Dave Smith and Robbie the Fire Bernstein argue that social media censorship stems from federal overreach since Woodrow Wilson, not private corporate malice. They contend Donald Trump's election triggered congressional pressure on tech leaders like Mark Zuckerberg, forcing platforms to adopt editorial discretion under false narratives of Russian interference. Rejecting Section 230 repeal as a dangerous government takeover, they assert that blaming the market ignores how Democratic "wokeism" and historical corruption created the current crisis, ultimately warning that nationalization would destroy free speech protections. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Why The Left Skips Causes00:08:07
Fill her up.
You are listening to the Gash Digital Network.
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.
You're listening to part of the problem on the Gash Digital Network.
Here's your host, Dave Smith.
What's up?
What's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
I'm Dave Smith.
He is the king of the caulks, Robbie the Fire Bernstein.
What is up, my brother?
Nothing much.
Just more being in my apartment.
That's all I got.
It's been quite a while.
It's been quite a while of that.
Rob is slowly losing his mind, but he's doing it with all of you, with all of you fine people, all of us together.
All right.
So for today's episode, what I wanted to do was a little bit slow in the news.
I mean, there's stuff we could talk about, but nothing that really jumped out at me too much that we haven't already been covering.
So I wanted to do a full episode on the topic of tech censorship, cancel culture, this whole problem that's been building over the last few years.
And it's something I've been thinking about a lot.
And I've been thinking about this for years.
I've talked about it many times on the show.
But I wanted to do maybe one episode where I put it all together and we kind of give our libertarian perspective on the issue of deplatforming and tech censorship or whatever you want to call it.
Unpersoning.
I've heard several different terms that are all somewhat accurate.
And I was kind of inspired about this.
I've just been thinking about it a lot the last few days.
I talked about it a bit with Michael Malice a few days ago, and that was inspired by Will Chamberlain was on Tim Poole's show.
And he was kind of saying like this was one of the major reasons why he just couldn't be a libertarian because libertarianism will just allow these private companies to censor speech and we need the government to do something about that and clean it up.
And while I disagree with them, I understand where he's coming from.
And then I heard Scott Horton on with Pete Quinonas on his great podcast, Free Man Beyond the Wall.
And I just really, Scott just nailed it so much.
And it helped, like Scott's just a genius, like always, and it helped it all really click for me.
And so I wanted to kind of talk about this from like a libertarian analysis of social media censorship.
And I would just say to the people listening who are skeptical, hear me out.
That's all I ask.
Hear me out.
There you go, Rob.
You left and came back.
Very good.
Sometimes when things get boring, Rob just takes off.
No, no, no.
This is the most important issue.
Well, it is.
I mean, I really do think it's a very important issue.
And, you know, as I've been saying, I really do think, I've been saying this for years at this point, but I really do think there is a good libertarian analysis of what's going on here.
And I think that a lot of people, like Will Chamberlain was saying on Tim Poole's show, they look at this as like an Achilles heel for libertarians.
I mean, you guys don't have an answer to this problem.
And to me, I think it is, it's not an indictment of libertarianism, the way I see it, but it is a fair indictment of a lot of libertarians.
And it's driven me crazy how many of the kind of beltway libertarian types.
I have a lot of friends in these organizations, but many people in the Cato Reason Koch brothers orbit are very, I mean, they just, it's just terrible the way they address this issue.
And it kind of ranges from, well, they're a private company.
They can do what they want to.
That's, it's their right, you know, and it's, it's like a range of that to, well, this is actually the market cleaning up bigotry or something like that, which is like the worst of all of it because it's just so, you know, insane.
We can get into more of that over the course of the show.
But so I do, I think it's really stupid that they attack things from that angle.
And look, to be fair, I mean, you could apply this to other issues as well.
So I think the most important thing to start with is to understand that this is a really big problem and it's a really big threat just to the health of our country.
Not to mention just ruining people's lives and ability to communicate for having the wrong political opinions, which just the spirit of that seems terrible.
But I think it is genuinely a threat to like how well functioning our society is.
And so I think it's a major, major problem.
And in the same way that like, you know, if you are, if you're going to talk to a leftist about Medicare for all, which I absolutely oppose, you know, Rob, you absolutely oppose it too.
But it does make sense to start by acknowledging that they are absolutely correct that there's a real problem here, you know?
And if you don't acknowledge that, even if you have really good arguments against Medicare for all, you kind of end up losing the debate in the public's eyes most times because they're addressing the fact that there's a really big problem here.
And you just seem like you're not if you don't at least acknowledge that.
So some lefty has a point of view and they're like, dude, there are people who like work and have jobs and work really hard and do everything right and raise their kids the right way and like yada yada.
And then they get like some medical bill and they're declaring bankruptcy.
And if you just look at that and don't acknowledge that that's like a really big problem, you're probably going to lose the argument in a lot of people's minds because it's like, I don't know, this guy at least cares about the problem, you know, and like you seem to not.
And so that it is a really big problem.
So the correct libertarian response to that is like to recognize this is a big problem and then try to make the argument of why this problem exists, which seems to be something that the leftists kind of skip over.
Like it very rarely gets addressed in leftist circles.
