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March 1, 2019 - Louder with Crowder

01:17:26

#439 LEGAL UPDATE: TIME TO SUE!! | Bill Richmond and James O'Keefe Guest | Louder With Crowder

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	We'll begin your highly anticipated, regularly scheduled programming in a minute.
	I wanted to take this opportunity to bring to your attention the importance of Mug Club.
	You've all seen it.
	Hand-etched, painted, girthy, asbestos-free.
	But in light of the four copyright claims on our Oscars stream and archive that we received within 24 hours of each other this week, as well as being the subject of a national news story regarding Facebook's live video suppression algorithms, I want you to know that MugClub has never been more necessary in our ability to fight back than today.
	Join up for less than 27 cents a day at lauderwithcrowder.com slash MugClub and make your voice heard.
	Also, it is my duty to inform you that the episode you're about to see includes graphic, half-Asian litigious content not suitable for younger viewers and or pu**y. Viewer discretion is advised.
	Louder with Crowder Studios, protected exclusively by Walther and Hopper.
	The End The End
	The End See, the S.P.L.C.
	are arbiters of what's determined hate speech and allowed on the platforms.
	And they decided that Blacko had to go.
	Blacko!
	That's what Jisky said I should be expecting you.
	It's a part of Mug Club.
	No L.S.A., P.L.S.A.
	Ah, yes.
	First it's the mugs, then it's the bottle.
	Now, nothing's safe.
	Okay?
	You want free speech, right, Mugscabar?
	I getcha.
	Let me explain something to you, boy.
	Free speech leads to hate speech.
	Hate speech leads to bigotry.
	And bigotry, that leads to violence.
	We don't need your kind of violence on our platforms.
	Blacko, Blacko, let's stop with the games.
	YouTube, the SPLC, you know we're one and the same.
	My friend, you gotta understand that the First Amendment wasn't made for people like you.
	It was made for good people.
	Fair people.
	People like me.
	This ain't complicated, Blacko.
	Free speech hurts people.
	I ain't never really cared about hurting people.
	I care about that.
	What do you wetbacks call it?
	Dineros?
	You gotta make a decision, buddy.
	What you fixin' to do?
	I'm gonna fix you!
	The End?
	No, not yet.
	I'm gonna fix you!
	Screaming Screaming
	Music Music
	that's probably you want the squeegee I'll squeegee You don't want me to squeegee your windshield?
	Are you sure?
	That's what that is.
	Actually, I realize we actually have my half-Asian lawyer, Bill Richman, here.
	So I have to make sure that our wonderful sponsor, Walther's, so you can see that it's unloaded.
	It still does have to be facing you.
	Thank you, Walther.
	I think it's OK.
	I don't know if we're happy about this.
	I'm not practicing firearm safety.
	We're going to have James O'Keefe on the show today.
	Oh, nice.
	Question of the day before we move on.
	This is a special episode.
	It's a legal update episode because, oh my god, it's been a week.
	Damn straight.
	We'll get into all of the false DMCAs as well as the Facebook.
	All the recent de-boosting of our videos.
	But my question to you is, which sin do you think is the most egregious?
	Are you tired of most of the DMCA's on YouTube, Facebook's lack of transparency, or professors like Charles Hermes?
	Because someone getting sued, Larry!
	I want to make sure that we understand here.
	We are beyond the point of playing nicely.
	Hey, we have Pentelus Comedy here.
	How are you, sir?
	I'm very good.
	I'm happy to be here.
	You're aiming to get over 1,000 YouTube subscribers.
	It's Pantelis Comedy, right?
	That's it.
	That'll be great.
	And he writes for the show, actually.
	He's one of the few writers we have.
	Helps us behind the scenes, part-time.
	He's brilliant.
	Greek from Montreal.
	Used to hate the sound of this kind of accent.
	Now it makes me homesick.
	Quarter black carrot.
	Show me your hood pass.
	What's up?
	Terrible.
	Gerald Morgan, Jr.
	How are you, sir?
	I'm doing well, sir.
	How are you?
	Wine of the day is?
	Wine of the day is Morlaix Corte Vele.
	Cour de Valais.
	It's an accent aigu.
	Is he pronouncing that correctly, Pantelis?
	Aigu.
	Yeah, it's close enough.
	It's correct.
	Valais.
	Tattoos, I don't know.
	We have my half-Asian lawyer, Bill Richmond, here.
	People are really excited for you to be here.
	Hi, friends.
	What I always find funny is that before, he's always completely off the wall, and then he tries to get professional once we go live.
	He's like, it's real buttoned up right as the show starts.
	Well, before we move into all of the legal updates and the potential legal actions, our hashtag-crowder anti-Oscars party.
	The costume winner was Chase Huckle.
	Is that how it's pronounced?
	Chase Huckle.
	Sea Shark 13.
	We have that over.
	We have that image there.
	He had a Tranny Bain costume.
	Look at that.
	Look at him.
	Big fan.
	And then the best Bill Richmond, half-Asian lawyer, Bill Richmond art contest winner is Conservative Jedi.
	I think we have that So you guys are going to be winning a t-shirt and or mug.
	I don't know exactly.
	This is a whole different show today.
	We have a 7 plus 1 by the way to get to after James O'Keefe's 7 plus 1 top big tech legal dramas.
	A little bit of a theme here.
	I feel so bad because Pantelis is from Montreal.
	He calls in by Skype and he works for the pitch meetings every morning and then this week because of all the sh** That's been going on legally from the Oscars livestream, which we'll get to in a second.
	Pantelis was here and he had very little to do because we weren't able to do the shows.
	But I got the lift.
	I don't know what you're talking about.
	We're in California.
	I'm not comfortable with this!
	Did I already ruin the show?
	No, I'm glad you got to come.
	We'll have you back out here soon, I hope.
	What is this?
	This is a very bizarre story.
	We'll have you back out here soon, right?
	Right, Pentelus?
	Yeah, of course.
	When, you know, legal troubles are done, I can come around with a message.
	That means you'll never be back.
	Yes, exactly.
	You're next on the list.
	After I get sued, yeah, just now.
	I also thought, by the way, we're going to make a beer from Brodigan's beard.
	We might want to take some yeast from your beard and do a control sample and see which beard yields the taste of your beer.
	That's a good idea.
	It sounds somewhat disgusting.
	No, it's not.
	I've had beard beer before.
	It's delicious.
	Really?
	What?
	Yeah.
	I've had beer from some guy's beard before.
	Is this like your experimental college days?
	No, no, no.
	It was rogue.
	Someone out there can tell me.
	I think it was Rogue Brewery, but I thought, oh, this is the last time I send my wife on a beer run.
	I punched her in the face a few times, so I don't know what's what.
	Gave her a fresh one.
	And I was like, this beard beer is delicious.
	Really?
	Yes.
	Well, every time I hear something like that, it makes me think.
	We did a story about a woman who made it with her My legal representation is present.
	You think this will bode well for us in a court?
	They're gonna show a clip from you, you sick bastard.
	It's true.
	It'll show them behind the scenes.
	All right.
	So listen, this is why half-Asian lawyer Bill Richmond is here.
	I have no idea.
	The line was crossed with me on the show.
	I had to deal with it.
	My legal representation is present.
	You think this will bode well for us in a court?
	They're going to show a clip from you, you sick bastard.
	It's true.
	It'll show them behind the scenes.
	All right.
	So listen, this is why half-Asian lawyer Bill Richman is here.
	How are you, sir?
	So let's explain for people who don't know, we have a few things to get to.
	What happened on YouTube, why you guys have not seen the Oscar stream.
	And by the way, they're biding their time hoping that by the time this last false strike on our Oscar stream is removed, you guys won't want to see it.
	Make sure when that Oscar stream is up.
	You like it and comment till the cows come home so they see that, you know what, they don't get to play this game.
	But we'll move on to YouTube as well as some other issues that have been occurring here behind the scenes.
	And it's just gotten to the point where our legal battles, you know, we're at the point we've had you on Retainer, you're probably going to be coming on full time.
	It's really becoming a full time job.
	How many, explain for people before we get to Facebook and James O'Keefe, the Oscars live stream.
	Explain to people what happened there.
	I mean it's a multiple battle war that we fought over the last kind of 72 hours.
	This week has been pretty nuts but just on the stream itself and then the archive there was an initial takedown.
	I think a lot of folks a lot of the followers audience and fans saw that it got cut down right by an ABC Disney strike.
	copyright strike, we're saying, hey, you're violating this and that, shut it down right
	in the middle.
	And just to focus right on that, the kind of arc of just the ABC Disney, we get the
	notification, the next day we file a counter notification, we work with some of our channel
	partners, we get in there, start talking to YouTube lawyers, et cetera.
	Before we go, let me say, there were four strikes.
	Four strikes effectively on the same piece of content.
	Correct.
	Four strikes on the same piece of content within 24 hours.
	Excessive.
	Three of them have been retracted or struck down, whatever term you want to use.
	Three of them!
	Or dropped.
	Especially the one that happened during the livestream that caused us to be able to livestream on YouTube.
	We had 40,000 people watching live.
	But this is important to note.
	We were well climbing to 50,000.
	Yes.
	This is important to note.
	And it was a hard strike.
	You get three of those, I think, in three months.
	We're no longer able to broadcast.
	Period.
	So all of the strikes, we should mention this, that are hard legal strikes, where when you file a counter notice, that's, hey, see you in court.
	And they're legally liable if it's a false strike.
