Dave Smith critiques Big Tech censorship regarding the New York Post's Hunter Biden Burisma story, arguing platforms suppressed election-relevant links while ignoring Trump's tax records. He details Facebook's forced admin approval for his group and contrasts the adversarial town hall interrogating Trump on white supremacy against Biden's softball session avoiding radical group questions. Ultimately, Smith suggests this media double standard and corporate suppression distort democratic discourse, potentially enabling future government nationalization of private platforms to silence dissent. [Automatically generated summary]
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Navy SEALs and the Murder00:01:42
Fill her up.
You are listening to the Gash Digital Network.
Hey guys, today's show is brought to you by Target of Opportunity, the U.S. Navy SEALs and the murder of Jennifer Evans.
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Target of Opportunity, the U.S. Navy SEALs, and the murder of Jennifer Evans.
Censorship Scandals Explained00:15:34
All right, let's start the show.
We need to roll back the state.
We spy on all of our own citizens.
Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
Here's your host, Dave Smith.
What's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem, the victor in the war on Optimum, AIDS, and COVID.
Is joining us again.
Of course, I'm Dave Smith.
He is the king of the caulks, Robbie the Fire Bernstein.
What's up, my brother?
How are you feeling today?
I'm doing pretty good.
How about you, Davey Smith?
Doing very good.
Doing very good.
Looking forward to this episode.
Some interesting things to discuss.
Of course, the candidates had dueling town hall meetings last night.
We'll get into that and talk about it for a little bit.
But before we do, what I want to talk about first is what I think is one of the biggest stories of the election cycle that really was blowing up on social media the day before yesterday and a little bit yesterday, although it was interrupted when Twitter went down, which is pretty rare.
But Twitter very conveniently went down the day after this shitstorm online.
And this all has to do with the New York Post piece about Joe and Hunter Biden and their dealings with Barissimo, the Ukrainian energy company.
And this was really something crazy.
So we discussed briefly on the last episode the story in the New York Post.
But as we were recording, it was before any of this social media censorship stuff started going on.
So the story itself, potentially pretty big story.
You know, who knows exactly what, you know, what might come out about it.
Uh, there might be holes in the story that are poked, it might all turn out to be real.
Um, but the real question, I think, is how much more shit do they have?
Because it seems like they have a lot more.
Um, but either way, there is uh, let's say, very unflattering pictures of Hunter Biden that have been- he looks cool as hell.
What are you talking about?
Unflattering.
I wish I could have a body like that.
The sleeping with the crackpipe thing doesn't look so great, but there were a couple of those pictures that were kind of badass.
You're like, oh, Biden's kid's awesome.
His teeth might be shading, but he still has all the teeth.
So that's a fucking winner.
You're doing crack keeping your teeth and making like 50K a month from just one job.
Yeah, no, it's better body than me.
I'm doing, you know, no, no one here is arguing Hunter Biden isn't awesome.
That's not, that's not where I'm going with this at all.
Okay.
That guy's kicking ass and taking names.
But of course, the scandal that which really is, if it's true, then it's a big political scandal, is that Hunter Biden was setting up a meeting with one of the execs at the company and his father, the then vice president, when Joe Biden has said that he knew nothing about what his son was doing.
So that is, by any metric, a real deal political scandal.
And who knows what else is there?
Now they're claiming there's thousands of other emails that they have.
And if this is, you know, if it's a lot more like this, this could be a big deal.
But all of that isn't even really the story.
What the story became is that this was silenced on social media in a way that I've never seen a story silenced on social media before.
Now, I've seen a lot of social media censorship.
And let me say at the outset that, as I've said before, social media censorship is a big, big deal.
And it is a really concerning threat.
And libertarians, at least lots of libertarians, are really goofy on this issue.
I'm not saying that you have to advocate any type of government intervention, but you have to treat this as the serious threat that it is.
And if you don't, you're going like we really risk losing a lot of credibility.
I've, you know, one thing that I've always thought about libertarianism is that it's libertarianism is an awesome philosophy because it really works in real life.
That's why.
If it doesn't work in real life, then there's nothing good about it.
Then it's like, like philosophy is only as valuable as it can be actually applied in real people's lives.
And so often libertarian types, and I'm included in this too, really love the philosophy and they fall in love with the philosophy.
And that's great.
Like I love this stuff.
And if you've listened to part of the problem for years, you know, I'm like, libertarians love to like debate, you know, hypotheticals, you know, like me and you have done shows before where we've, you know, back in the day talking about like minarchy versus anarchy.
And you're like, okay, well, what if there's a guy's property line is here and he's polluting and this pollution goes on.
Like we love living in these hypotheticals and what's the correct philosophical answer?
What's the role of government?
What's all this?
And that's great, you know?
But what you have to always avoid doing is being so wedded to your philosophy that you'll just fit real life events into your preconceived beliefs.
And I see a lot of libertarians do that.
Like they're finding a way for this to not be a problem because it's the private sector or the private sector and therefore like it can't be censorship or it can't be this or that.
This is all bullshit.
This is a major problem.
This is people being removed, deplatformed, taken out of the public conversation.
This is a real threat to free speech.
Doesn't mean it's a First Amendment violation necessarily, but it's still a threat to free speech.
And this is something that a lot of people get confused by because they're like, if you say, oh, this is censorship, you'll hear libertarians saying only the government can censor.
Like, no, that's not true.
That's not what the word censorship means.
Lots of different people can censor.
And if you say, oh, it's a violation of free speech, people will be like, well, you don't understand the First Amendment.
It's like, no, I didn't say it's a First Amendment violation.
The First Amendment says that Congress can write no law violating free speech.
That doesn't mean nothing else can violate free speech.
And some free speech violations might be okay, but that this certainly is one.
