Jim Acosta’s book reveals a White House aide allegedly attacking him to seize his microphone, while critics like James O’Keefe expose Pinterest’s Orwellian censorship of conservatives—suppressing Live Action and Shapiro—via whistleblower Eric Cochran. Jesse Morton, a former jihadist who founded The Jihad Journal and radicalized Westerners with propaganda like "How to Bake a Bomb," now fights extremism through counter-speech and exit counseling, tracing his own path from Malcolm X’s teachings to post-9/11 disillusionment. The episode ties media bias, platform censorship, and ideological warfare into a broader pattern of silencing dissent—whether by leftist elites or radicalized grievances. [Automatically generated summary]
CNN White House reporter Jim Look at me, I'm Jim Acosta has a new book out entitled, Look at Me, I'm Jim Acosta by Jim Look at Me, I'm Jim Acosta, subtitled, Why You Should Look at Me, Because I'm Jim Acosta.
The book details Acosta's struggle to cover the White House in such a way that everyone will look at him because he's Jim Acosta.
Acosta writes of the terrifying moment when he was forced to fight off an attack from a 105-pound female White House aide who tried to wrestle the microphone from his hand while he was in the midst of shouting his personal opinions at the President of the United States.
Acosta writes, quote, she came at me like a bat out of hell, and I realized at any moment I might lose my grip on the microphone so that the audience would no longer look at me, even though I was still Jim Acosta.
Now, there are some, some I should add, who were not there in the thick of the battle, who say I should not have knocked this attacker away from me because she was only a woman.
But some of these babes are fast, moving like a shark through the water or a torpedo or a girl.
So at any moment, they knock you off center stage.
I couldn't let that happen, unquote.
In another section of the book, Acosta writes movingly of the threat Donald Trump poses to the free press, saying, quote, Donald Trump calls the press the enemy of the people.
But really, when you think about it, who are the people that we should not be their enemies?
Are they me, Jim Acosta?
Are they even looking at me?
And if not, why not?
Do they not know who I am?
Unquote.
The answer to these and other questions are in the book, or in fact, in the subtitle of the book, which should save you a few bucks.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky, life is tickety-boom.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunky-dicky.
Ship-shaped hipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
A lot of conservatives, possibly even me, have been misusing the word absurd.
And since it may be the most essential word of our era, we should get the meaning right.
We sometimes say that labeling an Orthodox Jew trad con like Ben Shapiro alt-right or white supremacist is absurd, or that calling the centrist gay libertarian Dave Rubin far-right is absurd.
Now, pardon me, the word absurd means utterly or obviously senseless, illogical, or untrue.
And yes, in one sense, these labels fit that bill, if their point were to communicate the truth.
But in fact, these attacks are not senseless.
They're not absurd.
They're part of a strategy.
The internet and social media have up till now democratized information, which in effect means they took information out of the monopoly of powerful corporate left-wing gatekeepers and made it possible for independent voices to be heard, some of those voices conservative.
The left thought it could keep that under control by intimidating these speakers and their listeners with slurs like racist, sexist, Islamophobic, homophobic, all the rest.
No one likes being called names and demonized, and if anyone fought back, they were called uncivil.
This strategy largely worked.
Right-wingers, especially right-wingers who wanted to keep their jobs or get elected mixed districts, learned to watch their words and watch their steps.
And then along came Donald Trump, Trump who is rude and a bore and doesn't care what anybody calls him and can give just as good as he gets.
And that was okay at first because this is what the elites thought of Trump running for president.
People think that Donald Trump is a clown.
Donald Trump is a clown.
I mean, does anybody seriously think that Donald Trump is serious about running for president?
Donald Trump.
You know, he's a clown.
But likely moderator, apparently believes that Donald Trump is a clown.
Which Republican candidate has the best chance of winning the general election?
Of the declared ones right now, Donald Trump.
Ru-Ro, Trump won.
Never laugh at Ann Coulter.
Now, people have the right to free speech.
That's all well and good, but not if you're going to take the elite's power away.
I mean, how the hell did that happen?
It must have been Russia manipulating social media.
It must have been fake news on social media.
It must have been people suddenly liberated by Trump's bull-in-a-China shop mentality to finally say what was really on their minds on social media.
The elites can never let that happen again.
Google, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, these are massive corporations who believe in the leftism that ultimately serves powerful people like them and their globalist vision, and it leaves the rest of us nothing but welfare and opiates.
The left's real campaign slogan should be bug off and die, you deplorable little people.
So, if social media lets people speak and Trump frees them to speak what they're really thinking, and if in speaking they vote for Trump and Trump gets power, they've got to censor social media and get rid of Trump.
Here's how to do it.
First, push the idea that hate speech is not covered by First Amendment norms.
Second, define hate as anything that opposes left-wing opinion.