	They're all gone.
	We've never lost.
	Yeah, so we get this one, the first one of the four, ABC Disney comes in, everything just blows up on Sunday night.
	Then on Monday, we're following the things that we need to do, everyone's getting crazy, trying to investigate what is ABC Disney doing, reaching out to YouTube.
	Come Tuesday, they've dropped it.
	They've withdrawn it, they've looked at all of our arguments, and they've said, oops, we're done.
	They drop it.
	Well, that's just the first of the four.
	So within the stream itself, after the ABC Disney one comes off on Tuesday, the Academy Awards decides that they want to have the same thing.
	I don't know that they're not run by the same parent company.
	I'm not entirely sure the Academy is.
	Come on.
	Either way.
	He can't say it.
	I think they're in cahoots.
	Go ahead.
	Yeah.
	It's not outside the realm of possibility.
	I mean, look, they're obviously financially, there's no secret, it's not even to be critical, but they have a network, the network's doing an event, and they're streaming the event, and the event is the Academy Awards.
	So now the Academy comes in after ABC Disney has given up and says, oh, no, no, no, no, we're going to keep you down on the mat.
	But within 24 hours, again, we unleash the whole thing again, and they file a response back to our response, or a reply, if you will, that says, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, we're totally right.
	Four minutes later.
	Oh, no, no, no.
	48 seconds later.
	48 seconds later.
	The claim is dropped.
	The claim is dropped.
	Off the stream.
	But!
	That's not it.
	That's not the whole story.
	No, no, that's just two.
	That's just two of the four.
	Hold on, let me interject real quick.
	So people understand, this is a tactic that they use.
	So this is great that we're able to get these strikes removed, right?
	You can't go back.
	All but one.
	Right?
	You can't go back.
	We can't go back to Sunday night and get that live stream back.
	We can't get those people back watching the show.
	And that's what's so bad.
	And you can't do anything about it real time.
	Hold on, let's go through the strikes and then I want to get into that and any questions you have.
	Sorry, I'm just a little fired up.
	So that's number strike two.
	And then we re-uploaded the archive, right?
	Because the stream was cut at an hour.
	Well, we're going to re-upload the three hours.
	Everyone kept working.
	Everyone kept putting their contributions together.
	Everyone here, by the way, worked tirelessly all night because exporting a four-hour HD file re-export took all night.
	They were supposed to have a day off.
	No one's had time off.
	I'm incredibly appreciative to everyone, even Brendan.
	Continue.
	Number three.
	I mean, they're coming now after the Archive, right?
	They've said, okay, well, we were able to cut you off in an hour, hour and a half on the stream, but now you've got the full thing.
	You're uploading it so that the people can actually see what happened, and they throw the same ones in again.
	So we've got this Academy coming in.
	ABC Disney, though, appeared to have learned their lesson, and they did not attack on the Archive.
	But the Academy goes in, they do theirs, now they've dropped theirs again, and then we had a fourth one on the Archive, which is still there, and we're still fighting right now.
	Be clear though, the fourth one, and this is why this is so important for people to understand, there's a broken YouTube system.
	If you file a hard strike, and for people out there, I know a lot of people are looking for legal representation, and we're planning on trying to provide some more assistance to other people out there at some point.
	We're just not there yet.
	Join up at Mug Club, we'll have more infrastructure.
	But the hard strikes, that's different from a copyright claim that demonetizes you.
	Almost all of our stuff is demonetized.
	We do a parody video, they demonetize us and say, you used the Rocky track.
	But we did a direct parody of Rocky.
	We know it's fair use.
	On that point, by the way, transformative, do you have the numbers from the Oscars?
	What it was?
	The actual numbers?
	It was a three-something hour stream.
	Less than two minutes, I believe.
	It was two hours and thirty-four minutes of our content.
	Meaning sketches, totally original, non-Oscars at all.
	31 minutes of commentary, just us talking about it.
	What I would say, visual and audio overlays that transform the original work into something that is a new work and is critical of the original work.
	I had to fit into a Freddie Mercury slash Eddie Murphy raw leather jacket.
	That's transformative.
	Everything about it was transformative.
	I was a trophy!
	I know!
	We were all transformed.
	Four minutes of total time of the Oscars being full screen on our screen.
	Right, four minutes.
	And that means with no commentary at all?
	No, with commentary.
	Still with commentary.
	How many minutes of just the Oscars without commentary?
	You could count it in seconds.
	Is that like 1 in 124?
	I don't know what it is.
	So would that qualify as transformative?
	Because again, you just can't rip people's content, but the law is it has to be transformative.
	Would that constitute transformative?
	I mean, it's not only transformative, but one of the other factors is how much of the original work are you just showing wholesale?
	And that's what you're doing is you're coming in, you're commenting, you're adding visuals, you're actually specifically critiquing the work.
	And so of the few minutes, or really actually seconds when you break it down, a few seconds of clips here, a few seconds of clips there, where you're literally taking a breath between comments.
	I mean, that's what that adds up to over almost three hours.
	I think the most amount of time we watched was Rami Malek's speech because we said, oh, he seems like a real class act.
	And we commented during it too.
	We were like, oh, that's a good thing.
	We'll give you one, Oscars.
	Were you watching it from me?
	Yeah, of course.
	Until it got shut down.
	I'm the one who got it shut down.
	I'm the one who told ABC about it.
	I've got a question.
	It's for you, half-Asian lawyer Bill Richmond.
	Yes, sir.
	If they're repeatedly proven to be false claims, is there a legal recourse for us to be like, hey, listen, man, this is three, four times, obviously it's on purpose.
	So there is.
	There is a whole procedure involved with doing that.
	And one of the things is that we can get involved with, sorry about that.
	You can get involved with going after some of these, you know, random accounts that are doing small fake claims and maybe they do one a month or two or three a month.
	And look, we've got a lot of things that are happening.
	We can take away from dealing with this or we can go back in the war room and start dealing with these.
	But when they get to a level like this, when you have major companies that are coming in and saying, Hey, we really don't like you creating new content and transforming our works in a way that appeals to this audience.
	That's when we have to stand up and do something different.
	Right.
	And here, you know, it's an indictment of what they are doing themselves that these claims get dropped so quick.
	Well, here's the thing.
	They know all of the claims are bogus.
	Right.
	This is what's important for people who are out there.
	This isn't just about us.
	We'll get to Facebook in a second.
	We just happen to be an example, unfortunately, because particularly on YouTube, we're the number one conservative channel, so we kind of are the blueprint.
	But tomorrow, it could be you.
	One of you could be the blueprint.
	Once you get popular enough, they will come for you.
	And they're coming for all of us.
	That's what's important.
	That's why we have this at the Latte with Cracker shop, the deep platform in this shirt.
	Mug Club and our sponsors like Walther keep us in the game.
	Yeah.
	We've been demonetized on a lot of content.
	A ton of content.
	And that's not small money, by the way.
	No, and it's not small money.
	And increasingly, lately.
	That being said, that's, yeah, and that's really easy to do because they can say, oh, we're going to claim this, we're going to claim that.
	There really aren't, there's no recourse.
	Now, when they try to hard strike your channel, that's where they, in fact, someone has manually submitted a legal notice and we, Bill, half-Asian Bill, uh, half-Asian Bill Richman, manually submits a count, is it a counter notice?
	What is it?
	Counter notification.
	Okay, counter notification.
	And at that point, It goes to the courts.
	In other words, at that point, it's like, OK, listen, if you are lying here, now we're getting into legal hot water.
	They said, OK, we don't want any part of this.
	We've never lost.
	They've always retracted those.
	The thing is, it's the same claim.
	They retracted the hard legal strikes on the stream.
	It's the same claim on the archive.
	It's just there's no recourse because it blocks it in all countries.
	They're saying, we're not hard striking your channel.
	We're just blocking it in all countries so no one can see it.
	And what do they have?
	They have a month to respond?
	Something like that?
	It's a broken system.
	They've got a month to respond, and then there's a different process related to it.
	But ultimately, that is why it's a criticism of YouTube's system.
	Because when you think about it, all the history of what we have done over the last year, 18 months, two years, has been time and time and time again demonstrating how these claims are bogus.
	They're just used to disrupt business.
	They're used to make people have to stay late for the show to have to pay more people, and do more resources, and redo work, and ultimately disrupt the audience.
	And even though they know it's not ultimately going to stop us, They know it is going to have a disruptive effect, and it's the only thing they can do, so they keep doing it.
	But how do they keep doing it?
	YouTube allows it to happen.
	So it's not a system where, despite 10, 20, 30, 100 false claims that we've won every time, and so they have to affirmatively prove it before we get affected.
	It's still, we get affected, and then we have to come and prove it the other way.
	Right, exactly.
	After the stream is over.
	Four days after the event has occurred.
	And this is pretty consistent across the board, by the way, disproportionately with conservative channels.
	You know, we went out there when that lady came up who was talking about it, was it Ain't It Cool News?
	She came out, and we said, have you been affected at all by the adpocalypse?
	She's like, no, not at all.
	And I have someone I contact at YouTube, like, could we have a name?
	Yeah.
	No.
	No.
	That's so cool.
	Well, look, and it's a time-sensitive thing, right?
	So the Oscars, they happen.
	People kind of move on from it.
	Obviously the show's fun and entertaining.
	You can go back to it.
	Think about it this way.
	Think about if we're talking about a presidential election or a Senate election or some bill that's trying to be passed in Congress and they're like, we're commenting on what they're doing, talking about it.