And a lot of people like myself, there was almost like a divide amongst libertarians where like when Alex Jones got kicked off of all the social media platforms, there were some people like me who were like, this is really creepy and really scary.
And then there were other people like, you know, on the more goofy side of the libertarian spectrum who are like, oh, this is great.
This is the market cleaning up trash like Alex Jones.
And this is exactly what libertarians are for.
You know, just because the market is doing something does not mean libertarians have to be for it.
The example Michael Malice used was like, if you go to a restaurant and your food's cold and you're like, well, it's a private company.
They can do whatever they want.
It's like, no, just because a private company did it doesn't mean I can't be against it and hope that there are repercussions one way or the other.
But this example was different for several reasons.
Now, I might be wrong on this, but I've never seen a story squashed like this.
They actually made it so that you couldn't share the link.
It's not just like if you shared it, you could get flagged or recorded and then taken down.
They made it so you could not share the link.
You couldn't share the story from the New York Post, which is one of the biggest newspapers in the country.
I think it's the fourth or fifth biggest newspaper in the country.
So oh yeah, but almost certainly the most awesome.
I love the post.
It's just like, there's no like pretension.
It's just like, listen, we know you're fucking busy.
You can't obsess over politics.
We're not trying to be here like we're not all in a conversation where we want to feel smarter than everybody else.
Here's something to read on the subway on your way to work.
Have some fun with it.
There'll be a couple of pieces of information in here.
It's not like the New York Times.
You know, the New York Times talks to you.
It's like, good sir, you must read this if you want to be an informed citizen.
I'm the New York Times.
The New York Post is like, brah, what's up, dude?
You got five minutes while you're taking a shit?
Come, you know, read a little something.
I don't know.
Or don't.
Who cares?
Chris Christie's being fat again.
Like that'll be the cover.
Next pages.
Yep, that's basically it.
Chris Christie's being fat again, but then it'll always be some clever, you know, title.
Like it'll be.
And then two pages later, when you get bored, it's weird but true.
Someone got an entire elephant in their asshole.
And then you get bored again.
And then it's the New York City crime blogger.
I used to read that.
I haven't read the actual physical post in a while, but like that, you know what people describe of having a paper in your hand?
That was, that's a fun one.
Yes.
Now, this, but this story is actually, you know, perhaps a really huge deal.
And maybe not.
But either way, that's not even, again, none of that's even the story anymore.
The story is now that a newspaper, one of the biggest newspapers in the country, can publish a story that is, at least they're claiming they have evidence of a huge political scandal a few weeks before a presidential candidate.
And the powers that be of these companies can essentially do their best to silence this story.
Now, that is a different level of censorship.
It's also, if we're using the loose language of the Democrats and the corporate press, that is election interference in a fairly profound way.
And so it's not just that what made this case so different is several things.
Number one, that they actually banned the link.
Like they actually debted your ability to share the story.
You couldn't even share it in a private message to somebody.
Number two, that it was a major scandal involving one of the two major party candidates running for president a few weeks before the election.
And number three, which like all of these are pretty interesting, it was probably the most clear example of the bias, the political bias of the social media companies.
And this was Twitter and Facebook, at least maybe more, but I know for a fact, Twitter and Facebook both banned this.
This was, it was like on full display.
They actually gave, or at least Twitter did, gave their reasons for why they had done this.
And their reasons were that the material was hacked, which it does not seem to be clear from the evidence that this was hacked.
It seems like at least what the Post is claiming, right?
The story is that Hunter Biden brought his laptop into a laptop repair shop and abandoned it.
Also, the idea that you would censors, like, let's say someone hacked the Pentagon tomorrow and actually had the story on UFOs or the stories on Bigfoot or the story on that they secretly have the cure to cancer and they're just not sharing with us, whatever the hell that is.
Forget hypotheticals, the Pentagon papers.
Does that story get shut down now?
Yeah.
And, you know, again, and the other thing, and this is one of the things that's interesting, right?
Is that quite often when people have a bias, it's easy to be unaware of your own bias.
And it's easy also to convince yourself that it's not a bias.
Like you have to have a certain not personality type.
That's not exactly the right way to put it.
You have to be somewhat introspective in order to control for your own bias to some degree.
And none of us can probably do it 100%.
Like we all just have our biases.
But if you don't even attempt to do that and expose yourself to different points of view and constantly rethink how you, how you come to the conclusions you come to, then you're never going to, there's no chance that you'll be able to control for your own bias.
You know, I think about when Jack Dorsey was on Rogan's podcast, the second time when he was on with Tim Poole and his lawyer, which was like, it was a really, really interesting podcast.
And one of the things that came up there was that, you know, Tim Poole basically accused them of having a left-wing bias.
And they were like, no, we don't.
We don't have any political bias.
And he was like, but you can't, you will kick people off for misgendering somebody.
And they were like, yeah, absolutely.
We consider that hate speech.
And he's like, that's a left-wing bias.
And there's this interesting moment, right, where you see that from their perspective.
Like, if you have this bias, they'll go, no, we don't have a bias.
We just, it's hate speech to misgender somebody.
So, of course, we kick you off for hate speech.
And then you have to explain to someone that that is the bias, that right there.
Believing that calling somebody by their, you know, the biological gender rather than their preferred gender is misnaming someone.
That itself is a left-wing bias because right-wing people generally don't believe that, and left-wingers do.
And it's you have to actually get into all of your assumptions that underlie that, you know, like to that conclusion, which is not the easiest thing to do in general for people.
But so oftentimes, you know, people will have this bias and not even really think they're acting it out.
You know, it's fairly easy.
And I know a lot of people, I think the left is more guilty of this than the right.
And there's some evidence to back this up.
Like there's been studies that demonstrate that right-wing people are much better at accurately telling you what a left-winger believes than left-wingers are at telling you what a right-winger believes.
