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Nov. 1, 2022 - The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters
01:30:46
The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #514
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Hello and welcome to the podcast of the Lotus Eaters episode 514 on today the 1st of November 2022.
I'm your host, Harry, joined today by Connor.
Hello there.
And today we only have two stories for you, but they are big and important stories.
Very chunky.
Yes, especially Connors is going to be very, very chunky.
First off, we're going to be talking about there's something about Pelosi and trying to unravel the mystery of Paul Pelosi and the mystery attacker.
And then we're also going to be talking about The Intercept's new expose on how the DHS and the Biden administration have been censoring American citizens.
And let's be honest, the rest of the West as well, because we all use Twitter and Facebook as well.
Before I go further, we do have a new freemium content up that was premium before, but for the next week it will be free for anybody who isn't subscribed, so you can check that out.
It's the podcast that John and Beau did on what British aesthetics are.
I have not watched this one, but immediately from that thumbnail I feel a cool sense, a cool warming sense of home within the pit of my stomach that just makes me very happy.
It's a crash course on what cultural flashpoints we can identify as British.
It's obviously very difficult to pin down a British ethos or a set of British cultural identities.
I think English is probably more apt for this, to be honest.
But it's a bunch of examples where John has compiled them together and he and Beau sit around discussing what you can extrapolate as the values from these important cultural artefacts.
Yeah, I mean, for me, the aesthetics just feel incredibly homely when I see something like that.
Lovely patchwork feels, a bit of mist, a nice country manor.
Everything is right in the world.
And also, as well as that, we do have freemium livestreams that are going to be going out on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, the first of which...
On Wednesday, it's going to be one that I'm doing with Carl.
We're going to be doing a book club on Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind, which is a book I read for the first time very recently.
Very, very impressed with it.
Very useful work that Haidt undertook there, so I'm really looking forward to talking about that.
So you can check that out tomorrow, even if you're not a subscribed premium member.
Without any further ado, though...
Oh, one thing.
Happy No Not November, all.
Get off porn.
And on Saturday, you'll be able to preview the contemplations where Josh and I debate about it, so...
Yes, that'll be an interesting one.
It's a really good bit of content.
But anyway, now that you've freed up your right hand, we can get into the proper news.
So, there is something about Paul Pelosi, and there is a mystery that we need to unravel.
Just after Halloween, we've got our own very Scooby-Doo mystery going on.
That's right.
And that is that Paul Pelosi, husband of Speaker of Congress, I always forget.
Before I go any further, we do have some content that I would like to promote, which is a recent video that Connor and I did for our premium subscribers called The Politics of Black Panther.
You can stop with your Wakanda Forever nonsense.
Yes, my brother.
A film that I had not actually had to watch or wanted to watch.
I subjected him to it.
Before this, and as you can see, we made sure to get some good content out of it because it's about two hours long, so at least it wasn't entirely for nothing on my part.
But I do sincerely regret...
And as such, I punished you, I didn't think I would be punishing you, by telling Connor to watch the fantastic film Mulholland Drive, which we're going to be discussing.
And Connor hated that as well, because Connor has no taste.
Oh, I hate it.
No, hang on a minute.
Don't make it sound like I hate...
No, I know you hate Black Panther as well.
John, can you just scroll down slightly to the description of this video, please?
I wrote it myself.
Connor and Harry discussed the politics of one of the worst films ever made, Marvel's Black Panther.
We had people crying in the comments, some people even citing Rotten Tomatoes as, oh, you guys are stupid, it was rated by the critics.
This film hates you.
Don't give the sequel money, don't give this money, and watch this.
Instead, give us money to watch it to understand exactly why it hates you.
Quality by democracy is not something that I stand by.
Anyway, let's carry on into the news.
So...
First of all, I would like to highlight this particular Politico article, because we will be returning to it as we carry on, but it gives some good details of the assault as it went down according to the information that the police released immediately after the incident.
So let's go through a bit of this.
Police said Friday evening that the attack on Paul Pelosi, the husband of the Speaker Nancy Pelosi, was intentional.
Obviously.
The man accused of entering the Pelosi home and attacking Paul Pelosi with a hammer specifically targeted the California Democrat, San Francisco Police Chief Bill Scott confirmed on Friday...
I thought he was just asking for stock advice.
Perhaps, perhaps.
That was consistent with the revelation that the assailant, a 42-year-old Berkeley resident called David DePep, very strange name, had asked where is Nancy before the assault.
David DePep forced his way into the home through the back entrance.
Scott said, hell of a phrasing there, officers arrived at the house, knocked on the front door and were let inside by an unknown person.
And that's something I would like to highlight and keep that in the back of your head for later.
They discovered DePep and Pelosi struggling for a hammer and after they instructed them to drop the weapon, Scott said DePep took the hammer and violently attacked Pelosi.
to Pelosi.
What they're missing out there is supposedly some other information that the police released, which was that they were both in a state of undress when this happened, which is going to be something that, once again, we'll come back to you, because De Pap is not the sort of person that it's entirely surprising would be found in such a circumstance.
I was going to say that.
De Pap has a reason why he might be nude.
I've seen charitable readings of Paul Pelosi saying he may have been disturbed while sleeping and was in his underwear.
However, the fact that there is an unnamed third person there...
That's the thing.
We've got these questions that are piling up already.
Who was this unknown person?
What were they doing in the house?
What were they wearing at the time?
Why weren't they stopping the attack?
If they were with the attacker, DePap, why did they let the police in?
And why haven't they also been arrested?
Because...
There is no further information about this third person that I have seen released to the public.
Very interesting.
Police have taken DePap into custody and said he will be booked for an attempted homicide, burglary, assault with a deadly weapon, aggravated battery with serious bodily elder abuse, infliction of great bodily injury on the elderly, blah-de-blah-blah, all the sorts of things that you would expect.
And Pelosi has undergone successful surgery for fractures to his skull and arms.
Because as much as we may dislike the Pelosi's, I'm not going to wish harm to come across an 81-year-old man.
Right.
I'm going to say something very controversial here.
Oh dear, is this going to be taken off of YouTube?
No, it won't.
We do not wish harm on anyone.
We do not endorse this, of course.
It is illegal.
It's stupid.
Don't do it.
However, I can't force myself to be sad.
I don't care.
I'm not going to suggest that anybody should be going out and doing such things.
But no, I'm sorry as much as the New York Times and other publications will cry about it.
I feel no empathy.
This is the consequence of leftist policies.
Sorry.
You should have been armed.
As we get further into the...
Well, he had a hammer, so...
So?
It's his Second Amendment right to defend himself, and he chose not to exercise it.
Well, I mean, he's a Democrat, so he wants to take that away from everyone else.
But the political manoeuvring comes into play as we get further along the article, where they start to...
Give you an emerging portrait of a politically motivated attack by a man who consumed fringe conspiracy theories which shocked the San Francisco area and stoked fresh concerns about elected officials facing violence.
While authorities have not detailed a motive, DePap's online history, which seems to be something that we've only recently discovered and only recently began as well, indicates that he subscribed to this discredited narrative that the 2020 presidential election was illegitimate, no comment, Oh, I was going to say that joke, you stole it!
Right, so that's a conspiracy theory.
Yeah, the obviously true conspiracy theory.
Average Epstein Island attendant.
Yes.
But this man was just, according to the mainstream narrative, another crazed right-winger QAnon type.
But also we need to remember that he's from, as we go on, he's from Berkeley, possibly one of the most progressive areas of California.
Was he armed with a bike lock, by any chance?
He might have been.
He was also let into the house, I assume.
The reports will be...
I think it sounds like he was let into the house, at least given this strange third person who was there, who just was loitering about the place casually to let the police in, you know.
And there has been mention of forced entry into the home, but once again, this is all very suspicious.
And we can look at what we know about David DePapp now, further from what this article was saying.
So, he reportedly entered the San Francisco home through a glass door, and it wasn't clear if he circumvented any security measures, which, Seems very lax, if you ask me, why the Pelosi's don't have...
A ringing doorbell, at least.
A ringing doorbell, or if they don't have security on them.
I've seen reports that apparently they don't give security details to the family members of political operatives, but given that the Pelosi's house has been attacked and vandalised numerous times by various political activists, I find it very strange that they wouldn't have security on it.
Can I... Just point out as well, I don't know if you have this in here, Nancy Pelosi's daughter, I believe it was, endorsed when Ron Paul was attacked by his neighbour.
Oh, really?
Yeah, she cheered it on on Twitter.
So, this is a tad ironic.
Once again, no sympathy to the Pelosi's.
But then we've also got to question, where's the security footage?
Mm-hmm.
If you want to immediately wait out and dispel any conspiracy theories that might arise because of the strange circumstances of this, release the security footage.
Unless, of course, it says it tells a story very different to what you want people to think.
Once again, no fences, no security, just managed to slip in.
Very strange circumstances.
In addition to the suspected weapon used in the attack, Mr.
DePapp had also brought with him a bag that contained multiple zip ties and duct tape, according to two sources that have been briefed on the incident.
The attacker also attempted to tie up Mr.
Pelosi until Nancy got home.
to perhaps social media profiles, as they said earlier, reportedly included conspiracy theories and all of this sort of stuff.
And this has all been reviewed by CNN and the Wall Street Journal, the most trustworthy of news sources.
And I would also add to this, what was the context in which he was viewing these?
Because I'm sure plenty of leftists have had contact with these kinds of things.
It doesn't have to be right-wingers in contact with this, because leftists will get into contact with these things and try to discredit them, for instance.
So we're being left a lot of context out of these.
Public posts reviewed by CNN and confirmed as authentic by Mr. DePap's family include videos produced by MyPillow CEO and prominent election conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell.
My God, what a radical.
Who continues to baselessly allege widespread fraud had manipulated the outcome of the 2020 election.
Other posts included transphobic images, false claims that COVID vaccines are deadly and content surrounding sprawling conspiracy theories involving global elites allegedly corrupting and controlling the population.
This is put out by MSN, by the way, owned by Microsoft.
Very interesting.
Just going to point that out.
And once again, with all of this information, I ask, what was the context?
Because things can be viewed in a very different light if you say that they were viewing them to criticise them or viewing them to agree with them.