	Or if Congress is putting something out for us, we're commenting on that.
	They can shut us down so that we can't influence people.
	They tried to shut us down once with a presidential debate.
	Yeah, exactly.
	That's horrible.
	This is a tool that's disproportionately used by the left.
	This is what people need to understand, because conservatives don't go out and try and abuse the system.
	You can find more content than you can watch in a lifetime.
	Everything from calling me gay, to a secret transvestite, to a part of the Illuminati, to a Nazi.
	Secret?
	I don't believe in that.
	Come on, let's be honest.
	We just don't have enough female actresses here.
	Thanks.
	But we don't try and shut those down.
	You don't try and shut any of those down.
	We actively, as a matter of fact, one time someone ripped an entire show.
	Oh, yeah.
	And we just reached out to them and said, hey, listen, man, I appreciate the zeal, but could you take it down because it's our whole show.
	Yeah.
	And we'd rather you just maybe take a clip and direct them to our show.
	This person put up a clip instead and directed them to our whole show.
	Perfect.
	We go out of our way to make sure that we are following the kind of fair use rules that we preach.
	I'm just going to tell you something here.
	We're not talking about information.
	We're not talking about a request from... Somebody getting sued!
	Your glasses!
	Your teeth!
	Something getting f***ed up, Larry!
	That's why we got half-Asian lawyer Bill Richman here.
	Is there anything that you think I've missed on YouTube?
	Because now this moves us on to...
	The big thing that many of you may not know about this week, if you haven't been following James O'Keefe, is the Facebook issue.
	So all week, picture this, if this were your job, okay, and you suck at math, which, okay, I do as well, and someone said, you have to do math all day.
	That's your job.
	That's been my job this week, is going back and forth with Bill on legal issues, going, what can we do?
	I'm not good at this.
	I want to focus on creating content.
	I want to focus on creating more shows.
	And this week, we were precluded from doing any of that.
	And poor Pentelis was here.
	He just wanted to have a good time.
	He just wanted to tell the jokes, as they say in Montreal, the Greek sound.
	And instead, he's sitting here going, what's happening with your lawyer?
	I can't believe it.
	That's bullshit.
	That's exactly what I said.
	That is literally a quote.
	That's exactly what you said.
	Bro.
	Bro.
	Okay, so we had YouTube, and then we have Facebook.
	Well, let me give you a little bit of history here with Facebook.
	I guess, Bill, why don't you jump in kind of on the general history with Facebook before we're going to have James O'Keefe want to talk about the most recent, I don't know, at this point, is it even a sin?
	At this point, what do you call it?
	Did you just call it, I mean, it's just dishonesty?
	It's just, I don't know.
	Go ahead, Bill.
	So immediately after we met in the half-Asian zone, We dealt with the Facebook debacle.
	And a lot of folks were around then.
	A lot of the early long-time fans knew that there was a suspicion that things were not going right.
	And at the time, before the Gizmodo article came out, you were submitting-
	I didn't know you, that's how I met you.
	We did not even know each other.
	And at that point, you finally realized, okay, after months and months of trying to figure out
	why is my whole advertising platform being threatened through Facebook, why is all of this negativity happening?
	Why am I literally sending them hard checks with money?
	This is important for people to note with Facebook.
	I've run ads on Facebook for years.
	What happened was all of a sudden they came to me and said, hey, you didn't pay your tab.
	I said, well, hold on a second.
	You've charged me for two years every single week, and you've charged me every single week thereafter.
	There's just a two-week gap.
	I don't know what you guys did, but here's my credit card.
	Here's my PayPal.
	Fix it.
	They said, we can't.
	You're not good on your tab.
	I said, well, hold on a second.
	Here's another credit card.
	I don't know.
	You have to talk with accounts.
	And I said, OK, hold on.
	Let me talk with accounts.
	But you're still charging me for ads.
	They would not answer the call.
	They said, we're going to put your account into delinquency.
	That means creditors go after me.
	You can destroy your life.
	What did I do?
	Your good friend Jordan said, mail them a check physically to accounts payable.
	They deposited it!
	I think we have it as an overlay here.
	And then they still said, oh, your account isn't in good standing.
	I'm like, well, hold on a second.
	You've taken the money, and you're still taking money for ads.
	What do I do?
	And then the Gizmodo article comes out.
	This was in 2016, where I was named as someone.
	And this isn't about, this is one thing, you know, Alex Jones was on Joe Rogan.
	We were talking about it.
	We're going to get into that in a second, Joe.
	Choke me out, OK?
	Interdimensional elf demons.
	I actually thought it was very interesting.
	Very entertaining.
	You're interdimensional demon elves.
	Interdimensional aliens.
	I'm not talking aliens.
	It's the Clockwork Elves, man.
	The Clockwork Elves.
	Okay, Joe.
	There's a lot of this.
	Let's do this right now!
	It was wildly entertaining.
	Your face is not really enough for the impression.
	But I don't even, what was I saying?
	I was saying something before.
	Oh, okay, so this happened with the Facebook shoot.
	Gizmodo, yeah.
	And then Gizmodo, there was an article leaked where we were manually selected as a page to throttle.
	It was Ted Cruz, Chris Kyle Foundation, and myself.
	And I called Bill, not knowing about the time, saying, I don't know if this is related to the accounting issue, but can you tell me what you think?
	And he says, let me check it out, and I'll call you back.
	And then you called me back, and you said, yeah, this looks really bad.
	Well, you know, I mean, you get a call and you hear something like this and you think, crackpot!
	But you can imagine, I get a lot of calls that are, you know, some are, you know, got credibility and some don't.
	And so you gotta check them out.
	And when we started to look into it and we started to investigate and we started to say, If you investigate it as a true thing, what are the things you could use to verify that this is the way that it's happening?
	And when you looked at, I mean, before I even got involved, you were time after time after again, message, message, message, message, money, money, money, card, card, card, check, nothing.
	And then Gizmodo just confirmed the suspicions that you had at the time that there was something happening.
	And what the big part here is that we've always said this, right?
	You know, people use the term censorship, which we understand is a governmental thing versus a private company thing.
	And hey, this is their sandbox.
	They can create certain rules under the Constitution, federal law, state law.
	They can set the rules for their sandbox and say, I'll invite you in, you can spend some
	money here, it'll all be good.
	But the problem is when they say the rules are A, but they're actually enforcing a set
	of rules called B. And that's what happened here.
	They're telling you, spend hundreds of thousands of dollars of your money to build your business on this platform because here are the rules.
	But in reality, the rules were different for you.
	Right, right.
	And Breitbart and Chris Kopp.
	And a lot of conservatives out there.
	We've seen this disproportionately target conservatives.
	We'll talk with James O'Keefe about this.
	This isn't just about us.
	It's about anyone out there.
	If you've had suspicions, unfortunately, we have the resources to have confirmed quite a few of these suspicions.
	It's happening, I don't want to say across the board, but it's certainly happening a lot to conservatives.
	And a lot of people say, well, I don't know, and there's no way to prove it.
	Well, you do have to take legal action, and we've done that in the past, but I think it has to get a lot more severe going forward.
	Imagine this is your work.
	I don't know, you own a factory where you make chairs, OK?
	And you agree to a lease.
	You build up a factory, and they come in.
	You have a five-year lease at year two.
	They say, by the way, we're going to quadruple the lease, what you're paying.
	You say, well, hold on a second, we have an agreement.
	They go, nah, there's a loophole in there.
	But hold on.
	I paid for this.
	We had an agreement.
	That's what's happened with Facebook.
	That's what's happened with YouTube, is we've come to an agreement largely because they've courted us.
	They wind and dined us and sent us to New York.
	Not just largely.
	I mean, the Facebook emails, I mean, they're basically getting on their knees like, please come spend your money on our ads.
	The next email is, well, but we actually are taking your money, but we don't know where the money's going.
	It's just going into the Zucker zone.
	Yeah, exactly.
	The Zucker Zone, where all the conservatives sit there at that summit, and they're like, oh, really?
	I think you're earnest, Zucker.
	Please don't harm me!
	And he's like, I am a human.
	Drink the water.
	I am a human.
	Drink the water.
	I wonder what George Soros is doing right now.
	Round him up!
	Here's my question.
	So with that, that's how we met.
	Yeah.
	The result there was you spoke with, would you say, top legal brass at Facebook?
	They had some outside counsel.
	The outside counsel were very helpful.
	The inside folks, they had to get to the right folks.
	But ultimately, there was none of this, you know, screw you, we're not going to do what you want, what you're saying is completely bogus.
	It was, OK, here, we're going to apply your money.
	Here's your money back.
	I mean, it was a resolution that got us what we needed and in a place to where they had said.
	The resolution was a little more acquiescent than that.
	Oh yeah.
	Okay, it was resolved outside of court, so we can't necessarily discuss it, but listen.
	They weren't like, bullsh**.
	A, because they weren't Pentelus, but B, they didn't deny it.
	It was a result.
	And the point was, A, if there's a problem going forward, We'll be there to make sure it's okay.
	And look, there's got to be a fairness here to say, you know, Facebook's one of the largest employers in the country.
	Sure.
	There's a lot of people, and there's maybe a times where you could say, hey, someone's acting rogue, or hey, maybe there's an unintentional, but, you know, the Gizmodo article was most important because it wasn't just one person saying, hey, I looked in the cubicle next door and this guy's deleting conservative pages, right?