Part of that is because left-wingers control the culture.
So a right-winger kind of knows, you know, like what their view is.
But when the left-wingers are asked to explain what right-wingers believe, they're much more likely to be like, well, they're racist or, well, they're this.
They want to force impregnate you and then not let you have abortions and then see how to raise your child in church.
And hopefully they can get rid of people of other races.
Left-Wing Bias in Culture00:05:02
Exactly.
Now, by the way, that's not to say that right-wingers never do this about left-wingers either, but they're generally tend to be a little bit better at it, not caricaturing or misrepresenting what the left believes, but are more likely to be able to accurately represent what their claim, what their stated beliefs are, at least.
But so if you just right away are like, well, Donald Trump, if you have this view that Donald Trump is this fascist, corrupt, awful leader, and all of these other things that are under there, then of course you'd kind of be like, well, no, we're not doing anything wrong.
It's just this could really hurt Joe Biden and this is hacked and blah.
But, you know, just for example, the, you know, use the word hacked, I think is not exactly accurate.
At least it doesn't seem like this was hacked.
I could be wrong about that.
But how about Trump's tax story?
I mean, what's that?
You know, I mean, okay, it's not hacked, but you got secret records from someone else who didn't give them to you.
But there's never even a thought that we would ban that story on social media.
I mean, the idea that they'll go after fake news after all, you know, nobody, there's never even been a thought that social media would ban the Jussie Smollett story or the Covington Catholic kids story or the Trump-Russia collusion story or go on and on down the list, yada, yada, yada.
Like there's tons of fake news stories out there.
None of them get this type of treatment.
And I think it was plain for everybody to see that the reason this story got this treatment was because it damaged Joe Biden and they wanted to cut down on how many people would see this story.
I really don't see how there's any other way to view this.
I agree.
I mean, it's crazy.
And it's really interesting because I think Republicans are actually going to pull Jack Dorsey into Congress, but I'm not sure how I feel about the, I guess, government legislation aspect of it.
But this was clearly pretty flagrant.
Yes.
No, listen, I am very confident that any government intervention is going to make this situation worse, which is a hard sell for a lot of people on the right.
I understand that.
The only argument against that might be in what way has the left actually infiltrated these groups?
Like what kind of real relationship exists between Google and the government or Twitter or any of these media things in the government.
So if they're already kind of under the control of the left, so if the right is trying to wrestle back a little bit, maybe you can make that argument, but the whole thing is screwy.
Look, it's the same impulse, and part of this might be why libertarians lose.
You know, there's, there's other factors involved as well.
But it's always, when there is a problem, it's always an easier sell to say, let's write a law than it is to go, okay, well, here's actually how this problem needs to be solved.
This is why, you know, in with healthcare, it's, you know, it's like, well, write a law.
Everyone gets healthcare.
Write a law.
This is illegal.
Write a law.
Discrimination is illegal.
This is illegal.
Whatever it is, you know, like there's always, it always like is sounds like an easier, more obvious solution to say we should write a law.
And that's, and the, the right-wingers are just as, you know, maybe not just as, but they're also very, you know, they, they fall for that too.
Oh, write a law.
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CBD Benefits Without High00:15:37
I think a new platform is coming.
If you just got to like think about the way technology develops, like there's aspects of Twitter that I like, Facebook, I'm done with, except for the inner circle, which to be honest, I've been paying a little bit less attention to because I hate Facebook so much.
Instagram, I hate, except I'm trying to post clips over there because people like it.
But there's got to be, like, if you look at the best of Twitter and the way that you're kind of able to get information or the way social media works, I think that there's going to be a little bit of a market reaction where if you see a lot of this kind of censorship, people start realizing, oh, I got to be somewhere else if I want to get like the real information.
And also, just from a technology standpoint, someone's going to come up with something that's cooler and better.
This isn't the end of our ability of where we congregate online and share ideas.
I don't believe, you know what I mean?
If you take a 10-year perspective, you really think like Twitter is going to be the place still?
No one's going to come up with something cooler or better, or that if they continue to censor, enough people aren't at some point going to be like, well, I don't want to hang out here anymore.
Yeah.
No, it's, it seems unlikely that that would, it would go that direction and nothing better would come about.
But there was something really, you know, the backlash to this was humongous.
It was all over Twitter.
I mean, the story itself, the New York Post story was like trending in like a few different spots.
It was like number two and number six and number eight.
You know what I mean?
Like ultra.
And they wiped all of that out.
And then it was just people, then fucking tech censorship was trending and like all this other shit.
And people were going nuts online.
Like people were really furious about this.
And a big part of this is that, you know, when, as we all know, right around this time, right now, emotions run very high.
Right before a big election, this is when everyone gets really invested emotionally in politics.
And this has always been the case.
Emotions are higher now than typical every four years, but it's always every four years that it's the height, you know?
And this is, you know, whatever.
Democracy is the ritual.
This is our state religion.
This is like, you know, the fucking, I don't know, the big holiday.
This is the big ritual where we all go out and vote.
And that's how we make this magical thing, the government legitimate or whatever.
And look, libertarians even aren't fucking immune to it.
I know that I get some libertarians who normally love me furious at me when I criticize Joe Jorgensen and Spike Cohen.
They're like furious because they're in that mode too.
Like, this is game time.
This is all of our emotional energy is invested in this.
Like, why aren't you just, you know, why aren't you using your platform to compliment them about the good stuff instead of focus on the bad stuff or whatever, you know?
And people get there.
So to all of the Trump supporters, to have a big story like this that could damage Joe Biden and then to have it suppressed was just infuriating.
And there was this huge, you know, pushback.
And then Jack Dorsey did come out and give like a half-ass apology.
He did say, you know, like, well, we shouldn't have banned the link and we should have been more clear about why we were banning the story and all this stuff.
