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April 27, 2022 - The Megyn Kelly Show
01:36:06
20220427_elon-musks-twitter-takeover-from-all-angles-with-s
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Twitter Bans and Left Meltdown 00:01:49
Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
Um, or what's behind, I should say, the left's total meltdown over this.
My God, get yourselves together, people.
And what does it mean for banned conservatives, including former President Trump?
God, my team gave me the list of people who've been banned.
I forgot how long it is.
Do you know we're going to talk about James O'Keefe today and Project Veritas and this tape that they've gotten their hands on?
He's banned.
Project Veritas is banned.
So many people are banned.
Like they get banned and then you kind of forget about Marjorie Taylor Green.
She's banned.
Trump's banned.
Anyway, we'll go, we'll get into it.
What happens to them?
Do they come back to life?
Is there a resurrection?
And speaking of people who have been banned on Twitter, we're very excited to have one of the key players in this story.
Just over a month ago, the right-leaning satirical news site, The Babylon Bee, was suspended by Twitter after it named a transgender member of the Biden administration as its man of the year.
It was a joke, you see, because this transgender woman was named one of the women of the year recognized by USA Today.
And Rachel Levine spent almost her entire life as a man.
She didn't even turn trans until within the past 10 to 15 years.
And they literally want us to celebrate her as a feminine icon.
Meanwhile, all of her accomplishments came when she was a man.
And only in the last decade and a half has she switched over to being a woman.
Ideology Baked Into Terms of Service 00:15:42
So the Bee was having some fun with it.
And they've been shut down and they haven't been resurrected.
And they won't be under the old Twitter management, or they were told they wouldn't until they took down that tweet.
They refused.
And they've been sitting there in Twitter jail ever since.
Well, we should all be very glad this happened in a way because that story caught the attention of one Elon Musk, who happens to be the richest man in the world, who then happened to reach out to the company to confirm that the Babylon Bee had, in fact, been suspended prior to making his bid for Twitter, which was successful.
So, my first guest today is the CEO of the Babylon Bee, Seth Dillon.
Welcome back to the show.
Great to have you.
Great to be back on the show.
Thanks, Megan.
It's such an awesome story.
You've got to be feeling pretty good today.
Well, I mean, the story's not over.
We are still locked out of Twitter.
The deal, right now, you know, Twitter has accepted Musk's bid, but the deal hasn't gone through yet.
So it's not a done deal.
We'll see when all the ink is dry and the funds have been transferred and the ownership has exchanged hands and all of that.
What actually ends up happening?
As of this moment, we're still locked out of Twitter.
Yeah, right, because you won't take down your tweet.
Although, what's happening?
Because I've seen a lot of people in the past couple of days since Elon, since his offer was accepted, tweeting out Rachel Levine is a man and things like that.
And they're not being banned.
So what's the deal?
Like, have you noticed that?
And why the difference in treatment?
I have noticed that.
It's risky behavior.
Hats off to them for being willing to do that.
It could be that they've put a freeze on some of their enforcement policies while the deal is going through, maybe to minimize the likelihood of some kind of controversy coming up as a result of it and the distraction that might result from that.
I'm not sure what's going on.
You also have this weird thing where people's followings are jumping dramatically.
I don't know about what yours looks like over there, but mine has been climbing record numbers.
I think I gained like 15,000 followers in the last 24 hours or something like that.
So there's been a lot of people gaining followers and they're speculating about what the reason for that is.
I mean, obviously Twitter is in the news right now and a lot of people who left Twitter before for other platforms are possibly coming back to it as a result of the change in ownership that's that's forthcoming.
But it could be more than that.
Some people are speculating that there's been a lift on some of this shadow banning that's been happening and that it's opening the floodgates to new followers.
I don't know.
I think that a lot of that is speculation, but there is some crazy stuff happening on there right now.
All I know is I have 2.5 million followers.
I never click on what says 2.5 to see how many, how close I'm on to 2.6.
Yeah, so I have no idea.
I definitely did not go from 2.5 to 2.6.
So we know I didn't gain 100,000 overnight.
Although Ben Shapiro was just saying on his show, he gained something.
He said, quote, something like 200,000 overnight.
So I do believe there's some messing with the algorithm and sort of a, you know, it's a cleanup.
It's a cleanup in aisle seven before the new boss comes in.
And then he can see all that they've been doing.
And it's not going to work because he's going to see it.
That could be the case.
I don't know.
I don't want to speculate because I don't know what's going on behind closed doors, but a lot of people are speculating that there's, you know, a lot of documents being shredded right now and a lot of cover up that's happening and things that they don't want to be exposed.
Ultimately, you know, they're not going to be able to hide all of that.
And it does sound like Musk wants to make the algorithm open source, which is really interesting.
But yeah, I mean, back to what you're saying, I mean, it was a good day for free speech.
I think that a lot of people, people who love free speech, people who love this idea that we should be able to express ourselves openly and freely and not have restrictions.
You know, people who agree with Twitter's terms of service, by the way, and their intermission statement, which says that they don't want any barriers to free expression.
If you don't want barriers to free expression, then it was a good day because it sounds like Musk is actually going to make sure they live up to that statement.
And I don't think they have been up to this point.
So can we jump back?
So you got banned on Twitter and not banned, but I guess your account's been suspended.
So you're not able to tweet out the funny things that we love the Babylon B for.
And it's conditional, right?
They've got you like a hostage situation saying you will delete the tweet or your account will remain our hostage.
And you refuse to delete the tweet.
So good for you, by the way.
Love that.
It happened to Charlie Kirk, too, who said, he was making a similar point about Rachel Levine, saying she's actually a biological man.
And he got locked out as well.
So like they're big on like, I don't know.
Like, I don't know if it's because you named her specifically.
Like they're not actually that clear about how they apply their policies.
But you get suspended.
So what was the next iteration of that as far as Elon Musk goes?
Well, the next iteration of the suspension.
Yeah, what was the next thing?
No, like what?
So then you find out that Elon Musk has taken an interest in your suspension.
And he only follows like 100 accounts and you guys are one of them.
So you must have known that.
But like, it's quite different when you find out, wait a minute, he's actually personally taking an interest in this somehow.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I think that he, I think that he likes our content.
You know, he's interacted with our content quite a bit and he noticed that we had stopped posting it.
And this is the crazy thing, by the way, this idea that we need to delete this tweet to get back on.
Why do we have to delete the tweet?
Why?
I mean, if Twitter doesn't like the tweet and they want to take it down, then they can do that.
They have the power to take the tweet down themselves.
It seems to me that it's this omission thing.
They just want you to like bend the knee and do what they want you to do and acknowledge that you engaged in hateful conduct.
And it is unclear.
I thought of that.
You're exactly right.
God, that's annoying.
It is a very, it takes it a step further than just simply having, you know, if they were just to take our delete or tweet down and delete it themselves, then it would be annoying that they did that, that they censored us.
But at least they wouldn't be going that extra step of making us do it ourselves.
I think that that's taking it a little bit a little bit further than it needs to go.
And it is unclear, you know, what it is that prompts these things.
I think right now you're safe calling a trans person a biological male if their sex is male, but you're, you know, you're not supposed to refer to them as a man.
And so it really comes down to the gender sex distinction that they're trying to make.
And our joke referred to an individual who is a transgender as a man rather than as a biological male.
And so that runs afoul of the hateful conduct policy.
I think that's the sticking point there.
But yeah, I mean, Musk is a big fan of the B. He's been following us for some time.
And so he noticed when we were missing.
And I think it's just, you know, a lot of people are giving the bee credit as if we are the reason why Musk decided to buy Twitter.
I think he had it in his head for quite some time leading up to this.
Maybe it was just a contributing factor.
Maybe it was the straw that broke the camel's back.
I'm not sure.
But clearly he saw that there was an issue with heavy-handed censorship and wanted to do something about it.
I think it's really interesting too, because you have so many people who call themselves progressives.
And I have a different idea of what progress means.
I think there's like a really great quote that C.S. Lewis had said at one point about how if you're on the wrong road, then progress means doing an about turn and going back to the right road.
And the man who turns back soonest in that context is the most progressive.
Musk is just trying to take us back to the right road.
You know, these things started out.
These platforms were pitched as free speech platforms when they were first created.
There was not supposed to be any barriers to free expression.
He's trying to take us back to that road to get us on the right road.
And so in that sense, I think this is a progressive move.
I agree with that.
So without asking you about your private conversations with Elon Musk, I know that's between the two of you.
Did he call you personally?
Like, were you, you know, was there a moment where you were like, oh my God, Elon Musk is on the phone for me?
We had a couple.
We had a couple of moments like that.
Initially, when we were trying to book him for an interview for our podcast, there was no expectation that he would respond to a DM on Twitter.
And then all of a sudden he did.
And he was talking to us about why in the world do you have an office in California?
You know, it's nice weather, but it's the most expensive weather in the world.
You know, there was this like banter that was going back and forth all of a sudden.
It's like, okay, we've got Elon Musk on the line.
What do we do?
How do we get him on our show?
Yeah, I mean, he reached out.
He just wanted to confirm that we had been suspended.
And so, you know, he wanted to have an actual conversation to confirm that instead of just, you know, reading about it online and trying to figure out if it was actually true.
Okay.
That, I mean, it's, it's spiraled to such a crazy place since then.
When you saw that he had acquired the 9% of Twitter stock, did you think, oh my God, he's going to buy Twitter?
That is what we thought.
I mean, it was, he was giving all of these public statements that were kind of just leading people to believe that he was really going to take action.
That poll that he initially ran where he said, do you believe that free speech is a principle that Twitter really adheres to?
And he's, and he warned people, he's like, there will be important consequences for this poll.
So vote accordingly.
You know, I think he was making it clear.
He told us when we interviewed him a few months ago, he told us, you don't have to read between the lines with me.
Just read the lines.
I'll tell you what I'm thinking.
And I'm not going to try to mislead you.
Whether or not you could say that that's been consistently true for him throughout the past.
If you apply it in this case, you just take him at face value.
It was very clear that he wanted to get involved in a big way in Twitter very early on with his public statements.