Third, keep moving left-wing opinion so that only the elites know what it is on any given day.
Fourth, now you can define everyone who opposes your power as hateful.
Fifth, start banning their voices as hate speech.
They don't call Shapiro and Rubin alt-right because they think they're alt-right.
They call them alt-right so that they can lump them in with the others and silence them and all the people like them so that they can defeat Donald Trump in 2020, so they can have their power back and the rest of us can bug off, live in meaningless ease on our guaranteed incomes and die.
I told you this was going to happen.
I'm telling you it's happening.
And yesterday's Twitter attack on Project Veritas was Orwellian, as Orwellian an example as you could possibly get.
We're going to have James O'Keefe from Project Veritas on to talk about it.
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So yesterday, Twitter suspended the account of Project Veritas, James O'Keefe's great site that goes undercover and investigates the people that the mainstream media won't investigate.
And they censored them.
Well, have we got James?
Bring that man on.
Let's let him tell the story.
O'Keefe, you got in trouble again.
I told you to stay out of trouble.
Well, I'm doing journalism, so that's a criminal offense.
I'll say.
So explain, I should, just so people know, Project Veridas is an organization dedicated to investigating corruption, dishonesty, waste, and fraud in public and private institutions.
And James is the author of American Pravda, My Fight for Truth in the Era of Fake News.
Tell us what happened.
Oh, where do I begin?
A whistleblower comes to us inside of a company called Pinterest, which is a big tech company.
It's a $13 billion company.
We had a recent IPO.
And this is a whistleblower.
This is someone who was willing to lose his job.
He knew the risks.
He gave us secret documents.
And since I'm on the Daily Wire, one of the pieces of information in this document, I have the document in front of me, internal employees at Pinterest were calling Ben Shapiro a white supremacist.
And we're just talking about this.
And they put Ben Shapiro, the words Ben, Space, Shapiro, Space, Islam, or Muslim, any of those combination of words on what they call an STL or a sensitive terms list.
And he shared screenshots of employees working at high level in the company talking about how they would censor any content mentioning Ben Shapiro.
So there's this information, and there's also information that Live Action, the largest pro-life organization, the biggest pro-life media organization, they actually consider them to be pornography.
Oh.
And also other websites, PJ Media, Zero Hedge, all porn.
So we reach out for Pinterest for comment on Monday afternoon.
And Pinterest scrambles to try to cover this information up and removes live action from the porn domain block list before we publish the story.
We publish the story.
The story blows up.
Drudge links to the video.
And then Pinterest then places live action back onto the porn domain block list.
And then after that happens, Pinterest just bans live action.
And then what happens is YouTube, which Drudge has just linked to the video of all of these expose, YouTube bans the video, claiming that we violated the privacy violation of Pinterest.
And then what happens is Twitter censors us publishing the video.
So YouTube bans the video.
And then Pinterest informs this young man who blew the whistle that he's been placed on administrative leave.
So they didn't actually fire him.
They placed him on it.
And I think the reason why they didn't fire him is because they know that they have a lawsuit on their hands if they fire him for blowing the whistle on what has occurred.
So an extraordinary series of events.
That is absolutely amazing.
It is absolutely amazing that social media is ganging up on you to keep you from exposing social media from ganging up on conservatives.
I mean, it's George Orwell.
It really is.
They've gone, they've lost their minds, but really not.
I mean, it's a strategy, right?
They are trying to silence us before the 2020 election.
They want conservatives.
Well, this is the, his name is Eric Cochran.
I mean, he's a hero.
We just published an interview with him.
He did go on the Tucker Carlson show last night.
And what's extraordinary, you listen to this guy, Eric, is he says, I don't care about, he was making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year working.
And he just, I gave it all up because he wants to draw out a dozen people like him to do what he did.
And if you listen to Eric talk, Eric says this is the watershed moment.
He says, this is the moment.
He says it's all happening.
I've been doing this for 10 years.
I've never had YouTube take down one of my videos.
And I covertly film people.
I leak documents.
That's what investigative journalists do.
But now what's happening is that the tech companies are putting down the gauntlet and saying, no, no, this is a bridge too far.
You're throwing the stone in Goliath's eye and it's hurting us too greatly.
And they would never do this to the New York Times.
They would never do this to the Washington.
Those guys publish secret documents all the time.
They publish secret documents into state secrets.
They publish, I don't know, the documents on you and I.
But that's not what this is about.
This is about putting the line in the sand.
And this young man has made the extraordinary decision to give it all up to basically ruin his career for a cause greater than himself.
And I think that what's going to happen next is there's going to be a dozen people like him to blow the whistle.
And I don't think big tech is going to be able to stop them all.
Well, this is the thing.
I mean, first of all, just to unpack it just a little bit, what you exposed was they were putting, you know, I mean, Ben Shapiro, but also Lila Rose and her fight against abortion.