Like why are the, why are the costs of medical care so high?
I mean, you could, you could listen to Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden and a whole bunch of their supporters have an entire debate about student loan debt being bailed out, right?
Abolishing student loan debt.
And this entire debate will take place on, well, Joe Biden wants to, you know, give them $10,000 worth of bailouts and Bernie Sanders just wants to absolve the whole thing.
And you could listen to this whole debate and it never even comes up why college is so expensive to begin with.
Why are so many people going to college?
Why is the price so high?
And if you don't, I think anyone should be able to see that if you don't deal with that, you're obviously not going to be in as good of a place to have a prescription for how to solve an issue if you don't at least think about what caused this to begin with.
And so that's anyway, that's kind of the angle that I want to approach this whole thing with.
The idea of like actually thinking about what caused this problem and how it can be solved.
But to start off, focusing on what the problem itself is.
Recognizing A Real Problem00:08:01
Oh, by the way, let me just mention, because I know they'll probably be, this is, I'm really trying to speak in this episode to people who disagree with the libertarians on this issue.
And so I'd start by saying, I completely get why you disagree with the way so many of the Beltway libertarian types are talking about this issue.
You know, it's like it's really, really awful the way they're putting this forward.
But I would just ask that you don't dismiss libertarianism based on what some people who are libertarians are saying.
I think that's a fair ask in the same sense that, you know, if you're like some hardcore right-wing nationalist type or like an America first guy or like something, you know, like that, it, and I were to just say like, well, I'm going to dismiss all of that because of what Dick Cheney said.
And you'd be like, Dick Cheney doesn't represent me.
That's not what our movement is.
And I'd be like, I don't know.
He says he's a patriot and he says American exceptionalism and yada yada, all that stuff.
So that's, to me, that's what the patriots are.
They're, they're Dick Cheney.
And you would obviously like be like, no, that fuck that.
That's not us.
And so in the same sense, when I'm defending libertarianism and libertarians, I'm defending Ron Paul, Loderick von Mises, Murray Rothbard, that real shit.
That's what I'm defending on this topic.
So I would say there's a real problem.
And people like me and you are particularly aware of it because this is like what we do for a living.
We're like offensive joke writers slash podcasters who dabble in, we dabble in stand-up comedy and podcasting.
And in our stand-up comedy, we do wildly offensive comedy.
And in our podcasting, we have wildly radical political views.
So if cancel culture is a threat, it is we have our own, you know, our own dog in the fight that we, our careers are, are kind of on the line with this.
So it's an issue that's near and dear to us.
And I know you've mentioned this several times, Rob, like you're like, just on a personal level, like there might be something that's worse than this in the world.
I mean, the wars are worse than this.
But on a personal level, it's hard to not say that this is the issue that like scares you the most.
Yeah.
And also you got to take a step back and remind yourself, I'm not evil.
Like, why am I villainized by society?
There's no activity that I'm doing that in any way is evil.
Like you would think if you looked at the reaction to what I'm doing, you would go, like, what did that guy do?
Like, why, why are we trying to remove him from society?
He must have done something.
Did he hit his mother?
Is he yelling at old people?
Like, what kind of horrible thing has this guy done?
And it's like, oh, he's just exploring ideas that for some reason you don't want, which is in truth just censorship.
Yeah.
And I want to be completely clear and upfront with our audience.
Rob does hit his mother, but that's not why.
But that's not why they're censoring him.
It's none of that.
Yeah.
And she's, I mean, she could have left a long time ago.
So anyway, that's neither here nor there.
But yeah, that's exactly right.
And I think a lot of people are feeling that way.
It's like, so all there's so many people who they're like, I don't know.
I just reject this woke cathedral.
And that's enough to make me get me labeled as this awful person or like whatever feelings you have on an issue.
Like if somebody just doesn't agree all the way, like somebody just takes an opinion, it's not even a radical opinion.
We're not talking about like neo-Nazis or anything even close to that.
You're talking about someone being like, yeah, I don't really think you can transition your gender.
I don't believe that.
Like, if you're born a man, I don't believe you can become a woman.
That is enough to now have you labeled as this awful person who needs to be silenced.
And in some ways, this take is almost a little bit too gracious to their side because it almost presents it like, hey, I just want the freedom to, I guess, think through the possibilities here and just be able to have an open mind.
But it's worse than that because really it's like, no, if I look at what you guys are doing, there's an agenda, which usually somehow revolves around, I'm going to say, demoralizing our culture, weakening families and government spending more money.
And so I'm speaking out against that because I actually think that's immoral.
And also, I think the idea that not being able to just use your own critical reasoning to take a look at these things, I think is dangerous.
I think that firstly, it makes you miserable because now all of a sudden you're walking around like you're working against your own brain because you don't feel like you're able to just like think about things.
I don't think that's healthy for people.
And, you know, and like I said, we're being a little bit too gracious by almost being like, we just want to explore these ideas.
It's like, no, if we really think through it more often than not, we actually come out, I think, with a healthier perspective for all of society.
Like we can usually point to a very specific agenda of theirs, which at its root probably is evil.
Yes, absolutely, completely agree.