Wow.
And have you spoken with him at all this week?
No, we're not talking to him on a day-to-day basis.
We certainly don't want to bother him while he's really busy.
He's got to do this other thing.
It has to complete.
Yeah, we'd love to ask him to bust us out of Twitter jail, but we'll get there when the time comes.
I don't think he's in a position to do that at this moment.
Wait, that reminds me of the Kyle Mann skit that you guys did.
So Kyle is the one who does a lot of your writing, as I understand it.
And you guys did this little skit sort of, well, I'll just let it play out and let the audience listen to it and watch it.
It's Soundbite 1.
We got thrown in here for a pretty terrible crime.
We gave Rachel Levine our Man of the Year award.
We were just trying to honor such a great man.
Pretty heinous, right?
But we're making do.
You know, we've even been able to continue publishing articles with this laptop that someone left here in Twitter jail.
This is hard to do.
They're a little scary.
I've been really careful not to drop the subject.
Hey, no homophobic comments.
Oh, yeah.
I can't say stuff like that in here.
But don't worry.
I've got a plan to get out.
I'm digging a tunnel behind this poster.
As soon as I finish it, I'll be as free as the Taliban, Vladimir Putin, Kathy Griffin, the Chinese government, and all the other wonderful people who are still out on Twitter.
Luke, what's that?
I'm Elon Musk.
I'm here to rescue you.
It's great.
Trump, for the listening audience, Trump is in the background, just like filing his cards because he's also in Twitter jail.
So I think that's actually going to happen.
There's zero doubt that the Babylon B will come back if this sale concludes and probably even short of that, because I think Twitter is being just publicly dragged right now in such a way that it's going to have to.
Even if this falls through, they're going to have to reexamine the way they've been approaching their business model because there's just, there's too much anger at them over the way it's been.
Don't you think?
I mean, this whole thing has really served to expose just how biased against conservatives they are.
I don't think that would result in them backing down on it, though.
I mean, look how they're reacting to Musk.
It's the most interesting thing that they're, that they're, they're all up in arms, that they're not going to be able to censor everyone as much as they have been.
And it's a funny thing, too, coming from people who have been assuring us that they haven't been censoring us up to this point.
So on the one hand, they're like, no, we've never censored anyone.
This is a fair platform.
You know, we enforce the rules really fairly.
And then all of a sudden, Musk says, I'm going to open this up and make it a free speech platform.
And they freak out like that's a big deal.
Well, why is that a big deal if that's what you've been doing the whole time, if you haven't been censoring?
So it's really interesting to see the reaction, but I don't think that I don't think that if the deal, for example, were to fall through or something, then Twitter would of their own accord try to fix these problems.
I don't really think that they care.
They're really forceful in trying to get you to adopt their ideology, their way of thinking.
They unapologetically will try to say they know what's real, what's fake information.
They know what's good and acceptable speech and what's hate speech and what's unacceptable.
And they're happy to shove that down our throats.
All right.
So this may sound like a weird question, but explain why you think it's important for the Babylon Bee to be able to say Rachel Levine is our man of the year.
Where to begin with that?
I mean, I think it's a basic fundamental truth.
It's like, it's like, why is it important to be able to say that two plus two equals four when people are trying to tell you that two plus two equals five and that you have to say that two plus two equals five?
I mean, I think that's just what free speech is.
You know, it's, it's like that Orwell quote.
If that, if that, if two plus, if you're allowed to say that two plus two equals four, then everything else follows from there.
That's freedom.
I think that's just at bedrock, that's what freedom is.
And I don't think that speaking the truth or stating simple biological facts is, can possibly be hate speech.
You know, a fact is just a fact.
It's just a brute fact.
And you can't try to get at the motives of someone who's willing to say a fact.
So I don't know, this whole idea that we have to buy into this stuff, you know, and this is one of the issues that I have with Twitter right now is that they have their own ideology is baked into their terms of service.
They have this ringing tribute to free speech on the front end of their mission statement.
And then you dig down into the terms of service and they have a hateful conduct policy that includes all kinds of things like dead naming and misgendering as hateful conduct.
And if you disagree, you know, there's a lot of people who think it's misgendering to call someone who's biologically male a woman.
They consider that misgendering, but we can't even have a debate or discussion about that.
And I think that's ultimately what it comes down.
If you're going to say that you're a free speech platform with no barriers to free expression, then you have to let people debate those things.
And what's the harm in letting them talk it out and try to convince each other?
Why do you have to tell them that they must only say or think one thing?
Vivek Ramaswamy is coming out a little later, tech executive and philanthropist and knows a lot about this world.
And one of the things he says, and I think this is exactly right, is they smuggle in their viewpoint discrimination through that part of the policy you mentioned at the bottom, speaking to hate speech, right?
So who decides what is hate speech?
How is it hateful for you to push back on the narrative that Rachel Levine, who lived the vast majority of her life as a man, is in fact a man?
Free Speech vs Progressive Censorship 00:02:20
And you're basically saying shouldn't be honored as one of USA Today's women of the year.
That's a view.
That's a legitimate point of view that a lot of people share.
And so the way they smuggle in to steal Vivek's turn of phrase, their viewpoint discrimination against you is by calling it hate speech, by labeling it.
Now, I mean, like, it's not like somebody's on there dropping the N-word.
There are certain things we can all agree, depending on, I mean, like, I would agree, but if I listen to Spotify, I hear that word every other two seconds.
But there are certain words that we can, most of us agree, should not be bandied about with impunity on a forum like Twitter, which isn't run by the government, but a private company.
But they draw the line on anything that challenges liberal orthodoxies.
Yeah.
And not, you know, not just that, but it also comes down to the COVID misinformation stuff, you know, and these and these things are moving targets.
They're constantly changing.
It's not like they have like some fixed rigid policy that's just, you know, that's rooted in reality and you have to deal with that.
They have these moving targets everywhere that you have to keep up with.
And what's what's misinformation one day is a fact the next day.
And then, you know, what's what's hate speech, you know, today wasn't hate speech yesterday.
These things are changing all the time.
It's hard to keep up with it, but it is, it is smuggled in.
It is, it is a problem that that the terms of service themselves have ideology, progressive ideology baked into them so that you have to affirm that ideology or at least, or at the very least, like just not even speak about these issues and refrain from opining on them at all in order to stay on the platform.
And I don't think that's healthy for democracy, especially if the platform is so large that you have tens of millions of active users.
It's where most of the public discourse takes place, not just between private citizens, but between government officials and private citizens.
When you have a platform at that level and it's that influential in terms of shaping public thought and in terms of disseminating information out to the masses, you have to be willing to have debate on that platform, good faith debate.
And so much of this is done in good faith.
And a lot of people would argue, you know, from the from the other side, the conservative side of this, is that when you confront people with the facts on these issues, that's not hate.
Reality Over Feelings in Democracy 00:15:22
You know, telling the truth is a loving thing to do.
It's a compassionate thing to do.
You know, affirming a lie is not a compassionate or loving thing to do.
And I think there's a discussion to be had about that.
What constitutes actual compassion, love?
You know, it's defined as hate speech to tell the truth.
I think that's a problematic position to take.
And I think it's certainly something that we should be able to debate.
You know, I think about this sometimes.
Remember Dr. Keith Ablo?
He's gotten in all sorts of trouble since back when we used to have him on a fox during the day.
I haven't followed it that closely, but he did make a point that there is some, there's a mental disorder in the psychiatric field where some people feel like they have to cut off their arm and they feel really strongly that their arm must come off or they're going to die or they can't live and something.
And he said, if somebody like that comes into my office, I say, no, you're not right.
We're not going to cut off your arm.
That you're not going to die if you don't cut that arm off.
And he was likening that to the way he would treat somebody who thinks they're trans coming into his office.
Now, I realize today people freak out.
They freaked out back then from him saying that.
But certainly by today's standards, he'd get in trouble by saying something like that.
But, you know, there is a real question about whether we should be able to push back on people who say, I have this intense need to chop off my genitals, right?
Like, why can't there be more of a community saying, no, you are wrestling with something inside of you that may not be real, that may be curable?
It's not gay conversion therapy.
It's making sure this person really is suffering from the thing he thinks he's suffering from and sparing them, sparing them a lifetime of agony if they make a terrible decision the wrong way.
Right.
Yeah, it's not like these are all just happy success stories where after these transitions, you know, there's no issues after that.
Everyone just feels perfectly fine and content and happy in their new identity.
But even if you just bring it down to the fact that these are adults making their own decisions and you say, okay, well, you know, someone can do what they want to do and identify how they want to identify.
You still have the issue of compelled speech.
You still have the issue of, well, you're forcing other people to acknowledge that and agree with that and affirm that or not speak at all.
And I think that that's a problem, even if you're fine with the fact that people can identify with however they want or have whatever surgeries they want to have.
You know, the issue of compelled speech, I think, is one that's a serious issue right now.
In the Ablo discussion, it would be the equivalent of, you know, the person says, I know I don't have a left arm.
I want it off.
Why is it still there sometimes?
I know I'm missing my left arm.
And the left arm needs to come off.
It'd be the same as Twitter saying, you must refer to that person as a one-armed man.
You must.
And you're like, I can see two arms.
And they're like, it's disrespectful and it's hateful for you to call him anything other than a one-armed man.
I mean, that's effectively where we are right now.
And the rest of us are standing there saying, I know what my eyes can show me.
I see two arms.
Well, and it also comes down to, you know, the person who is offended by what you have to say.
Let's say, you know, somebody gets really upset that they've been misgendered because it hurts their feelings or it upsets them.
It makes them angry.
It doesn't, you know, it's not how they want you to identify them.
Well, I mean, there's plenty of cases where people on the left say hurtful things about people on the right, call them Nazis, call them racists, call them horrible names.
I've been called horrible names.
I'm sure you've been called terrible names.
And that hurts our feelings, right?
It's not nice to hear when people say mean things about you.
They have a right to say them.
Sometimes they do say them from a place of hate as well.
And sometimes it's because they just don't like us as a person.
And it's not just that they're trying to speak truth to us because they love us.