Now, that, of course, is far from adequate in many people's eyes, including my own.
But I would say that it is a little bit of an indicator that kind of toward what you were saying, that if this pisses off enough people, you know what I mean?
They will be, there will be pressure.
There will be pressure on them.
Now, the other thing I would just urge people to keep in mind is that there, you know, like I heard this one guy, Will Chamberlain, who I was tweeting at the other day, where he was just straight up saying nationalize them, nationalize the social media platforms.
And I'm just saying, like to people out there, it's like, okay, if you think that Twitter and Facebook being adversarial to a sitting president is a threat, wait till you see them on the same team as a sitting president who's now got them nationalized.
This is a very, very dangerous place to go.
Look, I understand the impulse, the impulse to want to be like, hey, this is like, you know, look, I get it.
I get that.
This is basically the public square in 2020.
And the fact that there can be this discrimination against anybody who objects to the progressive orthodoxies, and then you get silenced or shadow banned or whatever, or, you know, the major, the leaders are taken down, all these things.
I get it.
It's a real problem, you know?
But there's also a major problem with thinking that the government is going to come in to protect your free speech.
You know, I saw, I was arguing with some people and they say things like, well, look, if the government nationalized it, they're bound by the First Amendment.
So they won't be able to silence people's free speech.
And I was like, how's that working out for Julian Assange?
Has it these people who are the government?
They're bound by the First Amendment.
I mean, like, they're literally, they're going to kill this guy from driving him insane if they can't kill him by executing him in a fucking federal prison somewhere.
They are, you know, Edward Snowden is hiding out in wherever the fuck he is.
He's still in Russia.
You know, it's high, like, these are people who do not care for free speech and have actual prisons.
Like, they don't just put people in Twitter jail, they put them in real jail, which is even worse than Twitter jail.
So I just, I hope people would see that in many ways, I think this is the end game that's almost like designed.
That the end game is this is why you see, um, what's his name, uh, Robot Man over at uh Facebook.
Um, what's his name?
Why am I playing Zuckerberg?
Zuckerberg, yeah.
Uh, this is why you see him.
He's asking to be regulated.
I'm sure Jack Dorsey is too.
They want government big regulation.
And the truth is that government regulation is what's going to slow down the process that you were talking about before of other companies coming up to compete with them.
All in the name of protecting everybody's free speech while they're censoring people that for hate speech.
They're going to say that there's not a lot of hate speech on this platform.
And so we're not going to allow other platforms to come unless they can get through our regulators because we need to make sure that the public squares are safe for all and that there's nothing that's considered hate speech.
And guess what?
A lot of what we do on this show would be categorized as hate speech, the fact that we will talk about global warming and YouTube will put the little thing with Wikipedia underneath us to let us know that it's science.
All scientists agree with the other perspective.
So it's a vehicle for censorship.
Yeah.
Now, look, it's sometimes these are difficult decisions to make about how exactly to go about these things.
Like I know people have called me out for still being on these sites.
And I get that.
There's a legitimate point to be made there.
You'll be like, well, you, you know, you know all the problems with it.
They're hostile to your point of view.
So why don't you take your business elsewhere and not do it?
You know, there's an argument to that.
There's also an argument that it's like, I don't know, I, you know, I've built up a decent sized following on Twitter, and I don't really feel like giving that up.
And I want to be able to, you know, like I've been pretty good at introducing people these ideas and persuading people of some of them.
So maybe it's not the best thing for me to get out of that fight, you know, before they kick me out, which is probably inevitable.
So I don't know, you know, like there's, it's, it's debatable exactly how these things should be handled.
You have to be a little bit stealthy with all of this stuff.
But I, you know, look, I think there are like major problems in the culture.
I think there's major problems in the, you know, the tech companies.
But man, I am really skeptical about the idea that government will do anything except make these matters much worse.
The truth is, and as unsatisfying as that may be, it's like you have to win the culture, like at least to some degree, or be able to separate cultures, you know what I mean?
And not fight this war, which would be preferable.
But you have to, we have to somehow create an environment where enough people are just like disgusted by the idea of suppressing political points of view.
Like that just has to be, it's the only way that this will actually work.
Now, I don't know exactly how that happens.
I'm trying, you know, I'm doing what I can just try to convince people of that.
But the idea that you're going to get the government to come in, it's like, okay, but then like, if now the, look, nobody is really, I don't think, arguing that absolutely nobody should be kicked off of social media, that you should not be allowed to kick anybody out.
Like, for example, if you are making legitimate threats of violence or doxing people or planning crimes, most people aren't arguing that that person shouldn't be able to be kicked off of social media.
In fact, a lot of right-wingers and conservatives would probably be pretty down for, say, banning porn or banning, how about, you know, banning just like kitty porn or banning like really horrible things that we all think probably should be banned.
So it's not exactly that we think nothing should be banned from social media.
The question is about where that line is drawn.
Now, some government politician might promise you that they're going to put that line more, you know, where you want to see it.
But okay, then you give the government the power to draw that line.
And let me tell you something, people being critical of the government are going to find themselves on the other side of that line.
That's just the reality of what's going to happen.
The best thing of all of this was the intense outrage that followed.
And then the other thing I'll say, which look, I don't know, I'm speaking out of my ass a little bit here, but it seemed damn shady that the day after all of this was happened, Twitter was just down.
You have the day after this huge backlash on social media against tech censorship, the day that there's going to be dueling town hall meetings between the two presidential candidates.
And what has happened rarely, if ever, Twitter is just down for everybody.
No one can fucking use Twitter for a huge chunk of the day.
That was very strange.
By the way, I thought I was banned.
I didn't know Twitter was down.
I didn't even notice Twitter was down.
I'm like, ah, shit, I'm done.
What did I do?
I was like, I was really serious.