	It was like, no, no, there's a whole room of people, and then actually we have papers, and the papers say, man, The conservatives, right?
	It's like, well, I accidentally printed this policy and put it into place for years.
	I mean, that's not, there's a difference there.
	It was a draft, it shouldn't have gotten out, alright?
	It was a draft.
	And part of the resolution with Facebook, I think we can say this, was, we're going to make sure this doesn't happen again.
	Right.
	And so that, you know, we took it with the word, things did change.
	There was, you know... A little bit.
	A little bit is a little change.
	A little bit, a little bit change.
	A little bit, a little bit change.
	Baby steps, baby steps in the elevator.
	Baby steps, DMT, sex party in Silicon Valley.
	Nice, nice.
	Yes, all true.
	And so, you know, we move on, right?
	We move on to get back to the business of content, of red-faced audience.
	We'll get to that in a minute.
	No.
	And that's what we get to, right?
	It's like, hey, get back to the content.
	Yeah, we wanted to get back to the content.
	And this can happen to any of you.
	You know this.
	We've tried to focus on content.
	We've built up Mug Club to hedge our bets.
	After this, this is another example of what happened.
	Facebook started.
	Before we get to James O'Keefe very soon, Facebook started something called Show Pages.
	And they reached out to us and they said, hey, we'd like you to be a show page, which shows basically, as I understood it, multimedia-type pages would be in someone's feed, would be given priority.
	Basically, you would automatically appear at the top of the feed.
	I don't know exactly what it was.
	But lower-level people reached out and said, we think you're the perfect kind of content for a show page.
	And we said, well, hold on.
	How is this going to work once we convert it?
	What if it doesn't work?
	Can we convert back?
	And they said, you know what?
	All right, fine.
	We'll give it a go.
	And they came back to us and said, uh, we can't make you a show page.
	Because we want your content.
	Why?
	And they said, uh, you're not eligible.
	So here's what's happened.
	It's the same thing that's happened with YouTube.
	When they look at just the numbers, when they look at just the impact, they go, hey, this is the exact kind of content we want on our platform.
	Very highly engaged.
	It's content that people are watching on YouTube, for example.
	We keep people on site.
	You watch an average of 12 minutes per video over 30 minutes on a podcast.
	We play by every single rule, and they change it.
	So they said, please, please, please, please, please turn your show into a show page.
	We want you to be one of these pioneers as a multimedia show page.
	Then, ah, you're not allowed to do it.
	Um, and we always suspected one thing too.
	We had this, we called it here the YouTube algorithm, the YouTube Facebook sort of equation, where if we would have 20 or 30,000 viewers on YouTube, we'd have a thousand on Facebook.
	Despite at the time we would have more fans.
	On Facebook we'd have, I think we have about two and a half million fans, something like that.
	Two and two and a half million fans.
	It would be a tenth to a twentieth to a fortieth number.
	You can compare all of the YouTube views to Facebook.
	We always suspect, and we're going, well hold on a second, our video, that's our bread and butter, but no one sees them on Facebook.
	And we have screenshot after screenshot after screenshot of people sending us saying, we're not seeing your stuff in our feed.
	And that again comes to... We'll never let this happen again, Crowder, we promise!
	And we're going, well, it's like we think this is happening again.
	Now remember, one of the possible explanations here is that they have the crappiest livestream product on the planet.
	I mean, one of their main offenses could be, well, it's just because our product is Thor.
	In their defense, you gotta think of the devil's advocate arguments.
	They could literally come down and say, I'm so sorry, it's our fault, we cannot do this because we are the worst.
	I heard that the WWE live streams on Facebook are super huge.
	They're like 50,000 viewers at any given time and they run fine.
	It's just replicants of McMahon, that's it.
	I heard a lot of that stuff might be scripted though, so I don't know.
	It's fake news.
	It's fake news.
	Oh lord.
	It's fake news.
	I'm sorry.
	I just love the Greek bunch of y'all stuff.
	And then, so explain that.
	It brings us to, we'll have him on in a second, that brings us to what was just revealed in
	the O'Keefe video.
	Oh yeah.
	So do you want to tell people before we bring James out?
	Sure.
	So, so most recently, James O'Keefe was, you know, I'm sure everyone's familiar with some
	of his prior work in doing undercover videos and whatnot, but was able to get some just
	amazing insider information.
	And not just someone who decided they wanted to give an anonymous tip, but someone who
	was willing to put their life at risk, their career, their professional life at risk to
	describe what was going on behind the scenes regarding de-throttling or throttling.
	I think it's called de-boosting.
	De-boost is the name of the program.
	throttling of live streams and specifically again Stephen Crowder's at the top of that list.
	And what's important here is I'm this page and the only reason I don't want to do the like I
	want to talk about myself in Von Braun Joe. I just what I'm saying is we are unfortunately an example
	uh of potentially anybody but we are the only as far as I know at page that was fingered in
	both the Gizmodo article back then and now with video live streaming.
	A big part of that was, we lost so much profit on Facebook, because people weren't clicking the links anymore, traffic was being throttled, so okay, we're gonna focus more on multimedia, and then that went... And we kept saying, well, what's going on here?
	It doesn't make any sense, we can look at our growth on MugClub, we can look at our growth on YouTube, why is this not applying on Facebook?
	No answer, no answer, no answer, no answer.
	That's what's so important to note here, is this is something we had long suspected.
	Matter of fact, we talked about never live streaming again, On Facebook and just live streaming because we can only split it two ways to YouTube and to Mug Club because we got so few viewers.
	Then this drops from James O'Keefe and we're sitting there going, okay, he has the code.
	He has the actual code that's baked into our page.
	Again, tell me that that's not a dishonest business practice.
	Wait, if you tell us you can't say the word tranny, all right, fine.
	You tell me you're not going to verify us on Instagram.
	We all, OK, fine.
	But you can't bake in code that you don't tell us about that inhibits our ability to make a living.
	Speaking of which, hit the notification bell if you're watching on YouTube, which is really the only place you're probably watching.
	But more important, join MugClip.
	Lightoffcredit.com slash MugClip for $0.27 a day.
	And subscribe on iTunes as well so you can listen to the audio version.
	And if we get completely shadow banned or de-platformed, at least we can tell you on the iTunes.
	I think real quick, let's get him on.
	Do we have James?
	We have him here, Bill.
	It's not cross-examining because we're not in court here, but James O'Keefe, projectveritas.com slash brave.
	I know they're asking everyone out there to carry cameras with you.
	And really, if you don't have the hidden camera stuff, you can use your phone.
	We've used that in the past.
	We just use an iPhone.
	I'm on the phone.
	No, I'm catching you in a felony.
	James O'Keefe, how are you, sir?
	Good to be with you.
	Sorry to hear about the de-boosting, but I'm here to help you answer with information.
	Well, I appreciate it.
	I know you let me know about this.
	You sent me the video, and I saw the response here from The Virgin.
	And I know Bill has some questions.
	Bill, do you want to lead this off as far as your questions with James?
	I would.
	I would.
	James, thanks for being available.
	Obviously, everyone's been following this very closely, and the work is really appreciated, I know, across the community.
	And probably my first question right off the bat, and I think what a lot of people are interested in knowing is, How did you understand the credibility of the information that you were obtaining, and what steps did you take to make sure that it was verifiably correct?
	Well, that's a great question.
	How do we know you're not a liar?
	Go ahead.
	Well, this took a long time.
	Let's see, where do I start?
	So, about a year ago, we had this insider send us these documents, and this was a lot of documents, and I'm not an engineer, so I don't know exactly what they mean.
	Fast forward a couple months, we get a lot of information, we get a lot of tips at Project Veritas, as you can imagine, from a lot of people claiming to be a lot of things.
	Right.
	And we find out that this person did, in fact, work, or she claimed to work in content review intellectual property.
	So we look at the documents, and You know, my team went through all these, and we see the word de-boost, and we go, whoa.
	Because you don't have to be an engineer when you see this term, and I have it in front of me, iAction de-boost live distribution.
	And there was a screenshot of Mike Cernovich's, this woman had actually taken out a camera and took a picture of the computer screen showing this de-boost.
	So we're like, oh my God, I can't believe we didn't notice this earlier.
	Answer your question.
	I could tell the whole story, but I'll cut it to the bottom line.
	I have other sources inside Facebook that are not willing to go on the record, of course, and a couple of them logged into the back end and showed me this engineer's name, Danny Ben David, showed me his definition of of de-boosting.
	So I know this is real.
	I know that it's not just a made-up document that someone photoshopped because I saw it with my own eyes from another source that corroborated the identity of the engineer and the document itself.
	But the other source did not have access to the other part of Facebook where this de-boosting activity took place.
	He could only corroborate that de-boosting was a thing and that Danny Ben-David is in fact someone who works for Facebook.
	And number three, Facebook's response corroborates the fact that this woman is real because they fired her and I'm actually quite captivated by the response because they say it fired her for in fact leaking these documents.
	That's a big deal.
	Notice no denial.
	Because I do not know why they fired her.
	We couldn't report how they fired her.
	We thought maybe she got fired because she was a bad employee.
	No, they fired her for leaking these documents.
	Would this meet the standard for evidence?
	Does his case hold water?
	So in terms of having some substantial evidence, having someone who can corroborate what the evidence is, that is actually what it purports to be, and they can actually explain it, you're going to hit those authenticity, you're going to hit admissibility, so it goes a long way to what you have.
