But I quit.
I quit when I got an offer from Fusion.
And Fusion is...
It was an ABC-Univision joint venture.
When I started there, they said we won't be partisan.
For some reason, they decided to go far left and start pushing a lot of things that I thought were wrong.
They told me to, in effect, lie.
So the thing I'm bringing up is I just have such disdain for these news organizations and how they use definitions that suit their needs to get the clicks they want.
You're alt-right today, you're not alt-right tomorrow.
How much of an issue is that journalists are essentially fighting for their lives because newspaper is almost dead?
It's online publications.
They're trying to get subscriptions.
I subscribe to several different news online publications that used to be newspapers.
But the last time I picked up an actual newspaper, it's so much so that I felt like I had a joke about reading something in the paper and turning the page.
I almost felt like I'm a liar for doing a joke about turning the page of a paper.
Yeah, it's publicly known but not talked about a whole lot that these media organizations, mostly these digital new startups, don't actually get a lot of views.
So what they do is, it's called Traffic Assignment.
There's a company called Comscore that tracks the viewership, the unique views these sites have.
If you're trying to attract investment and you say, we get 20 million views per month, they're going to say, that's cool, but this site gets 60. What do they do?
Well, there are some sites, this is according to Variety, modernfarmer.com.
I have no idea.
idea.
I've never heard of it.
But there are many sites which you've probably seen where it's like the top 25 celebrities who, you know, mess up their makeup.
Yes, you click the page, and it'll show you a photo.
In order to see the next photo, you got to click the next page.
That's that way they turn you one person to 25 unique views, or 25 views, I don't want to say unique.
Then a company like Vice, for instance, will buy the assignment of your traffic and attribute it to themselves.
So when the comm score numbers come out, it will say all of those views from those clickbait sites are actually Vice, right?
Variety here, I don't want to get sued, but Variety said that their traffic went down 17% because someone they were buying traffic assignment from was going through turmoil and being shaken up.
And another one of their traffic assignment partners switched to, I think, got sold to NBC or something.
So what ends up happening?
Well, I can say a little bit.
There was a company that was a prominent digital news outlet.
I knew someone there who was decently high up who told me, our company is contemplating whether or not we should engage in traffic assignments to inflate our numbers.
I was told by another individual who was at one of these digital companies that he felt like what we were seeing was akin to the securities problem, the mortgage-backed securities from 2008. That's a better analogy.
Right.
That's what he said.
He said, think about this.
You've got all of these big companies, these big investments, hundreds of millions of dollars, $200 million invested into these digital media outlets because they're seeing these numbers.
So if you're investing money, say if you've got some cash, you've worked your ass off and you've generated a lot of money and you're like, look, we're going to get into the digital space.
We have a website that has 90 million clicks and we're going to take that and then you find out you just got fucking hosed.
I don't know what you'd call it, but it's a form...
So I grew up with a bunch of hacker buddies in a small little hacker community, and social engineering is something that I've been relatively well-versed in.
And Shane, whether he knows it or not, really, really understands how people think and how to get them to do things.
So I'll give you a fascinating example.
I left Vice in 2014. And after I left, some of the people I had brought on through recommendation were still there.
This buddy of mine says, dude, good news.
I'm going to be helping produce the news program for the cable channel.
I was like, wow, congratulations.
Does that mean you're moving to Toronto?
He goes, why would I move to Toronto?
And I was like, to work on the cable channel.
This was back in 2014. He goes, what are you talking about?
We're getting a cable channel.
I'm going to work on the news show.
And I was like, dude, it was a Rogers deal.
The cable channel is in Canada.
It wasn't a couple years later until they got the US-based channel.
But what happened was a bunch of my friends who worked at Vice didn't know the cable channel they got was based in Canada, but they believed they were going to be working on a cable channel in the US. That's important because you need people to really want to work there and be passionate.
And Shane was a master of giving you just enough information so that you believed in what you were doing without realizing it's actually not that great.
And again, I'm not trying to be a dick.
I think Shane's fantastic.