I was like, what did I even say?
I didn't even say nothing.
I didn't even tweet any clean borderline.
Did I call anyone a retard today?
What did I do?
But yeah, no, then it turned out it was just the site was down, which whatever.
Maybe I'm wrong about that, but it seemed fucking shady.
There is shady shit going on in social media.
And this is like what pisses me off when I think so many libertarians are goofy.
Like they just don't, it's like you like what I was saying before, like the whole point of having a good philosophy is that it actually works in real life, that it's actually good for real people.
If you don't have that, then it's just stupid.
And libertarian philosophy is great because it actually works.
That's why like free market philosophies are better than these others.
I mean, look, truthfully speaking, like there's probably lots of other philosophies that would work if the real world wasn't the real world.
You know, I mean, this is kind of like what the commies are all always arguing.
It's like, well, that wasn't real communism.
And if this was in this way, and if workers didn't care about this as much, and if people weren't, you know, propagandized by the capitalists, and if they weren't this and that and that, then this would all work and it would usher in the utopia.
And they might actually be right about some of it.
I mean, yeah, there's still a lot of problems.
And there is the like Missesian, you know, price calculation problem, which they really can't get around.
But I don't know.
Like, yeah, if human beings were different, if human beings were like bees, that communism might work.
I mean, bees are kind of communist, right?
They all basically, they'll sacrifice themselves for the queen gladly.
They all do their little jobs.
They all get equal pay.
They all, you know what I mean?
Like, but humans aren't.
That's not how we are.
So it's like, if your philosophy doesn't deal with real life, then it's stupid and it's not doing any good for anyone.
So many libertarians, you know, it's like people will point to a real problem, like a real world problem, and they'll just go like, well, this is it's a private company and blah, blah, blah.
Start your own Twitter or whatever.
Like, this is not an answer.
This is not a real solution.
And you can't deny the extent of the problem.
I mean, dude, what's gone on on Facebook this year?
And I don't know what we're going to do.
We might move the group off Facebook.
I don't know.
I've been talking to Brian about some different options and we're not exactly sure yet, but we're going to figure something out.
But Facebook is really, I mean, dude, so this year, and this is why I mean, like, libertarians should wake the fuck up.
Is that this year, while the government authority has expanded to be something out of like a libertarian author's dystopian future nightmare where the government is actually, you know, has their has its citizens, you know, watching fucking TV to see what they're allowed to do when the governor informs them every day at noon and wearing masks, terrified of germs all around the country while the government's, meanwhile,
while the government's raping them financially, just stealing trillions of dollars from them while people are scared of germs.
Like this is actually happening, believe it or not.
While they're doing that, if anyone, if any doctor or scientist argues that, oh, you know, we don't really need the government to do this.
We don't really need lockdowns.
I think this is this shit's getting censored on Facebook.
They're not letting you see it.
You know, I mean, this is like something really, really creepy that has some implications for actual liberty in the real world.
I've never seen anything like what's happened on Facebook this year.
And there's always been problems with this shit.
This has been building for years.
But this year on Facebook, it went from being like where I would get a notice every very rarely, every few months, there'd be some notice because I'm the admin of the uh or one of the admins.
I guess we all are um admins of the uh the inner circle, our private Facebook group.
And you get a notice every now and then, like, oh, a fake story was was shared or something like that.
So once the COVID thing hit, it was like every day, every single day, this post was removed for fake news.
This post was removed because it's not an accurate story.
And like it's a private group.
It's a private group.
We just want to share stories amongst people who all are at least somewhat like-minded, listen to this show.
Yeah, maybe not, you know, there's different opinions.
We got rid of that one guy.
We didn't get rid of that guy.
Facebook Group Moderation Issues00:05:49
That's he left.
Rest his soul.
The late great.
But it's, you know what I mean?
But it's all people who are like listen to this show and are somewhat interested in the same ideas.
We may not all agree on everything, but we're all at least interested in a lot of the same ideas.
And we just want to share stuff between ourselves.
They go, no, no, no, because we've determined that's not accurate.
And by the way, you know, one of the fucking funny things too is that, you know, there was that video.
I think it was back in March.
It might have been in April, but it was back when there was a video of a doctor who was basically saying, like, oh, you know, these ventilators are killing people.
This was back when they were still begging for ventilators from the federal government.
He goes, the vent, and it's like, ah, this is just some quack on social media.
Oh, no, except it turns out he was right.
And then a whole bunch of the people who were like, oh, the lockdowns are unnecessary.
Well, now pretty much everyone's coming around to agreeing with them.
So this is, you know, of all those articles that were removed, probably at least 50% of them were right, you know, and they just claim that they're fake news and remove them.
But then what happened most recently, just a few weeks ago, is they just decided to switch the group to where me or you or Brian has to approve the statuses before they're posted.
So that's like an option in a Facebook private group.
You can either have it where like everyone's allowed to, this is like a setting that you're allowed to choose, or at least you used to be, where you could have it so like every post has to be approved before it's posted, or you can just have it where people post and they can post whatever they want.
Now, everyone who knows me, because I actually really am a libertarian, like not just in terms of what I think the role of government ought to be, but like temperamentally, I'm really a libertarian.
And I always have been.
Like, I really, you know, like I'm a comedian.
Like, I've, you know, I have friends who like have families and are, you know, like traditional people.
And then I have friends who are like, you know, like Ari, like going to some festival to do mushrooms for a week or something like that.
And I just, I'm just like, hey, you, it's your life, man.
I don't know.
I can barely figure out my life, let alone tell you how to run yours, you know?
But so, of course, my attitude, as anyone could guess, when I first started this group, is like, do you want to sit here and approve every status and decide which ones are allowed to be posted or not?
I'm like, of course not.
I don't want to do that.
Anyone post whatever they want to.
Post anything you want to fucking post.