Very strange.
The 42-year-old suspect also reportedly had a list of other people he wanted to target in addition to the House Speaker.
Law enforcement was confirmed.
A 2013 article in the San Francisco Chronicle identified Mr.
DePapp as a hemp jewellery maker.
And this is where...
Perhaps some of the narrative becomes a little bit confusing.
Hemp jewellery maker living in a Berkeley home with Gypsy Torb, the couple's two sons, her daughter, and another person.
Which is a very strange circumstance.
Is this a throuple?
Well, it will be...
We all discover the exact nature of the relationship that these people shared together, and...
Take your mind back to Politico, talking about that mysterious third person.
Move to the next.
People have pointed out that Politico have released a new article, so click on the images.
Here for me, John, please.
Thank you.
A new article saying that beyond Trump Jr.
and Higgins, pro-Trump commentators from Charlie Kirk to former Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clark Jr. also weighed in online to raise questions about the investigation based on unfounded and false claims.
Among those baseless claims, that a third person answered the door when police arrived at the Pelosi home, which San Francisco law enforcement has said is untrue.
But you reported that.
Just tap along to the next image for me, please.
And we've still got the evidence.
The article is still up online if you want to go and see it.
So Politico is being absolutely shameless there, trying to erase the past, what they reported, which supposedly was taken directly from what the police officers responding told them.
So which one is it, Politico?
Was there an unknown third person who just casually let the police in, which kind of disrupts some of the narrative that were being sold here?
Or is it that they were never there in the first place?
It's the mum from Mean Girls.
Do you guys need anything?
Some snacks?
A condom?
It must be.
That's the only explanation.
And, as I said, we can see that the narrative is forming.
if we go to the next one again under questioning DePap has allegedly told San Francisco police officers that he wanted to hold Ms Pelosi hostage, interrogate her and injure her if she lied DePap articulated that he viewed Nancy as the leader of a pack of lies told by the Democratic Party and if Nancy would tell DePap the truth he would let her go and if she lied he was going to break her DePap also later explained that by breaking Nancy's kneecaps, she would then have to be wheeled into Congress, which would show other members of Congress that there were consequences to actions.
He allegedly added that he wanted to use Ms.
Pelosi to lure in another person, though the FBI document does not say who.
When DePap released- realised that Mr. Pelosi had called the police, he allegedly decided to stand his ground.
DePap explained that he did not leave after Pelosi's call because much like the American founding fathers with the British, he was fighting against tyranny without the option of surrender.
So he's obviously just mad?
Yes.
He is a Berkeley drug addict nutter.
Yeah.
So, this is being politicised just for...
This is being politicised to make sure that everybody knows that it's the right-wingers are the evil ones, the right-wingers are the only ones that Yep, Tulsi Gabbard.
She literally just left it.
And DePap appears to have started blogging in 2007, originally posting about psychedelics and spirituality.
More recently, someone using his name began posting a stream of furious far-right political messages.
On two separate blogs, a user called David DePap, which I assume is the user confirmed by the family to be the same guy, which...
I don't know if I would take their word for it because they don't necessarily know his entire online activity.
Posted biggest attacks on Jewish people, LGBT, blah blah blah, climate change denial, and whether or not it's confirmed as true by the family as stated by CNN. Once again, I don't really believe CNN. Do we know which platform these posts were made on?
They haven't mentioned anywhere.
Okay, because...
And there's no links, there's no screenshots to any of these images.
I don't know if there's any way people can find it to go into the metadata, because we do know, and I'm not asserting baseless conspiracy theories here, we do know that certain intelligence agencies do have the power to retroactively put posts there.
And so the...
Framing of that as a man with DePap's name, rather than saying it's definitely DePap himself.
When previously all of his online activity had been surrounding crystals and hemp and psychedelics.
Yeah, he could well have been radicalised, possibly, but that sounds suspicious.
Very suspicious.
So, could it have been that this is some sort of retroactive justification?
That's what I'm thinking, but I'm not going to say anything definitive here.
But this isn't also the only time, as I mentioned, that the Pelosi's have been attacked at their home and their home has been vandalised, and it's not always by right-wingers either.
On New Year's Day 2021, for instance, the Pelosi's awoke to find a severed pig's head and red paint spilled all over their driveway.
Unknown assailants had spray-painted 2K in an apparent reference to stimulus checks, along with the words, cancel rent and we want everything.
Just average right-wing talking points right there.
And in May, pro-choice activists from the group Ruth sent us.
How ironic, given that she was very, very iffy on Roe v. Wade.
Wade.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, that is.
Targeted the Speaker's home, demanding action on abortion rights after the leak of the draft Supreme Court decision on Roe v.
Wade.
John here has also highlighted this photo from earlier on this year, in May, when Paul Pelosi himself was in a car accident and was arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol and drugs.
I'm shocked there's alcohol in a Pelosi home.
Never.
For which he was given five days in jail.
Right.
It's good to be connected, isn't it?
My personal favourite reason for why it is that he might have decided to go undo this is that he was radicalised by Gamergate.
Eight years later, almost nine years later at this point, Gamergate is still haunting all of us.
He just watched one too many Sargon videos, and he knew what to do.
The Attack River reportedly ran a now-deleted Wix blog, once again, how convenient, Where he posted conspiracy theories about QAnon, blah blah blah.
How did I get into all of this?
He allegedly wrote.
You've got to throw in all of these allegedly's in here on August 23.
Gamergate.
It was Gamergate.
Okay.
I'm just gonna say...
I'm not saying it's a false flag.
All I'm saying is that this glows.
Yeah.
Gamergate.
Just saying it just outright.
Why is it that I'm a far-right terrorist extremist, you ask, who plans on assaulting and murdering political operatives?
It was Gamergate.
That's right.
Zoe Quinn, you've got a lot to answer for.
I mean, well, to be fair, given the amount of men...
No, I'm not going there.
This does glow...
This does glow like a worm waving sticks, though.
It really does.
And then we get on to some of the conspiracy theories about what was really going on and the actual true character of Depap himself.
For instance, Elon Musk himself decided to wade in on all of this by posting a link to an article from Talking Points Memo on MSN here, claims to be a far-right website, that laid out a baseless...
A homophobic conspiracy theory about the attack on Pelosi.
The New York Times tweeted out a new headline talking about this with the headline, Elon Musk in a tweet shares link from site known to publish false news, at which Musk responded with, This is fake.
I did not tweet out a link to the New York Times.
I do like Elon.
What website did he originally tweet out?
It doesn't say.
There's a lot of people, there's a lot of things, obfuscation constantly going on, all of this.
But then if we go to a site like Newsmax that wants to talk about the actual character of the person, this David DePapp person, we find a very different picture being painted.
Pelosi's attacker was progressive and mentally ill according to his own ex-girlfriend.
Those two words are redundant.
They mean the same thing.
True, but we just need to be clear for those watching on YouTube who maybe haven't encountered this before.
DePap had been residing in a decrepit school bus that sits outside the Berkeley home of his ex-girlfriend, one Oksan Gypsy Taub, who is a pro-nude activist.
And DePapp himself was also a nudist activist.
Wait, so...
Average right-winger.
Yeah, naked people living inside a school bus.
I also found out, through other research, that he lived with her and the kids that they had together after they broke up, and then she had a boyfriend who she got engaged to who also lived with them, and she had a kid with him as well, and he also ended up as the best man at their wedding.
And they're all nudists.
Yeah, and they're all nudists, and I think cooked is not a strong enough term for whatever went on there.
Sure, but I'm less concerned about how cocked it is and more about the fact that you have three nudists living in a house together, two men particularly living with children who aren't theirs, and there's absolutely no concern of child safeguarding there whatsoever.
Very strict.
Well, we are talking about California.
We're talking about San Francisco, yeah, true.
Yes.
A two-decade resident of the San Francisco Bay Area, DePap was also known for his pro-nudity activism.
He had picketed naked at protests against laws requiring people to be clothed in public.
Once again, we shouldn't be surprised to hear this coming from California and San Francisco in particular.
Taub herself said about him, "He is mentally ill," she said to ABC7.
"He has been mentally ill for a long time." Taub, who is currently serving time in a California prison for abducting a teenage boy, so there you go, said DePap had disappeared for over a year and then resurfaced.
Yeah, she said he thought he was Jesus.
Yes, there was also that.
When I met him, she said he was only 20 years old and he didn't have any experience in politics and he was very much in alignment with my views and I've always been very progressive.
And I think you've pointed out as well he's also a confirmed member of the Green Party of America.
So that's all very interesting.
And in fact, we also have local news in California trying to do an interview with DePapp's neighbor in Berkeley, which we've got right here.
And I've just wanted to play some of the highlighted parts of this to give you an overall more rounded picture of this gentleman.
So the last time you saw him was a couple weeks ago?
Yeah.
And he was here for a few days?
Yes.
Okay.
Anything strange about him or anything that stood out?
There's something strange about the whole household.
The entire household is very, very strange.
How about him?
He is birds of a feather akin to them.
So they are just, you know, nudist drug abusers and That's who gravitates toward them.
And the children who seem to be under age or under 18?
I'm not sure how old they are.
And Trisha, again, what do you say their politics are?
I'm not sure.
I would imagine that they're more left-leaning because of their support for the gay community and for other people, but it is Now I'm not sure what way they lean because...
Because they have the flag, the LGBT flag with the pot.
But any signs of anti-Semitism?
You know, they are completely unhinged, so I wouldn't be surprised at all.
Yeah.
Yeah, they play a lot of Kanye in the mornings.
Completely unhinged.
It cut off right before she was talking about their support for BLM. They've got pride flags on their home.
So, once again, average right-winger.
And to be fair, because he disappeared...
A year ago, supposedly, and then showed up recently.
Even if he had gone into right-wing conspiracy theories and such, his mental state, his behaviour was all the result of a very left-wing lifestyle, as I would put it.
And speaking of left-wing lifestyles, he was also an illegal immigrant into the US because he was Canadian.
And he was in the US illegally because he overstayed his visa, according to sources.
But California is a sanctuary state, and Nancy Pelosi supports that, so what's the problem?