But, you know, there's plenty of examples of speech like that that isn't deemed problematic on these platforms.
So they're very specific about what they hone in on and consider it an offense that you can't come back from that results in a permanent suspension.
Yeah, the trans issue in particular is very dicey for them.
They are very protective on this issue.
And it's because trans lobbyists are so damn loud.
And again, I've said this many times, do not represent the majority of trans people who are not these crazy, like far left lunatics that their advocates are.
I mean, it's just crazy.
Like Katie Herzog's been saying, get better people, get better representatives.
But here some of it was encapsulated in the discussion that they had on Joe Rogan.
This is 2019.
And you remember this, we had Tim Poole on the show and we talked about this moment, this incredible moment where Jack Dorsey, the former, the founder and head of then CEO of Twitter and his chief legal officer, I think she's general counsel, went on to the Joe Rogan show and Joe had Tim Poole come on, who was really well versed in all of this, and kind of cross-examine these guys on their censorship policy.
We have a little bit of that queued up at Soundbite 4.
So your platform restricts speech.
Our platform promotes speech unless people violate our rules.
And in a specific direction.
In any direction.
But Uncle, I don't want to say his name.
The guy who calls for death gets a suspension.
The guy who insinuates death gets a permanent ban.
But Tim, you're misinterpreting what I'm saying.
And I feel like you're doing it deliberately.
It's not about one particular thing.
It's about a pattern and practice of violating the people.
And you have a pattern and practice of banning only one faction of people.
Quillette recently published an article where they looked at 22 high-profile bannings from 2015 and found 21 of them were only on one side of the cultural debate.
But I don't look at the political spectrum of people when I'm looking at their tweets.
Right.
You have a bias.
I don't know who they are.
You're biased and you're targeting specific individuals because your rules support this perspective.
No.
I don't agree with that.
Can you be clear, though, and like what rules support that perspective?
Specifically, the easiest one is misgendering, right?
Because that's so clearly ideological.
If you ask a conservative, what is misgendering, they'll say, if someone is biologically male and you call them, you know, she, biologically male and you call them a she, that's misgendering.
That's a conservative view.
The progressive view is inverted.
So now you actually have in your policies a rule against the conservative perspective.
I have a rule against the abuse and harassment of trans people on our platform.
Right.
Again, the smuggling.
Smuggling, right?
That's really what she's saying.
And there's a report out today from Politico saying that woman, the general counsel, cried on Monday during a virtual meeting with her team as she expressed concerns about how the company might change under Elon Musk.
By the way, she's said to be the person behind the suspension of the New York Post account and was pivotal in Trump's ban from Twitter.
I mean, this is why you get people like Ben Shapiro saying, Elon Musk is going to have to go in there and clean house of people who are not pro-free speech.
Doesn't matter conservative, liberal.
Are you pro-free speech or aren't you?
And not the fake kind, the real kind.
Well, yeah, they'll say they're pro-free speech, but they're just also in favor of reasonable content moderation.
This is just reasonable content moderation, Megan.
You know, they're just trying to apply good standards that are based in not being abusive and hateful.
But yeah, the ideology is smuggled into that.
And this is not really an issue of them not having a problem with hate speech.
It's that they actually hate speech.
They hate the freedom to disagree with them.
They want to enforce their ideology.
And I think that she's being disingenuous.
I think she knows exactly what she's doing.
But the crying in the meeting thing, I mean, it just goes back to show you how emotional all this is.
This is feeling based.
It's all based on feelings.
And we need to have some facts enter into the discussion.
We need to let reality drive some of the conversation instead of just feelings.
Is it so hard?
Is it so heartbreaking for you that a man has taken over the platform?
He says he's going to improve it.
He's going to make it more profitable for shareholders and its employees who will benefit from that as well, by making it a truly open forum, by allowing different viewpoints to air.
I mean, if you have such a deep problem with that that it brings you to tears, get out.
Get out.
You're in the wrong job.
Quit.
You're a damn lawyer.
You go to law school to learn about opposing viewpoints and how to make the better argument.
If you can't do that, leave.
You're shitty at your job.
True.
And I would also say this, you know, most of this stuff is geared towards safety, right?
She mentions abuse and threats and things like that.
So we have these, we're supposed to put these policies in place for the safety of the people on the platform.
And that's another thing that I would disagree with.
You know, I think Tim made some great points there.
I make similar points when I'm responding on these things, but I think this issue of safety is an important one.
You know, you can try to create a safe environment and in doing so, actually harm people.
And there's great examples of this.
I think a really great illustration of it is this study that was done on public playgrounds in New York City that found that the playgrounds had been made too safe for children.
And it was actually harming the children because it wasn't teaching them about risk.
And this is the thing, like when you go to college, for example, and they try to tell you that you need to have a safe space when you're in an environment where you're supposed to be learning, you know, encountering other ideas, encountering debates and being on the receiving end of criticism, even harsh criticism sometimes.
That's how you build resilience.
It's how you build character.
You don't want to be in a safe space where you're just insulated from all of that, or you're never going to grow as a person.
You might never change your views on things where you should change your views.
And you're certainly never going to be challenged.
So this idea that we need safety and protection, you know, we are adults and freedom of speech is a valuable thing.
And I think that it's so condescending to act like we need to protect each other from ideas that might harm us.
And instead, we should be trying to protect the freedom itself.
Absolutely.
All right.
So much more to go over, including the Babylon Bee now reportedly hiring, backing, helping the woman behind Libs of TikTok, who was outed against her will by this Taylor Lorenz, who is again playing the victim.
I'll bring you up to date.
We'll talk more about it and Elon with Seth in one second.
Seth Dylan is staying with us.
One note of clarification, not from anything we've reported, but from something that's out there.
There is a Twitter executive, the CMO, chief marketing officer named Leslie Burland.
And the reason we know what happened at this Twitter internal meeting, company-wide call, on Monday, is Project Veritas obtained a 45-minute recording of it.
So people have been reporting on it, and that's fine.
God bless James O'Keeffe because he gets his hands on great stuff.
But this woman is being, I think, unfairly lumped in with the chief legal officer, the general counsel.
This Leslie Berland, so far as I can see, didn't do the thing she's being accused of on a lot of websites and so on today.
She, well, let me put it to you this way.
This is the soundbite of her that's circulating.
Okay, listen.
Elon made it clear in public that a large part of the reason he bought the platform was because of our moderation policies and disagreements in how we deal with health.
This puts Twitter service and trust and safety, as well as anybody who cares about health on the platform, in a very difficult position.
Okay, so she's being slammed because she's saying Elon made it clear the reason he bought it was he wanted to change our moderation policies.
And this puts us in a very difficult position if we care about trust and safety.
The truth is she didn't say that.
The truth is she was repeating the questions that had been asked by the employees.
And here is the full sound bite.
Back to you, Parag.
Elon made it clear in public that a large part of the reason he bought the platform was because of our moderation policies and disagreements in how we deal with health, something that we place and value very highly within the company.
This puts Twitter service and trust and safety, as well as anybody who cares about health on the platform, in a very difficult position.
Can you speak your thoughts on this and how those teams will be supported?
All right.
So I just want to make that clear.
She starts it with question back to you, Parag.
She's the moderator.
She's bringing the Twitter employees' questions to the CEO, and she's basically the one who has to read them.
And she did clarify that in response to this, but just, you know, we have to make sure, forgive me, but like this, this general counsel is a problem and should go.
But I don't, I haven't seen the evidence that the CMO is in the same boat as her.
So I will defend her, at least based on what I've heard so far.
Okay, so let's switch gears because it's sort of related, but it's not totally related to what we've been discussing.
Libs of TikTok got suspended on Twitter as well last week.
And it was a very big story.
And they were the subject of a long piece by Taylor Lorenz, who works for the Washington Post, who decided that they need to be outed, that they are also anti-trans and contributing to, quote, hate.
And so the Washington Post decides to unleash the Jeff Bezos resources on Libs of TikTok, which is run by somebody who wishes to remain anonymous, though she did give an interview while masking her identity to Tucker and at least one other source.
I don't remember.
Was it you guys?
I can't remember, but at least one other.
And anyway.
New York Post, I think.
New York Post, New York Post.
There we go.
So the right wing got very upset with the Taylor Lorenz reporting because it was unnecessary.
We didn't really need to know who was behind Libs of TikTok.
They don't do this kind of reporting for anonymous accounts pushing BLM narratives or trans narratives.
It's just libs of TikTok, which outs what libs on TikTok are saying about usually LGBTQ issues.
You have stepped in in some way to back the woman who's been outed as the purveyor of Libs of TikTok.
What have you done?
So, yeah, I mean, this is a crazy story because there's all kinds of stuff happening here.
You recapped a little bit of it, but Libs of TikTok had been suspended twice on Twitter leading up to this.
There were all these mass reportings where basically the account was getting mobbed and they were trying to get it shut down.
So you had some Antifa groups that were leading this charge and they were just piling on and thousands of reports were streaming into Twitter, the safety team that she was just talking about, you know, for reports of harassment and abuse.
Libs of TikTok Suspension Drama 00:11:00
And the account kept getting locked.
So it got locked a couple times in a row.
They required that a couple of tweets be deleted in order for the account to be unlocked.
So that was kind of leading up to this whole thing where there was this doxing story that was put out by Taylor Lorenz, which, you know, was the goal of that was to expose who this person behind Libs of TikTok was.
And it's very funny when you hear the interviews that Taylor gives about this, you know, on the one hand, she tries to say, oh, we didn't expose any information.
We didn't, we didn't reveal this person's identity.
But then on the other hand, a moment later, she talks about how it was important for us to determine whether or not this was a foreign actor and reveal who this person was.
So which is it?
Was she revealing the person or not?
Let me play that.
Okay.
Just pause your story right there because we have that on tape.
I mean, it's crazy how often the left now goes to a foreign actor.
It was the Russians.
It was somebody foreign.
That's why I had to do the reporting.
We had to know if it was letter by Putin.
Here's Soundbite 5.
I think it's rare to see an account gain so much prominence so quickly and be shaping these narratives in such an effective way, especially against trans people.