They put her on as a porn site.
I mean, that's an amazing thing.
So porn site legitimately banned from Pinterest, and they put her on a porn site.
You expose that and they shut you down.
I mean, this is an amazing.
So listen, truth is stranger than fiction.
If you wrote, you're from Hollywood.
If you wrote a screenplay about the executive producer would throw it in the trash, that's too ridiculous.
That's too cliche.
No, I know this sounds crazy, but it's all happening.
This is the moment in time.
I'm not exaggerating.
Pinterest put pressure on Google.
Pinterest put pressure on YouTube Corporate and said, this is too true.
And the more, and then just like from that movie, The Insider, that's a metaphor for what's happening because this guy's an insider.
When Al Pacino says, the more true it gets, the worse it gets.
He sits, he talks, he courageously blows the whistle.
We publish the information in a responsible way.
I'm not an opinion guy.
I'm not a pundit.
I just published facts that the public had a right to know.
And I can't go to the New York Times, The Washington Post because those guys hate my gut so much that they put their hatred and their passion for politics and party over the First Amendment.
And the only place I have to go is YouTube.
And YouTube takes me down.
And do you see those blue check mark guys on Twitter giving a crap about this?
No.
They say, off with his head.
The intercept, which is the entire purpose of the intercept, is to publish secret documents.
He's saying Facebook needs to ban O'Keefe.
And this is the moment.
This is the moment in time.
All they had to do, all they had to do was say, you know what?
We were wrong.
We shouldn't have done this.
We won't do it anymore.
That's all they had to do.
They could have just changed the policy and let Lila Rose have a place on Pinterest.
But instead, they go after you.
It is incredible.
And it is also incredible because it's happening all over James.
I mean, it's happening at very, very big levels.
What's amazing about this is these guys, I mean, look, you are a powerful company because of what you do, but you're not a massive corporation like these guys.
I mean, these are massive corporations ganging up on an independent voice, which is putting forward provable facts.
I mean, everything you had was on video.
You have the guy showing it.
You show the documents.
It's an amazing thing.
There's a corporation silencing an independent voice that's telling the truth.
That's the whole story.
Shake People Awake00:02:47
Well, what Eric Cochran says in response to that is he says, hopefully it shakes people awake.
I think it's a very powerful.
It's like that righteous indignation that Andrew Breitbart, the title of his book, which itself was a quote from Ida Tarbell, the muckbreaker from the 1890s and 1900s.
You're trying to shake people awake.
And Andrew, I can't, I mean, seven years ago, when I did, when we did these stories, you'd have the blue check mark mainstream journals.
They'd talk about it.
But there isn't a whisper.
There isn't a word said, uttered about the First Amendment.
And what you begin to see is that these companies are not actually in, they have to choose between, it's like that meme where the guy is trying to figure out which red button to push and he's sweating because they have to choose between the First Amendment principles that are supposedly sacrosanct and their political party Leninist allegiances.
Yeah, buddy, I don't think they're sweating anymore.
I think they've made that choice.
They've already made that choice, but I think it's going to shake people awake.
It's going to wake people up because fundamentally the values that we all share is American.
This is an American value.
This is not a right-left thing.
This is a fundamental ver, we fundamentally share that civic duty to publish information for the public's right to know so that citizens can make informed decisions to elect the representatives.
And if journalists and the fourth estate are going to decide we want to protect the big corporations who censor the First Amendment, now this is the moment.
This is the event horizon that we have passed, and I'm very inspired by what Eric has done.
Hey, O'Keefe, I'm proud of you, brother.
You're doing a great job.
Thank you for coming on and talking about it.
I appreciate it.
Thank you.
All right, we'll talk to you again.
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CIA's Concerns Revealed00:15:32
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If you don't think this is going to go on at the absolute highest level, in other words, they're silencing James O'Keefe, but they want to silence anyone who's exposing the truth, right?
I mean, James, you know, I'm not going to call him a little guy because I think he's got a good operation going, but it's an indie operation.
So he is a little guy in that sense versus these tremendous, I mean, Google is a tremendous corporation.
Google, YouTube, you know, Twitter, these are big, big people stomping on him.
The New York Times, a former newspaper, runs a story that it was given to them by what they call anxious CIA agents.
I would have used the word panicked CIA agents.
Here's from the New York Times.
Remember, John Durham is the U.S. attorney who William Barr has sent to investigate the investigation, the eye of eye, the investigation of the investigation of how they started spying on Donald Trump.
Here's the New York Times story.
Justice Department officials intend to interview senior CIA officers as they review the Russia investigation, according to people briefed on the matter, indicating they are focused partly on the intelligence agency's most explosive conclusion about the 2016 election, that Vladimir Putin of Russia intervened to benefit Donald Trump.
The interview plans are the latest sign the Justice Department will take a critical look at the CIA's work on Russia's election interference.