I don't blame him for this, but it's clever.
You get a bunch of employees who believe they're going to be on this big new American cable channel.
Well, Shane never said American.
He just said cable channel.
It's your fault for assuming it was going to be in America.
But that meant a lot to those employees.
So you're able to boost morale, get everybody really excited until they find out it was in Canada.
Then they were like, wait, what?
But eventually they did get their US channel, but that's Shane's, he's brilliant.
That if you earn enough points, you'll get like Galileo.
He'll appear in your civilization.
Use him.
I firmly believe that in 100 years, the next, you know, Civilization 50, you'll be able to earn a great merchant, Shane Smith, because of how, like, you know, he was able to build this empire.
He did it through very clever ways of getting investment.
And admittedly, I really like the stuff they used to do back in the day.
I think the guy's, wow.
He knows how to do it.
And the reason I bring him up is because the big story about traffic assignment was Vice losing like 17% because of that practice they were doing.
So he really knew how to do the smoke and mirrors, you know?
But when you look at how it pans out to all the other news outlets, then everyone gets laid off.
You don't have to wonder why a thousand jobs just got lost in the past week.
It's just investment money.
And once they reached their threshold, it all came crashing down.
I don't think this one is on par, but you have one YouTube channel with 1,000 subs.
Make 10 more.
Ask all your subs to subscribe.
Now you've got 10,000 subs.
Get it?
Same thousand people, ten times, and you go around telling people, I've got ten thousand subscribers, when in reality, it's just a thousand people on ten channels.
So there's really clever ways to inflate your numbers, and this attracts investment.
It also, but more importantly, it allows leverage in dealing with ad buyers and ad networks.
Someone sent me an article that the Attorney General of one state, it may have been New York, said misrepresenting yourself online through fake views, clicks, and likes is illegal.
I think what they were saying is that using other people's images to create fake accounts is like an invasion of privacy or something.
But we're getting to that point.
But, you know, there's people who play that game, I guess.
It may have changed, but essentially, I follow you, you follow me.
That way, you'll see some people, they'll be following 100,000 people, and they'll be followed by 90,000 people, and then they walk around bragging about how they got 90,000 followers, and it's like, well, hold on.
Like, you just have an agreement with them.
You're not influential.
It was a trick that people would do to inflate their numbers.
So that's one of the big problems with tracking fake accounts is that it's just someone's opinion.
There's two things.
Most high-profile accounts will read as having a ton of fake followers because people will sign up just to follow you and read what you have to say because they want your feed.
They want Joe, they want Bill Clinton or whoever, and they want to have that feed of people.
They don't interact.
And so then they're labeled fake.
The other thing is...
When people make fake bot farms, they purposefully will follow people like you so they look real.
But let's say you're somebody with a hundred thousand subscribers, you know, you're making a living, you got a career on YouTube, but you don't have a manager with YouTube.
It's also kind of scary that they can use this to extort him so that he doesn't – he takes the Washington Post or they're attempting to get him to take the Washington Post and remove a legitimate news story about an actual murder.
You know, when I look at what the National Enquirer did, it just reminds me of what the media does.
They know what they can do and they know how to do it.
The media is influence.
It's power.
You know, brands, they're scared.
They're scared.
So you look at what happens with some of these Twitter accounts that will lead campaigns where they encourage all their followers to send emails.
It's not the same as blackmail by no means.
But when you know there's an attack vector like Wild Sardines Company, they don't want to deal with a brigade from activists.
You tweet at them, your fans tweet at them, and they immediately cancel on your show and they disavow you unless you do something, unless you say something, unless you disavow something.
So granted, it's leaps and bounds worse when a National Enquirer allegedly tries to extort Jeff Bezos.
The craziest thing about it is allegedly – again, allegedly that the investigator, I think his name is Becker, was entertaining the possibility that a government entity intercepted the texts, the nude selfies from Bezos.
But I did see another journalist tweet that they're not entertaining that.
Well, part of the other thought was that his girlfriend's brother, who's a Trump supporter, might have somehow or another got screen grabs of her phone.