And one of the things that's so infuriating about libertarians arguing, you know, like, again, I'm not against, and I'm going to present a case for this on this show.
I'm not against the libertarian policy prescriptions on this.
And I think that this might be a really bitter pill for right-wingers to swallow that their proposed solutions to this are really bad, really dangerous, and are going to make the situation worse.
That's ultimately what my argument is going to be here.
Again, right-wingers who are listening or left-wingers, because there are actually a lot of left-wingers who are for, you know, think these companies have become monopolistic.
I get where you're going to disagree on that.
All I ask, hear me out.
Hear me out on the argument.
But to criticize some of these libertarians first, it's just insane to me that any libertarian would just like all they'd have to say is like, well, it's a private business and they have a right to do what they want to do.
And actually, it's not a First Amendment violation.
And then the ones who are like, well, this is just the marketplace cleaning up bad ideas or something.
It's like, I just cannot understand how you, like, how tone deaf you could be, how much you could miss the forest for the trees.
Like the, um, I mean, just look, if you, if you really, really love the establishment, if you love the way things are going, then I could understand you being totally on board with the tech censorship and all that stuff.
Like if you, if you go, I think the Democrats and Republicans are doing a great job managing the country.
And I think that academia and the corporate press and all of them, they're just spot on.
I love what CNN's doing.
I love what the Democrats and Republicans are doing.
I think everything with American society is completely healthy and going in a great direction.
If that's your take, then I could understand why you would be all for this.
Okay.
But if that's not your take, if you think that maybe the Democrats and Republicans are like corrupt criminal organizations and academia is like dumbing down children and propagandizing them rather than making them critical thinkers.
And if you think the corporate press are a bunch of liars and mouthpieces for war criminals, then it's insane that you wouldn't see this as a threat.
Because basically what happened is that the internet came around and was the great equalizer, you know, and this was this changed everything.
It changed everything from the real monopoly that the corporate press had on the media.
That has really been radically, I mean, revolutionized.
You can't overstate it in the last 10 years, but really in the last five years.
It's really all changed.
And so if you think that this establishment is awful and you'd like to have a fighting chance to change it, then you have to see this as a threat.
Analyze What Led Us Here00:03:09
And I will say to pat us on the back a little bit, we've been pretty good about this from the beginning.
And I'm not even talking about what policy you recommend again.
I'm just talking about recognizing a real problem.
And from, you know, when as soon as the Alex Jones thing, I think even before that, but as soon as the Alex Jones thing happened, you know, we were like, this is really creepy and really dangerous.
And you can see how it, you know, it accelerated over time to the point that the sitting president of the United States of America was kicked off of Twitter.
That is a huge moment.
That is really like a profound thing that the guy who was sitting in the Oval Office could not communicate with the people of the country in the manner he preferred, in the manner that got him elected to begin with.
All right, guys, let's take a quick second.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
So let me start here.
This is, and tell me, you know, in your mind, or leave me a comment or a tweet or something.
If you are one of these people who think libertarians are just wrong and we need to repeal Section 230 or we need to nationalize, because that's kind of to me, what I've heard, there's a range of state solutions that people have proposed.
So in the same way I gave the libertarian range, broadly speaking, the range goes from, you know, like repealing 230 all the way to nationalizing social media.
Government Expansion Explained00:14:43
I've heard arguments from that and some things in between and stuff like that.
Okay.
So if you're one of those people who advocates that, tell me if you think this is reasonable.
The point I made before about the price of healthcare in college and things like that, is it at least reasonable to start with trying to analyze and understand what happened that led us to this moment?
what happened that caused this problem that we have now.
I think that's, let's, let's start there as I build my case, okay?
Because I think that's a reasonable starting point for anyone to say, if we're going to talk about, if we recognize there is a problem and we want to talk about solving the problem, the first step is probably understanding what caused this problem to begin with.
And I'm going to just start briefly.
Bear with me with a little bit of my libertarian propaganda, if you don't mind, as I like, as I like to do.
And just, you know, okay, I don't want to like, you know, again, I'm just, I'm, I'm begging you to hear me out on this, but don't, so just don't dismiss it because this is, this is all true, even though you've probably heard it before and it's, you know, it's, it's libertarian, you know, obviously through a libertarian lens.
But if you were to just quick on the history of America and then getting into the history of the internet and social media.
So if you, if you were to look at the history of America, right?
I don't know if you've ever read the Constitution before.
It's been quite a while, but I've read the thing and good book.
Good book.
I recommend it.
But if you read the Constitution and look at the government today, you might notice that the government that we live under in no way, shape, or form by any stretch of the imagination is represented in the Constitution of the United States of America.
Like none of it.
I mean, it's just, they couldn't be further from each other.
Today's government is, you can read the Constitution all you want.
There is no way that you get out of the Constitution.
So what you guys are writing into law here is the most centralized, most powerful, biggest government, world empire, most powerful organization, most powerful organization in the history of mankind.
That's what you guys are talking about in this Constitution.
There's just no way you could get that out of it, but that's what we have.
That's the reality of what we have.
And I mean, there's just blatant, obvious contradictions.
I mean, just look at like, just read like the Second Amendment and then look at gun control laws.
There's no way you can, I mean, you, people do it.