Investigators want to talk with at least one senior counter intelligence official and a senior CIA analyst.
The people said both officials were involved in the agency's work on understanding the Russian campaign to sabotage the election in 2016.
While the Justice Department review is not a criminal inquiry, it has provoked anxiety.
I would have used the word panic and terror, but it has provoked anxiety in the ranks of the CIA, according to former officials.
Senior agency officials have questioned why the CIA's analytical work should be subjected to a federal prosecutor's scrutiny.
They're spying, right, on an opposition campaign, the opposition's campaign.
Why should it be subject to scrutiny?
So the New York Times is being sympathetic.
But if you want to see something truly amazing, and I know I have to show it to you because it was on CNN so nobody saw it, here's CNN's law and justice analyst.
Okay.
Let me see.
His name is Shimon Prakoupes.
Don Lemon asks him about this investigation.
Listen, this is on a news agency, right?
This is on a place where there are supposedly journalists in the room.
Listen to what his answer is about this.
You know this report in the New York Times that he mentioned that the Justice Department is now questioning CIA officers as they review this Russia investigation, which is...
It's troubling because, you know, it's not...
You don't do this.
The CIA kind of operates in their own world.
And for the Department of Justice to start begin questioning CIA agents, people who work there, you know, for me, I think what all of this comes down to is the former CIA director, John Brennan.
And I know the president obviously has been very unhappy with the way John Brennan has behaved since he left office.
And so I think it goes all back to that, that he's very concerned about some of the information and how some of the information that the CIA had really may not have been stood up.
They couldn't really verify a lot of the information.
And the CIA, certainly John Brennan, was sounding a lot of alarms to members of Congress saying something's going on here.
I know he was talking to people at the FBI at the time, concerned that something was going on.
But what we're seeing from the Attorney General right now is that he's saying, well, you know, they were acting on a lot of information that he's concerned was not verified.
The guy on CNN says, you don't investigate the CIA.
The CIA lives in its own world.
I mean, those are the words that just came out of his mouth.
I'm not even making it up, right?
The CIA lives in its own world.
These are journalists.
These are journalists.
The CIA lives in its own world.
Remember a couple of weeks ago, I played that scene from Three Days of the Condor where CIA agent, renegade CIA agent Robert Redford, goes to the New York Times at the end and says, I've exposed you.
I've sent the information of the evil stuff you're doing to the New York Times.
And the evil CIA head says, what if they don't print it?
He says, oh, print it.
You know, they have the heroic shot of the truck coming out with the New York Times in the back of it.
Unbelievable.
Unbelievable.
Now they're saying, no, no, no, don't print that.
Don't print that.
That makes Obama look bad and it makes Donald Trump look put upon.
You know, it's an amazing, amazing reversal.
I mean, when James said they have to choose, they have to choose which red button to push First Amendment or their leftist sympathies, they chose already.
I mean, I talked about that earlier in the week, about the New York Times has already said they think corporations should be censored as long as it's not them, as long as it's not what they determine is a journalistic corporation.
And the thing about this is, I talk about this as a strategy, and it is a strategy, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's a conspiracy.
Okay, that's not what I'm saying.
I'm not saying everybody's gotten together and they're all huddled together and they're saying, here's what we're going to do.
We're going to move the definition of hate.
Every day there's going to be a new definition of hate.
First, we're going to say it's, oh, if you don't like gay people, that's a problem.
Wait, Obama can't say yet that he is in favor of gay marriage, so it's not hate yet.
But the minute Obama says he's in favor of gay marriage, suddenly it's hate to be opposed to that.
Uh-oh, now it's hate if you don't let a man into the girls' bathroom in your elementary school.
And now it's hate if you won't admit that the man is a woman and he can't play sports with women.
You know, the idea of hatred moves every single day.
The left gets caught in it themselves, but the important point is, is that it's always defined by the elites.
It's always defined by the people who have the power so they can keep the power.
And it's always to exclude the people in the Midwest, those deplorables in the Midwest, is what makes them deplorable, is that they don't know what the new hate is, and so they don't know when they are being hateful.
But they don't have to get together and plan that out.
It's not like that.
It is something that is naturally happening in their minds because they only know each other.
They never talk to the rest of us.
They don't know what Ben is saying.
They just know he's a powerful conservative voice.
You know, they're not listening to him and thinking, they're not reading his book and thinking, hmm, you know, good point.
You know, it's interesting there, disagree with him here.
Here, he hasn't got this right.
You know, they're not doing that.
They just know he's the bad guy and he's got a voice and he's got to be shut down.
Speaking of Don Lemon, or what does Tucker call him now?
He calls him Don Lamone.
When I first heard him doing that, I thought, have I been getting this wrong all this time?
Don Lemon is sitting with, you know, Jim, look at me, I'm Jim Acosta, right?