So I was, I mean, my story was kind of long, but I really wanted to make the case, like why this account mattered.
And I think it's incredibly important, you know, as someone that covers the influencer industry to know who is exerting influence in this way.
I mean, for all we knew, this could have been a foreign actor, right?
Or someone we just didn't know.
Oh my God.
Keep going.
So that's not.
Didn't know.
We need to know.
So, you know, she felt she's got moral reasons for why she needs to expose this person.
And it comes on the heels of her literally just weeks ago weeping in an interview and saying that she had personal information exposed and how horrifying this was and how traumatizing it was for her personally to have somebody, you know, putting information out there that she didn't want out there.
But that's literally what she does professionally.
And so the hypocrisy there is just absolutely stunning.
It's breathtaking.
But, you know, I saw this as an opportunity.
You know, Libs of TikTok is a very impactful account.
And I think the work that they're doing is actually very important because what they're doing is they're bringing to light a lot of these things.
A lot of these videos are videos of teachers admitting what they're talking to their students about.
And sometimes they're kindergarten teachers, you know, and they're talking to their kids about issues related to sex and gender and things like this.
So the kind of stuff that DeSantis is dealing with here in Florida, we're based out of Florida here.
You know, these are the types of things that Libs of TikTok is bringing to the surface.
And by the way, this isn't like, these aren't private videos that are being leaked.
These are publicly posted videos on social media that are just having a light shown on them and being amplified.
And I think that's an important point to make too.
But I think it's important that we see what's going on.
And I think Libs of TikTok is doing something really important and significant.
And so, you know, I worked out a deal with her where she can continue to do this, even if they try to cancel her.
The whole point is they can try to cancel her, but I'm not going to fire her for doing this job.
So she works for me now.
We've worked out an arrangement.
It's not a deal between the Babylon Bee and her, but we've worked out a deal where she can actually run this account, get paid a salary to do it, and we're going to turn it into a media company.
That's amazing.
I love that.
Good for you.
You were her Elon Musk.
He was hers.
It's on a much smaller scale.
You were hers.
Well, there's an update to the story, which I kind of love.
I have to say.
Speaking of Tim Poole, he decided to take out a billboard in Times Square calling her out on some of her nonsense.
Our pal Jeremy Boring of the Daily Wire helped.
And it's in Times Square right now, I think, right?
It's in Times Square right now.
And it basically says, Taylor, I don't know, I guess we'll show in a second.
It'll come up.
But it said that she doxed Libs of Tech.
Taylor Lorenz doxed the Libs of TikTok.
at Timcast.
Hey, WAPO.
There it is.
Okay.
Hey, WAPO.
Democracy Dies in Darkness.
Taylor Lorenz doxed Libs of TikTok, which they totally did.
And then she comes back and once again, oh my God, this woman never misses a chance to play the victim.
She comes out, says, oh, Tim Poole and the CEO of the Daily Wire did this in an attempt to discredit my reporting.
Okay.
So no, right?
No, they were really just doing what you just did, pointing her out as a hypocrite.
She's out there crying about getting doxed and she's a doxer.
She says, this billboard's so, it's undeniably so idiotic.
It's hilarious.
But don't forget that these campaigns have a much darker and more violent side.
Okay.
I await your update on how your life became violent as a result of this.
She never provides an example.
Blah, blah, blah.
I'm grateful to be in a newsroom, recognizes these bad faith, politically motivated attacks, and has a strong security team.
I'll bet you she's got 25 security officers around her right now with her fake claims of the violence.
So Tim Poole responds by saying, I'm not discrediting your reporting.
I've repeatedly said it was justified and that publishing a name is something we can argue on the merits.
I'm calling you out for lying when you and the Washington Post denied linking to private details.
You published Libs of TikTok's private address.
Just own it.
He goes on to say, I'm glad to hear you are not upset and your friends and fans are also happy.
It's the way it should be.
You make a statement.
I contest it.
All of our points are heard.
You on CNN, me in Times Square.
Now move on.
Here she is.
My family and friends are not happy.
They have been subject to a nonstop stream of hateful attacks, doxing.
There she goes again.
And ready?
Wait for it.
Violent attacks.
Name one.
Challenge.
I call bullshit.
What?
Violent attacks?
You don't think Taylor Lorenz would have run to the airways to inform us all if a violent attack had happened against her friends, her family, as a result of something she wrote?
Bull.
Happy to hear that you're moving on.
And on it goes.
I just, and with no compassion or even acknowledgement of the fact that she just did all of that same stuff, minus her fake violent attacks claim to Libs of TikTok.
Yeah, it's like I said, it's breathtaking.
I love how you read that, by the way.
The dramatic reading was great.
Thank you.
I mean, I wish you had the clip of her sobbing on TV.
I do.
Stand by.
We never come to air without it.
It's Soundbite 6.
I've had to remove every single social tie.
I had severe PTSD from this.
I contemplated suicide.
It got really bad.
You feel like any little piece of information that gets out on you will be used by the worst people on the internet to destroy your life.
And it's so isolating and terrifying.
It's horrifying.
I'm so sorry.
It's overwhelming.
It's really hard.
I'm sorry.
No.
It's one thing, you know, if she wasn't actually doing this to other people and she felt that way, you could really feel sorry for her.
But the fact that the reason that people come after her is because she comes after them.
You know, it's just insane that she's that she tries to play the victim like this.
But you know, this is a this is the point that I made when I publicly stated that I had worked out an arrangement with the creator of Libs of TikTok.
The effort to dox her was not about journalism.
This wasn't about telling a story that needed to be told that was of great public interest.
This was about trying to intimidate and harass this girl so that she would be so afraid it would raise the cost of her doing her job to the point where it would become too terrifying and risky to do it.
And what I wanted to do was step in and give her the assurance that she could continue to do this.
We'll provide her security if we have to, so that she can continue to do what she's doing and not have to have those worries.
But that was the point of this piece.
It was to make her feel the way Taylor was just saying she feels.
It was to make her feel terrified, horrified, and crawl back into a hole and hide and stop doing what she's doing because it's so effective.
I don't need identifying information on Libs of TikTok's creator.
I know she's a woman.
I mean, I read her name, of course.
We haven't repeated it on this show, but how old is she?
Like about what age range is she?
She's in her 20s.
Oh, so she's young.
Right.
Of course.
She's got reason to be afraid that there will be penalties.
And, you know, she was, as I understand it, from Brooklyn.
It's like, okay, so nobody in Brooklyn agrees with her.
So there's a reason why she's afraid to share her identity because the Taylor Lorenzas of the world have made her opinions not acceptable, right?
Like her pushback and some of these narratives, and some of them are insane that she posts on her Twitter.
Any pushback, unacceptable.
You're in the same boat, except thankfully you have some job security and some, you know, now powerful friends.
And she didn't when Taylor took a shot at her, when Jeff Bezos basically took a shot at her.
Yeah.
And I, they knew that.
And so I think that that was the goal of the piece originally was just to get her to basically feel so afraid that she would stop doing what she's doing.
And she's, she's very bold.
I mean, is she afraid?
Absolutely.
At the same time, you know, she hasn't really been deterred.
You know, she's, if anything, she does realize that this means that the work that she's doing is effective.
And so her strong desire to keep going, I think, represents a boldness and courage there.
I think she's actually very courageous, even though she is obviously reasonably scared of the threats that are posed to her now at this point.
I mean, she gets death threats every single day in her inbox.
It's really nasty what's coming at her.
But, you know, this is, it's a part, it's innate, it's part of what you do here.
And Taylor, if she's going to be out there doing this kind of work, doxing people like her, then she should expect this kind of a response.
She shouldn't be crying about it on TV and acting like, you know, she's, she's on the receiving end of some great injustice.
Yeah, like out of nowhere.
It's so hard to determine why this happened to me.
As I understand it, Libs of TikTok went from like 700,000 followers on Twitter to over a million now.
So Taylor's little campaign didn't work.
And of course, her lie about it could be a foreign actor, and that's why I needed to unearth this, is exposed because she clearly found out who it was and knew it wasn't a Russian or a foreign actor and went ahead with her little doxing campaign anyway.
And Tim Poole is right.
Then they lied about it.
The Washington Post itself in writing lied and said that we didn't reveal any personal information.
Tesla Stock Risks for Musk 00:15:00
And they very much did.
They linked to her home address and didn't have the balls to just own it.
They lied on paper.
So this is not the paper of record.
This is not Democracy Dies in Darkness.
This has become a partisan hack rag run by a guy with a political agenda.
And we should be pushing back publicly as much as possible.
And we can be mad about it.
And we should be upset about the way that they handled it.
But it is true that they amplified the voice that they were trying to silence.
And her platform is way bigger now than it was before they started all of this.
And we have Taylor Lorenz to thank for that.
So thank you, Taylor Lorenz, if you're watching and listening.
You're violent.
There you go with more of your violence, Seth.
Thanks for fighting the good fight.
Thank you.
It was a pleasure.
Coming up, a different take on the Elon Musk Twitter news from Peter Schiff, who predicted this was all bluster and that it would not happen.
Back on our show two weeks ago, well, we said, why don't you come back on so we can ask you all the tough questions?
And to his credit, he said, I'll do it.
What does he say now?
That's next.
Peter Schiff, chief economist and global strategist at Euro Pacific Capital, is back with us today to talk about Elon Musk, the predictions that Peter got right and those he got wrong.
Two weeks ago, Peter was on this show and said the following.
I don't think Elon Musk has any intention of buying Twitter.
I don't think he has the ability, the liquidity to finance such a large purchase.
So I think he's just having fun.
Aha.
Well, Peter Schiff is back with us today to talk about that prediction and also whether Musk buying Twitter is going to be a net benefit for all of the investors in his companies, like those who have bought Tesla.
Welcome back, Peter.
Good to have you.
Oh, thanks for having me back, Megan.
Okay, so that was not correct.
How'd you get it wrong?
Well, I guess I overestated Musk's intelligence.
I mean, he's obviously a smart guy, but he's not that smart.
And sometimes smart people do foolish things.