They have these mental gymnastics, living document, you know, legal analysis, but it's, come on.
I mean, you just, anyone with common sense could look at that and go, well, obviously having a handgun ban in Washington, D.C. or whatever is, there's no way you could argue that that is constitutional.
It's right there, plain as day, you know?
And there's a million different things like that.
And what happened was that, look, the Constitution with, you know, it pretty much lays out not the exact society me or you would want to live in, but pretty close.
Compared to what we have today, pretty goddamn close.
A very limited federal government with all types of checks and balances that really can't do too much.
And then this fucking badass Bill of Rights that really just fucking lays out everything the government cannot do to the people.
You cannot abridge this right or that right or that right.
And pretty much, I hope most people could recognize that the problem with the Bill of Rights in 2021 is not that, you know, the Bill of Rights is just too respected and enforced in this country.
The problem is that the Bill of Rights is completely disregarded in America today.
That is the issue that we have.
And of course, there's nowhere, by the way, in the Constitution that says all of these rights are unalienable and given by God and men are free, unless there's a germ, in which case governors are.
In that case, you're all dictators, really.
Like there's there actually isn't a part of the constitution that says that anywhere.
Okay, so how did we get from there to here?
Well, I would start by saying this, again, a little bit of libertarian propaganda, but it's all goddamn true.
So, but look, from the end of the Civil War to say the year 1910.
So if you go from 1865 to 1910 in this country, we have the largest experiment in free markets in the history of the world.
Now, I'm not saying that everything was perfect or that it was a perfect libertarian society.
There were lots of problems.
And if you look at 1865 to 1910, anywhere in the world, there's lots of problems, usually lots more problems than America had.
But in this time period in America, and try to imagine this in today's day and age, right?
There was no income tax.
There was no central bank.
There was no welfare state.
There was no regulatory state.
There were no occupational licenses.
I mean, just none of this existed.
The federal government spending was tiny, tiny.
It's a couple percent of the national income.
It was just almost irrelevant by today's standard.
You had what compared to today looks like a pure, true free market.
And what this resulted in was the greatest economic superpower in the history of the world.
That's just what it was.
And people can, you know, you can pick that statement apart.
I know leftists like to do this a lot where they're like, oh, but there were brutal factory conditions and all this.
And it's like, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Don't compare it to anything afterward.
Compare it to that time and everything before.
There was never a period in time where the lot and life of the average person increased more in human history.
Okay.
Where the average person's life got so much better than it did in that time period.
All right.
And after that, well, or around, you know, the turn of the century, the last one, the progressive era came in and there were great expansions in the size of government.
You know, the whole progressive era is when you had, oh, by the way, the other one is that there weren't public schools in that period in time either.
So really just imagine how removed the government was.
But then that came in, the public schools.
And then, of course, you had Woodrow Wilson.
I mean, it really started under Teddy Roosevelt with the push for public schools, the push for the regulatory state, antitrust laws and stuff like that, but still nothing compared to what we have today.
And then Woodrow Wilson really changed the country.
And he created the income tax and the Federal Reserve.
He got us into World War I and things were really never the same.
And the Federal Reserve came in, started printing up a bunch of money, you know, messing with interest rates, printed a ton of money so we could go fight World War I. All this money floods into the system.
You have the roaring 20s.
And then what happens, Robbie, when you have a big artificial boom, you get the big, very real bust.
And that's what happened in 1929.
And then the country just fucked and the country really lost itself there because they had the crash that they had created.
Go read Murray Rothbard's The American Great Depression.
So they had the crash that they created.
And then they took all of the wrong lessons from it and said, well, the problem was laissez-faire capitalism because it was still plausible at the time.
I mean, they try to do it now, but back then it was a lot more plausible to blame a problem in the American economy on laissez-faire capitalism because really that had been the economic system in this country, except for the last, you know, couple decades at this time.
And this is what caused this problem.
But so then you have the New Deal and really the rise of big government for the first time ever.
And they didn't even bring back the swing dancing.
You know, those 20s, they're having a good time dancing around.
They put all that money in the system.
Swing dancing.
Never came back.
Yeah, it was a real shame.
I would stomach all the other things if we could have just kept that good swing dancing.
But so, you know, this does nothing to help the economy.
It just prolongs the depression, the longest depression in American history.
There's double-digit unemployment all the way up to World War II.
Then we get into World War II, the biggest bloodbath in human history.
We come out the victors along with the Soviets.
And this is really when we become an empire where we are the dominant force in the world.
The Soviets take half of Europe and we take essentially everything else, not in the traditional outright imperialist sense where we're planting American flags and taking their minerals, but we're basically calling the shots for how everything else runs around the world.
And then you have, you know, more periods of expansion of government throughout the years.
I don't want to go through all of American history, but obviously you have the great society under Lyndon Johnson, and this is a big expansion of government.
The government spending continues to grow.
However, throughout the rest of, you just get to a point where by the end of the 20th century, this now looks nothing like what the American government looked like in the end of the 19th century.
It's just completely different.
Now you're talking about the IRS, a huge force in every working person's life, that they have to pay a huge portion of their income every year to the federal government.