	And from a practical standpoint, it's not just having one piece of evidence, and that's kind of why I wanted to ask about the credibility.
	Everything that we do here, and I know that you do as well, is based on not just a rumor or a hearsay or a random anonymous tip, but it's taking those things and verifying them Separately and individually.
	And so that's knowing what the credibility is and the steps you took.
	In addition to afterwards getting, you know, essentially verified by Facebook, acknowledging, I think, Stephen, you raise a very good point.
	Not to include the 7 plus 1, by the way.
	That's not very well researched, but that'll come up next.
	Later, later.
	But the other big point there is that this was the opportunity for them to deny, James, the work that you had done.
	And they didn't.
	They, in fact, very much corroborated that these documents, they could have said these documents are fake.
	Before we get to that, I do have a question.
	How do you know I was included on the Deboost, amongst the Deboosted?
	So, and I have a copy of the, you know, this is the, from the video, this is the actual code.
	It says iAction, Sigma iAction Deboost Live Distribution.
	This whistleblower took a screenshot of Mike Cernovich's page, and then she saw this code appear on your page Stephen, we didn't get a screenshot of your page, but we did get a screenshot of the code that appeared on your page.
	It says, Psi Sigma I action debushed live distribution by this engineer.
	And that's something that would be discovered in a motion for discovery, motion for enforcement.
	And I asked the whistleblower, you know, whistleblower insider, whatever you want to call her, I said, would you swear under oath?
	in a court of law that you saw this on Steven Crowder's page is 100%.
	She saw this de-boost action taken on your page and the Daily Caller's page and Mike Cernovich's page.
	She did not see it on any other liberal or political liberal pages.
	She only saw it on your page.
	So then I asked you, Steve, and I said, well, did you do anything malicious?
	Did you talk about suicide in such a way that would get you banned?
	I probably have in the sense that I said, don't do it.
	Well, you shouldn't be banned for that, and if you are deboosted, they should be notifying you.
	Yes, we certainly were not notified, yeah, of the deboosting.
	And I think something that's really important here as well, James, and you didn't know this before you released this article.
	You know, this is how I met Bill Richman.
	We just talked about the Gizmodo article.
	Because there was a leak where someone said we were manually throttling pages.
	Before that, Bill and I had talked about this, we had several videos trending at the top of Facebook.
	One of them was guns, and I can't remember what the other video was.
	It could have been the Feminist Film Festival.
	And then afterwards, we never trended again.
	And we had an issue with accounting, and this article came out, and I spoke with Bill.
	And you didn't know that I was one of the few people named To have been manually throttled before, and I think I'm the only one named in both of these stories.
	Back in that one, it was Chris Kyle Foundation, Ted Cruz for President, I think Breitbart, and yours truly.
	And here, the only three that I've heard named are, I believe you said Cernovich, Daily Caller, and myself.
	So, a big part of us dealing with Facebook was, hey, this ain't gonna happen again, and that's why this story was such a surprise.
	Well, one of the most shocking things about the story, and this is what the insider said, is that What makes this so damning, what makes this so egregious is that... Listen, let me defend Facebook for one second here.
	Facebook has thousands of employees that police... There are some anomalies where some crazy low-level employee takes down, you know, Ben Shapiro or takes down Dennis Prager.
	I actually saw that happen.
	The insider showed me You know, some things and I saw that they, but people they get put back up.
	I mean, you can protest, you can say, listen, I didn't do anything wrong.
	But it is justified with notoriously anti-semitic Jewish scholar, Nazi, Dennis Prager.
	Yeah, we get Dennis Prager, right?
	But if he's some anomaly, some low level left wing employee in Facebook takes the guy down, he gets put back up.
	And there is a commitment to police, this sort of crazed extremist employees at Facebook,
	because we have 60,000 people, once in a while someone's gonna take someone down,
	and there's adults in the room.
	But in this case, the de-boosting, you guys don't know that it's happening to you.
	That's the thing that is very shocking.
	That is the reason why I asked her, she said, well the reason why I chose to lose my job and leak these documents, she actually went on food stamps for a few months because she was broke and unemployed, is because she said the people don't know that it's occurring.
	It doesn't even show up on Facebook's content review, I'm sorry, on Facebook's task Management system.
	It doesn't show up that they're doing it.
	And I've got 75 pages of code, iAction.
	It's automatic.
	It's machine learning.
	They go through your videos, Stephen.
	They convert your videos into text.
	They find keywords.
	The keywords trigger an algorithm, which automatically de-boosts you.
	And you don't know that.
	We called it something in the office, I think Quarter Black knows this, we called it sort of the Facebook to YouTube ratio, in the sense that we were almost guaranteed whatever stream viewership we had on YouTube, it would be anywhere from one tenth to a thirtieth the amount on Facebook, and same thing for videos that were uploaded.
	And here's the thing, with YouTube, and I'm not letting YouTube off the hook here, certainly not when we just talked about ABC Disney and the broken system there, We can see how long people are watching our videos for, where they're coming in.
	We can look at demographics.
	We can tell exactly how many people are watching.
	And we can never really tell that with Facebook, and we haven't been able to monetize videos as far as I know on Facebook.
	But when you have consistently videos, I think our average viewership is close to the million mark.
	And then on Facebook it's 40,000, 50,000, and there's still a couple million fans who've liked that page proactively.
	We just assumed it was, well, Facebook's dying off because nobody likes it anymore and they're, you know, snapping wiener pics on Snapchat and Instagram.
	Turns out that might not be the case.
	Did you have some other important...
	Well, one of the other questions is, in a lot of these instances, when you hear from one of the social media platforms, they'll say, you broke this rule, however subjective or vague the rule might be, and so we're going to have this consequence.
	But at least we have a rule that we can argue with, or fight with, or that kind of thing.
	Here, the response from Facebook is very interesting.
	They say, well, you may have acted with misconduct by uploading to the live stream pre-recorded videos.
	But what you don't find is, where's the example of this actually happening?
	If this really was a rule that Facebook had in its policies at some point in the past, and it was actually violated, why hide behind a secret algorithm?
	I think James has that quote, because I don't think we filled the audience in on that.
	They did respond, and they didn't deny that they've been doing this.
	I can read it to you, or you can throw it on screen, but I'm going to read you Facebook's response to this iAction deboost.
	So what's interesting about the response, Bill, is that Again, within like an hour of our story breaking, Facebook corporate responds to their buddies at theverge.com and all these mainstreaming reporters are buddy-buddy with the people inside Facebook.
	Facebook says, Some pages that tried to game the system by uploading pre-recorded videos to the live API, a violation of Facebook's policy, if moderators found the video, the action deboost tag would be applied to undo the newsfeed boost otherwise applied to live videos.
	And Stephen, I asked you, do you recall doing this?
	No one here has ever done it.
	I know Quarter Black has been in charge of that.
	No one here has ever done it.
	But if it would have been done, it would have been done a long time ago once to test, because we thought there was something fishy with our live streams.
	Going, hold on a second, we're getting 1,000 viewers on a live stream here, and we're getting 20, 30,000 on YouTube?
	What's going on?
	Let's see if we upload this as a video separately versus a live feed.
	If it would have been done, and I don't believe that it has, I just don't want to be put on the hook for that.
	It would have been done once to test a theory.
	That we thought Facebook is doing exactly what they appear to be doing.
	So, no, I don't know that we have done it, and we certainly haven't done it consistently, and their answer isn't very... To me, it's not very clear if they just de-boost that video, that feed, or if they de-boost the whole page, because we've spent a lot of money on Facebook advertising, and a big part of that was them courting us, saying, hey, the great thing here, especially with media, is you're going to appear in people's timelines, we really want to be a multimedia platform.
	They came to us!
	So that's why it would be nice to have clarification.
	Well, another thing, another fact that's very interesting is that if you look at the code in the video where it says Sigma Distribution, Sigma is this name of this program authored by this engineer Danny Ben David with the intention of rooting out like suicide.
	I mean, people on Facebook live stream, Facebook's a big company.
	People kill themselves on Facebook.
	There's pornography, there's people getting chopped in half, there's all gory thing, child porn.
	The content review agents go through and go through that.
	So this system was apparently used to combat things like that.
	That does not exist in Facebook's response, but my insider showed me that the reason why this was taken allegedly, was to combat suicidal or violent things.
	So I'm hearing two different explanations of what this de-boost is for.
	If you want my opinion as someone who's done this for 10 years, you know, hidden camera,
	exposing people, I think they're just caught and they're not debating what we've exposed.
	They're just sort of obfuscating here.
	And I think you guys are owed an explanation.
	I think you need to see the back end and you need to know what's going on with your live stream.
	In their defense, if it's the child porn issue, they could have seen your nudie scene and been confused.
	I just look like a child.
	Bill is very baby-like.
	They could have thought it was cherubim porn.
	Do you have any other follow-ups for James?
	The big thing is, like I was saying, if there really was a violation, then they lead with saying, you have violated X policy, instead of a post-hoc, well okay, our response now for having done this for however many years or months it's been going on, and only to your pages, is because we think you may have done something wrong.
	But notice the response does not even say, the pages had issues, or the pages that were discussed, or Stephen Crowder did these things.
	They just say kind of generally, Oh, well, that's why we did it.
	And that might even be true, but I think, James, your point is correct.
	There has to be an opening of the kimono.
	Let's share what exactly are the facts here.
	Yes, you have to go to the kimono reference, of course.