All he was looking for was appropriate housing, and I thought that housing was a human right.
It doesn't matter who's home, so Nancy, Paul, you may as well have invited him in.
And judging by that third person there, you might have even invited him in, but I guess we'll never know for certain.
42-year-old suspect was born in Canada in 1980, was in the US as early as 2001, citing his valid social security number that can only be obtained with a job.
So, once again, he was just looking for housing, Paul, you absolute xenophobic monster.
Matt Walsh and other commentators online have chipped in on this, and Matt Walsh has stated,"...I don't know what the hell happened at Nancy Pelosi's house, and I suspect none of us will ever know for sure, but I do know that trying to paint a hippie nudist from Berkeley as some kind of militant right-winger is absurd, and will always be absurd." Being that this is San Francisco, it seems perfectly plausible that some drugged-out nutcase broke into their home.
Trying to turn this San Francisco crime story into an indictment of Republicans is what's implausible and ridiculous.
And Michael Schellenberger, the guy who's been very...
Apocalypse Never.
He was a Californian governor candidate.
He's a fantastic gentleman.
Yeah, fantastic gentleman who's been doing a lot of work to try and aid those in California who have been badly, badly affected by their incredibly lax drug policies had a very similar take to this.
But Tim Poole set out the two sides of the argument as it's really going on online right now, which is that you either believe a far-right QAnon cultist sought to murder Nancy Pelosi and mercilessly beat her husband Paul, or...
Honestly, I'm not saying anything definitively, but this is slightly more where I'm leaning towards.
You believe that Paul let in a gay leftist prostitute for sex, but then a fight broke out over drugs, and we know that Paul has done drugs before, hence the arrest earlier this year, and then beat Paul with his hammer after beating him with his hammer.
These are the two sides going on right now, but Tim points out again in the tweet right underneath it, why don't you just publish the surveillance footage?
Then this will clear it all up.
Unless, of course, you're worried that the surveillance footage might damage the narrative that you're trying to build.
Do you remember Andrew Gillum, by any chance?
The gentleman who was running against Ron DeSantis as governor for Florida in 2020.
No, I don't.
Oh, so he, DeSantis narrowly won the race, and Gillum was supported by the Obamas, all the establishment types.
He was recently, I believe, arrested because there was gay male prostitutes ODing on his floor, and he's a married man.
So a pretty common thing.
Yeah, just your average Democrat.
But happily, even though we don't have the surveillance footage, George Alexopoulos was able to draw what I consider to be an artist's rendition of the event.
So if we click here, it's been broken into.
This just isn't what it looks like.
It just isn't what it's looked like.
And maybe we'll never know what actually happened, but I do know that leftists are currently moulding that the right-wingers are not buying their, frankly, BS narrative.
And neither should we be, because, honestly, it does sound like a load of nonsense.
So maybe we'll find out what happened, maybe we won't.
All I know is that the Pelosi's are very strange people.
Doesn't he look like the guy from Monster House in the bottom right?
He looks like any number of movie monsters there, to be honest.
But let's move on and take a look at Biden's Watergate moment then.
I just need to take a very quick drink, because I am losing my voice.
Not fun, but we will power through.
Oh, there we go.
Much better, much better, much better.
Um...
Yeah, so just a reminder, obviously that's free at the moment.
Go enjoy the free thing.
So it turns out it's no longer a matter of speculation.
The US government has been conspiring with the heads of Silicon Valley social media platforms to manufacture consent electorally, censor what they deem misinformation, and ban dissident voices from the town square.
Now this shouldn't be surprising to us, but it is surprising to plenty of people who are outside of political narratives, who don't question things as much.
And we've got disparate bits of information which I'll be referencing as we go through this major internet expose.
Zuckerberg's recent appearance on Joe Rogan where he just explicitly said it, for instance.
Oh, no, no, no.
He soft-sold it.
Oh, really?
It's even worse.
Yeah.
But the Intercept story actually exposes literal federal surveillance on an unprecedented scale.
And it is to the point where this will have electoral consequences as of next week with the midterms.
And I wouldn't be shocked if it has legal...
Consequences and political consequences in the form of impeachment hearings.
And I'm not stoking this up.
I'm not just being wishful thinking here.
This is colossal.
The Intercept article actually compares it to Watergate.
The scope of this is far, far bigger.
It's far more egregious.
So we're going to explore the Intercept exclusive and all the anterior articles that led up to it.
Just before we start, I've been forced to plug this.
It's the free premium podcast because it's our anniversary event and this is...
My good friend John Wheatley and Beau's podcast on British aesthetics.
So go enjoy that on the website.
Anyway, on to the more important and relevant stuff.
The Intercept article here we have, titled Truth Cops.
The leech documents outline the HS's plans to police disinformation.
And I'm going to read at length from this.
It's going to be a very long segment, but it really is worth it.
So, the Department of Homeland Security is quietly broadening its efforts to curb speech it considers dangerous, an investigation by The Intercept is found.
Years of internal DHS memos, emails and documents, obtained via leaks and an ongoing lawsuit, as well as public documents, illustrate an expansive effort by the agency to influence tech platforms.
The work, much of which remains unknown to the American public, came into clearer view earlier this year when the DHS announced a new Disinformation Governments Board.
We all remember Nina Jankiewicz, for example.
We'll talk about her later.
A panel designed to police misinformation, false information spread unintentionally, disinformation, false information spread intentionally, and that's usually a term used in times of war by enemy states, so it's literally calling Americans that spread, quote, disinformation, agents of foreign powers, working to under the mind.
Exactly.
Whereas what the Biden administration is doing would fall under the definition of sedition and treason, and I hope trials follow as a result.
And malinformation, factual information shared, typically out of context with harmful intent.
So you can be punished if you're sharing factual information, but the fact checkers deem it without context.
Yeah.
All of that apparently allegedly threatens US interests.
While the board was widely ridiculed, immediately scaled back, and then shut down within a few months, other initiatives are underway as DHS pivots to monitoring social media now that its original mandate, the War on Terror, has been wound down.
So this is just a retranslation of the Patriot Act.
I mean, the fun thing is that we managed to get the DHS, the Disinformation Governance Board, shut down, yes, but it still lives on in spirit in what we're going to be discussing today.
Well, it predates it.
If anything, the Disinformation Governance Board would have at least been more outward-facing and transparent.
It was more a formalisation of policies the government has already been undertaking.
Yes, it was, we're not doing this, the Disinformation Governance Board was the, and now it's a good thing stage.
They didn't even make it to that, but they were already doing it in various forms, and The Intercept has done some fantastic reporting here.
And reminder, The Intercept is a very left-leaning out with it, to the point of where its Trump derangement syndrome actually drove Glenn Greenwald to quit and start his own substack.
So this is not...
On the side of the Trumpers, the MAGA Republicans, this is just saying, dear God, our guy, in many respects, Joe Biden, is an authoritarian dictocrat.
I mean, I respect their ability to come out and just be like, yeah, guys, I mean, I know we're not on your side, but Christ.
Yeah, it's not the Sam Harris position.
Behind closed doors and through pressure on private platforms, the US government has urged its power to try to shape online discourse.
According to meeting minutes and other records appended to a lawsuit filed by Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmidt, a Republican who is running for the Senate, discussions have ranged from the scale and scope of government intervention in online discourse to the mechanics of streamlining takedown requests for false or intentionally misleading information.
According to a draft copy of DHS's Quadrenal Homeland Security Review, DHS's capstone report outlining the department's strategy and priorities in the coming years, the department plans to target, quote, inaccurate information on a wide range of topics including, quote, the origins of COVID-19 pandemic and the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines.
Racial justice.
The US's withdrawal from Afghanistan and the nature of the US's support to Ukraine.
This is just a comprehensive overview of all the current things.
The lockdown was good, mandates were good, BLM was peaceful, Afghanistan wasn't botched, and Ukraine is a bastion of democracy.
And if you say anything else other than that, the entire federal government will crush down on you.
Well, that's the thing.
This is only one step removed from making this stuff illegal, just outright.
Yeah.
Yes, and we will see how the infrastructure has already been laid out to do that as we go on when we look at the exact kind of groups involved in corresponding with the warehouse.
You may not get put in real prison for this stuff right now, under certain circumstances, but you will be getting taken off of all major social media platforms.
Well, we already have attempted to do it with some of Trump's allies in saying, oh, you supported January 6th, etc.
You incited violence.
So they are looking to lock them up.
They just haven't come for the American people directly yet.
They're only cancelling your social media accounts, eventually all of your banking abilities, and unpersoning you entirely.
And the groups involved in this are intent on doing that, and the White House is trying to let them.
The challenge is particularly acute in marginalised communities, the report states, which are often the targets of false or misleading information, such as false information on voting procedures targeting people of colour.
Do you remember when Joe Biden said that black people can't use the internet so they can't get voter IDs?
Yeah, I think Joe Biden's more of a threat to black people voting than anything, but there you go.
The inclusion of the 2021 US withdrawal from Afghanistan is particularly noteworthy, given that House Republicans, should they take the majority in the midterms next week, have vowed to investigate it.
This makes Benghazi look like a much smaller issue, said Rep.
Mike Johnson, RLA, a member of the RF Services Committee, adding that finding answers will be a top priority.
So the DHS justifies all these goals, which have expanded far beyond its original purview on foreign threats to encompass disinformation originating domestically by claiming that terrorist threats can, quote, be exacerbated by misinformation and disinformation spread online.
The CISA, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, another alphabet agency which is coordinated on this, has defended its burgeoning social media monitoring authorities.
So stating that, quote, once CISA notified a social media platform of this information, the social media platform could independently decide whether or not to remove the post or modify it.
So that means that the government are saying, oh, it's not awful.
It's a private company.
They can do what they want.
But they're obviously leveraging state power and they're holding the idea of social media platform restrictions through Congress over their head to say you should comply with us so you can enjoy your protections.
This has been the excuse that leftists have used for a long time.
They're a private company, they can do what they want.
The problem is now that all of this information has come out, they won't actually go back and try and reformulate new principles.
They will simply go, oh well, the government is just trying to protect people from bad information.
That's what they'll do.