That's why, you know, when I mentioned earlier the potential for civil war, like we don't know what it could look like.
This could be it.
It could be special interests using information.
It's the information war, you know, things that people have talked about.
I was thinking about this a while ago.
It's like, man, why did people shoot each other 100 years ago?
I mean, so they do, but like, you know, World War II, why are they running it?
Because they wanted to gain control.
They wanted to centralize power or they wanted to push an ideology or a government or expand their power.
You don't need to shoot somebody to do that.
You just need to convince them you're right or you need to get them to fight each other.
So I think it's fair to say, yeah, the Russians are absolutely screwing with us.
But we've learned through – if you trust the reporting and it's hard to know what's real or not – that the Russian campaigns were not only promoting Trump supporters, but they were promoting Black Lives Matter.
And I think I'd be willing to entertain the possibility that what we call the culture war today was seeded specifically by special interests, potentially Russia.
Nothing to do about it.
It's done.
You know, when people adopt an ideology...
You can't easily break that, and some people refuse to cross that divide.
The first thing we have to assume is that it was effective.
What we view in the culture war was exacerbated by these campaigns.
We don't know to what extent they had an influence over the US, but I will say I think it's fair to point out they play a role, and then we can see what happens.
Charlottesville.
We can see the dramatic escalation where you end up with some crazy guy associated with white nationalism ramming a car into a bunch of protesters.
It's, you know, people get riled up to a point.
There's a really great video called This Video Will Make You Angry by CGP Grey, where he talks about how these groups, they argue amongst each other, not against each other.
They make each other angry by posting images of the other.
You know, there's certain subreddits where I don't want to, you know, start a brigade, but they'll post memes nonstop attacking a particular politician.
They're not arguing with the left or the right.
They're arguing to themselves about what's wrong with the other.
And so these groups grow and get angrier and angrier.
And then when they finally meet in the real world, you get extreme violence.
So it's very possible to seed those communities and rile people up, push these things.
And it's also terrifying how few people are aware.
I mean, there's a lot of these really toxic pages that you'll find that are commenting on things that are – whether it's Instagram or Twitter or whatever.
And what ends up happening, the average person, say on Twitter, will look at their mentions and see 10 tweets where they say, you shouldn't talk about this anymore.
How dare you?
And they'll assume everyone when in reality it could be one person.
They've got a new payment processor, which means we've seen the budding off of an of a mirror economy, which is dangerous.
The fact that Americans in general can't share the same platform and had to create an alternate that had to be supported by separate means, if this continues in that direction, we're going to end up with tons of systems that operate for only certain political factions.
Jack Conte, the CEO of Patreon, said to, I believe, CNBC, you can't say anything you want in the world.
What does what I say in the world have to do with what service you provide?
Now, by all means, if you want to ban them, you can, but you can then see the adopting of ideology.
Someone posted a funny comment, a company that refuses to sell water to a dehydrated man in the desert because they think the wrong thing.
But then what happens?
Different companies emerge and you get tribes that are divided not only by their ideology, but literally they're unable to communicate with each other.
That can only lead to one thing.
The tribes getting physical.
Charlottesville, Portland, Boston, Berkeley, San Bernardino.
These various instances where they've clashed and bashed each other.
People have been killed.
Some people show up with guns.
I think that's...
I gotta be honest.
I don't think there's a way to fix it.
I don't.
There's a hilarious comment.
I'm sorry, comic.
Programmer humor on Reddit.
And they said, when you talk to an airplane engineer or mechanic, they say, oh yeah, these things are engineered safety.
You're more likely to get in a car accident than die in an airplane.
And there was an article that I think it may have been in Gizmodo or Deadspin or something that said, don't listen to them.
We all know what we saw.
And it's like, dude, if we're getting to the point where kids at a blackout basketball game are in black body paint and throwing up three-pointer signs is Nazis, how do you bring those people back from the brink?
And I'll say this, too.