Acosta selling his new book, Look at Me, I'm Jim Acosta, by Look at Me, I'm Jim Acosta.
And they're talking about whether or not they're biased and whether or not they hate Donald Trump.
Now, this is a station, a cable news network that sold this Russian conspiracy, and now the bottom has dropped out of their ratings because people went like, oh, nothing they were saying is true.
All that banana is an apple.
Suddenly, the apple is not a banana.
Whatever it was, it's suddenly not true.
Here, you go, you know, they use the term old white guys to mean entrenched, powerful people.
If you want to see two entrenched people, you know, you can almost smell their cologne, these two guys.
You don't have to be white and you don't have to be old to be entrenched and powerful because they know that they're not going to get fired.
Here they are talking to one another about how fair they've been.
For all those people who say, oh, you know, the press CNN hates Trump and the CNN is, you know, loves the Democrats, I watched Manu Raju with Nancy Pelosi, who clearly did not want to answer Manu's questions today, even in her body language.
And you know what?
He persisted and he asked her the tough questions anyway.
So of anyone, a Democrat or Republican, regardless of who it is, if you hold a position of power, we, the journalists at CNN, are going to question you about it, whether you like it or not.
That's right.
We're here to hold their feet to the fire.
And just because we are pro-truth doesn't mean that we are anti-Trump.
And, you know, as I write throughout this book and I try to close it out on a hopeful note, we are not the enemy of the people.
We are defenders of the people.
And we want to defend the people because we're devoted to the people.
You and I, Don, our families, our parents, our kids, our loved ones, we all think about all of those folks when we come into the office and do this job on a daily basis.
We're not here to spin things or color things a certain way.
We're here to give the people reliable, accurate information on a daily basis.
That's why we all come into work every day.
It's beautiful.
I mean, you could put that in a comedy show, a situation comedy, because they don't know.
They don't know that they're talking crap.
They don't.
I really believe that.
They think, no, no, no.
You know, Acosta has essentially said that they have to be biased to cover Trump properly because Trump is so bad, but he doesn't hate Trump.
That's not biased.
That's just the truth.
They now think their opinions are the truth.
So, you know, when they call Lila Rose porn, they kind of think, well, that's kind of what it is to them, because the right to kill their children, the right to stick scissors in a baby's head and suck out its brains, is such an important thing.
It's not killing somebody.
That's not killing a baby.
That's just women's rights, you know.
So it is porn to them, I know.
If we're not allowed to hear from Lila Rose, let's at least hear from the babies in Planned Parenthood.
Come back here.
You're not a human being.
Look at me.
No one can see you.
Don't steal, you piece of tissue.
Help!
My point's not mad at it!
That was Jeremy Boring's finest moment, as far as I'm concerned, playing the baby.
Here's...
And here's the left's response to that.
Don't speak.
When we first met him, don't speak.
Please, don't speak.
Please, don't speak.
No, no, no.
You know, the most famous scene in 1984 is the scene when they torture Winston Smith, not to convince him that 2-2 is 4, not to convince him that 2-2 is 5, to convince him that 2-2 is whatever the party says it is.
Hate is whatever the party thinks it is, because hate is whatever they want to ban.
And hate right now is you and me.
It's us.
And it's going to be that way at least until the 2020 election.
And if we lose the 2020 election, who knows how long that's going to go on.
We've got a great guest, a really important guest coming up, Jesse Morton, who wrote an amazing article in the Wall Street Journal called I Invented the Jihad Journal.
But I got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
Come over to dailywire.com and subscribe.
And you know, we were talking about this on backstage yesterday.
When you subscribe, you protect us from these people.
You know, when our sponsors can't get chased off, when we know we've got your support, that's how we live.
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It is a good, solid subscription, which gives you a lot of goodies, but it also protects our voices and keeps us on the air.
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Jesse Morton is a former jihadist, and he is now co-founder of Parallel Networks, an organization combating hate and extremism, and special advisor to the Counter-Extremism Project.
I wanted to bring him in because I wanted to talk about what real hate looks like.
It doesn't look like Ben.
Jesse, are you there?
I am here.
Can you hear me?
Yes, I can.
Thank you very much for coming on.
I thought your article in the Wall Street Journal, I invented the Jihad Journal, was shocking and just an amazing piece.
Really good job.
Could you start by explaining how you became radicalized in the first place?
So I was a young individual who was confused.
I grew up exposed to a very counter-cultural perspective.
My father was sort of a beatnik that had moved us to a commune.
I grew up with Bob Dylan in the 1960s countercultural influences.
And then I ran away at the age of 16 because my mother's side of the family was very physically abusive.
So I was sort of traumatized when I ran away at 16 to get away from home abuse, gravitated towards actually traveling with the Grateful Dead and became a very far-leftist anarchist before converting to Islam, having found the autobiography of Malcolm X during a few day stint in jail in State College, Pennsylvania.