And the government itself, immediately contradicting this, says, As documents revealed by the Missouri lawsuit show, the CISA's goal has been to make platforms more responsive to their suggestions.
So they're engaging the behavioural nudge, much like SAGE did during the pandemic in the UK. There's a history of this...
Sorry.
They stepped up counter-disinformation efforts began in 2018 following a high-profile hacking incident of US firms when Congress passed and President Donald Trump, unfortunately...
Signed the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Act, forming a new wing of DHS devoted to protecting critical national infrastructure.
Jesus Christ, are you alright there, Connor?
Yeah, sorry, I've got a slight cough.
You seem like you're struggling.
Let's just say that this is making you feel so sick.
Unfortunately so, yeah.
So, unfortunately, Trump basically wove the noose for his own neck here.
And he's created the infrastructure, probably unknowingly, that's allowed them to target their political opposition and hamper his electoral viability.
Trump had a lack of political savvy in a lot of areas, which meant it was very easy for some of his enemies to get one over him.
He wanted to drain the swamp.
He didn't realise quite how deep it ran.
So, oh god, I'm so sorry.
I really am losing my voice, so I apologise.
An August 2022 report by the DHS Office of Inspector General sketches the rapidly accelerating move towards policing disinformation.
From the outset, the CISA boasted of a, quote, evolved mission to monitor social media discussions while routing disinformation concerns to private sector platforms.
In 2018, the DHS Secretary, Kirsten Nielsen, created the Countering Foreign Influence Task Force to respond to election disinformation.
The task force, which included members of the CISA, as well as its Office of Intelligence and Analysis, generated threat intelligence about the election and notified social media platforms and law enforcement.
So it's basically saying, we think there's going to be election interference, so you should take preemptive measures to censor what we believe is coming from foreign actors.
That then broadened to the scope of domestic actors who are spreading misinformation about the election.
There's very, very nice broad categories right there.
Definitely.
At the same time, the DHS began notifying social media companies about voting-related disinformation appearing on social media platforms.
In 2019, DHS created a separate entity called the Foreign Influence and Interference Branch to generate more detailed intelligence about disinformation, the Inspector General report shows.
That year, its staff grew to include 15 full and part-time staff dedicated to disinformation analysis.
In 2020, the disinformation focus expanded to include COVID-19, according to a Homeland Threat Assessment issued by Acting Secretary Chad Wolf.
God, I wish I had a name like that.
Yeah, I wish there were better politics involved than this gentleman there.
This apparatus had a dry run during the 2020 election when CISA began working with other members of the US Intelligence Committee, Office of Intelligence and Analysis Personnel, attended weekly teleconferences to coordinate intelligence community activities to counter election-related disinformation.
So they had weekly meetings with all the alphabet agencies and social media to say who to censor and what.
According to the IG report, meetings have continued to take place every two weeks since the elections.
Emails between DHS officials, Twitter and the Centre for Internet Security outlined the process for such takedown requests during the period leading up to November 2020.
Meeting notes show that the tech platforms would be called upon to, quote, process reports and provide timely responses to include the removal of reported misinformation from the platform where possible.
In practice, this often meant state election officials sent examples of potential forms of disinformation to CISA, which would then forward them on to social media companies for a response.
Basically, the government chooses exactly what social media companies should be censoring, including the Hunter Biden laptop, which we'll get onto.
Under President Joe Biden, the shifting focus on disinformation continued.
In 2021, January, CISA replaced the Countering Foreign Intelligence Task Force with the Misinformation, Disinformation and Malinformation team, which was created to, quote, promote more flexibility to focus on general MDM.
So that means whatever the government doesn't like, they are allowed to censor and recommend social media platforms should censor.
By now, the scope of the effort has expanded beyond disinformation produced by foreign governments to include domestic versions.
The MDM team, according to one CISA official quoted in the IG report, quote, counters all types of disinformation to be responsive to current events.
Jen Easterly, Biden's appointed director of CISA, swiftly made it clear that she would continue to shift resources in the agency to combat the spread of dangerous forms of information on social media.
Quote, one could argue we're in the business of critical infrastructure, and the most critical infrastructure is our cognitive infrastructure.
So building that resilience to misinformation and disinformation I think is incredibly important, said Easterly, speaking at conferences in November 2021.
So the government will build your mental resilience.
Yeah, exactly.
You are cognitive infrastructure for the state.
That is evil.
Yep, we need to brainwash or they won't do what's best for them.
Exactly.
The CISA's domain has gradually expanded to encompass more subjects it believes amount to critical infrastructure.
Last year, The Intercept reported on the existence of a series of DHS field intelligence reports warning of attacks on cell towers, which has tied to conspiracy theorists who believe 5G towers spread COVID-19, which they don't, obviously, YouTube.
One intelligence report pointed out that these conspiracy theories are, quote, inciting attacks against the communications infrastructure.
So they're using this as an excuse to say, hey, conspiracy theories can hobble our ability to communicate.
Therefore, we have to censor communications so that conspiracy theories...
Don't get in the way of the global conversation.
Yeah, but it's obviously coached in the idea of, oh, this is critical infrastructure.
Conspiracy theories might lead people to attack it.
Therefore, we have to censor speech to keep everyone safe.
You can see the way they've marketed it here quite deftly.
Meeting records of the CISA, Cybersecurity Advisory Committee, the main subcommittee that handles different information policy at the CISA, show a consistent effort to expand the scope of the agency's tools to foil disinformation.
So, it then starts talking about Nina Jankiewicz and the government's disinformation board in this article.
It makes mention of the disinformation board and says, as we said earlier, it was the explicit front-facing arm of this, but it was already being done.
The DHS eventually scrapped the disinformation board in August, while free speech...
Advocates cheered the dissolution of the board.
Other government efforts to root out disinformation have not only continued but expanded to encompass additional DHS sub-agencies like Customs and Border Protection, which, quote, determines whether information about the components spread through social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter is accurate.
So, they're even controlling border-crossing narratives.
Other agencies, such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Science and Technology Directorate, whose responsibilities include determining whether social media accounts were bots or humans, and how the mayhem caused by bots affect behaviour, and the Secret Service have expanded their purview to include disinformation, according to the Inspector General report.
The draft copy of DHS's 2022 Quadrenal Homeland Security Review reviewed by The Intercept also confirms that DHS views the issue of tackling disinformation and misinformation as a growing portion of its core duties.
While, quote, counterterrorism remains the first and most important mission of the department, it notes, the agency's work on these missions is evolving and dynamic and must now adapt to terror threats exacerbated by misinformation and disinformation spread online, including by domestic violent extremists.
It's great that in that little bit before there they talk about the amount of bots on social media and how they can cause mayhem, change narratives, change the way that people are viewing narratives, when now that Elon Musk has bought Twitter, he's like, okay, let's clear out all the bots then, and Twitter was refusing to tell them how many bots were on the website.
Do you remember when Elon initially pulled out the deal?
Well, it was because of the fact they wouldn't reveal to him all of the bots.
Possibly.
But Tim Paul had an...
Oh, did he?
Opposing theory on this.
It's partially that, because they know that the bots are swaying political opinions in a certain way.
Do you want to take another sip, your voices?
I'll be alright, I'm sure.
But it's also that Elon, in the deal, must have been privy to non-disclosure agreement-bound information, such as, we have contracts with the federal government that we can't break, and if you sit in this chair, you must continue them.
That's why he tried to escape it, because he realised the kind of spider's web he was getting himself into.
That would make sense.
Yeah, it's very worrying.
So, reminder, when they talk about domestic extremists, they mean people that oppose the, quote, George Floyd protests.
So, it turns out that an FBI official interviewed by The Intercept described how, in the summer of 2020, he was reassigned from his normal job of countering foreign intelligence services to monitoring American social media accounts...
And on a June 2020 Mero bearing the subject line actions to address the threat posed by domestic terrorists and other domestic extremists prepared for the DHS headquarters for Wolf, Trump's acting DHS secretary, delineated plans to, quote, expand information sharing with the tech sector in order to, quote, identify disinformation campaigns used by domestic terrorist actors to incite violence against into the structure, ethnic, racial or religious groups or individuals.
Bear in mind...
Inciting violence is not covered by the First Amendment.
However, they go well beyond that in what they censor because Biden then set up a Dobuin-style hate crime reporting website that I covered a little while ago with Dominic Frisbee that said even comments, First Amendment protected things, will get you surveilled by this sort of stuff.
Well, that's the interesting thing.
This is completely terrifying, because barring the fact that they're not yet just locking people up for what's being said online, which I don't see as being completely outside of the realm of possibility, how is this any different from the level of surveillance, if not a massive improvement, in a sense, on the level of surveillance your average Soviet Union citizen was subject to?
Well, they didn't have the technological reach to actually achieve this.
They didn't have the technology.
This is what they would have done.
The only thing separating our current regime from the regime back then is they've not yet started locking people up.
No, they haven't.
Interestingly, though, their definition of domestic terrorist...
Well, actually, no.
Let me correct.
They have started locking people up for January 6th, but you can say, oh, it's a riot, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But they have started potentially locking people up in places like Canada for questioning narratives based around gender identity, for instance.
They have.
And if you'd like to know their definition of domestic terrorists, can we go to the next one?
Just a reminder, it's you.
The Attorney General Merrick Garland said, for speaking at school board meetings and protesting gender ideology, or BLM materials in school, or trans identity ideology, Attorney General Merrick Garland acquiesced to a group that said, we should put parents at school board meetings on a domestic terrorist watchlist.
So when they're talking about countering disinformation, misinformation, that means us, even though we aren't in the United States, and I'll go over how that happens later, and it means you, even the politically unplugged parents who aren't creating content, just trying to scoreboard meetings and going, what the hell are you putting in my kid's library?
You are a domestic terrorist liable to be surveilled by the Department of Homeland Security.
You should be very, very worried.
So, back to the Intercept article, and I apologise for reading at length, but this is really heavy stuff.
It's very important stuff.
Biden prioritized such efforts Last year the Biden administration Released the first national strategy For countering domestic terrorism The strategy identified a Broader priority Enhancing faith in government And addressing the extreme polarization Fueled by a crisis of disinformation And misinformation Often channeled through social media platforms Which can tear Americans apart And lead to some violence Remember how he blamed it all on MAGA Republicans?