Like that's, this is going to be a free speech group, you know?
And they used to let us do that.
They don't anymore.
So they said now, because multiple people in your group have been, have violated our policies, I now, or one of the three of us now, has to approve every single post that happens.
But there's a timeframe that they gave.
And they say it's until December.
Seems a little bit strange.
Seems a little bit strange that they just go, you know what?
Until December, they're going to fucking, we're going to make sure that there's an extra step before people share their information.
If you look at the New York Post thing, imagine what's going on behind the scenes in terms of general suppression of alternative point of views.
Yep.
Yeah, that's, that's, you, you can only imagine, right?
Yeah, because this is like, if this is what we know about, please, let's see what's actually going on.
I actually wanted to say it.
It says, so this is in the last 90 days.
This is what Facebook writes.
In the last 90 days, Facebook removed several posts from your group because they went against our community standards.
We've turned on post approval for your group, which means an admin or moderator must approve posts until December 5th.
I'm just saying, that just seems a little bit weird, right?
Like, why would it just be after November that we have to do this until then?
Like, why?
I don't know.
Just it seems very strange and very convenient.
Community standard.
What community?
I thought we had a community right here of people that wanted to be alternative.
Yeah, that's our fucking community standards.
And, you know, it's funny because they've within the libertarian, I mean, this is very inside baseball in the libertarian world, but there's been like other libertarian groups that are critical of our group because we've had, you know, like a few like right-winger types, more of the like right-wing reactionary types in our group.
And not like that many.
There's been like five or six, probably.
And a long time ago, like two, three years ago, people complained about a couple posts and they were like, hey, I think you should kick this guy out.
Like he's saying things that I think are racist or that are wrong.
And I always said to him, I was like, no, no, we don't kick people out here.
I go, if he's saying something that's horrible, then go win the argument.
Like destroy him.
I like those people.
Yeah, they're fun.
But it's, but I'm just like, well, no, why?
What, what service am I doing to you or to the liberty movement in general if I'm telling you, oh, yeah, we can avoid the arguments of people who we call bad people.
It's like, no, your job is to go win.
So go win.
And, you know, other groups would be like, oh, Dave's group is like, has all these alt-right people in it or whatever.
But it's really funny if you ask any of the fucking people, alt-right or right-wing reactionary or anything like that in the group, they would hardly tell you that this is like an alt-right group.
Those people, the reason why that last guy, one of the reasons why he left the group is because he was getting trashed constantly and attacked from all the other people in the group because most of them aren't right-wing reactionary types and whatever.
I don't care.
I want to have like a free speech area where everyone can say what they want to say.
And I don't care if you're left-wing or right-wing or you have some deviation from libertarianism, whatever.
Alt-Right Safe Space Dynamics00:02:34
What point do you want to make?
Everybody can make some good points sometimes.
And now, Facebook straight up like won't let you do that.
And I also got to say, I feel like I'm like, this is a honeypot a little bit.
Like now they're like, they're like, oh, okay.
So all this horrible, fake, evil shit's being said, but now you have to approve it before it goes in.
So of course, you guys know me.
So I just go, okay, well, I'm approving everything.
I'm not approving any posts.
So I literally will just pull up my phone and there's just tons of posts.
I go approve, I don't even read half of them, just approve, approve, approve.
And then I'm like, oh, God, now am I like that?
Now they're going to be like, well, you approved hateful shit.
So I'm a little bit more culpable or something like that.
That's just what it feels like.
So we got to figure out where we're going or what we're going to do with this whole thing.
But I started a website, global safe space.com, and I'm hoping to get a bunch of racists to use the website.
I know it's also worldwide safe space.com, a safe space for anyone to express their point of view.
So I don't know if there's a developer in the audience, you want to take over those domains and build us out a new platform.
Global Safe Space.
Well, listen, I mean, we'll see where all of this shit goes, but it's a really, you know, it's a powerful way to control the conversation.
And one way or the other, you got to hope that this can kind of be addressed.
All right, guys, let's take a quick second.
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December 5th, live run your mouth any year recap party.
I went through every one of my episodes.
I got an artist, a really funny guy, LVMP memes.
It's going to be like daily show style, 20 minutes, hopefully my best jokes from every episode of the year.
It's experimental.
So like stand up, I might find out that shit was only funny to me when I said it alone in a room.
But that's what's going to be fun about it.
So hit me up.
I'll have a ticket link up over the weekend.
December 5th, Shedcast guy is going to be dropping some fire beats.
I'm going to do some stuff.
We'll be fun.
All right.
Sounds great, man.
Absolutely, guys.
Make sure if you can go on out to that support, Robbie the Fire.
So there was dueling town halls last night.
I will say it was, it was retarded that they had them on at the same time.
That was like really ridiculous.
It made absolutely no sense.
But it did put you in a fun situation where you had to go for like a political junkie like myself.
You have to go, all right, well, which one am I going to watch live?
And which one am I going to watch after?
And there was a little bit of a debate because you go like, well, Trump is a more exciting performer.
So you kind of want to see what Trump has to say.
But Biden, Biden, he might, yeah.
So which, but I ended up going with Trump.
I watched Trump Live and I watched Biden afterward.
Did you watch both of them?
So, you know, I spoke to the presidential parties, both of them.
I told them that I do run your mouth live in the sheds on Thursday nights and we go late and we drink.
So I watched a half hour of each of them, like exactly the first half hour of each of them today.
And I'll definitely finish them over the weekend.
I would say they, my takeaways, I think they both actually, for the candidates, had good performances.
Yeah.
Now, this isn't saying actually impressive by normal standards, but for both of these guys, I thought they did a good job.
I thought, you know, on that note, I want to like, what was so interesting about Trump, and it might just be that I've watched too much politics that like I can see a little bit more of like the game of what's going on there.