I became a Muslim who followed Malcolm X more than I followed the actual interpretation of the Prophet Muhammad.
Gravitated towards a political interpretation of the religion and radical revolutionary interpretation of the religion almost from the beginning.
I was taught by a Moroccan veteran of the Afghan Soviet jihad in Richmond, Virginia, and taught a millenarian perspective of the religion, that the end times was near, that the believers, the Muslims were in a perpetual war against the non-believers, predominantly the great Satan, that is the United States.
And because I felt like my society had not bailed me out of the abuse and because I had never developed the skills it took to address the underlying traumas that got me radicalized first in sort of tuning in and dropping out and then secondarily in a fundamentalist interpretation of the Islamic religion, I adopted a very, very serious view that became more and more sympathetic to Osama bin Laden and his adherents in al-Qaeda over time.
So when 9-11 happened, I actually was inclined to support the terrorists and to go against my own country, feeling that it had abandoned me and betrayed me.
Wow, that's an amazing story.
Now, talk about that.
You invented this thing called the Jihad Journal, which was actually an innovative attempt to spread the jihad.
Yes, it was.
We were very prominent.
I ran an organization.
So I graduated through the ranks.
I actually was getting a master's degree at Columbia University while I was a propagandist setting the template upon which a large portion of online radicalization ensued.
My organization, Revolution Muslim, located in New York City, was responsible for 15 terrorist plots.
We're connected to 15 terrorist plots in the end.
We ran until 2011 when Osama was killed in Abbottabad.
And basically what we did was we realized very quickly that as the threat we perceived was not so much from people that were trained abroad by al-Qaeda, but one that was homegrown.
The domestic alone wolf attack was what we were beginning to be more concerned with.
And the leadership in al-Qaeda was basically saying that what we should do is project the message, their message, through social media in particular.
What we did was rather than just convey their message, we conveyed it in an American way.
It almost was al-Qaeda on Madison Avenue, if you will.
And one of the ways that we were most innovative was in conjunction with other prominent propagandists such as Samir Khan and Anwar al-Aldeki, two American individuals that were later killed in a drone strike in Yemen after joining al-Qaeda in the Rabbin Peninsula.
Al-Qaeda On Madison Avenue00:08:01
We started an English language online e-zine that was very, very glossy, full of very good graphic design.
I wrote the lead article for the first issue, and we collaborated on making it appeal to the American or the Western mindset.
Unfortunately, I've changed my beliefs now, but that template went on after my organization threatened the writers of South Park for portraying the Prophet Muhammad.
That template was launched by Al-Qaeda in the Rabbin Peninsula as its own outlet called Inspire.
And Inspire had an article in it that was called How to Bake a Bomb in Mom's Kitchen.
That's the recipe that's been utilized in innumerable texts thereafter.
And the most successful example of that was the Boston Marathon bombers, who in 2013, while I was already incarcerated and was changing my ways, I had to see the consequences of that recipe come to fruition when Azarna brothers killed two and injured hundreds more at the Boston Marathon finish line.
Since that day, and before that, but particularly that day, sets worth a motion of me trying to make amends for the damage that I have caused.
And now I work, interestingly enough, alongside of the director of intelligence at the NYPD that used to monitor me for several years of my life, and we worked to combat the hate and extremism that I once espoused.
Well, let me go back for just a minute to the Jihad Journal.
When you were trying to incite people to make lone wolf attacks, what kinds of things did you tell them?
How do you inspire someone to do that?
Well, I mean, it's a combination of mixing the theological or the religious and the fundamentalist religious interpretations with the political.
So a lot of what you see in the language of ISIS and al-Qaeda is not strictly religious.
It is religion.
It's a political grievance.
And it's a revolutionary political grievance.
It's almost like taking, you know, far-leftism and replicating it in a manner where it doesn't call for a socialist utopia.
What it calls for is a transnational caliphate that is a utopia from the past that never actually existed.
And so when you can transform religious rhetoric into idealistic narratives about current events and the great Satan and American imperialist in the Middle East, what you can do is you can mobilize people to go against their own society.
We're talking predominantly, you know, second, third generation Muslims from immigrant countries where their parents came here and they grew up here.
They're totally enmeshed in the American society, but for whatever reason, they feel like they're drawn to an identity from their ethnic background.
Or you're talking converts who tend to be the most zealous, but also misinformed.
So it's really not so much a religious argument, but there's a very crafty way which the propagandist can make it seem like it's spiritual and religious, because it's a comprehensive worldview and a comprehensive culture.
And for those that are most susceptible to radical ideas, they love to see the world in a black and white worldview.
And so we used three primary principles that take a long time to go through in suggesting first that God is the only one that can provide legislation.
So democracy, the concept of man-made legislation, is actually a form of idolatry.