Yeah.
He means faith in the government is code word for faith in him.
And reducing polarization means neutering you and shutting you up if you criticize him.
We are working with like-minded governments.
Isn't that interesting?
We are working with governments similar to us to censor misinformation.
That's global American empire for those people that didn't realize that.
Civil society and the technology sector to address terrorist and violent extremist content online, including through innovative research collaborations, the strategy document continued, adding that the administration was, quote, addressing the crisis of disinformation and misinformation, often channeled through social and other media platforms that can fuel extreme polarization I'm not using the frame they use in
in this.
In the fact, the FBI had spent millions of dollars on social media tracking software like Babel X and Dataminer.
According to the Bureau's official guidelines, authorised services include proactively surfing the internet to find publicly accessible websites and services through which recruitment by terrorist organisations and promotion of terrorist crimes is openly taking place.
So they're calling anyone who is going to go to the January 6th protest well in advance of people walking into the capital when they were let in by police officers.
as a terrorist organisation.
I'm sorry, also knowing how the FBI operates, I've just got the Spider-Man image in my head.
Oh, the Governor Whitmer plot where most of the people involved with Feds.
Or when, for example, the FBI director could not tell Ted Cruz whether or not there were FBI agent provocateurs encouraging people, including Ray Epps, to go into the Capitol.
Patriot Front that come across exactly like what you would expect a completely dissident and completely legit organisation to look like.
Yeah, exactly.
Another FBI official, a Joint Terrorism Task Force officer, described The Intercept being reassigned this year from the Bureau's International Durestic Terrorism Division, where they primarily worked on cases involving Al-Qaeda and ISIS, to the Domestic Terrorism Division to investigate Americans, including anti-government individuals such as racially motivated violent including anti-government individuals such as racially motivated violent extremists – obviously not the Black Panther Party there – sovereign citizens, militia, and anarchists.
So, um… Luke Radowski will be on their watch list any day now.
They work on an undercover basis online to penetrate social networking chat rooms, online forums, and blogs to detect, enter, and dismantle, and disrupt existing and emerging terrorist organizations via online forums, chat rooms, bulletin boards, blogs, websites, and social networking, said the FBI official.
The Privacy Act of 1974 enacted following the Watergate scandal restricts government data collection of Americans exercising their First Amendment rights, a safeguard that civil liberty groups have argued limits the ability of the DHS and FBI to engage in surveillance of American political speech expressed on social media.
The statute, however, maintains exemptions for information collected for the purposes of a criminal law enforcement investigation.
So all Americans are being treated as criminals.
That's what's happening.
He is sovereign who decides for the exception, as they say.
There were no specific legal constraints on the FBI's use of social media.
Faisal Patel, Senior Director of the Brennan Center for Justice's Liberty and National Security Program, told The Intercept.
The Attorney General guidelines permit agents to look at social media before there is any investigation at all.
It's a wild west out there.
The first FBI whom The Intercept interviewed in 2020 amid the George Floyd riots lamented the drift towards warrantless monitoring of Americans saying, man, I don't even know what's legal anymore.
So, that's the background.
That's the history.
That's the scope.
Let's look at the actual effects.
There's a quote in here that says, The extent to which the DHS initiatives affect Americans' daily social media feeds is unclear.
During the 2020 election, the government flagged numerous posts as suspicious, many of which were then taken down, got documents cited in the Missouri Attorney General's lawsuit disclosed.
A 2021 report by Election Integrity Partnership at Stanford University, so not an election denying outlet, found that nearly 4,800 flag items technology platforms took action on 35%, either removing, labelling or soft blocking speech, meaning the users were only available to view content by bypassing a warning screen. meaning the users were only available to view content by The research was done in consultation with the CISA.
So let's look at Twitter's role while in this article, shall we?
Prior to the 2020 election, tech companies including Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Discord, Wikipedia, Microsoft, LinkedIn and Verizon Media met on a monthly basis with the FBI, CISA and other government representatives.
According to NBC News, the meetings were part of an initiative still ongoing between the private sector and government to discuss how firms would handle misinformation during the election.
We do not coordinate with other entities when making content moderation decisions and we independently evaluate content in line with Twitter rules, a spokesperson for Twitter wrote in a statement responding to The Intercept.
However, there is evidence of Twitter taking down small anonymous accounts according to the DHS's diktat.
So during the 2020 election, Department of Homeland Security sent an email to an official at Twitter.
They forwarded information about potential threat to critical US infrastructure, citing FBI warnings in a case about an account that could imperil election system integrity.
Can you guess about how large the scope of this account might be?
What dangerous things they might have been saying?
Well, I can see it on the screen there, so don't hold me in suspense.
The Twitter using question of 56 followers, along with a bio that read, DM us your weed store locations.
Hoes be mad, but this is a parody account.
Under a banner image of Blucifer, the 32-foot-tall demonic horse sculpture featured at the entrance to the Denver International Airport.
God knows why Denver has that.
Blucifer?
Never heard of that.
We are not sure if there's any action that can be taken, but we wanted to flag them for consideration, wrote a state official in the email, Fred, forwarding on other examples of accounts that could be confused with government entities.
So they thought this obvious parody account with 56 followers, they tried to say this could be confused with the government entity.
Right.
The Twitter representative responded, we will escalate.
Thank you.
Interesting.
It's a joke.
It's all a joke.
Well, yeah, but do you remember the Alex Berenson lawsuit, by any chance?
So his lawsuit against Twitter was successful to reinstate his account.
And during the discovery process, he...
Yeah, I do remember a bit of this now, actually.
Carry on.
He exposed screenshots of an April 2021 exchange on Slack, where Twitter employees had spoken to White House COVID advisor Andy Slabit.
And Twitter employees said they had one really tough question about why Alex Berenson hasn't been kicked off the platform, because he is the epicentre of disinfo that radiated out towards the persuadable public.
So that's very interesting.
Alex Berenson, epicentre of power!
Bringing down the Republic with his tweets.
So Vijaya Garde herself was also implicated in this.
In June, the same DHS Advisory Committee of CISA, which includes Twitter Head of Legal Policy, Trust and Safety, Vijaya Garde, formerly now also the woman that banned coal, and University of Washington Professor Kate Starbird, what a name, drafted a report to the CISA director calling for an expansive role for the agency in shaping the information ecosystem.
The report called on the agency to closely monitor social media platforms of all sizes, mainstream media, cable news, hyper-partisan media, talk radio and other online resources.
They argued that the agency needed to take steps to halt the spread of force and misleading information with a focus on information that undermines key democratic institutions such as the courts or by other sectors such as the financial system and public health measures.
To accomplish these goals, the report said CISA should invest in external research to evaluate the efficacy of interventions, specifically with research looking at how alleged disinformation can be countered and how quickly messages can be spread.
Last Thursday, immediately following billionaire Elon Musk's complete acquisition of Twitter, Garde was terminated from the company.
And here we see the pieces come together of Elon Musk going, what have I stumbled on here?
And since Elon Musk has gone in, we now have this tweet from Unusual Wales, which is an investment and tech reporting outlet.
Twitter has actually frozen internal employees out of the tools that they can use to censor disinformation and enforce policy.
So what have they uncovered?
They are worried that this is going to be continued, I think.
So, back to The Intercept.
Let's look at Microsoft role, shall we?
Late February, Jen Easterly, the CISA woman, texted with Matthew Masterson, a representative at Microsoft who formerly worked at CISA, that she is trying to get us in a place where the federal government can work with platforms to better understand mis-distrends so relevant agencies can try to pre-bunk slash debunk as useful.
So she's part of the intelligence agency's pre-crime division.
So if we can go to the next one, the author of this has tweeted the screenshot out.
This is actually a text exchange from Masterson and Easterly.
And at the bottom, if we can just look at this, it says...
I thought the tweet said that this was between Vijaya.
No, this is a Microsoft...
Oh yeah, Microsoft Exact Text.
Yes.
At the bottom, if you can just go on the image please, John, the text says, was on the call, the coordination is greatly appreciated, was disappointed that platforms, including us, didn't offer more, we'll get there, and sector leadership had zero questions.
We'll get there, and that kind of leadership really helps.
Platforms have got to get more comfortable with government.
It's really interesting how hesitant they remain, again, Microsoft included.
They're so hesitant to just become evil tools of the evil government.
Do you remember when Google's tagline was, don't do evil, and they got rid of it?
Yeah, yeah, I understand why now.
Yep, not shocking.
Now, remember as well, Microsoft have been censoring for a long time, This is a Forbes article here where it says, Microsoft Agreement have included provisions banning the use of its Office 365 software to,
quote, engage in activity that is harmful to you, the services, or others, including communicating hate speech as well as banning, quote, illegal activity.
Microsoft reserves the right to review your content, to investigate possible violations, and any content it considers to be a violation of these rules can result in Microsoft halting the user's access to its coveted products.
Including Office 365 and even the Microsoft account the user uses to log into their own desktops, laptops, and tablet devices.
So this article actually scaremongers about, oh, what if they ban feminism and LGBT rights because it's illegal in other countries?
Actually, Microsoft is going along with the progressive hegemon, and they are actively coordinating the alphabet agencies to censor you.
Right, so let's go back to the Intercept article to talk about Facebook's role now.
The intercept talks about censoring the Hunter Biden laptop.
In appearance on Joe Rogan's podcast in August, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed that Facebook had limited sharing of the New York Post's reporting after a conversation with the FBI. The background here is the FBI came to us, some folks on our team, and was like, hey, just so you know, you should be on high alert.
There was a lot of Russian propaganda in 2016.
The FBI told them, Zuckerberg said, we have it on notice that basically there's going to be some kind of dump.
When the Post story came out in October 2020, Facebook thought it fit that pattern and the FBI had told them to look out for.
But documents filed in the federal court as part of a lawsuit by the Attorney General of Missouri and Louisiana add a layer of new detail to Zuckerberg's anecdote, revealing that the officials leading the push to expand the government's reach into disinformation also played a quiet role in shaping the decisions of social media giants around the New York Post story.