But I feel like in the last election, he came off like an idiot, but a fun idiot.
Now you watch him, you're like, holy shit, this guy's just a genius because he goes in there and the lady is full intent.
Like half the political game is that you don't want to bring up some topics and you want to focus on, and he shows up and right off the bat, it's like an interrogation where she's doing a much better job that Biden ever could of holding him to the worst parts of, you know, of him so far.
What's going on with the, with the taxes?
How come you won't get people to wear the mask?
Why didn't you let people know that this was going to be, you know what I mean?
It's like, you want to control the narrative that you can sell your good points and you want to try and get past these issues as quickly as possible.
And she was really holding his feet to the fire and he navigated it like perfectly.
I'll tell you what I think helps Trump in the dueling town halls, right?
Is because like I will say, I'll be honest, Biden did a really good job.
As far as Biden goes, like he didn't really stumble too much.
He didn't have any senior moments.
He spoke about issues.
I mean, you know, it's, there's always something to be desired.
It is Joe Biden after all.
But judging on a Biden curve, he had a very good performance.
One of the things that I think really helps Trump aesthetically, if you watch both of them, is that Trump is being grilled by a hostile adversary and Biden's hanging out with his boy.
Like that's, that's what it, not just what it came off as.
That's what it is.
It was clearly this woman, Savannah Guthrie, whatever her name is, who hates Donald Trump's guts and goes in there like, I want to ruin this guy's presidential reelection.
And Biden with an old pal who used to work for the Clintons, who somehow, it's unbelievable that they even let that guy fucking Stephanopoulos, that they let him do the town hall.
Like you would think at least one person would go, well, you did work for the Clintons.
This is kind of, we have to have someone who's perceived as neutral to do this, but no, that's what happened with the C-SPAN guy.
I didn't quite follow that story, but originally there was supposed to be a moderator and Trump said, this is unfair.
They panned him for saying it's unfair.
And then he did something on Twitter that he now lost his job at C-SPAN.
Yeah, he's been suspended.
I don't know the details of the story, but he's been suspended and he's making it out like he's the victim.
But you're like, if you're the victim, why did C-SPAN suspend you?
This seems a little bit weird.
But just to the town halls, she, you know, one of the things that's funny.
Now, listen, I'll say this.
I have no problem with an adversarial press.
I think that's how it should be.
I don't have a problem with being very tough on President Trump.
I just think the problem is they should also be very tough on Biden if that's what they're going to do.
But it's interesting to see how aggressive she was and how much they all, you know, it's like, I'm just, you know, I'm old enough to remember the last three weeks.
And so I remember when Donald Trump interrupting Joe Biden made him a monster, when Mike Pence barely interrupting Kamala Harris made him a man splainer.
Yet this Samantha Savannah lady, she interrupts Trump every three seconds.
And everyone's like, wow, what a great job she did there.
Or at least everyone in the corporate press world, not so much people outside of it.
I thought that it was, you know, it's like the story of the entire Trump presidency.
I have no problem with being tough on Trump.
I think they should be.
I think that everyone should be tough on the president.
Like, why not?
That's the role of journalists.
And also, I think it's just kind of the role of citizens.
You should be highly skeptical and critical of the people who wield tremendous power over you.
But the stuff was like so stupid.
It's everything.
It was like a microcosm for the Trump years in America.
It's like, okay, they're being critical of Trump.
Are you going to hit him on one thing that you actually should be critical of him for?
Nope, none of that.
It's why, why did you get COVID?
Is it your fault?
You know, were you always wearing a mask?
How come you don't love masks?
How come you don't have a mask on right now?
She asks, as she doesn't have a mask on right now.
All these things that are just like these, these fucking bullshit points.
I mean, I couldn't, I actually couldn't believe they go out again on the will you condemn white supremacy.
I was like, there's videos, there's these videos online out there just that are montages of Trump condemning white supremacy throughout the years.
He's done it like a hundred times at least on camera.
He's condemned white supremacy.
And they, and he did it in the debate, in the first debate.
If you go like listen to what was said or read the transcript of what was said, it was like, will you condemn white supremacy?
And he said, sure.
Like it was like right away.
And then right away, she goes, but you know, you didn't condemn white supremacy.
He goes, I did.
He goes, will you condemn it right now?
He goes, absolutely.
It's just this weird, like, what are you trying to get?
And then she asked him to condemn QAnon, which is look, like, first off, it's ridiculous.
And I actually thought Trump handled it pretty well.
He's like, I don't even know what that is.
He goes, from what I understand, they're against pedophilia.
Like, I'm against pedophilia too.
But it's very, you know, this is a corporate press game.
It's a tactic that I really think is not working so well anymore.
I think it's something that they used for a long time that has worked fairly effectively.
And it is not working so much anymore.
But if you, it's kind of like this leading question.
So if it's, it's like the, you know, when did you stop hitting your wife type question?
So if you go, if you go, Rob, do you, will you condemn, you know, Nazis?
Now, obviously, it's, it's not that big of a deal for you to go like, yeah, I condemn Nazis, right?
But there's almost just by me asking the question in implication that that needed to be cleared up.
We needed to know whether or not you condemned Nazis.
And then when I don't ask your opponent whether he condemns Nazis, it's like, well, obviously this guy condemns Nazis.
And then when you say, yes, I do condemn Nazis, the story can be like, Rob finally condemns Nazis.
You know, like that's so it's, and of course, if you don't condemn them, then the story is Rob refuses to condemn Nazis.
It's just like one of these tactics.
But you'll, it's really not very hard to notice that you have never seen a Joe Biden town hall or debate or any of these things where he is asked, do you condemn your radicals?
This is never asked of Joe Biden.
Do you condemn Antifa?
Well, how do you feel about cop cars being burned?