And then there's this idea that you have to hate and reject everyone that practices any form of legislation other than the one that, quote-unquote, God has revealed to Muhammad in the Quran and in the narrations attributed to the Prophet Muhammad.
And then there's this idea that when you can synthesize the two of them, you're actually practicing monotheism in its complete form.
And so a Muslim that doesn't believe in the Islamic State is not actually a Muslim at all.
So not only are you hating the non-believer, you're also hating the believers that disagree with you.
So basically, it's just a global hate movement that's dedicated towards reestablishing some pristine past that never actually existed.
And long story short.
When you were arrested, what were you charged with?
So I had threatened the writer.
I had a cohort.
His name was Zachary Chesser.
He was a kid from an affluent background, Fairfax County, Virginia, radicalized in like six months through direct contact with Anral Aldegi, who was a very prominent preacher that still is connected to most terrorist attacks we see today.
And the South Park writers said that they were going to portray the Prophet Muhammad in a bear costume.
We issued a death threat against the South Park writers because we knew that it would create the kind of publicity we needed to get coverage in the mainstream press, but a small segment of those that witnessed that coverage would adhere to our views.
It was basically free marketing.
And in the process of trying to exploit that situation, we clearly entered the realm of illegal speech.
So what was radical revolutionary speech where we knew we were consciously walking up to the line of the First Amendment, putting our middle fingers in the air, so to say, and then carefully trekking back.
We had gotten away with that for many years.
The South Park threat crossed that threshold.
I knew that it did.
I fled to Morocco, and it was there that I was extracted from the movement.
And suddenly the Arab Spring broke out, and I had exposure to Arab millennial youth, found that they really desired a lot of the things I had taken for granted, and then went to a series of processes where we started to sort of reverse course.
I was arrested for inciting the murder of the South Park creators and conspiring in the production of Inspire Magazine with Samir Conner and Anwald Aldegi, the magazine that went on to birth ISIS's own English language iterations, W and Kumia, which have been calling not just for the pipe bomb attacks, but now for mowing people down in the streets.
Amazing.
So tell me now, what are you doing now?
So you've changed.
You're working with the police who came after you.
How are you, what is the journal you're working on now?
So we are starting an organization called Parallel Networks.
Parallel Networks is basically believing that rather than, as you suggest, outlawing speech, we should develop networks that rival in size and scope the networks that we believe to be extremist, jihadists being a clear-cut example of them, that only networks can battle networks.
And so we're formulating a cotter of people that have left extremist movements.
We have an organization and a website called WhiteUponLight.online.
It has a 24-7 call-in number.
We can provide support to individuals that want to leave movements.
We publish counter-speech.
And one of the most interesting things that we recently did was we published a replication of the English language jihadi magazines I started.
That's where the op-ed in the Wall Street Journal comes from.
It looks exactly like ISIS's own production.
We spent 10 days in the secret chat rooms of ISIS adherents, letting them know that a new magazine was coming to the point where they were promoting our magazine for us.
And so that when we launched that op-ed, the magazine product that we created was being disseminated without any knowledge of ISIS supporters.
So now we're picking them apart inside of their own communities in encrypted platforms.
They've migrated away from Facebook.
They've migrated away from Twitter.
Now they're on an application called Telegram, and we're in there dissecting that movement, trying to marginalize the voices in that movement that are promoting IC.
So this is one of the things we do.
We provide counsel and support to individuals that are coming home with terrorism-related offenses to protect them from society.
We do an array of things, go around and speak about my experiences, my experiences with the NYPD Director of Intelligence Officer Mitch Silber that now works with me, share our stories, train individuals that might be responsible for thwarting attempts at terrorist attacks, get a better understanding of this phenomenon.
But most importantly, we promote dialogue and engagement rather than polarization and hate and hatred of the other.
So we're only a year and a couple months old.
We're developing rapidly.
We're very happy with what things are moving forward.
We have a great support system and counter extremism project, which works diligently to make sure that Facebook is held accountable for its negligence in removing extremist content, that Twitter is held accountable, and social media platforms are held accountable for their removing particular levels of speech.
We come in and we clear up the process by providing the services on the ground that can help individuals change and that can then combat these networks with other networks that rival them in size and scope, but that are built on pro-democratic, post-enlightenment interpretations of religion that are very effective in pulling people out of their support for groups like IC Central Quarter.
Another Kingdom's Impact00:05:41
Where can people find out more about you, Jesse?
You have a website or something?
LightUponLight.online is our core hub, or pnetworks.org is where we house our marketing and our main organization.
But our activity is hosted on LightUponLight.online.
It's a website where we have an array of programs and initiatives, and they can contact us there.
We'll be glad to answer any questions that they have or provide consultation and any needs or services they might desire.
Jesse Morton, thanks very much for coming on.
I really appreciate it.