According to reports, records filed in the federal court, two previously unnamed FBI agents named Elvis Chan, an FBI special agent in the San Francisco field office, and Demlo, and the section chief of FBI's Foreign Intelligence Task Force, were involved in high-level communications that allegedly led to Facebook's suppression of the post's reporting.
So you can charge those, gentlemen, with treason.
What is it with all these absurd names popping up in this Elvis Chan?
I'm sorry, America, you're just an absurd country.
Well, unfortunately, their remit is global.
In May, the Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmidt took the lead in firing a lawsuit to combat what he views as sweeping efforts by the Biden administration to pressure social media companies to moderate certain forms of content appearing on their platform.
Attorneys for the Biden administration have responded in court by claiming that the plaintiffs lack standing and that social media firms pursued content moderation policies on their own volition without any coercive influence on the government.
On October 21st, the judge presiding over the case granted the attorneys general permission to depose Anthony Fauci, CIA officials, and communications specialists from the White House.
The interesting thing here, the reason they included Fauci is the suit alleges government-wide efforts to censor stories, especially ones related to the pandemic.
It also names multiple agencies across the government that participated in efforts to monitor speech and open collusion, that's a direct quote, between the administration and social media companies, identifies, for example, emails between the officials from the National Institutes of Health, including Dr.
Fauci, and Mark Zuckerberg himself at the beginning of the pandemic, and reveals ongoing discussions between senior Biden administrations with meta-executives on developing content moderation policies on a range of issues, including issues related to election and vaccine information.
So, remember when they were partnering with The Atlantic to do COVID-19 articles?
Turns out the government was feeding them the exact information on what to report.
There's also a formalized process for government officials to directly flag content on Facebook or Instagram and request it be throttled and suppressed through a special Facebook portal that requires government or law enforcement emails to use.
So, if we want to have a look at that, if we can go next, there's a tweet that shows this from Lee Fang, the author of the article, or I just found the archive link that's been shared around online.
Still up.
So you can just post the link in there if you have a government-issued email and you can just directly take things down.
Oh, brilliant.
Yeah.
It's just a private company, bro.
Yeah, so it's not like they were acting of their own accord.
The government was just going, here's the link.
Remove it.
Great.
There's also a thing leading up to this that I reported a little while ago.
Facebook had, without a subpoena, forwarded I think?
And then an hour later they came out and said, oh, actually, no, no, no, that statement was wrong.
It's false.
We never did any of this.
The spokesperson in question worked for Planned Parenthood and Obama for America, and now works on Facebook.
So you can see where the deep state is sinking its teeth in here.
So those are all the platforms.
I'm not sure why we're surprised about any of this, though, because Jen Psaki came out and said this last year, and she had a mask-off moment and alluded to it.
We've got a little clip.
This is a big issue of misinformation, specifically on the pandemic.
In terms of actions, Alex, that we have taken or we're working to take, I should say, from the federal government, we've increased disinformation research and tracking within the Surgeon General's office.
We're flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation.
We're working with doctors and medical professionals to connect to connected medical experts with popular with popular who are popular with their audiences with with accurate information and boost trusted content.
So we're helping get trusted content out there.
We also created the COVID community core to get factual information into the hands of local messengers.
And we're also investing, as you'll have seen, in the presidents, the vice presidents, and Dr.
Fauci's time in meeting So they're playing favourites for which influence they're like.
They're handing the narratives to Facebook and they're telling them exactly what to censor.
Saying it all with a big smile on the face as well.
Yeah, exactly.
It's terrifying.
They're mocking us.
Also, do we remember this?
Do you remember the Time magazine piece, by any chance?
Oh, everybody.
Everybody should remember this.
This was shocking that they came out and just admitted to all of this that there was a shadow campaign going on behind the scenes.
They literally called it a cabal.
So, again, we shouldn't be shocked that social media and pressure groups and the White House themselves have been conspiring to Fortify the election and make sure that Donald Trump did not steal it.
Because they already said it.
These people could do a much better job of keeping all of this under wraps if they wanted to.
The problem is that they're so...
Smug.
And so smug about it, they can't help but just rub it in everybody's faces.
Because at the end of the day, sadly, we're going over all of this.
I don't see, without a complete upheaval of the elite ruling class of America, a complete pulling back of all of the influence that America has over all of the other countries across the globe that it has its tendrils in, I don't see how they don't just end up getting away with it.
Well, this is the thing.
If the Republicans sweep the midterms, if they sweep the presidency...
And then if they actually have the political will to do it...
Yeah, well, of course, you need to change Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy as the heads of the House.
We need Joseph McCarthy back is what we need.
Yeah, exactly.
You need to treat this article like a checklist of all the agencies and individuals who need gutting and indicting.
Metaphorically speaking, of course.
Oh yeah, they need legal and political consequences.
They need to be indicted, they need their livelihoods stripped from them if they've done something treasonous, and they deserve jail time.
Simple.
Now, the most conspiratorial side of this, just before we wrap up, if we go back to this, is that JPMorgan Chase are heavily involved in all this?
Yeah, very strange.
In a March meeting, Laura Demlau, an FBI official, warned that the threat of subversive information on social media could undermine support for US government.
Demlau, according to notes on the discussion attended by senior executives from Twitter and JPMorgan Chase, stressed that we need a media infrastructure that is held accountable.
Is this the same JPMorgan Chase that recently clicked times with one Mr.
Kanye West?
Well, it's the same JPMorgan Chase that did this a couple of years ago.
If we can go on to this, that not many people always talk about, but I love citing this document here.
I've archived it.
Blueprint for Digital Identity with the World Economic Forum.
If we can just scroll down to page 12, John.
Perfect, yeah.
You can see every major financial institution, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Thomson Reuters, the UK Cabinet Office, the Australian Cabinet Office, And the White House.
And this was 2015.
So this has been in the works for at least seven years with pretty much every institution.
This is why they are always invited to the table.
And what they want from you explicitly in this document is for you to have a consumer ID, a citizen's ID, a digital identity, a digital wallet, and the ability for you to vote to be tied for you to have all of this.
See, there's another problem with all of this as well, which is that if you as an individual wish to try and take action against something like this, if you wanted to organise some kind of boycott, what you've got there is a collection of businesses and industries and organisations that collectively...
Own everything.
Everything you interact with on a day-to-day basis will, at some point down the line, have involvement with these organisations, so if you are spending money on literally anything, you will be funding these people indirectly, at the very least.
It has become almost impossible to actually dissent against these organisations.
It's the same thing with the hedge funds that BlackRock, State Street and Vanguard all own stakes in Twitter, for example.
So all of the hedge funds that are partnered with the World Economic Forum also own these social media platforms.
I mean, BlackRock's not even partnered with the World Economic Forum.
Larry Fink, the CEO, is on the board of the World Economic Forum.
Yes.
If we can go up to pages 5 and 6, please.
We can see here that the member of JPMorgan Chase was Max Neukryken, Group Head of Strategy, who contributed to this.
We can go to his World Economic Forum profile page.
Yeah, that's great.
Brilliant.
So he's got a profile on the World Economic Forum, and it's not involuntary.
He's a massive high up.
Then we can go just back to the document.
Yeah, so the people involved from the UK Cabinet Office was Chris Ferguson, and the woman involved from the White House's National Economic Council was Adrian Harris.
So who's Chris Ferguson?
We can just go to his, we can scroll down.
Leading the digital data and technology response to coronavirus.
Right, so he was behind vaccine passports.
Brilliant.
So the digital ID man who wanted a digital citizen's wallet and central bank digital currency, which you could be deplatformed from if you said the wrong thing on social media, was in charge of COVID passports.
If we can look at the member of the White House Economic Council, Adrienne Harris is...
She was nominated to lead the New York State Department of Financial Services by Governor Kathy Hogle in August 2021.
Remember the one that was appointed and is likely not going to be re-elected after...
Oh yeah, after what's-his-face, Cuomo.
Yes, Mario Cuomo was excommunicated and was confirmed by the New York State Senate on January 25th, 2022.
She was a senior advisor to both Acting Deputy Secretary and Undersecretary for Domestic Finance, Mary Miller, and Deputy Secretary Sarah Bloom Raskin in the US Treasury Department and And special assistant to the President for Economic Policy as part of the National Economic Council during the Obama administration.
And she's also a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Research Fellow.
It's a long-standing example of the coordinated secret conspiracies between international bodies, international banking institutions, international pressure groups funded by very wealthy billionaires with dark designs for us, and the deep state, the government.
So, apparently, according to Natalie Winters, we'll just finish up with this very shortly, representatives from JTB Morgan Chase, looking into the documents that fed into this Intercept article, were attending virtually all Department of Homeland Services meetings.
So why do they have a stake in that?
Well, I think we can go to this one that was recent, and the consultation period is coming up on it.
This was March, reported on at the time, but it turns out the White House have been developing a digital dollar, and Biden signed an executive order on it.
CBDC is rearing narrowly heads again.
It literally says, based on the potential United States CBDC options, this report should include analysis of potential implications, whether or not it can...
Monitor and reduce carbon footprints, prevent fraud, ensure that taxes are paid.
And so the Attorney General is involved.
Remember the gentleman that designates you into domestic terrorists and has been coordinating all of these intelligence agencies to go after you via social media?
He's involved in saying the legal implications of what a digital currency can do.
So we have the international financial institutions, the international bodies, and social media all coordinating to basically sync up your social media to a digital ID and a digital citizens wallet.
If you say the wrong thing, surveillance of which has gone grander in scope, To the point that we will finish on in second, that if you say the wrong thing, you will be utterly unpersoned.
Digitally, you will not be able to vote, and you will not be able to earn a living.
And they have laid out this financial structure.
And if you do have money, they'll probably block your access to be able to spend it as well.
Exactly.
Yeah.
So, for more of our coverage on the events leading up to this story, I just thought I'd finish with this.
Josh recently did a little segment on how Joe Biden is spying on you, including over here.
He recently did the National Security Memorandum on Partial Revocation of Presidential Policy Directive 28.
This broadened the scope from America to be surveilled to literally anyone in any country and removed your right to privacy considerations.
And so it turns out that Josh was ahead of his time because this is a very chicken and egg scenario because this wasn't the start of it.