You have the Federal Reserve managing the economy, a huge regulatory state, a huge welfare state, the entitlements, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, all of these things, right?
It just looks nothing like what the government looked like, what the economy looked like in the previous century.
And that was the world that all of us have been born into.
However, post 9-11, in the 21st century, already starting from a big government place, we've seen a tremendous expansion in the size and scope and power of the national federal government.
Just unbelievable.
I mean, from George W. Bush, by some measures I've seen, they say he tripled the size of the government.
Obama spent more than he could.
Trump exceeded it even more than Obama could at a much higher rate.
And that's kind of where we are.
Just to have some perspective on this issue, right?
When I was born, like I'm not that old of a guy.
I'm still on the right side of 40, you know?
Now, I know for those of you who are like 20, who listen to the show, I know that still sounds very old.
I remember how old 40 sounded when I was 20, but you know, give it some time.
It's not that old.
I'm not that old.
Okay.
But when I was born in 1983, you know, Ronald Reagan was the president of the United States who had run on a message of getting rid of big government.
The government was tiny compared to what it is today.
Absolutely tiny.
I mean, things that we just take for granted today did not exist.
And some of them were brand new.
I mean, like even, I don't have the dates in front of me, but even the Department of Education was brand new back then.
And the Republicans were talking about getting rid of it.
And the Department of Energy was very new, like a whole lot of these things.
The Department of Homeland Security did not exist.
There was no such thing as the TSA.
There was no, like, this stuff just didn't exist.
Government spending was minuscule compared to today.
Even though it was out of control by reasonable standards, it was nothing like it is today.
You know, they were talking about, you know, oh my God, the debt went up to like $40 billion or something like that.
You know, now we're sitting on fucking, you know, tens of trillions of dollars of debt, or the deficit was probably 40 billion, whatever.
I don't have the numbers in front of me, but it was much, much smaller than it is today.
The government has been just tremendously, has expanded in huge ways.
And with that, with government expansion to this level, corruption has gone through the roof.
They kind of go hand in hand.
The government is corrupt by its very nature.
And the more government you have, you know, there is no way that you're going to have a government that's spending $5 trillion a year and not have a lot of corruption.
Because where's that $5 trillion going?
It's a huge honeypot and someone's going to get their hands on it.
As Scott Horton said recently, it is the largest honeypot in the history of the world, quite literally.
And so where does that go?
Well, it's going to a lot of politically connected people, you know, primarily the big banks, the military industrial complex and huge corporations.
So that's the corruption that is the backdrop of all of this.
That's America that's the backdrop of all of this.
So throughout all of that, the powers that be have basically had full control of the corporate press.
But that all changed when the internet came out.
And all of a sudden, there was a threat to those people.
And so that has to be understood in the backdrop to all of this, that this is so much of the source of the populism on both the left and the right.
Internet Threatens Corporate Press00:02:31
And it's really a huge source of the culture war in general, which is that, and you see it.
This is why the culture war gets so white hot every time it's close to an election season, because one side is going to rule over the other side.
One side will control this ginormous national government and the other side has to live with it.
They have to live.
The Trump supporters now have to live under Joe Biden's rule.
And if Trump had won, the Biden supporters had to live under Trump's rule, kind of.
And so that's what people are so scared of.
Now, that may not be completely accurate because obviously Trump didn't exactly get to rule as the whole government was working against him.
But from the left-winger perspective, they're living under Trump's rule.
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Now, with the social media stuff, this all was really, it was revolutionized.
I mean, there's nothing, nothing short of a revolution.
I think that, you know, you, like I said before, you can't overstate it enough.
The fact that people could just communicate with each other.
Social Media Revolutionized00:14:54
And if CNN is lying through their fucking teeth, there can just be a meme about it or a little video of someone breaking it down and giving all the facts and showing exactly how wrong they are.
And 10 million people can like it and watch it.
And everyone sees that 10 million people can like it and watch it.
And then Brian Stelter can try to post something on Twitter and you just look under his tweets and it's just like, like, you're a lying piece of shit.
What the fuck are you talking about?
You look like a pig.
You're such a liar, blah, blah, blah.
All these things.
It's beautiful.
It's just fucking beautiful.
Like they just can't get away with it like they used to.
And even with the tech censorship being as big of a problem as it is now, we still have a lot of that.
They still have not been able to completely, you know, get rid of all of that stuff.
But that is the backdrop that you have to kind of at least acknowledge.
I understand everything I'm saying is through a libertarian lens, but there's really nothing that isn't true about what I just described.
Like that is a huge part of the history of the country and how we got to this place.
So think about it like this.
You remember that Louis C.K. joke, Rob?
The old Louis C.K. joke about the Wi-Fi on the internet?
Everything's amazing.
Nobody's happy.
That's right.
That was kind of his point, right?
So now I'm not, again, I'm not dismissing the problem here.
Yeah, airplanes fucking suck and they start end up charging you for the Wi-Fi and usually it doesn't work.
The guy sitting next to you wants to look at what's on your screen and you're like, dude, look at your screen.
You don't need to watch the porn I'm watching.
This is for me.
It's not for you.
And usually once you pay that surcharge, it still doesn't work.
So there's still a lot to be upset about.
There is.