And I think buying Twitter is going to end up being probably the most foolish thing Musk did if it in fact happens.
I mean, if you look at where the price of Twitter is trading, the market is obviously assigning a very large probability to the deal not going through.
So it's still not a certainty that it's going to be done.
And I think, you know, for Musk and probably for Tesla shareholders, I would be hoping that it doesn't get done.
I think if you own Twitter, it's a great deal because Elon Musk is getting you out of jail.
He's overpaying for Twitter and Twitter is going to probably lose a lot of money while Musk owns it.
But the bigger problem and why I thought that Musk wouldn't do it is I didn't think, A, he would want to sell his Tesla shares in order to buy Twitter.
But I think more importantly, I didn't think he would want to pledge his Tesla shares as collateral for a loan to buy Twitter, which is what he's doing.
Because, you know, who's to say that Tesla can't do what Netflix did?
I mean, Netflix is now down 70% from where it was a few months ago, and there's no bottom in sight for that stock.
The same thing could happen to Tesla.
Tesla's stock price is way in the stratosphere compared to its actual earnings, its valuation.
And there's nothing that would prevent the stock from dropping 70% or more.
But if that were to happen, he would be forced to sell those shares into a very weak market in order to repay the lender.
And who knows where that transaction would be priced?
It would probably have to happen at a significant discount to the market.
And I think that's why you saw Twitter stock down 11, 12% yesterday.
And it was down 2% the day of the announcement.
But people are starting to think about this possibility.
And I think it's like waving a flag at a bull, or in this case, a bear when it comes to the shorts for Twitter.
I think this is a gift.
They smell blood.
And I would expect the shorts to be piling into that stock because they know if they can push the price down low enough, they're going to flush out Musk and they'll be able to cover their shorts at a much lower price.
I think I understood what you're saying.
I was hanging on there by a thread, but you're basically saying he's overpaying and that if he has to actually dip into like sell some of his Tesla shares, that's a very bad thing for Tesla, for him.
And that since the value isn't in Twitter, it's smart to short this purchase.
It's to bet that it's not going to work out, that it's not worth what it's trading for right now.
I don't know if the purchase is going to work out.
If you think it is going to work out, I think Twitter is trading at about 48 and the deal price is 54 and change.
So you make some good money if you buy it now and it goes through.
But if it doesn't go through, then the question is what happens to the price of Twitter stock?
It's probably going to end up being a lot lower.
But my point is that the real risk is for Tesla.
But, you know, I think if Musk were to sell some Tesla stock now to buy Twitter, that's not that bad because Tesla is overvalued and so is Twitter.
The risk is that he doesn't sell his Tesla.
He borrows money and pledges the shares because then he could end up selling the shares at a much lower price than the price he would get if he sold it right now, because he would be selling under a distressed circumstance where the price was significantly lower than the price he could get if he sold stock now.
All right.
The word that's coming to mind is buzzkill.
You're a buzzkill.
Come on.
We're excited about this because we want him to take over Twitter to restore some semblance of balance in the big tech information wars.
Yeah, Megan, I'm not against him owning Twitter.
I mean, I use Twitter myself.
I've got almost 700,000 followers.
And, you know, I agree with a lot of what Musk is saying.
I mean, I would like the forum to be more open.
I don't like it being policed by the socially collect, you know, correct employees, the woke people who are working at Twitter.
I would much rather have a guy like Musk own it than current management.
So I'm not objecting to this as somebody who uses Twitter.
I think it's good for the user experience.
I'm just talking about it as a financial analyst.
Is it a wise transaction for Musk?
And what are the implications for Tesla shareholders?
I mean, I think it's great for Twitter shareholders.
They get a bunch of cash and they can invest it someplace else.
I think it's a risk for Tesla shareholders.
And I think it's a risk for Elon Musk himself as the largest Tesla shareholder.
I think he's putting a good portion of his fortune in jeopardy.
Now, I don't think he's not going to go bankrupt.
He's not going to be poor.
I mean, he could lose $100 billion or more and still be very rich.
So I'm not worried about Elon Musk.
He has more money than he could ever spend.
But a lot of the people who own his stock, they may have very large positions relative to their net worth.
Those people should be selling.
I mean, they are exposed to significant risk.
I mean, Tesla was overpriced to begin with, but now this is another factor that could significantly weigh on the share price.
So we'll get into the connection between what happens with the Tesla stock and the Twitter stock in one second.
But don't you think that Elon Musk actually can find efficiencies that were not being pursued by the current management and that he will make Twitter better?
I mean, he has a reputation of doing that at companies.
I realize now he's got three massive companies to run.
So he's not going to be all that available.
But he's got a pretty good track record of choosing the right companies and making them work.
Oh, you know, I'm not saying he can't make Twitter better.
I mean, maybe he could make Twitter a more profitable business than it is now.
Now, will he make it profitable enough so it'll be worth the 44 billion that he's paying for it?
I have no idea.
But my only point is that that's irrelevant to Tesla.
Tesla stocks are.
So you're saying, okay, wait, before we get to that, because we're going to do, we're going to dumb it down.
So you're not saying that he's not going to improve it and find efficiencies and make the company more valuable.
You're not saying he can't do that.
You're saying your concerns are about the financing of this deal.
And how it could drive down the Twitter value right from the start.
Okay, is that correct?
Well, the Twitter value, no, the Twitter value is irrelevant to anybody but Elon Musk and his partners because the current shareholders are going to be gone, right?
They're going to get cashed out of the deal and they walk away.
Now, can Elon Musk make Twitter a more valuable company than it is today?
Probably.
But can he make it valuable enough to be worth the $44 billion he's paying?
That's a much more difficult task because I think he's overpaying for the company anyway, based on the assumption that he could make it far more valuable.
So there's a lot of ifs there.
But again, it's Elon Musk.
He can take a chance.
That's his money and his partners.
What I'm talking about, again, is the vulnerable position that this puts Tesla in as a company when you've got somebody with a $12.5 billion margin loan effectively against a huge position in Tesla.
And Tesla is a very expensive stock.
The momentum could break.
The price could collapse.
Look what's happening to so many of these other momentum stocks.
You know, I think Tesla was the original meme stock before GameStop and AMC.
Tesla really was a meme stock.
It was all about Elon Musk and his personality more than the actual profitability of the company.
But anything could happen to change that momentum.
Look what just happened to Robinhood.
You know, Robinhood is down 90%.
You know, that's the app was really popular, social media during the COVID lockdowns.
This thing has imploded and now they're laying off a good percentage of their workforce.
But one stumble, one missed earnings.
You know, Tesla's most recent earnings were better and the stock went up, but they're one earnings announcement away from a potential crash.
And having a guy short or basically leveraged long in this big position is very vulnerable because if the price falls enough, the covenants in that loan are going to require the stock to be sold, regardless of the market price.
He's going to be forced to sell that stock.
And since the price has gone down, he's going to have to sell a lot more shares to cover what he owes.
And why would that be bad for Tesla?
Well, it's just bad for the stock price, you know, whether it's bad for the underlying company.
I mean, you know, that is a different story.
I'm talking about the stock price of Tesla and people who may own Tesla right now who think the price is going to go up.
There is a tremendous risk that it goes way down.
And the fact that Elon Musk has just borrowed so much money or is thinking about it.
I mean, it may not happen because the deal may not happen.
And if the price of Tesla stock drops enough between now and the deal, maybe that alone will call off the deal because, you know, Musk might be concerned about the loss and value of Tesla.
So we'll see.
Again, the market is pricing in a significant risk that this deal does not happen.
You had predicted that there would be a drop in the Tesla stock.
And indeed, we have seen that this week, someplace between 7% and 10%, it fell after the announcement of this deal.
But how confident are we that that is attributable to his announcement about Twitter?
Because what the papers tell me, Bloomberg says, you know, it happened amid a broader sell-off in equity markets around the world due to slower economic expansion, persistent inflation.
And then Baron says the broader stock markets plunge can be blamed for at least part of the decline in the Tesla stock.
So how much of a factor was his announcement on the Twitter deal and what we've seen happen to Tesla this week?
The stock.
Well, there's certainly something to be said for the fact that it might have dropped anyway, but it was down 11, 12% yesterday, the day following the announcement.
That was one of the biggest declines in any one stock.
I think you had a 10% drop in GE.
But GE actually had earnings that they missed on.
I mean, there was no news, no bad news was released on Tesla.
So the only news was this deal.
And yes, the overall market was weak, but not nearly as weak as Tesla.
So I don't think you can just dismiss this transaction and say, well, you know, it's got this huge drop has nothing to do with this Twitter deal.
I think it has a lot to do with this Twitter deal.
And I think the stock is going to continue to be under pressure as long as this deal is out there.
Now, if the deal falls through and it doesn't happen, then you could see a big rise in Tesla, because I think that would be good news that it's not going to happen.
But, you know, if it's going to happen and it does happen, it is going to be a significant negative that is going to weigh on that share price and is reason enough not to buy the stock.
I mean, I don't own it anyway.
I mean, so even if there was no deal, this is much too expensive a stock for me to buy.
I don't buy stocks that way.
I'm looking for value.
And, you know, I don't see it in Tesla.
I see a lot of competition coming.
In fact, I mentioned Netflix.
I mean, Netflix and Tesla are very similar.
If you look at why Netflix became so expensive, it innovated.
It had a new idea, the streaming service, and it grew very quickly.
The share price went up very quickly.
But all of a sudden, a lot of people emulated it.
Now it's got all sorts of competition from major studios and television networks and internet companies that it didn't have before.
So it's a crowded field.
Meanwhile, their customer base is, you know, is bombarded with competition, but they also have higher food prices, higher energy prices, higher rent.
How much money do they have for all these streaming services?
They don't.
And so they're having to cut back.
And I think the same thing could happen with Tesla.
Tesla has everything, the market to itself.
It shows that there's a lot of demand for electric cars.
Well, what do you know?
A lot of the major automobile companies all around the world are now coming up with electric cars of their own to compete with Tesla.
Meanwhile, the cost of building these cars is skyrocketing because of the raw material costs.