How do you feel about people being assaulted in the streets?
How do you feel about property being seized?
None of this stuff is ever asked of Joe Biden because they'll never give you the implication that this is even an issue that needs to be discussed.
So this is like the game they play.
But I think people are seeing through it.
I really do think.
I mean, I don't know because, you know, like I'm on the internet.
I'm probably on Twitter more than I should be and some of these things.
And, you know, a lot, a lot of Americans aren't.
Most aren't.
So I don't, I get like a little bit of a skewed perspective myself, but it's like, I guess when you, when you are online and you see them asking this, and then you see the video montages of Trump condemning it like a million times and being asked by the same journalists, like fucking, what's his name?
Mike Wallace, who's asking Chris Wallace, excuse me, who's asking Trump, will you condemn white supremacy?
Trump was asked at a 2016 debate if he condemns white supremacy and he did by Chris Wallace.
He asked him the same question and he condemned it.
So now four years later, he's back asking him again.
And it's like, this is, oops.
Sorry about that.
This is like real bullshit.
But I don't know.
I wonder almost what effect it's having on kind of, you know, regular voters who aren't exactly in the position I'm in.
Anyway, aside from that, Trump, Trump had a very good, very good night.
He was his normal Trumpian self.
He was kind of, like you said, he did a good job of redirecting questions to where he wanted.
He was, it helps Donald Trump to be seen as taking questions from voters, even some who don't support him, who aren't treating him like he's this unique evil guy, or just kind of mixing it up.
He also, that one older lady just started hitting on him in the middle of the thing, which was, I don't know if you saw that.
She's like, you're so handsome.
I love that.
I thought for sure at one point there was the mother-daughter and the daughter for sure walked away like, hey, do you feel wet now also?
There's something about being in Trump's presence and feeling that warmth.
I forgot what I was going to say.
It was something to do with the Trump thing.
Well, so that's, let's talk about Biden for a few minutes.
I know you have a heart out in a few minutes and you got to go do some work.
Not that this isn't work, but it's so much fun that it doesn't feel like work.
But on the Biden one, you know, Biden did a decent job.
He wasn't bad.
He didn't have any senior moments.
He managed to get through things.
He made his pitch about as well as you can.
The return to normalcy.
I'm a decent guy.
He had a few moments that were not great.
But the thing that stood out to me more than anything else was just, and especially in contrast, because I just watched the Trump one after I went over to watch Biden's town hall, is just how, I mean, the whole thing was a softball.
Now, there were very few tough questions that were asked.
I mean, a few, a couple, like kind of tough ones, but really nothing.
And the, you know, of course, the big thing is that the New York Post story doesn't come up.
Doesn't come up.
He's not even asked about it.
And just to be very clear about this, the campaign did not deny this.
The campaign very specifically did not deny this.
They said that there was no meeting between Joe Biden and this exec of the Ukrainian energy company on his official schedule.
But they did not say this meeting absolutely did not take place.
They did not say these aren't Hunter Biden's emails.
They didn't say anything like that.
And so you would think that would at least, if you have a major newspaper reporting this story and you're not denying it, that would warrant getting the question.
Like, let's just say, if that was the same story for Trump, that would damn sure be a question that was asked.
And of course, they did ask Trump about his taxes and all that stuff, right?
But none of this.
It's not as if, you know, we have some anonymous source that says Trump called the military losers.
No one goes, oh, well, you can't talk to him about that.
Of course, that's going to come up.
Anyway, if there is another debate between these guys, I have a feeling Trump's going to come up.
For sure, going to come up.
But I almost think that that's another reason why we're not going to see another debate.
Well, it's quite possible.
That is quite possible.
Although Joe Biden did say that night that he's ready to do it.
So we'll see.
I have a feeling that's, I'm like 50-50 on whether that debate happens.
We'll see.
Joe Biden was asked about, he had one moment that was pretty stupid where he was saying cops should shoot people in the legs.
It's funny to just instead of shooting to kill them, like just shoot them in the leg, which is like pretty much everyone who knows about this is like, yeah, you can't shoot people in the legs.
Like it makes it much more likely for bullets to ricochet and hit other people.
Anyway, and the question isn't like shooting someone in the leg versus the point is that you're not supposed to shoot anybody unless you're doing it in self-defense.
And if you're doing it in self-defense, like someone else has a gun and they're pointing it at you, you can't just shoot them in the leg and hope they don't squeeze a few rounds off at you before they go.
Anyway, it was stupid, but it wasn't anything that's like devastating.
He was the only thing that I saw that Stephanopoulos asked him that was somewhat giving him some pushback was that about the Supreme Court packing where he pushed Biden to agree to take a position on packing the court before election day.
So Biden said, I'll take a position.
I guess he wants to see how this process goes with Amy Coney Barrett.
So that was it.
But even that was not very harsh, was really not he just he was, you know, softballed him the whole time.
But Biden did good under those circumstances.
Kind of left it with saying that I think probably they both had fine performances.
Probably Trump wins the night because he had a good performance under much tougher circumstances.
But I think right now, if, you know, if there is a third debate, which like I said, I'm 50-50 on, but if there is a third debate, this is a huge, huge debate, which might be what this all comes down to because it's a pretty close election right now.
Third Debate Election Impact00:00:38
And so we'll see.
We'll see what happens there.
The other thing that's going to be interesting is if there are more of these emails, how much of a story is that?
And the other thing, which for some reason, I still have a feeling that the corporate press is holding on to something else.
I think they got some other anti-Trump October surprise.
Take a shot.
Not sure what it is yet, but that's my guess.
Okay.
I know you got to run.
Anything you want to say in closing?
Nope.
Thank you for having me on.
Run your mouth.
Run your mouth at Robbie the Fire on Twitter.
Thank you guys for listening.
We will be back on Monday with a brand new episode.