There is a lot to be upset about.
But just for people who don't know, the Louis C.K. joke is that basically there's a guy, I think he later said it was him, but he makes it a guy in the joke.
But the guy who's like, they're like, oh, it's like the first time there's ever Wi-Fi on a plane.
And they're like, oh, we have Wi-Fi on the plane.
And he's like, what?
That's so crazy.
There's Wi-Fi on the plane.
Like, that's amazing.
And then the Wi-Fi goes out and he's furious that the Wi-Fi's out.
And they're like, the joke is just about being pissed off about losing something that you never had.
You know what I mean?
It's a brand new thing.
You're sitting in a chair floating through the sky.
Right, right.
It's a great bet.
But to some degree, that's what we have going on here right now.
We didn't lose anything that we've always historically had.
We're losing a new tool that we got.
And that still sucks.
I mean, I'm not against that, but a lot of people will make the point where they're like, oh, you think like fucking cancel culture is brand new?
Try being anti-war during World War I.
And there's truth to that, right?
Like, yeah, people were straight up.
Sure.
But like, particularly the anti-war activists during World War I, many of them were institutionalized.
They were locked in jail.
They were raided by the FBI.
I mean, they just straight up, Woodrow Wilson, the villain I mentioned earlier, he just straight up cracked down on the anti-war movement.
And so, you know, it's not as if these are new tactics or even the worst implementation of them.
But what people are upset about is that we did lose something that we were just given.
So it is kind of amazing to think about.
But if you even just go back five years ago online, it really was more of the wild, wild west.
I mean, you could say things on there and no one was really worried about getting kicked off.
When YouTube first started getting political and people were putting out a lot of political content, there was not a thought from any of them that I got to watch what I say or I'll get silenced and demonetized.
It just wasn't happening.
And same on Facebook and same on Twitter.
You know, it's funny.
I was mentioning this the other day to Michael Mallis, but the first time I ever interacted with Christopher Cantwell, you know, for people who don't know the guy who got dubbed the crying Nazi after Charlottesville, it was him like calling me like faggot on Twitter.
And because we got in an argument over, I think, immigration or something like that.
And there was just no thought ever like, oh, you can't say that on here.
It's like, no, you could be on Twitter and be a fucking real deal white nationalist advocating for it, you know, and calling people faggot and doing whatever.
Like that was just, it was a different climate.
It was a different thing.
Nobody was really policing these things.
I shouldn't say nobody.
I'm sure he probably even had problems back then.
But it really, you'd have to be that extreme and that nuts to have problems with like, oh my God, I got kicked off Twitter or some shit like this.
It just wasn't something other people were concerned about.
And I understand where people are, you know, like, please don't pretend I'm implying something that I'm not implying.
I'm not sitting here and saying, wouldn't it be great if the internet was still white nationalists calling people faggots?
That's not the point.
I'm just making the point that that's how different from today the culture was, right?
Like that's just how it's changed that much in just a few short years.
And cancel culture in general.
I mean, you know, you look at Gina Carano, you know, getting fired for saying like, you know, you would think she said something positive about the Holocaust.
But what she actually said was something like, oh, this, the Holocaust was really awful and we might be going down a similar path.
And that's just as bad.
Basically treated exactly the same way as if she had said something positive about the Holocaust.
And I guess you wouldn't get the gig with Ben Shapiro.
But aside from that.
You can totally fit more Jews into ovens.
Like if she was like that, I've seen ovens.
They could have gotten them way more done.
They only had a short window.
I thought the Germans were supposed to be efficient.
Yeah.
I mean, it's really not that much different.
Like, I mean, I, you know, in terms of like the treatment that she gets, it's almost like they, you know, they treat her in the same manner.
Okay.
So, sorry, one quick second.
So that's just how much the culture has changed.
And this thing has really gone in a crazy direction.
And so what you might want to wonder, right?
And sorry that this was a long rant, but I think it was all important to get in there.
But back to the point of if we want to solve this problem, the first thing we got to recognize is what happened here.
What happened?
Why did we go to this place where now all of a sudden they're trying to silence all of these people?
I mean, look, Alex Jones had a huge internet show since I've, you know, since well before I've been politically, you know, active or radicalized or any of this shit.
He was always huge.
It was never like really even a thought.
Alex Jones getting kicked off of the internet.
I mean, Alex Jones was, you know, it's funny because you think like, oh, you know, somebody, whatever, is a threat to power or someone's saying something, you know, whatever it is, the QAnon people who get kicked off now or the people who have like conspiracy theorists.
I mean, Alex Jones was leading the march that the government did 9-11.
And I remember like, you know, in the years like 2007, 2008, 2009, that was like huge.
A lot of people online believed that shit.
And none of us ever even had the thought that this might get you kicked offline.
And this was like the biggest terrorist attack in American history.
And he was sitting there saying, this has Dick Cheney's fingerprints all over it.
You know, I don't know if he was exactly saying Cheney did it, but he was very open to the inside job.
He was straight up saying elements within our own government did this.
And it's a shame because now the world doesn't have an outlet to hear about demon creatures.
Yeah.
And he was right about that.
And the frogs are gay, evidently.
They croak.