So there's more competition.
It's more expensive to make them.
I mean, their market share is going to be competed away and the valuation could suffer.
Investors are going to start to look at this from a more realistic perspective.
And the valuation is going to come down.
The problem is now, with the valuation comes down, now Musk could be forced to sell his stock.
Who's going to buy that stock and at what price under those circumstances?
Student Loan Forgiveness Costs 00:08:23
That is the risk.
I mean, both for Elon Musk and for any shareholders in Tesla.
All right.
So to dumb it way down, if we want to know whether the Twitter deal is actually going to go through, a smart thing to watch might be the price of Tesla shares.
Or the price of Twitter.
I mean, the deal price for Twitter, I think, is 54.20.
And Twitter is trading at 48.
So obviously, if the deal goes through, you have to just buy, you can buy it now at 48 and you make seven bucks.
I mean, it's a good return in potentially a short period of time.
But the question is, why is the stock trading at 48 when Musk is going to buy it at 54?
It's because it's not a certainty.
Because the risk is you buy it at 48, hoping to make $7 and the deal is called off and it goes from 48 to 28 and you lose $20, right?
So there's risk there.
So if you look at that price, if the price of Twitter in the market starts to trade a lot closer to that deal price, then that's an indication that at least the market has more confidence that the deal is going to go through.
That is negative for Tesla.
And I would imagine that the closer the price of Twitter gets to the deal price, the lower the price of Tesla is going to be.
Okay.
All right.
Now, one more subject before I let you go.
Joe Biden is getting ready.
It looks like, I mean, it's stunning.
I can hardly believe that it's actually he's going to do it.
But to forgive, quote, forgive, I don't know how much in student loans.
And it's incredibly immoral.
I mean, it's incredibly immoral to say those people who paid off their loans, they're suckers.
They're a bunch of losers because the federal government is going to swoop in now and pay the loans of those people who refused to pay, who didn't pay their debt.
Not to mention, it's a huge wealth transfer, right?
And it's a wealth transfer from the working class and the middle class to the upper class, the people who went to college, people who, all the other people who said, you know what, I can't afford college.
I can't afford it.
And I don't want to put myself in debt.
So I'm not doing it.
Those people, guess what?
You didn't get to go to college and now you're going to have to pay for the college of the people who chose to go.
Yeah, look, this is another example of two wrongs, not making it right.
The government never should have got into the student loan business in the first place.
The only reason that college is so expensive and so many people now have so much debt is because of government.
Before government got involved in guaranteed student loans and then direct student loans, college was not expensive.
If your parents were poor or middle class and they couldn't afford to send you to college, you worked your way through college.
You got a summer job.
You waited tables, no problem.
You graduated debt-free.
And if your parents were even upper middle class or upper class, no problem.
They covered your cost of college.
College was inexpensive.
But once the government started providing students with all this money, that's when the universities really took advantage of the students and the government to jack up prices because you no longer had any competition.
Students no longer cared how much college cost because they were getting the money from the government.
They were getting these loans.
And without the government guarantees, the banks wouldn't have loaned the money.
And so if the students didn't have the money, then the colleges couldn't have charged so much.
So now you have a situation where because of government, everybody has all this debt.
And their solution is, well, let's just forgive the debt.
That is an even bigger moral hazard because what you're now telling people is nobody should pay for college.
You're an idiot now.
Even if you can afford it, just borrow the money because it's going to get forgiven.
I mean, you'd have to be a complete idiot to pay for college.
And now, if you thought college was expensive before, wait till you see how much more expensive it's going to get once they start forgiving the loans.
Because now colleges can say, look, we're going to charge you $100,000 for this tuition, but who cares?
Borrow the money.
You're never going to have to pay it back.
It's all going to get forgiven anyway.
In fact, if you come to our university, we'll just throw in a free car.
We'll just wrap that up and throw it in with your student loans because you're not going to have to pay for it.
I mean, this is all a grab bag.
Government pays for it.
It's going to be a disaster if they actually forgive it.
I mean, what they should do, I feel badly for a lot of these students that have all this debt because of the government.
What I would do personally, I would like to forgive the debt, but only if you get the government out of the student loan business forever.
No more government student loans, no more guaranteed student loans.
That way you'd avoid the moral hazard and you force these universities to cut costs to lower their tuition because otherwise they'll have no customers.
Because the only reason they can charge so much now is because of these government loans.
So the government gets out of the way.
The free market is going to lower tuition.
It's going to cost a lot less.
Now, fewer people will go to college because right now, because the government makes it so easy, a lot of people who barely graduated high school go to college and they take remedial math, remedial English.
They're wasting their time.
The degrees are worthless.
They study underwater basket weaving.
We have a lot of kids that don't belong in college.
They're only there because the government makes it available and pays for it.
They need to be learning trades.
They need to be learning skills.
The last thing they need to do is waste five or six years in college.
But that's not, unfortunately, where we're headed.
They're likely to forgive these loans.
And they're just going to do even more damage than what they've already done.
And the other factor that even if you forgive these loans, you have to recognize that there's a cost to it.
How are you going to pay for it?
Because forgiving these loans, if you tell all these college students, you don't have to pay your loans back.
I mean, what that means is like the government is giving up all this income that they were getting.
Up to 1.6%.
So how are they going to make up the difference?
Are they going to raise taxes on the middle class to cover the car?
Right?
Of course.
How else would they?
That's their go-to.
No.
No, they're just going to print more money.
Because all this, because can you imagine if you tell these students that have student debt right now, you don't have to pay the debt back.
Now the students have more money to go out and buy more stuff.
They can buy more cars.
They can travel more.
They have more spending money.
Well, that's more inflation.
They're going to push up prices because the government is not going to reduce its spending, even though it's reduced its revenue.
So it's going to require, it's going to mean bigger budget deficits, more money printing, more inflation.
That's how the public is going to pay for student loan forgiveness.
They're not going to see their taxes go up.
They're just going to see prices go up more.
And now, of course, the government's going to blame it on Putin or they're going to blame it on the pandemic or anything else.
But it's government.
It's this deficit spending.
It's money printing.
And if the government says, we're not going to take that revenue, we're going to forgive the student loans, then they're going to have even bigger deficits.
And again, as I said, more people are going to borrow more money to go to college.
The colleges are going to raise tuitions even higher.
So nobody's going to pay.
Everybody's going to take on debt, knowing that the government is going to wipe out the debt.
And that's even bigger budget deficits, even more inflation.
This is insanity.
It's insanity.
And of course, politically driven.
His numbers are in the tank with young people right now.
He's lost only 20 points off of his approval rating.
And so even while President Biden himself has expressed skepticism about doing this for some of the reasons you outlined, he's now reportedly getting ready to do it because of politics.
It's disgusting.
It's irresponsible.
Tax imprint is no way to run a federal monetary policy.
Megan, this is the problem with democracy.
This is why we have student loans in the first place, because the government, see, when they lowered the voting age down to 18, the cost of college became a big issue because now you have all these 18-year-olds that are voting and they're going to college.
And so how did the Democratic Party want to lock up their votes?
Hey, we'll promise to pay for your college.
So, hey, you don't have to have a summer job.
You don't have to wake tables over the summer.
Go to the beach, have fun.
We'll make it easy for you to borrow money.
And so that's what they did.
And, you know, you get into bed with the government.
Opt-In Algorithms for Free Speech 00:15:18
Eventually, you know what's going to happen to you.
And that's exactly what happened.
And that's what they're doing again.
Obviously, if Biden is saying, hey, vote for me and I'm going to forgive your $50,000, $100,000 of student loans, yeah, that guy's going to vote for you.
That gal is going to vote for you because you're giving them this huge prize.
It's like a bribe.
It's like you're bribing people for their votes.
But the people who are paying for it don't understand that they're paying for it.
That's the problem because the beneficiaries know what they're going to get.
That's the scene, right?
The seen benefit of this is, oh, I'm a student.
I don't have to repay the money.
All the unseen consequences are diffused.
All the voters who are going to end up paying for it don't realize how much it's going to cost.
And so Biden doesn't lose their votes.
He gains the votes of the people who benefit, but he doesn't necessarily lose the votes of the people who have to suffer and bear the cost because they don't even understand that they're paying for it.
As you say, you get in bed with the government.
This is the scene.
This is the scene in that movie where you wake up with a horsehead in the bottom of your bed.
Don't do it.
Peter Schiff, always interesting.
Thank you so much.
Up next, tech entrepreneur and author of Woke Inc, Vivek Ramaswamy is here.
He's the one who coined that they're smuggling in their content or their viewpoint discrimination through their hate speech policies.
Very interesting theory.
And he's got a lot of thoughts on what this means for America.
That's next.
Tech entrepreneur and author of the book, Woke Inc, Vivek Ramaswamy, joins me now to explain how Elon Musk can liberate Twitter successfully.
Welcome back to the show, Vivek.
Great to see you.
Good to see you, Megan.
How are you?
Good.
So all show long, we've been talking about something you wrote in a piece for the Wall Street Journal on April 26th.
And it was a piece called How Elon Musk Can Liberate Twitter, you and our mutual friend Jed Rubenfeld of Yale Law School.
He's married to Tiger Mom, Amy Chua, who's amazing too.
Long story.
Okay.
Anyway, I love the way you put it.
So I stole it for purposes of this show with attribution, which means it's not stealing.
You write.
Well, thank you.
You don't have to do the attribution even next time.
Oh, thank you.
I love the idea and I'm happy.
I'll take it.
You write, Twitter and others smuggle viewpoint discrimination into supposedly neutral content moderation categories, primarily misinformation, incitement, and hate speech.
Right.
So your point is that all they do is viewpoint discrimination.
And there's a reason that it always goes against one side.
And they don't want to own up to it.
So they just label it as, oh, that's pursuant to our policy against hate speech, against misinformation, against incitement.
So they can still look like the good guys.
Yeah, I think you've got that right, Megan.
It runs just one layer a little bit deeper that allows them to get away with it, which is the classic modern problem of taking a political decision, but wrapping it in the veneer of technocracy.
Okay.
So here's the thing.