	He's trying to make sure if there is to be a lawsuit that he has the Asian card in there, but it's really only half a kimono.
	It's a very short kimono.
	It's like Rob Lowe in Thank You for Smoking.
	I do have a question for you, though, and then a follow-up.
	Maybe James can also help clarify this.
	How important would it be if, let's say, an emotion for—is it an emotion for discovery?
	Is that what it is?
	Well, you would serve discovery requests.
	Okay, so how important would it be to, let's say, a case if it were verified that this is a real thing—and it seems like it's a real thing, they're not denying it—and that it was not equally applied across conservative and liberal platforms?
	Would that change it if they said, well, this was applied pretty much consistently across leftist platforms, not just conservatives?
	What it would do is it would only mean that everyone is being conned.
	That's really what it would mean.
	It does make it worse if it's targeted to a certain political group, just as if it would be bad if it was gone after a certain race or religion or that type of thing.
	But it's essentially saying a political creed or race or religion is bad, but it's somewhat like hate crimes.
	The crime is still a crime, regardless of whether it's a hateful or targeted at a specific group.
	And James, can you confirm anything like that?
	I know you said your source mentioned this, but do you have any information that could confirm that people on the right were more unfairly targeted?
	Yes.
	There's a deboosting, and then there's this other part of the story.
	I've got these documents on my desk, so I have my facts correct here.
	These are all screenshots taken by the Woman Who Blew the Whistle, this is something called a troll report.
	A troll report where they identify language, that there's a whole bunch of tactics they use, there's a glossary of words that are used by individuals, and this guy confirms that they do, in fact, demote bad content.
	Can you give us some examples of those words?
	Because I read this, I've seen this, and I was obviously not appalled, but... I wish I could say surprised.
	Not surprised, just... It was really more of a disappointed, apparently.
	You did that on Facebook?
	So I want to make sure I get my facts straight, and this is incontrovertible proof, Stephen.
	This is not my words, the whistleblower.
	These are documents obtained of this troll report where they use words like lulz, normie, mainstream media, MSM, the term MSM.
	These are terms appropriated by conservatives.
	Liberals don't really use the term MSM on social media.
	Isn't SJW on there?
	SJW's on there.
	What else?
	No leftist channel.
	It's not like they've re-appropriated the word and go, we're proudly SJW.
	I mean, you know, maybe if you found some like transgender black single mom with rickets, maybe there's someone who would carry that mantle.
	But that's something, if they're saying these are words to throttle pages, putting in SJW would definitely disproportionately target conservatives.
	I don't know why LOL is on that list.
	So, no, it's LULZ.
	It's like a, you know, it's a meme.
	So this is after, so here's the deal.
	On the inside of Facebook, we saw this Seiji Yamamoto character, one of the top engineers, right?
	After the 2016 election, meme culture kind of helped elect President Trump.
	So they decided to have an influence on elections, and this is one of the most powerful parts of the story.
	They assigned what's called a troll score.
	under the fake account index, a special feature leading, this is a direct quote, leading up to important elections, unquote, identifying these keywords that conservatives use.
	This is like a big deal.
	And Mark Zuckerberg said under oath and testimony last spring that they don't do this, that they don't make political determinations.
	Yes, they ban Klansmen and pornography and violence, but they don't But this engineer, Seiji Yamamoto, and he's not a low-level guy.
	He's the head of the whole department that heads this stuff.
	We have a copy of the confidential report where they identify these words, and it's all in the documentation that this whistleblower gave to us.
	All right, do you have any more questions?
	That's it for right now.
	Okay, that's it for right now.
	Well, James, Mr. O'Keefe, please do keep us in the loop, obviously, because we do have a half-Asian Kraken here.
	Kraken?
	Kraken?
	Kraken!
	I don't know why I keep saying it incorrectly.
	It is projectveritas.com slash brave, not to be confused with that awful Pixar film.
	It was a big swing and a miss for Pixar with the redhead.
	James, thank you for being here, brother.
	We appreciate it.
	Thanks, Steve.
	And, no, no, no, you don't need a break.
	We don't need a break.
	We're going to be going to the 7 Plus 1 here in just now, I think.
	Oh, yeah.
	Yeah, okay, hold on.
	You forgot the van in the chamber!
	Eight.
	By the way, there is no one in the chamber.
	We checked this.
	For people who are just tuning in now, we checked it, we cleared it.
	This week is actually, if you haven't noticed the theme, 7 plus 1 Big Tech Legal Dramas.
	Speaking of which, I had a quick question for Half Asian Lawyer Bill here.
	I'm just sitting here listening and soaking it all in.
	Has there been any widespread throttling and de-boosting, essentially, of liberal accounts?
	Have a lot of liberals come forward?
	Because all I've really heard—and this may be my own bias— He literally just said that while you were in the bathroom.
	He literally just said no as far as he knows.
	As far as he knows, because of the trigger words they use, like any page that has SJW, No, he said you haven't seen it in the media.
	I thought I knew the answer.
	I think the answer would be no, but I'm asking him, like, is there anything behind the scenes where, like, oh, it's both conservatives and liberals getting screwed?
	It just seems like conservatives are getting screwed, and I just wanted it to be not my opinion, but fact.
	Well, hold on.
	You don't know yet.
	That's why you have to sue.
	Allegedly.
	Allegedly.
	There's the word.
	There's the keyword.
	Allegedly, according to the eyewitness.
	And the amount of documents that we have.
	A phone photo of a computer screen, allegedly.
	It is that the specific code was only seen on conservative pages.
	And of those conservative pages, the ones that were memorable, Mike Cernovich has got an actual screenshot, which was not able to get a screenshot of Stevens, but affirmatively said, I saw the code on Stevens' page.
	And then said, I've seen other pages that did not have the code.
	So, is it possible that it is on other pages?
	Absolutely.
	Is that something that Facebook could come out and be like, hey guys, actually it's on everyone.
	Hey look, we can show you the usage that we actually only did it if you uploaded a pre-recorded video to the live feed, which is the excuse they've given.
	But they have not said any of that.
	No, they haven't said any of that.
	They've said that we violated the rule, which we may or may not have violated once.
	I'm willing to bet my bottom dollar that we have never done that, and if we did, you don't get to throttle an entire page.
	Something else I was going to say.
	This is one thing too, and I really did enjoy Alex Jones on Joe Rogan's show, and they're both actually, they've both been on the show, I consider them both friends.
	So entertaining.
	It's great.
	But there was a point where they were talking, and they were saying, is it true that on YouTube now they demonetize any videos that have the word truth or liberty in them?
	And they were like, yes it is.
	It's not.
	So the lie is not necessary because the truth is bad enough.
	We have videos up there like the truth about guns, the truth about... we have multiple videos that have the words the truth in them, and not all of them have been demonetized.
	So is it true that conservative videos have been unfairly targeted?
	Absolutely.
	Have we seen a disproportionate amount of demonetization?
	Yes.
	But you don't need to lie and say, Hey, I heard that any video that even has truth in the title is demonetized.
	It's not accurate and it doesn't help the legal cases going forward.
	This is something you need to understand.
	There's bitching on social media and then there's actually taking legal matters into your own hands and taking the proper steps and using the avenues that are available to you.
	So just, my only point is, if you don't know, Don't lie, because then you toss the lies in with all of the truth.
	All right, but these are the seven plus one big tech legal dramas, which really shouldn't be... They were missed.
	It's almost like big tech's run out of ideas at the DMG sex parties.
	Number seven, to copyright a mockingbird.
	Yeah, that almost... That's not good use of an attorney's time.
	Number six.
	This is no surprise.
	Your favorite.
	My Cousin Dorsey.
	Yeah, that's number six.
	Seven plus one.
	Big legal dramas.
	I want to hear Pentelus read one.
	Give us number five, Pentelus.
	Number five is a few good men-hating Facebook engineers.
	We have the best Photoshop team, and I've seen Stephen Colbert's Photoshops and Bill Maher's.
	They're just absolutely terrible.
	We really have great people, even Brendan.
	I'll say this one because I'm already guilty of the hate speech.
	Number four, and justice for all, tranny makeup tutorials.
	Yeah, I don't think so. Man, I look good here. Let's have Bill, can you do number three?
	Can you read it?
	Absolutely.
	Anatomy of a bullshit plane.
	There you go.
	Oh, look at that.
	That's a legal term.
	That is.
	It's not a very iconic poster, that one.
	No.
	Number two.
	Inherit the windbags.
	Yeah, for those who don't know, that was the infamous monkey trial.
	The actual monkey trial.
	It was the evolution trial.
	No one talks about how back then just a lot of the evolutionary theory was incredibly racist.
	They just gloss over it.
	Hold on a second.
	Hold on a second.
	You want to accuse the conservative Christians of being like, do you know what some of you believe there?
	We don't want it.
	We don't want it.
	We can't even.
	Hey, why don't you hit us a number two there, Pentelus?
	All right.
	Number two, an uncivil half-Asian.
	Yes, an uncivil half-Asian.
	By the way, we have a major conspiracy episode coming up, and it is about the graphic designer for all early 90s through early 2000s John Travolta films.
	I'm pretty sure it was the same person.
	I'm not saying Illuminati, but... Number two!
	Can't forget number two.
	Legally half-Asian.
	Not so much a drama.
	Look at his face!
	That's good!
	I love how amused, I don't know if I should be concerned that my legal representation is as amused as the part-time
	Greek Montrealer.
	We both have good taste in humor.
	Number one, top big tech legal dramas is Presumed Guilty.