This was just broadening the scope of the operation that was already going on.
This was just the tip of the iceberg.
Please go and check this out.
Basically, we've got a bunch of deep state barnacles on America right now, and they're pushing the tide higher and higher so that you can't reach beneath the bottom of the boat to scrape them off.
This is all just a list of proven treachery.
We have the names, we have the organisations.
So Republicans, when you sweep the midterms, do something about it.
Apologies for that running long.
No, there's plenty of information to go over there that I think we're all grateful for having exposited to us.
But with that, let's go on to the video comments where I hope there is some rays of sunshine for us.
Lord above.
Just as an interesting heads up for, uh, Connor and friends, uh, Miyazaki's first published work is finally being translated into English in a few months, um, after 50 years.
Um, it's actually pretty much just a short story, so you can just, uh, finish it in, like, a single day if you really want to.
I also find it fascinating just how many elements of this story would go on to find their way in some form or another in his future movies, even if it's just one little bit here or there.
Yeah, it definitely looks...
Just have to say, though, it's probably the most dark story he's ever written.
It's just kind of just an oppressively foreboding and just kind of hopeless world he's envisioned.
I can see the ohms in the top right that look exactly like it's from Nausicaa, and it's very...
That looks really cool.
That looks very interesting.
What's the word?
Mononoke-esque.
But yeah, I also haven't read the Nausicaa manga, which I would like to at some point, but I also have a reading list that is impossibly long.
I do always like going back to the first work that a particular author has done, because oftentimes you can see...
Elements of everything else that they did later.
Kind of mushed into one unrefined product.
And you can see maybe a theme here that they've taken.
They go, okay, I'm going to make something complete out of that.
It's always really interesting.
But don't worry about recommending Dark Stories.
I have just recently finished the Berserk Golden Age arc, as I've been reading through that.
And that has some...
Pretty harrowing stuff in it.
So I'm pretty sure I can handle anything at this point after some of the stuff I've read recently.
Jesus Christ.
Let's move on.
In the 90s, the ombudsman in a local fisher village on an island close to where I grew up was asked if they could receive some refugees from the Balkans.
The woman in the municipal administration was an integrated refugee herself and was shocked when she heard that, sure, we can take some, but usually we use mackerel as bait.
Today that comment would be awarded with a prison sentence, I guess.
Yeah, I suppose so.
Do you see Suella Braverman's trying to be thrown out because she called it an invasion?
Which is actually true.
I find it funny.
People get so offended when it's people descended from immigrants fighting the hardest against immigration.
It's like, well, yeah, because they know what immigration can do to a place, for the love of God.
But with that, let's get on to some of the comments, shall we?
Let's go for it.
So, think positive.
I try every single day.
It's difficult.
So, something tells me I will watch Connor's segment several times just to have my arguments in solid memory.
Good job on the summary of all this madness.
Well, we all really appreciate that.
And also, obviously YouTube throttles us to death most of the time.
We've had one repealed, one week-long strike suspension and that.
They are really trying to suppress this sort of stuff.
So, if you do feel particularly compelled, please share the segment with everyone.
Whether it's in...
Private Telegram or WhatsApp chats, or whether it's on your own social media, you do us a lot of favours.
And share the original sources as well.
Wherever you can, this is information that needs to go out there.
As in-depth and comprehensive as that was, Connor was skipping through some of the article just because it is that long and in-depth.
So I think we can all do ourselves a service by reading through that full thing and then coming back to this video so that you can refresh yourself on what was going on.
Zach Edinger said, been loving all the content you guys have been putting out recently.
Hope for the day of the two-year birthday you can get some former Lotus Eaters in the office for a cameo.
Keep up the good work.
That would be nice, wouldn't it?
That would be lovely, it depends on their availability, because obviously a lot of the times they've left because they had to move elsewhere, so it is just a logistical issue.
I think Thomas had to go off and finish his PhD as well.
Yeah, he had to go to York, Wheatley's living in some manor house, God knows where else.
John's been able to show up once or twice, it's always pleasant when he does.
Of course, that's why I like making content with him.
I'm not slagging off Wheatley, don't worry.
It's difficult for guys to get in, but hopefully maybe...
And who knows where Hugo is nowadays.
Yeah, he's busy setting up Ancapistan, I'm sure.
Yeah, probably.
Maybe we can pressure him into a video cameo or something, won't we?
That would be nice.
Alright, on to the Pelosi comments.
Casey Darling says, Sad times in which we live.
In the same world, this attack never would have happened because Paul Pelosi would be in prison for insider trading.
I know, we can all dream, can't we?
Edward of Woodstock says, Carl, leave these people alone.
Don't go after them.
Don't be violent or even verbally abusive as it's wrong and accomplishes nothing.
Some half-naked psychopath.
Sargon made me do it.
Gamergate made me do it.
Yeah, these two things do not line up.
I always found, even back when I was just a bit of a normie, all of the, like, I don't know, hype, you could say, around what Gamergate was just didn't ring true to me.
They treat it like false consciousness for neckbeards.
They really do.
Well, no, they treat it as though it was the Taliban uprising.
It's ridiculous.
Baron Von Warhawk says, The elephant in the room when it comes to the hammer attack is how the hell someone sneaks past the security systems wearing nothing but underwear, and where the hell was Paul's bodyguards?
Once again, the bodyguards thing I've seen explained away as well.
They don't assign bodyguards or security personally to the family members, but it's like, sorry, this is Nancy Pelosi's house with her incredibly rich and influential husband, Where's the security?
That has been the centre of attacks.
Surely, given that they are so independently wealthy, they could afford to get themselves some security, even outside of the government assigning it to them.
It's a shame they didn't have an infrared camera set up, because obviously if it was a nudist, he would have glowed harder than this entire story does.
Yeah, I know.
Also, I have heard of 80-year-old men who die from one wrong slip in the shower, yet I'm supposed to expect this old drunk survive the brutal hammer beating.
That is...
though, to be fair, he still has days in the hospital.
I'm not saying he's gonna die, but we should wait to see how that pans out.
Because they've said he's alright, but you don't know.
My nan took a fall, and it took ages for her to actually die from whatever it did to her brain, so...
Yeah, I know what you're talking about there as well.
So these things can vary.
These things can take time.
I'm not wishing death on the guy, but I am wishing for a hefty prison sentence when he gets what's coming to him.
Michael Magos says, Nancy and Paul are worth over $200 million and didn't have any security.
Yeah, very strange.
Even if it was just something where it's like, oh, well, the government won't assign them.
Why haven't you got it yourself?
Your house has been constantly targeted by activists.
You can afford that freezer with all the ice cream.
I'm pretty sure you can afford one guy.
Very strange.
Very strange.
Think Positive Again says, Ah, Gamergate at it again.
Living rent-free in more heads than even I imagined.
I know.
Free Will 2112, do the FBI have the same amount of knowledge about the third man as they do about Hunter Biden's laptop?
You better be careful discussing it so we don't get this info as answered.
I know.
Captain Charlie the Beagle says, I find the Paul Pelosi incident kind of funny.
So do I. Yeah, now this is on the website, um...
I'm sorry, as we said, you've reached what you sowed.
You've literally had an illegal immigrant leftist drug addict in San Francisco break into your house.
You weren't armed as according to the Second Amendment.
And you wonder why you get smacked over the head with a hammer?
It's like, okay, you've created this policy.
And also, you're an evil, corrupt person.
I don't endorse it, but I'm just not upset.
Sorry, I can't be.
I always think of that tweet that gets sent around all the time recently, because it's just so applicable every single time, of me reaping.
Oh yes, I'm doing great!
Me sowing is that, and then me reaping.
Oh, what?
WTF, guys?
guys what's going on baron van warhawk it should be noted that while the media keeps claiming that david the pap was a trump supporter he has in the past participated in pro nudity rallies and had both blm rainbow flags and marijuana symbols on his property things that aren't usually associated with the alt-right well trump himself is not alt-right so i don't know what's going on No, exactly.
Alt-right's cringe.
Alt-right, I think the alt-right is such a nebulous term at this point.
It was at one point in, say, 2015, referring to an actual movement, but since then the movement has become so dissipated and all of them hate each other.
Yeah, it's a boogeyman.
Richard Spence is a Democrat voter now, so come on!
Yeah, shock, exactly.
Alt-right's cringe, exactly.
Kevin M, this isn't the first time Mr.
Pelosi was in the news for being hammered, though last time he did get a DUI. Hey!
General Hai Ping, Chinese Internet Battalion, De Pap and Pelosi are just honouring the age-old Northern tradition of stripping off Dante's skivvies for a fight just to prove who's artist.
Can I address General Hai Ping just briefly?
He seems to be under the illusion that we hated each other after the Snyder thing.
We didn't.
No, he is right on one thing, though, which is I absolutely demolished you.
No, he didn't.
You're factually wrong about some of the Man of Steel stuff.
But then you made me through the absolute shit that is Mulholland Drive.
I think you're wrong right there.
He's taking a bait.
He's taking a bait.
I've got him re-limined.
Well, we'll have a mature and interesting discussion.
I'll like one scene.
Just don't tell his girlfriend.
Moving on.
Alright.
Bleach Demon says, the bizarreness of the Pelosi incident only grows with every article and brushstroke trying to politicise Happy Hammers.
Oh, if it had been played up as a drugged-up hippie, or trist gone wrong, most Americans would strug and say, typical California.
Yet this has again turned into, what is the other Democrat hand doing?
Jordan Turner, the American Republic is dying.
At this point, it's probably nothing that can be done to save it.
What we need to hope for is twofold.
Firstly, that our new despots decide to represent the American people and not lord over them.
Good luck with that.
Secondly, that in the acceleration of the decline that will inevitably follow, that America does not bring the whole of the West, if not the entire world, down with her.
Sadly, America is so central to the functioning of the entire world, whether it comes to markets, whether it comes to the dollar being the reserve currency of the entire world.
If America goes down, the rest of the world goes down with it.
The real question that we should be asking is what are we looking to build up after this?
The explicit aim of Agenda 2030 was to displace America as the global superpower and have the BRIC-style nations and a European North American bloc presided over by the World Economic Forum as a sort of parallel ruling parties over it into consuming and producing nations.