I obviously didn't mention alt-right violence all that often, but then you have to realize the alt-right is tiny.
Tiny, tiny, tiny.
They're rare.
They've admitted defeat.
Richard Spencer, I think he said this at Antifa 1 or something.
No one showed up.
He hit an event in Florida.
Eleven people showed up.
I'm not worried about that guy.
I'm worried about these fringe ideologies that are racist, intolerant, and violent slowly seeping into our culture.
When you see politicians openly embrace race-based government policy, It really does worry me.
I think I have this perspective growing up in a mixed race family where I've been insulted by the left for being white and I've been insulted by far right racists for being a mutt.
And so I don't like either of it.
I really don't.
And they don't threaten me anymore.
They just don't.
But the left-wing racism and these ideas of racial equity and determining what you're worth based on the color of your skin are becoming more and more pervasive.
The lawsuit with Harvard that Asians have a harder standard, a tougher standard for getting in, even though Asians are a smaller minority than white people.
Why does that make sense?
Why should I have to approach someone and justify my race to them?
That terrifies me.
It really does.
And when we see Kirsten Gillibrand tweet the future is intersectional, well, intersectionality is that ideology of race-based policy.
Ocasio-Cortez puts forth the Green New Deal that says racial equity.
I prefer to judge someone on the content of their character, not the color of their skin.
Because, you know, I've talked about progressive tax.
I think we can do a lot for public option, for expanding Medicaid.
The idea of a Green New Deal at its core, to me, is fascinating.
Can the government, you know, can we allocate tax money to invest in new technologies, fusion, nuclear, and reduce carbon emissions and do great things?
Can we make high speed rails?
But then when you come out and say, pay the unwilling and these other equity things and intersectionality, I'm like, that's not what I'm talking about.
In a socialist or communist society, you still have to work.
I don't know what society exists where you expect people to undertake the greatest construction project in the history of humanity, a massive train network that makes all planes obsolete, but at the same time tell people they don't have to work if they want money.
And Pew Research put out a poll a couple weeks ago.
The Democratic Party, 54%, want more moderate policies.
So I fall in that bracket.
But still, you still have about 43 or so that want more left-leaning policies.
But what that means is the parties split.
And so here's the problem I see.
If you're going to put me up – if you're going to say, Tim, you got to vote.
You have to vote.
You have to make a choice.
You've got a moderate conservative who believes things I really don't agree with, but he doesn't want to give money to people who don't work, and he doesn't believe in identitarian politics and race equity or whatever.
And then you've got the Democrats who are so far left to me, I can't even see them anymore.
Who do you think social liberals and liberals are going to vote for?
The closest person to them politically will be a conservative.
That's what scares me.
We had this great future with a potential for a public option, for expanding Medicaid.
I mean, look, I really do believe social programs are important.
We can do more.
I like a lot of what Bernie has to say.
I think we need to reform education, but I think education could be expanded.
Again, I'm interested in the ideas.
I want to advocate for them, but we need to figure out how to do it.
But where I fit politically, I'm politically homeless.
Everyone always would think I was stoned because I would talk about this kind of stuff with my friends while they were stoned.
The philosophical consequences of technological innovation.
It is not the postmaster's fault that he spent 30 years becoming the best of the best in working at the post office that technology emerged that is going to displace him and put him in the poorhouse.
When I was about 19 years old, I was skateboarding in downtown Chicago and I saw an old black homeless man.
And I had some leftover food and I was like, hey, what's up, dude?
You want some food?
And he was like, oh, you know, thanks, man.
And I was just like, I got to know, can I ask you a question?
How did you become homeless?
And he said, you know what, man?
He's like, I think he was like 60-something.
He said, I used to have a job.
I worked all day, every day.
I had a family.
Eventually, you know, I didn't have kids.
My friends started to get old and move on.
I lost touch with a lot of them.
Some of them died.
And one day I got told that my job wasn't needed anymore.
And so I couldn't do anything.
Went on unemployment for a little bit, but the job I was good at didn't exist, right?
I can't remember exactly what he said.