I do appreciate you having me.
Take care.
Thank you.
Thanks.
Speech combating speech.
And, you know, if you can't tell the difference between a guy telling people to kill people and Ben Shapiro, Dave Rubin, if you can't tell the difference between what hate really sounds like, you know, to the point that they're threatening people's lives and people who are supporting the Constitution and want people to be free and want babies not to be killed, if you can't tell that difference, you have lost the plot of America.
You have lost the plot of the West.
You've lost the plot of freedom.
They mean to do it.
The silencing people just makes them stronger.
I love that line about battling networks with networks.
Final reflection.
Recently, I finished the third, Another Kingdom, the final book in the trilogy of Another Kingdom.
It's been a huge experience for me.
I mean, it's three years.
It's essentially a thousand-page novel that took me three years to write.
It's probably the last novel I'll ever write, or at least the last serious prose fiction undertaking.
I think I have another book I want, another nonfiction book I want to write.
But it really has been a huge, huge deal for me.
And, you know, obviously we're going to start to turn it into a podcast.
And yes, yes, we'll let Michael Knowles read it again.
But I got this letter that I just want to share with you from a lady named Alyssa, who was in the tropical storm, Harvey, in southeast Texas.
And she says, our house got 17 inches of water.
My husband, two sons, a two-year-old and a one-month-old, and I were trapped in an upstairs room for three days.
We were displaced for months.
And while we were better off than many of our neighbors, it wasn't easy to help our tiny children cope with such a major upheaval while still recovering from childbirth.
She says, it sounds silly to call what happened to me postpartum depression, but that was a major component of my mental state after the flood.
Whatever the cause, I was in bad emotional shape.
I didn't have anyone to talk to, wasn't dealing with as much or more than I was.
And those I did talk to urged me to get medicated, which wasn't the path I wanted to take.
My relationships deteriorated, and I'm ashamed to say I blamed God for inflicting this on our family during what should have been such a happy time.
Shortly before we were able to move back into our house, I started listening to the Another Kingdom podcast.
I'm a fantasy fairy tale junkie.
I'd been intrigued by the premise, but I'd been too distracted to check it out.
Five minutes into the first episode, I was hooked, and it really changed things for me.
I would listen while pushing my kids around in the stroller, giving all three of us a few moments of peace.
I would pop my headphones in and listen to an episode as I scrubbed drywall dust off every surface of our house.
During a time when there seemed to be precious little to look forward to in our daily lives, Another Kingdom gave me a reason to look forward to Friday.
I identify with Austin Lively in multiple ways, and his journey helped me remember who I was and what was important while I figuratively and literally put my house back in order.
I was listening to your interview with Ben about the books, and when you said the plot for Another Kingdom dropped into your head fully formed, it hit me like a ton of bricks.
I'm conceited enough to believe that one of the reasons God inspired you to write this story is because he knew I and others like me needed to hear it.
As an aspiring writer, I want nothing more than to bring people closer to God through my writing, and Another Kingdom showed me that I can do so while telling a good story.
So thank you.
Thank you from the bottom of my heart for being receptive to the spirit of the Lord as you wrote this story.
I'm so looking forward to season three and have managed to convince my husband to read the first book.
Now he's a fan too.
Again, thank you so much for writing Another Kingdom.
Let wisdom reign.
She also sent me a follow-up email saying, don't tell Knowles, but he did a great job.
So we won't tell him, but he did do a great job.
You know, I just want to tell you that when I wrote this book, this book did drop into my head.
I did feel almost ordered to write it.
I certainly felt ordered to turn it into a podcast, which is not my way.
I like to write things and send them off to publishers and let them deal with that.
The fact that I had to do this, me and Knowles had to do this together, and then we got help from all our friends here at the Daily Wire to put it together.
But the fact that we sort of did it ourselves to begin with goes kind of against my grain.
I'm not an organizer.
I'm not somebody who I'm a writer.
I stay in a room by myself and write things.
But I did it.
I remember specifically a day when I went out in prayer and I was praying and I said to God, I didn't want to do this.
I don't think it's going to work.
I hear you telling me to do it, so I'm going to do it.
But it's on you because I think it's going to be a terrible, terrible mess and it's just going to go out there and disappear without a trace.
So if it works, you get all the credit.
And if it doesn't work, I don't want to hear about it because I didn't want to do it in the first place.
Well, it has worked tremendously well, which should be a lesson to me, I hope, and possibly a lesson for us all.
However, now the fun is over.
I have to plunge you into the Clavenless weekend, so you're doomed.
But if you survive, I will be back here on Monday.
I will look forward to talking to you then.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is The Andrew Klavan Show.
The Andrew Clavin Show is produced by Robert Sterling.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring, senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover, and our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
Bernie's Tax Confusion00:00:47
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Copyright Daily Wire 2019.
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