Yep.
It's a hellscape.
You know, as somebody who considers himself a particularist, this just...
Yeah, I hate the universal man.
It pains me.
It pains me.
However, while the second point is possible, if unlikely, the first point is not going to last if it ever occurs.
Our overlords may frame themselves as the first citizens, but eventually, either the goodwill will die, or, if you are more cynical, the mask will slip, and much like Rome before us, the first citizens will become our lords and masters.
Okay.
We'll see.
And finally, BaldEagle1787 says, Man, who knew that Elon buying Twitter would give courage to whistleblowers and leakers to expose the US government's agencies influencing elections in the US? Wonder if people are going to be upset at that.
Oh wait, Democrats only get upset at election influencing when it's not helping them, or Russia is supposedly behind it.
Well, now we're on the website, we can just say, yeah, yeah, Biden totally stole the election.
I don't know if we're allowed to say that.
John, are we allowed to say that when we're on the comments?
I mean, he totally stole it in a landslide victory, guys.
I don't know if we're allowed.
I'm still unsure is the thing.
But let's go on to your comments, even though those last two were your comments anyway.
Okay.
With Biden's Watergate, I'd like to wish our FBI agent listening a very lovely morning.
Yeah, ain't that the truth.
In Minecraft, guys.
Remember FBI, it's no nut November.
Callum Dayton, question.
How much further does the Republic of America have to go before it becomes a Soviet paradigm, as in model or copy?
That's the comparison you made.
you made.
Free will.
Free will.
This is why I said yesterday, the new tyranny will make Stalinism look like a picnic because the technology is beyond what Orwell imagined.
This is why I said yesterday, the new tyranny will make Stalinism look like a picnic, because the technology is beyond what Orwell imagined.
Yeah, the term totalitarianism was brought up to describe the Gestapo, West Germany, Stalinists, but they didn't have nearly the technological scope as our technocrats have today.
Yeah, the term totalitarianism was brought up to describe the Gestapo, West Germany, Stalinists, but they didn't have nearly the technological scope as our technocrats have today.
Which was one of the few blessings that they had, the fact that if you wanted to get anything done, you had to wade through mountains of paperwork, whereas now, you can just control F on a Word document.
Yep, and I think the establishment have come around to the idea that they can use technology to gain an unprecedented level of control over our lives.
Robert Longshore, US deep state heading full speed towards actual fascism, What do you mean full speed?
They're already there.
Omar, the thing is, even if by some miracle the government investigates the government and it finds it did actually do something wrong, true, who's going to punish it?
The government?
Or the people?
You'd be lucky to see a $200 fine like the Pelosi's risk incurring for insider trading.
Since I've never heard of the Pelosi's getting fined to blatant corruption, it's probably just as likely to.
Even if they throw us a sacrificial fool guy or two, the true puppeteers in the shadows will never likely be touched.
It's kind of blackpilling.
Well, that is the thing, is that the public officials who are supposedly accountable to the public, and even then I'm very, very sceptical on whether they are or not, don't represent the actual people who maintain the infrastructure of this whole system.
You named a few FBI agents throughout that entire thing.
They're not accountable to the public.
They're not people that you vote for.
They're people that are just part of the system now.
They have their own agenda.
Whoever comes in who is elected will have to toe that same agenda, because that's just how things are done.
Well, unless Trump does Schedule F and fires a lot of them.
Well, once again, unless Trump, you know, does fire basically everybody in the...
Yeah, but obviously it's a free and fair election, so whoever the Democrats put up will obviously win the hearts and minds of the American people.
I'm a Guy Fawkes Catholic myself.
Kevin Fox.
Leftists.
The social media platforms are private companies and can do what they...
No, he's not.
So is Pelosi also, apparently.
So apparently he's the Pope, but he was trained by Paulo Freire, an actual Marxist.
And he's doing deals with China at the moment.
Also leftists.
No, Musk has taken over Twitter and the government can't control it.
Free will.
The change from owning your digital products to having to have a subscription for them is another step towards the road to surf them.
You will own nothing and you will be under control.
Of course, do you remember the Saudi Arabian line?
Oh, the one that we were going to build into a gigantic wall.
Yeah, they still are.
Do you know how you get food there?
Airdropped?
Yeah, you have to sign up to a subscription service for your vegetables.
I assume that they will just send drones to your front door so you never have to leave the pod.
And then when the drones don't arrive one day because you've said the wrong thing, you just starve to death.
Well, you starve until you've learnt your lesson, I imagine would be the thing.
And if you don't learn your lesson, then you starve to death.
You get mulched into soylent green.
X, Y, and Z. About one of my dislikes of the SAAS model, the subscription puts you at their mercy and then they can screw you like this.
Frank Reynolds.
Communists.
Social media companies are private.
They can make whatever rules they want.
DHS. Are you sure about that?
Are you sure about that?
We do need an edit there.
Sophie, don't forget the word dictator is derived from the word dictating, meaning they get to dictate what people are allowed to say and what they aren't.
If you do not follow the allowed narrative, you are to be met with severe punishment.
This is a dictator behaviour.
They want to dictate for the public what they can say and what they can't, and worse, they largely succeed.
Andrew, every single person high up in the Biden administration needs charges brought against them.
True.
Unlikely, though.
There needs to be justice for the countless crimes of the past two years.
S.H. Silver, extending this misinformation policing to the Afghan withdrawal and Ukraine debacle is especially insidious to me.
I can't say that word, apparently.
Can I get the police knocking after me again?
FBI, open up!
Suppressing the ability of the populace to simply question the efficacy of the regime's neoliberal world policing.
We also have some honourable mentions about our initial plug.
Confused AF, would now be a good time to discuss Black Panther's lack of diversity?
I think we do mention that.
Do we mention that in that video?
I don't think it even came up.
It may not have even come up just because...
We did criticise the fact they're all speaking English despite having never been quote colonised.
Oh, I was criticising the fact that yeah, they're an incredibly Americanised culture supposedly for something that's trying to be authentically African.
I don't think we really discussed much of the lack of diversity, if only because...
Because we don't care.
Yeah, I don't really care.
Oh my god, African country full of black people.
Yeah, that's fine.
It was an entertaining film that wasn't just, and if it weren't for white people, we'd be space supremacists.
Obviously, the point to make, though, is the fact that it completely contradicts the kind of diversity that's pushed in other films, like the way, even though I've really been enjoying it and loved it, it is a little bit jarring that Valerians in House of the Dragon, the Valerion family, are all black.
It comes across very...
We was dragons.
Yeah, it comes across a bit out of nowhere, even though I've acclimatised to it, and you know, thankfully the actors they got to portray the parts are very good actors, so I can kind of put it to the back of my mind.
It's still jarring, especially when the Song of Ice and Fire universe is set up in such a way that if you want more black people, just say that there's more Summer Islanders at court, because it's an established universe where people of different ethnicities have defined places that they come from.
It's not just a giant multicultural melting part.
Have you seen the reporting about Black Panther Wakanda Forever, that they are rescinding the amount of merchandise they're making because they fear that black men won't go see the movie and buy the stuff because there's no black men in it, other than Numbaku?
I haven't seen...
Isn't he already worried it's going to make a loss?
Because they're like...
Racism's one greatest foe, sexism!
Godspeed, boys!
Godspeed, black men!
It does look absolutely terrible, though.
It looks garbage.
I mean, the first one was bad enough in the first place.
I went from thinking it was, oh, it's just another bad Marvel film after watching it.
Well, you turned your brain off, I guarantee, a little bit.
Well, yeah, because I have such low expectations for it in the first place, I was just watching it like, yeah, it's race propaganda, oh, they want to kill YTR, whatever, and then I thought about it a bit more.
It's like, no, this is really dreadful.
Yeah, it hates you.
I really hate this. - Bain Scotty of Swindon says, "They thought this obvious parody account "with 56 followers could be confused "with a genuine government account.
"I mean, yes, people can be that stupid.
It doesn't justify the course of action they've taken, but in the interest of being honest, yes, there are people, particularly on the left, who lack the brainpower to figure it out and might actually blow a fuse if they see it being quirky.
That's true, there is a reason after all, if you remember correctly, there is a reason that Joker put in those obnoxious flashback scenes when he realised his girlfriend had been imaginary the whole time.
And do you know why it was?
Because sadly there are retards in the audience who wouldn't have figured it out otherwise.
So, I don't want to call the man a retard because I actually quite like him.
Stefan Molyneux did get that wrong.
What?
Yeah, he watched the Joker film and he went, oh yeah, I looked at my phone for like five minutes and didn't see the flashback bit.
So I just thought she was a single mum that had walked out on him and so it was meant to be a repetition of how his mother had abused him and that sent him down the path and everyone was going, no, no, you're wrong, Steph.
There's this, this, and this.
And he went, no, I'm not wrong, double down.
He actually went and saw the film again and he went, oh yeah.
Oh yeah, yeah, sorry.
Well, what...
Why would you just look at your phone if you paid to go to the cinema?
Because he was making a note, but it's just, yeah, silly.
You'd wait till after this.
You make your notes in your head.
It's not that difficult.
X, Y, and Z, E, E says, Well, he is, though.
He is a nutter, but he's a nutter purely because of the fact I would say he's a victim of the kind of lifestyle that's pushed.
He's a nonce.
You could say that.
Well, yeah.
He's actually a nonce.
He's not a victim of anything.
His girlfriend is a nonce.
Yeah, and then he's naked around you.
Yeah, like, no.
But the case in point, X, Y, and Z, E, I'm never going to pronounce it the way you want me to because I'm English, dammit.
Z does make more sense.
Yeah, it says, Case in point, Killdozer, he was someone who had legitimate complaints, and there was an active campaign to screw him.
He ultimately got pushed over the edge, and he wound up a subject of a dankular video.
Very good one, by the way.
It is a very good one, and I understand what you're saying.
I would say that the sort of leftist lifestyle that is pushed on a lot of people does claim victims, but that still doesn't excuse the behaviour that came as a result of that.
But anyway, I think that's all we've got time for.
Thank you very much for tuning in today.
We'll be back again tomorrow at 1pm.
So thank you.
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