	That's a striking similarity to Harrison Ford.
	And the plus one this week, plus one top ten, top seven, top seven plus one, the plus one, the plus one, I keep saying the plus one, the plus one, the plus one, top big tech legal dramas, Aladdin.
	There you go.
	That has been this week's seven plus one.
	A whole new world.
	You forgot Sivan in the chamber!
	Well thank you.
	You forgot Stefan in the chamber!
	Again.
	Nine!
	Did you hit it twice?
	It just played itself again.
	Is this the show?
	Do I have a TriCaster with Parkinson's?
	I have like 16 bullets.
	Pretty confident it's just the style.
	You're also very bad at... Wait, eight?
	Yeah, 16, you're right.
	That's right, 7 plus 1.
	I was thinking 6 plus 1.
	I was thinking the Walther PPK, the PPKS is 7 plus 1.
	I don't think you were doing all the math.
	No, I wasn't really doing the math.
	Again, I've been having to do legal crap all week.
	We are going to keep you updated.
	So, if we were to, let's say, file a suit, would we be able to let people viewing right now know by sometime next week?
	Yeah, we definitely will.
	I mean, look, there's a lot of work that we put in, not just on the legal team, but working with you and your team to make sure that everything that we're doing, we're verifying it, we're checking against legal structure, we're looking about what the natural consequences are, and also weighing it against the fact that it's going to take time away from content and away from the audience.
	So that's why we have to go out, do the right thing, both to the audience and from a legal standpoint, also being that You know, this isn't just about you.
	It's about you and everyone else.
	I mean, there have been times where both the left and the right have stood up and said, what are these social media companies doing with their shadow banning and their ridiculous rules and their subjective application of them?
	Here, again, though, consistently, consistently, consistently, the only one name between Gizmodo and James O'Keefe's investigation is Steven Crowder.
	It gives us more of a leg to stand on so that we can hopefully pave the way for the rest of you.
	Because I don't want to do this for the rest of my life, and I'm hoping for someone else to come.
	I want to see other conservative channels out there.
	I want to see more.
	I want to see you guys grow.
	And to do that, listen, it's a multi-tiered approach.
	Join up at Mug Club.
	You help us fight this battle.
	You help us have not only Bill Richmond, but hopefully, I don't know, clerks?
	Are there clerks?
	The associates.
	I shut the clerk.
	I shut the clerks and moral legal team and listen let me know if here's one thing a lot of people go sue Charles Hermes sue Twitter sue well it's at some point that does mean that there are going to be some days some weeks if we're in court or I have to take the stand where you're gonna miss out in the show and and that's a part of what Mug Club is and I I want to make sure that if we go down this road that you understand the magnitude of it, that you understand the severity of it, that you understand we are doing it for you.
	And so I want to know if you're willing to sacrifice some content in the short term for us to be free from the shackles of corporate censorship long term.
	Half-Asian lawyer Bill Richman, I look forward to the updates.
	Thank you very much.
	Pantelis Comedy, go subscribe to him on YouTube.
	He's one of the funniest men I know.
	We'll be right back with The Close.
	There's a lot of crime going on in Mexico, and the drug cartels are sort of infiltrating the suburbs, and MS-13 is all over Long Island, you know, with Oxycontin.
	If you want to help, just stick with the calling the police and stuff like that.
	I don't recommend actually getting involved in sort of, you know, citizens' arrests, and then sort of like, what are you guys doing there?
	and I'm gonna tell the gobs and that doesn't turn out great.
	It's a heartbreaking sight.
	A cold, hungry, half-Asian lawyer with no one to sue.
	For only 27 cents a day, you can ensure a steady, nutritious diet of big-tech shadowbanners and corporate hypocrites to a hungry, half-Asian lawyer.
	Feed half-Asian lawyer Bill Richmond.
	Join Mugslum today.
	Hello Lolliwoodcarnival viewers, Hopper here.
	Don't forget that you can listen to the podcast on the go on iTunes and SoundCloud.
	And the audio, you can download it. And you can listen at your leisure.
	Yeah, I want to be clear here that I wasn't joking.
	that I wasn't joking.
	Like, there's people you don't like.
	Oh, Trump's a Nazi and I hate these Proud Boys and these Patriots.
	Yell at them.
	Sure, do that.
	But then when they're actual gangsters or actual criminals, maybe take a step back.
	Yeah, let them sort of mind their own business and you should probably mind yours.
	Tell my wife I love her.
	And that picture wasn't me.
	I'm sorry.
	I'm sorry.
	a an
	That was someone who's drowning trying to do a lat flair, pose, but then gets taken
	away by the current, but he's so narcissistic that he still keeps going, I gotta squeeze,
	I gotta flex, gotta do the lat flair.
	All kinds of lat flares.
	All kinds of lat flares.
	Have you seen how conservative the Hodgetwins, by the way, are on Instagram lately?
	Oh yeah, yeah, extreme.
	They've gone full bore.
	So far.
	Thank you so much on behalf of Eden Lawyer Bill Richmond, we will keep you updated, and let us know which sins you think are most egregious here.
	It has nothing to do with the power of the mob, We've just, we've filed for motions for information before in the past.
	We've tried to play nicely.
	We've settled out of court.
	It's gotten to the point where it's really impeded our ability to make a living.
	Thank you so much to Pentelus Comedy.
	Please go subscribe to his YouTube channel.
	He does a podcast with Mike Ward, by the way.
	Yes, he does.
	On the New Cameo Network.
	It's fun.
	So something I do want to talk, and I've talked about this before, but I think it's more relevant than ever.
	is this mantra that I hear a lot, and I think it's incred- I hate to use the word toxic now.
	These terms have been co-opted.
	But it really is toxic, the idea that failure is not an option.
	You hear that a lot.
	Failure is not an option.
	Um, well, right now this is an example.
	We're talking about this.
	We're fighting Facebook, Disney, ABC, the Academy.
	I don't even know if they are Disney, ABC.
	Uh, internal battles, of course.
	We have battles with- well-known battles with YouTube.
	This has been going on for a long time, and it is I want to say sometimes it feels insurmountable, and I'll come back to this.
	Sometimes, of course, I want to pack up and go home.
	It has been a very, very trying week, and as you know, Hopper's been sick.
	He's been doing very well.
	Thank you so much for your comments.
	I'm not at the top of my health game right now, but let me just tell you something.
	Failure is absolutely an option.
	I know that.
	I've talked about this a lot, but I'd like to put a finer point on it.
	A good example, recently I was watching television.
	And I saw a commercial that mentioned Huntsville, Alabama, you know, Rocket City, USA, and the man in the commercial was talking about how failure, failure was not an option.
	Now here's the thing, I understand where he's coming from, I'm not saying that rocket scientists, NASA, whoever this guy was, is being dishonest.
	He's effectively trying to express the importance of the task, and the severity of the failure therein.
	Okay, someone could die, something could blow up.
	I appreciate the accountability being expressed in the sentiment, so do not get mad, don't say you're attacking NASA, that's not what I'm doing here.
	But I disagree with the phrase.
	And I think it's one we need to do away with.
	I certainly would encourage you to do away with it in your personal life.
	Mainly because I see so many people use it as a personal mantra.
	Failure is not an option.
	Kind of like an, I think I can.
	I think I can.
	I think I can.
	But I've talked about this before.
	My good friend Chello has talked about this before.
	Failure is always an option.
	In fact, it's often the easiest and most readily available option.
	That doesn't mean that the consequences are easy or desirable, but the action of failing is always there, every step of the way.
	It's more apparent to me now than ever.
	As we talk about on this show, your guiding light above all else, I hate to sound cheesy, but it needs to be truth.
	And so I don't think that ever denying reality is the most productive route.
	I just don't believe it.
	I know that it's been helpful for me, and I think it would behoove many of you to consider dropping the mindset for a more accurate one.
	Failure is always an option.
	Don't tell yourself it's not.
	If you tell yourself it's not, you're effectively denying this huge, this ribbon, this milky way, this cosmic belt of reality.
	Sometimes it's the biggest cosmic belt of reality in your path, certainly the most looming.
	Let me give you an example.
	Let's say you're driving down a freeway.
	There's a major roadblock, let's say a five-car pileup.
	Does it help you to say, there's no pileup, it's not even on the table?
	Or is it more productive to see the pileup, to acknowledge it, and to refuse to allow it to impede your progress?
	See, the former mindset, that of telling yourself that there is no roadblock, failure's not an option, leads to what?
	What does it lead to?
	Riding straight into that roadblock.
	The latter, acknowledging it, seeing the roadblock, including this data, incorporating the information into your reality, largely because it is reality, I'll come back to that in a second, living your truth, would be more productive, it would lead to a solution.
	You know it's there, but you don't want to end up in that roadblock, so you're more likely to Take a different route!
	To recalibrate!
	To succeed!
	Why do we tell ourselves this, that failure is not an option?
	Why do we consistently lie to ourselves?
	And why has it been accepted as though it's... And I see it in the Christian community as well as this sort of self-help guru community.
	Which is more productive?
	Okay, let's just look at this from a pragmatic point of view.
	The failure is not an option mantra.
	Or, let's just say, let's... we switched it to failure is disallowable.
	I'd like to see more people saying failure is disallowable as opposed to lying to themselves saying that failure is not an option.
	It may sound trivial, but one is a soundbite and one is a way of life.
	One is a mantra that sounds good on daytime talk shows, that sells self-help books.