This was 14 years ago.
But he was like, so everywhere I went, I said, you know, I'll do anything.
I'll do anything.
But even the small jobs that paid a little bit to flip burgers weren't enough to cover my rent.
After a few months, I got evicted.
Then, because I didn't have a place to live, I couldn't go to the job I did have.
I started sleeping outside and I've been here ever since.
Yeah, I try explaining to people, they always make this political, you know, the political compass, authoritarian, libertarian, left, right?
And people like to claim that anarchists, like the violent, smashy ones in Antifa, are libertarian left.
And I'm like, no, no, no, no.
Like, the libertarian left quadrant are pot-smoking hippies who live on farms.
Anarcho-communism makes a ton of sense when it's you and your buddies working together on a farm, sharing responsibilities.
It doesn't make sense for a community of, you know, 300 million people, and you have to trade extremely specific resources to make a computer happen, right?
At that point, you need to be able to quantify the value of specific objects, and that's why communism doesn't work on massive scale.
But I will say, artificial intelligence is a different conversation.
You know, technological advancement is going to result in, like, Luddite riots.
You know, the opioid crisis?
I could be wrong.
I read that there was a connection between unemployment.
From these factories getting shut down and depressed dudes popping pills.
There was a masculinity report was published by Harry's, the shaving company, and they said the overwhelming majority of what contributes to a man's happiness is gainful employment, like 80%.
So what happens when a factory shuts down?
You got a bunch of young dudes who want to do something.
The only other thing that I think I would like to at least make an attempt at is what would be the path for a person who's been banned from these social media sites?
What do you think would be a reasonable way to bring people back into the conversation?
Whether it's YouTube or whatever.
What would be a reasonable way I mean, don't you think there should be- Turn it back on.
I believe that as long as these companies are monopolies, and they are the public sphere, it is wrong to permanently exile someone for saying a bad word, for holding the wrong opinion.
Well, not only that, the criticism of that movie was no different than the criticism of any movie that they thought sucked, but it happened to be about a feminist idea, or a woman's movie.
What was interesting is that, I mean, it's been so long, so forgive me if I get this wrong, but I believe Leslie Jones was tweeting her followers to go to Milo as well.
If you don't – so what they say is – it's actually a really interesting precedent.
The Daily Stormer encouraged – I'm going off of some news reports.
I could be wrong.
Encouraged people to send racist images and start sending mean things to this woman who I think – I believe she was Asian or black.
And a court ruled that the First Amendment will not protect you if you encourage others to engage in harassment.
It's really interesting then when we consider what's going to happen with the lawsuits towards all of the people who smeared and defamed and called for action against Covington kids.
That precedent that was used against Daily Stormer is now going to be used against these high-profile celebrities and personalities.
What I'm about to say is not to claim that Alex Jones is mentally deficient or anything like that.
You can have whatever opinion you want.
The point is, if your justification for banning him is that he said San Diego wasn't real, does that mean people who don't have a grasp on reality aren't allowed to use social media?
Does that mean that people who are stupid aren't allowed to use social media?
And I think so long as Twitter is a monopoly— We should probably have some protections on the ability to engage in public discourse.
I'll give you a really important point.
Occupy Wall Street took place in Zuccotti Park in New York on what's called a privately owned public space, POPs.
This space is owned by a private entity.
However, they had no legal grounds for evicting the protesters from the park because the public was encouraged to come.
So I would argue if Twitter is actively encouraging public participation, they lose the protections to ban whoever they want.
I think it's rather terrifying that you would cede political power in this capacity to foreign interests, stockholders, and private individuals at a massive corporation, a monopoly that's not even beholden to the US to a certain degree.
Forgive me for being a little bit of a liberal who wants regulation on massive corporations, but I'm surprised I don't see it from other people on the left.
Thank you for educating me on this and giving you a perspective, and it's a very articulate and very intelligent perspective, and I really appreciate it.
And I think for everyone, this helps us to sort of get an understanding of, you know, just the whole spectrum of what's going on with all this stuff.