They seem to like it.
Yeah.
Oh, no.
They're, oh, they're into it.
You can tell.
No, they're, they're into it.
All right.
I know the difference between a gay frog and a boy frog being raped by another boy frog.
Okay.
You think I can't tell the difference?
You think I can't tell when that frog wants it?
You can hear it on the ribbon.
We're getting distracted here, but the frogs want it.
They're gay.
All right.
But so this just wasn't, this just wasn't a thing.
It was not.
And in fact, a lot of us thought it was impossible, never foresaw it happening and thought that, well, that's it.
The internet's the great equalizer, you know?
And that's just the way it is.
And, you know, these voices were, you know, very effectively, if not silenced, really diminished, really, really diminished.
I mean, people who quite possibly, and I understand if you don't like their politics, not being upset about this.
But like I said before, you should only really cheer it on if you love the establishment, because the truth is that this is now something that can target any anti-establishment voice.
But the truth is that Alex Jones would be a much bigger player in the American political scene in the culture if he was not kicked off YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, you know, iTunes, all the rest.
A lot of people, a lot of people like, you know, Milo Yiannopoulos and Gavin McGinnis and like all these different guys who they had huge followings, you know, and that's all gone now.
Now they're all relegated to their own little corners.
And that's how this kind of works.
And if you do, you know, for libertarians, again, just to knock libertarians one more time, you may not like any of these different political groups.
But if your solution is like, well, make your own Twitter, make your own Twitter, and everyone's making their own social media, you could also see there's a real problem with that because now all you're going to have is left-wingers talking to left-wingers, right-wingers talking to right-wingers.
And if you're a libertarian, don't you need to, just by definition, convince a lot more people to be libertarian?
Because we're such a small percentage of the population.
And if all we can talk to is other libertarians, how the fuck do we ever get anywhere?
You know, so just like for that reason, you should be concerned about all of this.
But what really happened that led to this change?
Why is it that these same guys, Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey, and some of these other major players, why are they going around kicking off every right-winger now when they didn't want to before?
Like before, they were completely fine to not do it.
And it kind of makes sense why.
If you rewind the tape six years ago, I don't know, do they really want another job on their hands of going around and kicking every right-winger off of their site?
First off, they're very immediately incentivized not to, right?
Because that is kind of their business model is they want people on their sites.
They don't want to boot a huge percentage of people off of their sites.
At least that was the starting point.
And the incentives seemed to line up for that to be what they wanted to do.
So what changed?
And everybody knows, really, what changed.
Donald Trump got elected.
That's what changed everything.
Donald Trump got elected.
And then there just had to be, you know, an explanation for why Donald Trump could have possibly gotten elected.
And so the point I'm making here is that it starts with politics.
That's what this whole thing starts with.
It's all poisoned by the government.
So at least grant that to the libertarians, that you might, even if you're starting, even if I've only built the case up to this point right now and say that, you know, which is one of the things that libertarians get accused of all the time, it's from the libertarian perspective, it drives you a little bit nuts, but they'll always admit, or a lot of times people will admit basically that yes, the libertarians turns out were right all along,
but now we have this problem that libertarianism can't solve.
Okay.
So like this would happen all the time when they'd be advocating we go in, you know, to bomb ISIS or something like that.
And it's like, but we told you never fight the war in Iraq, never arm ISIS, never get involved in this part of the world.
And they're like, yeah, yeah, in hindsight, you are right about all of that, but we got ISIS now.
So we got to go bomb them.
And it's like, oh, listen, okay, that technically speaking, that can be true.
You could have been right about every call, but you know what?
We made the wrong calls.
And now you might not be right about this next call.
But at least grant that had the size of the government never gotten so out of control that everyone had to have such a stake in who is wielding control over this government, had the corruption never gotten so out of control that it was just so blatantly robbing from the American people and just selling out the country, as Pat Buchanan puts it, something close to economic treason against the American people.
Had none of that happened, Trump never gets elected.
He was all a refutation of all of that, of the existing system.
I mean, and I don't, this isn't like some abstract thing.
I mean, literally, who did he beat?
He beat the Bushes and the Clintons.
This was a rejection of the Bush, Clinton, Obama federal government.
And so Trump gets elected.
And he ran on a, you know, somewhat incoherent and you know buffoonish, you know brash, fuck the system, you know uh campaign um, but it was a clear indictment of the entire ruling class.
Then you know, that's kind of what he ran on, that these people are all idiots and corrupt and the Bushes lied us into war and the Obamas were a failure and the Clintons are a rapist and a warmonger.
Fake News Origins Revealed00:02:49
You know, like this is.
This was right at the center of his campaign and it really pissed off the establishment.
And the establishment got terrified um, of how much they they had lost a grip.
Their monopoly on media was gone and there this guy, who you know was a huge middle finger to the system, had won and, from their perspective, very potentially dangerous to this huge honeypot.
Like what the hell might this guy do?
He's talking about ending a whole bunch of it um, he's talking about ending wars and draining the swamp, and you know all this shit.
And and so they had to blame something and they couldn't blame themselves, you know.
So what did the narrative become?
Well, it was Russia.
Right, it was Russia, it was Russian interference.