Much of what they do is viewpoint-based discrimination, but some of it is actually the kind of thing that you have to do in order to just operate a functional social media site.
So what I wanted to do in the piece, along with Jed, was to clarify what these different categories are so we could smoke the difference out.
What do I mean?
Even Elon Musk has said that he wants to remove things like spam that litters his feed.
I think that's a good thing.
It'll improve the user experience for Twitter users.
If you didn't have some level of content moderation, all of the feeds would be filled by porn, by just unpleasant content, commercial spam, the kinds of bot-driven content.
So you need to be able to clean that up, even though that's constitutionally protected while still operating as a free speech platform.
So that's the conundrum that Elon Musk faces.
So what Twitter's been doing for a long time is that they have been wrapping in viewpoint-based discrimination by smuggling it into the categories of the supposedly neutral content moderation.
And so my first suggestion, Elon Musk, is to make sure that he smokes out the different categories and becomes really clear about what's what, because there's a very clear answer about what to do with each of them.
Okay.
First is genuinely false speech, like commercially fraudulent advertising.
Well, there's an answer for false speech.
You have to prove that it's false, but if you do, you can take it down, but you shouldn't be able to take it down without actually proof of falsity.
With respect to incitement, it's a private company, but actually the legal precedents give us a good standard that Elon Musk can use.
If there's really going to be an imminent risk of, say, bodily harm or unlawful activity and it meets a Brandenburg versus Ohio test, you know, this is time-tested stuff.
It's been around for a long time.
We don't have to recreate the wheel.
If it meets that test of imminent harm, take it down, but it can't just meet the test of what a given Twitter employee thinks on a given day could theoretically lead to violence in the future because that includes everything.
And then there's that third category of hate speech.
And this is the category that Elon Musk has to get rid of altogether, where any society that permits free speech has to acknowledge that there is no such thing as a false opinion and there's no such thing as an opinion that isn't allowed in the marketplace of ideas, even if that's an odious opinion, even if that's an opinion that hurts some people.
That's part of what it means to live in a society that protects free speech.
That's the principle that Elon Musk should bring to running Twitter in recognizing that hate speech is in a different category.
And then Megan, like, look, I mean, do a lot of people want to see racial epithets online?
No.
Are racial epithets a form of hate speech that express an opinion?
Absolutely.
So how do you resolve that conundrum?
Are you just going to drive all of your users away?
And this is where I come up with a really simple solution along with Jed that we printed in the pages of the journal today, which was that actually the thing that you got to be able to do is give users the choice.
Twitter has this censorship regime.
If you really like it that much, let the user opt into it or let the user opt into an algorithm that can show them content that they do and don't want to see, but don't make those decisions centrally because that's what turns this from a free speech, what could have been a free speech platform into a platform for really a centralized form of political censorship and related indoctrination.
So that's the view at a high level.
I like the plan.
However, I see some potential pitfalls with the hate speech policy, right?
Because it's if you were to allow, like what could be said?
So if pursuant to those guidelines, you could say, let's make it somebody, a fictional character, because I don't know, you know, whatever, you know, Joe, Jane Schmo.
Jane Doe.
Jane Doe is an effing C word whose face should be bashed in and relatives should be harassed.
And then they retweet it and they retweet it and they like it.
They like it.
They like it and they retweet it.
And now it's trending.
Jane Doe is an effing C word and all that stuff.
It's not incitement.
It doesn't call for immediate violence that's likely to happen.
It's definitely hateful.
It's got what anybody would consider slurs.
But if we're not going to ban them, then it should be okay.
But it's going to create a shitstorm in Jane Doe's life, probably, right?
Because it's going to circulate.
It's going to circulate.
So what about something like that?
Yeah.
So just for the purpose of the example, Megan, at least for first discussing, are you okay with dropping the should have her face punched in part, but all of the other odious stuff still included, effing C word, all that?
You okay to start with that one first?
Like, I don't know.
I'm still working it out.
You want to leave that in there.
You want to leave that in there.
Okay.
You and I agree that the government could not ban that.
That would be a constitutionally banana.
The government could not ban it.
Yeah.
The government, the government could, well, let's agree with that.
So, so for the sake of the example, let's just agree that that does not count as an as an incitement to imminent bodily harm.
Okay, let's just put that in that category.
Then let's talk about it.
Fine.
Because when that goes viral, some people may be on the other side of that.
And I don't want to distract from that from the main issue, which is just there's a really odious thing you're saying about Jane that's going to make her life worse.
That's not going to result in her suffering from physical violence, but is going to make her life worse off.
And that's going to trend virally.
What do we say about that?
So here's what I say about it.
Most users don't want to see that kind of content on Twitter.
They will have the opportunity to opt out of it.
Many of them will be able to opt out of it by saying that they want to opt out by opting back into Twitter's pre-existing regime, which would have that kind of content taken down.
And others, through their own user behavior, will actually be able to train simple artificial intelligence AI algorithms that Twitter uses today to effectively show people the kind of content they want to see.
That's the other proposal that we make.
But at the end of the day, if there are people who really want to opt in to see the kind of content that you just described, odious content, hateful content, content that doesn't make me feel better in my course of living my day when I see that.
So I'm not going to go search it out.
But let's suppose there are the kinds of people out there who want to search that out and say, you know what, that's what people say in the real world and I want to see it unfiltered.
Then I say that is part of what living in a free speech culture actually means.
We support free speech in this country, not because it is not harmful.
Free speech has harm.
This was the same debate in 1787 as it is today, but we accept free speech and we embrace free speech not because we believe it does not cause harm, but because we believe the right way for working out our disagreements is through more speech rather than less speech and through ultimately a free exchange of ideas that democracy and the advancement of truth ultimately depends on.
So, you know, push comes to shove.
There's a lot of, there's a lot of reasons why I think the problem isn't as big as you might be concerned about there.
But when the rubber hits the road, yes, I come down on the side that somebody should be allowed to say that and that users shouldn't be forced to listen to it.
They should be able to turn that off, should be able to turn their settings such that they don't see that, should be able to opt into Twitter's existing paradigm, which wouldn't allow them to see that.
But for those who do want to see it, they should be free to see it.
And for those who do want to say it, they should be free to say it.
I feel like it's just what bothers me about the way Twitter operates right now is such a statement like that would probably be censored under the present day rules, though 100% I've been subjected to that on Twitter for years.
And all you need to do is go back and look at the tweets at me after the Trump debate to see that.
I mean, it was absolutely vicious.
And one of the top executives of Twitter actually told me personally that what happened to me was one of the reasons they started to think about, should we be moderating some of this content more?
However, however, it doesn't make me in favor of these moderation rules.
It doesn't make me say we should crack down on speech more on Twitter because what's happened is they've just chosen their favorite left-wing causes and they cracked down on, you know, back to the viewpoint thing, they cracked down on the people who touched those sacred cows.
But so Twitter didn't like what the Trump supporters were saying about me, but they were 100% with all of the liberals on TikTok calling me a racist after I left NBC for trying to get into a discussion about how the society's acceptance of blackface has changed over the past 40 years.
They loved it.
Twitter amplified it.
They let everybody go for it, right?
No problem.
They had no problem with that.
So I don't, I have very mixed feelings about this content moderation thing because I think it's just going to be employed against one side if we try to say, oh, the balance of decency would prevent this.
Well, it hasn't been a problem.
Let's go to the harder question.
The easier question is, is Twitter hypocritical in the way they apply those standards in a partisan way?
Absolutely they are.
The examples are countless.
Jed and I pointed out several in our article of the way that certain of President Trump Trump's tweets were taken down when certain other mobilities.
Can I read that?
That's a good paragraph.
Let me just read that Vivek.
Sure, right.
And then I'll let you finish your point because I wanted the audience to hear this.
You write, conservative opinions about transgenderism are censored as attacks on a protected group.
Conservative views on COVID are flagged as misinformation.
In May 2020, Twitter censored as a quote glorification of violence President Trump's quote, when the looting starts, the shooting starts tweet, while leaving untouched Ayatollah Ali Khomeini's tweets calling for the destruction of Israel and Colin Kaepernick's tweets supporting the burning of police precinct houses.
Claims that the Democrats stole the presidency in 2020 are censored, while claims that Russia did the same in 2016 go untouched.
And of course, the truthful Hunter Biden laptop story was suppressed as misinformation.
So such a good point about the Russians versus the Democrats, right?
Such a good point.
And this is an op-ed, so I can't, we could just go, we could write an entire essay on just the countless list of hypocritical examples that reveal what's actually happening here is the enforcement of a partisan agenda rather than a complicated adjudication of what content moderation means.
But that's the easy part.
I still think the question you were getting at before is the harder question, which is interesting to adjudicate and talk about.
Let's just set the rules of the road and assume that right-wing people run Twitter in the future and then left-wing people run it in the future, kind of like our federal government works.
I would like to see a platform in which the rules of the road and the kind of content that makes it through to everyday users shouldn't vary as a function of who's actually in charge or the politics of the person who's in charge.
And I guess to pick up the strain of our last conversation, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, Megan, is what objection would you have, you know, in having the position that at least you were taking, what objection would you have to the idea that the user can decide for himself or herself whether or not they want to see it.
Right?
Well, in a way, they already can.
In a way, they already can because you get to choose who you follow and unfollow.
So if you, you know, I actually have a very funny story about this, Vivek.
You have a very funny story about this.
So when I was at Fox News, there was some account and it tweeted out some like thought of the day.
It was like some introspective self-help type thing.
I'm like, oh, this sounds like a good account.
I'll follow them.
And then I was getting into the elevator at Fox News and they tweeted the same site with which I was becoming familiar tweeted.
And I quote, forgive me for going there, the shocking truth about anal sex.
I was like, okay, I need to unfollow.
I'm going to need to unfollow.
And I literally went to hit unfollow, but instead I accidentally hit like getting into the elevator.
And so I couldn't like unlike.
It was too late.
I was in the elevator.
I was like, oh my God.
You know, I was like, I just liked this tweet.
I didn't mean to like this tweet.