	The other is a very non-sexy but necessary mindset to deal with your own shortcomings.
	Most importantly, one is dishonest and one is truthful.
	I'd say it's honestly, it's even more severe than that.
	In that one is dishonest in arguably the most destructive way possible.
	And then it's the kind of dishonesty in which you lie to yourself.
	But when you're married, failure is not an option.
	Failure's not an option.
	In your work, failure's not an option.
	Failure's not an option.
	In your physical training, failure's not an option.
	Failure's not an option.
	Only to find yourself at some point when you've been living with this mantra, I don't know, a broken marriage, possibly a divorce, losing your job, or in the most literal sense, physical harm, finding yourself under a barbell.
	By the way, I don't know what's happened with my wrist.
	It's not the power glove with the boy from Boy Meets World, the brother, the old Fred Savage.
	Wizard.
	Wizard, that's what it is.
	It's so bad.
	And by the way, that's why I believe that physical training is so important.
	A lot of people say, oh, you're a meathead.
	No.
	Sometimes experiencing the most literal strain possible tells you a lot about yourself, a lot about your place in this world and how you interact with it.
	So do me a favor.
	We do this every week and often you tweet me or you send me messages and it ends up on the Mug Club Life Advice segment.
	Do me a favor, run this experiment.
	Find out what your maximal strength is.
	How much you can squat, deadlift, hell, I don't care.
	How many pull-ups you can do, okay?
	This is just an experiment.
	I'm not saying that how many pull-ups you can do determines your marital quality.
	But just find something that measures your maximal strength.
	Write it down, okay?
	Perform it once.
	Now, I want you to add 15%.
	Doesn't seem like a ton, right?
	Tell yourself failure's not an option.
	Repeat it as many times as necessary.
	Listen to your amp-up music.
	Get Slayer going.
	I don't know what you listen to nowadays.
	I don't know if Linkin Park is still a thing.
	That's what pissed me off in high school.
	Get yourself to peak by any means possible and try it.
	Pause this right now.
	Try it.
	Add 15%.
	Did you succeed?
	See, that's why the mantra of failure is not an option is so harmful.
	Because amidst all of this lying to yourself, All the while, these roadblocks keep piling up.
	You will come to that roadblock.
	You will come to that pileup.
	It's there.
	It's always there.
	But if you acknowledge it, if you're honest with yourself, you can prepare for it.
	And you can choose, not always, but often, to disallow failure.
	So I want you to take that same experiment, okay?
	Find out your maximal strength.
	Same as before.
	Could be a squat, could be even a number of pull-ups.
	It just has to be consistent with what you did before.
	Now, instead of performing it and then adding 15% and amping yourself up with failure is not an option, I want you to take a different tack.
	I want you to acknowledge that that is your limitation.
	That going past it will lead to failure.
	Keep that in the back of your mind.
	But don't reach it.
	Don't max out.
	And here's what I want you to do.
	I want you to not perform to failure, but to chart a course to improve it.
	For example, let's say your maximum squat is 300 pounds.
	Consistently do less.
	Call it 275 pounds.
	But gradually add, every time you go into the gym, 5 pounds.
	Work hard!
	Work hard!
	Work diligently, but not to failure.
	If you can do 15 pull-ups, only do 12 or 13.
	But consistently.
	And add one rep.
	Write it down.
	And then, I want you to come back and note when you surpass your previous limit.
	I guarantee you, this is a promise, okay?
	Not an empty promise.
	I guarantee you that using that method, you will surpass it.
	And you'll probably be surprised by how quickly it happens.
	Now, this experiment here, it's not about lifting weights.
	is to show you that one way of doing things, the failure is not an option, doesn't work.
	You can try and move that weight, shove and heave and strain all you want, you will be no closer, 0% closer to achieving growth than you were when you started.
	The other, while not sexy, very workmanlike, it's not a show horse, it's a Clydesdale, will lead to breakthrough.
	The breakthrough you were seeking in the first place.
	It's a great irony in life that these triumphant, these grandiose ways that we try to achieve our breakthroughs, they're usually the ones that keep us from achieving them.
	Because it's the preparation that matters.
	It's the in-betweens, like I've talked about.
	It's the unsexy measures we take when no one is watching.
	When the excitement's worn off and failure is always an option in the back of our mind.
	See, one, the failure is not an option is effectively the false mantra of living your truth.
	That's why I think I hate it so much.
	Whereas the decision to acknowledge failure as an option, but disallowing it to determine your long-term circumstances is the equivalent to living in the truth.
	I don't think there's anything sillier than saying I'm speaking my truth.
	That's a hedge to say, you could be a f***ing liar.
	That's what you could be saying.
	Sorry, Corridor Blackguard has to hit the censor button.
	I'm a little pissed off this week.
	I don't really care.
	I've let it fly.
	I'll reset.
	I'll recalibrate next week, because I realize failure with my vocabulary is an option.
	But what does living your truth mean, if you're not living in the truth?
	There is absolute truth, and sometimes your truth and the truth are incongruent.
	As a matter of fact, I'd wager more often than not, because often the truth is really uncomfortable.
	But guess what?
	The truth is always there.
	It's always there, and if your truth isn't the truth, it's going to hit you like a brick in the face.
	Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow.
	Sooner or later, the truth is coming from you.
	Did I say from you or for you?
	I don't care.
	Live life without limits!
	That's another bumper sticker that I saw.
	I'm trying to go on a course.
	Live life without limits!
	Someone has this bumper sticker showing that they were climbing on a summit.
	What the hell does that mean?
	What does that mean?
	The truth is you have limits!
	I'm a rock!
	No!
	You're a human.
	And you're breakable.
	We all are.
	Where people lie to themselves when they're sick.
	How many times do you know these people?
	The positive speaking bullcrap.
	I understand you don't want to be a negative Nancy.
	But you're like, no!
	I'm not sick!
	I don't get sick!
	I'm going to speak over myself!
	I'm not sick!
	And they cough up a lung.
	Listen, you can't lift that weight.
	At some point in your life, you're going to die.
	You are sick.
	Your marriage has problems.
	You're dropping the ball at certain aspects of your job, or as a father, or as a husband.
	You've made promises to yourself that you haven't kept.
	That's reality.
	And to tell yourself that failure is not an option is to consistently live in a state of denying reality.
	It's delusional by definition.
	Right now, to give you an idea, to tie this back into us, and I don't want this to just be about me, we were hit with four copyright claims in the same day, on the same show, to try and suppress it.
	Three have been defeated.
	They're just biding their time on the fourth, hoping that the Oscars will no longer be relevant, and that you don't watch it when it's available.
	Please prove them wrong.
	We're currently preparing for an epic legal war with Facebook.
	One that will test the integrity and fortitude, not only of myself, but everyone on this team.
	Also you.
	How long will you stick it out?
	How long will you support us?
	This week we had to miss three shows to fight these battles.
	Believe me, that wasn't fun for us.
	There are going to be a few more weeks like that, if this goes to court.
	How long are you in?
	When the dust has settled, the excitement of the initial war, the battle cry has died out, when we're in the trenches, rained on, covered in dirt, waiting.
	Are you still there?
	Because failure is always an option!
	I have to be honest with myself, right now, failure is the most easy, readily available option.
	I'm not a rock, I'm not a man without limits, I'm a very limited man who is fallible and breakable.
	It'd be a lot easier to fail right now, because rather than continuing, rather than reinvesting and creating for the unheard majority of Americans, you, the international fans out there, I know we have a lot of Canadian Greek Orthodox, Pantelis just told me this, I could collect my marbles that I've gained thus far right now and go home.
	Even more, I'm at a point right now where I know that failure of this program, of this movement, of your movement right now, is a much more easy option today than it will be once we're in this fight.
	Because once we're in this fight, we can't unring that bell.
	Unless we win, I can't recoup all the resources, finances, creative energy, and just life energy that's been invested into it.
	Failure is a much more easy option for me to choose today than it would be tomorrow, or the next day, or the next, and I know that, and I struggle with it.
	I could lie to you, I struggle with it all the time.
	There are times where I come really close to calling it and packing it in.
	To deny that, to lie to myself, and to lie to you about it for the sake of some kind of inspirational soundbite would not only be dishonest, it would cloud my judgment to the decisions that I have to make for all of us moving forward.
	It would also belittle, by the way, the magnitude of what you've done for me.
	You, the listener, you're for us.
	The truth is that you've helped us build something so impactful, so important to such a multitude of people that the walls are closing in, tempting us by providing the option of failure.
	That's where we are right now.
	Failure would be a relief.
	Failure is an option, I'm not gonna lie to you.
	I go a step further and say not only an option, it's a very possible outcome.
	That's why it's at the front of my mind.
	I want it to be at the front of yours.
	Because then we're all on the same page knowing that right now, at this moment in history, we all have a decision to make.
	We can choose failure right now.
	We can choose easy right now.
	And it's available.
	It's right there.
	We can choose relief.
	We can choose peace through failure right now.
	Or we can choose to go through the hard door.
	And this may not be as inspirational, it may not sell as many books, but I can promise you this, so long as you, all of you watching, listening, streaming, choose to go through those hard doorways, those thresholds, meaning many, doorway after doorway after doorway, so long as you keep choosing to do that with us, I promise you so will I. You tell me, are you in?
	Comment, let me know.
	If you're in, I am.
	To the rest of you, fill your hand, you son of a b****.
	For everyone else, there's Mug Club.
	See you next week.

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