And thank God, by the grace of God, the, you know, the black box that is the elevator didn't allow the like, the mistake to go through.
So I dodged my point.
Otherwise, you might have had some unfollows too.
And people will be a little confused about your new tastes in content.
Could have done a story about that.
We do have some control.
We have control now.
We have control now.
I mean, I think that in a certain sense, you didn't have the control to say that there's a person who you decided to follow, but within the people you follow are people who follow President Trump or people who follow Iana Presley, who says a lot of things that may be closer to incitement to violence than what President Trump has said in the past.
It doesn't matter.
You can even have it on a content-specific basis.
You don't control what someone else retweets.
People don't necessarily agree with everything they retweet, but might put it out there for people to see.
If you don't want that to disrupt the flow of your day or your experience or your user experience of the platform, you can set your current settings to be exactly what it is with Twitter today.
Trade-Offs in Protecting Odious Opinions 00:02:29
This would be on my proposal to Elon at least.
Leave that intact.
Don't tear that down.
Just create a parallel experience that allows people to see what's on the other side of the veil.
And even when you create that parallel experience, you can use your own behavior to further train what's exposed to you and not.
But that is different from saying that a certain person who's expressing a viewpoint, however odious that viewpoint was about Jane Doe, that is still a viewpoint that in our society, there's no such thing as a false opinion.
There are false facts, there are no false opinions.
But when there are no false opinions, even if it's an odious opinion, it's one that a society that protects free speech has to be committed to protecting.
And I thought Elon did a good job of this.
You know, it's easy for him to say, but I thought he did a good job of it nonetheless, to say that he believes that the people who are every bit as critical, harshly critical of him should have a platform on Twitter just as he does.
That's the culture of free speech on which this country was built.
It is a culture that involves trade-offs.
People have to remember, the free speech advocates included, the world of free speech is not a rose-colored, honky-dory world.
It is a challenging world that exposes us to many trade-offs of the experiences we face, the risks we take by allowing people to say what they want and express the opinions that they want to express.
That has costs.
But starting in 1787, by my book, Everybit Holding True in 2022, those are the trade-offs we accept in return for having an open marketplace of ideas that allows the best ideas to win, that allows a democracy to thrive, that allows the pursuit of truth to actually achieve its goal of educating truth.
Because the thing is, if we have a policy that says you can't say the thing about Jane Doe, like, and you know, we should be bashing in the faces of her friends and relatives or of her.
If we ban that, then you're going to open the door to, you know, the trans people saying, you put me at risk and my family at risk when you say I'm actually not a woman, right?
Like that's what they claim now.
This is harm.
You do violence to me.
You threaten me.
You, you know, you're, you're challenging my very right to exist.
And that's how they get these sweeping bans.
They take something that seems objectively reasonable, like you shouldn't be calling for the bashing in of somebody's face and say, that's exactly the same as you saying, I don't accept your claim that you can change biological sexes or you can change genders.
So it does become a slippery slope.
You almost want to kind of just go with what's what it wouldn't be okay for the federal government to ban, Twitter can't ban.
Disinformation Threats on American Soil 00:06:56
You know, I liked your original piece with Jed, you know, a year plus ago that we talked about on our show, which is just treat them like they're, like they're essentially government agencies and they have to follow the same rules.
And then we have jurisprudence that we can just follow to figure out what's okay and what's not.
Yeah.
And that was an assumption baked into this piece that Elon would not be a steward for the government.
Because historically, what's been happening with these platforms is that they're absolutely deputized by the party in power in the United States, now the Democratic Party, to do through the back door what government could not do through the front door.
And since nowadays we have to describe everything through a rhyme, the way I describe this one is, you know, if the, when you say if it's state action in disguise, the Constitution still applies.
That's the principle there.
Actually, if you're really acting on behalf of the state, then you're bound by the Constitution.
That was what we published in January 2021.
Now, this piece was based on the assumption that Elon Musk is not going to be acting as a pawn for the ruling Democratic Party in the United States, but he still has some irreducible challenges for how you make it a user-friendly platform that people want to use while still protecting free speech.
This was sort of a how-to guide to accomplish that goal.
But exactly, the more fundamental first principle, it should go without saying, but maybe it's worth saying nonetheless, is that the first principle is that Elon Musk should be crystal clear, that he will not be censoring content on behalf of the state.
And Megan, it's worth remembering.
I mean, just think about the context of what's going on in the world right now.
Look at what's happening in Russia.
Okay.
This is in the news.
There's a major war playing out in Europe, a whole separate topic we could talk about another day.
But let's think about what Vladimir Putin is doing in Russia.
He has banned the BBC.
He has banned all kinds of misinformation.
And as the state, the party in power, transparently saying that there's misinformation about the war in Russia coming from the toxic Western media, his people aren't allowed to see it.
That is what an autocrat does.
That is what gives us the moral standing to be on the other side of that geopolitical struggle.
But I worry about living in a society where actually what we're doing here in the name of taking down hate speech and misinformation as decided or at least influenced by the party in power isn't that much better.
In some ways, it might even be worse because at least Vladimir Putin bans it directly.
Whereas what we have here in the United States is a government that pretends not to do that, but actually influences private parties through a combination of threats and inducements and joint coordination behind closed doors to effectuate a really similar outcome.
And I hope if there's one outcome of this war in Ukraine on the other side of the other side of the world, it is that we still look ourselves in the mirror to ask ourselves what it is that gives us the moral authority to stand up to autocratic regimes like Russia and China.
If we go through this war ending without us having gone through that cycle of introspection, I think it will be a lost opportunity for the rediscovery of the few strands of national identity that still define who it is that we are as a people.
It's not the color of our skin or even our shared heritage, because guess what?
In this country, we don't have one.
What we do have is a set of shared values.
And one of those values was a commitment to one side of the trade-off that we set in motion in that Constitutional Convention of 1787, where we said that we protect free speech not because it is easy, but because it is worth preserving.
That reminds me, of course, we've had the Biden administration already say they're concerned.
They're concerned about Elon's purchase of Twitter.
And this is we have both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton pushing for the online crackdown on disinformation.
Vivek.
Hillary Clinton.
She's the biggest and best purveyor of disinformation.
She's the one who came up with a whole Russia gate lie.
We know that now.
It was repeated by John Brennan, then head of the CIA, to Barack Obama while he was the sitting president.
Hey, Hillary's come up with this plan.
It's a distraction from her email scandal.
She's going to say that he has some ties to Russia to try to undermine the guy's candidacy.
She and Barack Obama separately now speaking out about disinformation online, pushing for the Europeans to crack down on it with their big tech, which they are.
And Barack Obama now making this like the biggest platform of his post-presidency push that we need to crack down in disinformation.
What do you make of it?
Look, this is a surprising reversal of what used to be a liberal concern.
The idea that you might have an Orwellian state that suppressed the free flow of information.
The idea of fighting against that was a liberal idea.
Whether this is a liberal idea or conservative idea today, I don't really care about the label, but it is interesting just to see how far the so-called progressive movements in this country have come.
And I also love the shift and the easy sort of, let's just say, conflation of disinformation and misinformation, which is also something that you say the words enough times, people start to view them the exact same way, kind of like equality and equity.
But that's a game of language, jiu-jitsu.
But, you know, what I would say here is just imagine the narrative without saying that this is in the United States, that you have a party in power in the United States that adopts a false report from one political candidate to attempt to go so far as to plant a mole in the opposition party.
And then when that opposition party takes over, but then when you regain power four years later, you're also working behind the scenes to threaten private companies to take down information that otherwise could prevent the opposition party from getting elected and to take down misinformation that's defined by the party in power and to take down hate speech that the party in power doesn't like.
This would be something out of a George Orwell novel.
Maybe it will be something out of modern day Russia or China and yet reveal the curtain and ask which country is actually doing it.
That's a description of modern day reality here in the United States of America, Megan.
And I think that that is chilling.
I think it is chilling.
And it is, am I disappointed that it has to come to an actor in the private sector or a set of actors in the private sector to be able to stand up to this, which is fundamentally a problem with our civic culture and even the state itself?
Yeah, it's disappointing that that's where we are.
But at the end of the day, I think we're getting pretty close to the last line of defense on basic principles like free speech and open debate is something that we preserve and protect from state intervention or from state corporate intervention.
And there's, by the way, a word for the merger of state power and corporate power that is the definition, textbook definition of fascism.
I think that that's something that we have to worry about here on American soil.
And as I hear these words come out of my mouth, you know, five years ago, I would have listened to myself and thought this sounds like some kind of conspiracy theorist.
I wish this were a conspiracy, if it weren't a reality that I'm just describing in plain language.
It's not even hiding in plain sight.
It's lying in plain sight.
And I think that that's part of what makes a moment like the takeover of Twitter, an otherwise, you know, let's just say mundane topic for M ⁇ A takeover news to have such political importance in where we are as a culture today.
And I do think that that's real.
I think it's real.
I need one word answer because we're out of time.
Do you think the sale will be completed and Elon will buy it?
Yes.
Okay.
All right.
Now, listen, Vivek has another book coming out.
It's called Nation of Victims.
It comes out later this year.
Special Podcast Episode Tomorrow 00:01:06
You can pre-order it right now and you should.
The subtitle is Identity Politics, The Death of Merit and the Path Back to Excellence.
Hope you enjoyed our in-depth discussion of the Elon Musk purchase of Twitter, which I agree will happen.
I want to tell you that tomorrow, we've got independent journalist Matt Taibbi, friend of the show, back with us.
I'm really looking forward to that.
He speaks sense.
I mean, pretty much reliably, right?
It's like you can't say that about everything in media, but Matt, you can.
And also to tell you that now is a great time to download the show if you haven't done so already, because tomorrow we're going to drop a special episode just on the podcast feed.
You know, we do the show live on Sirius and we post on YouTube and so on.
We're doing something special tomorrow just on the podcast feed.
You'll find out what it is if you subscribe and then download the Megan Kelly Show on Apple, Pandora, Spotify, Stitcher, wherever you get your podcasts for free.
And we are looking forward to bringing you that content.
You'll find out tomorrow what it is.
Thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly Show.
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