Now, this is all a bunch of bullshit.
Everybody who pays attention to this shit knows it.
So it's a complete Clinton deep state corporate press lie that Russian interference in any meaningful way played a role in this and, of course, the collusion thing was just all fucking, just all nonsense.
Um, but that was, that was that's what they went with.
They needed something and they went with that.
But how did Russia interfere?
Well, they did it through social media.
That was the narrative.
That they did it through social media and this whole focus from the government and the corporate press and you know all of the powers that be became that there's fake news, there's disinformation and, for those people who remember, fake news was not a term that Donald Trump coined to talk about CNN.
It was a term that CNN coined to talk about the fake news on the internet.
That's what happened.
Okay, now the other thing.
I just I, I want to pause right here and just briefly mention uh, something else um, and then we'll jump right back into how Trump winning created this whole mess of online censorship.
All right so um wokeism, cancel culture, this whole culture of that every, everybody's a racist or sexist the, the obsession with um uh, racism and and Lgbtq issues and all of this other stuff and the, the type of culture that leads to Gina Carano being ruined because he said the wrong thing, and all of this stuff.
All of this because you, because you can't write, You can't really talk about, like tech censorship without mentioning, like the woke culture, because that's kind of how it gets applied.
Woke Culture As CIA Plot00:03:45
All of this is a government program that's been pushed on the American people.
It's probably a fucking CIA plot, to be honest, but it's very clearly a government program.
And if you look at it, it is pushed by the like, who's it pushed by?
Well, it's pushed by academia, which is a big government program.
It's the government subsidizes the loans so that people can go to these schools and learn all of this bullshit.
You know, it's just, that's what it is.
And it's pushed by the big corporations who are in bed with the government.
I mean, some libertarian could sit here and tell me J.P. Morgan Chase is a private entity, but let's get real.
That's a government entity right there.
And it's pushed by the government, by politicians.
It's completely pushed on the American people.
And the major reason why it's pushed on the American people is to distract from the corruption.
I've talked about this a lot in other podcasts.
I don't have that much time to like build this case right now, but it's absolutely pushed on the American people in the wake of the Occupy movement because they were terrified that the leftists weren't identifying as commies or leftists.
They were identifying as the 99% against the 1%.
And that scared the shit out of them.
And that's when all of this woke shit, which had been lying kind of dormant in universities.
So anyway, whatever.
That's when this all started getting pushed by the major news outlets like the New York Times and shit like that.
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Tech Companies Face Regulation00:15:25
So all of this wokeism has been being pushed.
Really started being pushed in the end of Obama's, in Obama's second term, when people were really outraged about the banker bailouts and rightfully so that continued under Obama and really outraged that Obama didn't clean up any of George W. Bush's government.
He only made it worse.
And then when Trump won, it just exploded.
Okay.
So just point that out.
So what's poisoning the well here is this government program of wokeism and politics in general.
So back to 2016.
So Donald Trump wins and they blame it all on the fake news.
And what does Congress do?
Well, they haul Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey and all these guys in front of Congress and say it's you.
You're the problem here.
You guys are the ones who are allowing this fake news to be spread.
Hey, what the hell are you doing about this fake news?
What are you going to do?
Now imagine, you know, again, I'm not saying that those guys aren't villains because they absolutely are.
Believe me, me and Rob, our group got kicked off Facebook a few months ago.
We're not happy about any of this stuff.
I think it's awful what they're doing to a lot of people.
But just to give the villains their due, like in the same way in a superhero movie, you'll see the backstory of the villain and realize why they became a villain.
I mean, try to imagine yourself in that position, Rob, getting hauled into Congress.
You know, you're not a political guy.
You're a tech dork, you know, who's like a billionaire now.
And you're a socialite and you're going to all the fancy parties and all this.
And all of a sudden they're like, you're the reason.
We're all furious Trump won and it's because of you.
How might you respond to the threat of, you know, implicit threat from Congress?
Well, you might start going, hey, what do you need me to do?
Right?
So that's kind of step one here.
Okay.
I'm not saying that describes all of it, but that's a huge, huge part.
It's a really big part of all of this.
And you got to think that, so this woke culture has come in also that's all around us now.
And all of a sudden, these guys living their cushy lives in Silicon Valley and all this shit.
Now you're kind of like, whoa, shit, that I'm getting threatened from Congress.
And all my friends might be looking at me like, what are you doing?
And you won't be allowed at the cool parties anymore.
And all this social pressure on you to say, hey, like, what the fuck?
You're allowing all of this fake news on your site.
You're allowing, you know, Nazis and whatever the fuck they call it, you know?
And they created, they manufactured this.
But here's my thing that I would point out real quick.
The government from the very beginning of all of this stuff, from the very beginning of the revolution in media and information, has wanted to crack down on it.
They always have.
Obama was pushing widespread internet regulation.
It failed because there was a big backlash against it.
But the government was pushing internet regulation for a while.
But then what happened was they basically shook down the tech companies after helping to fund and create the tech companies.
They shook them down and they knew they were serious.
Look, part of the reason, and you could even say, like, right, when Jack Dorsey or when Mark Zuckerberg testifies in front of Congress, and there'll be a bunch of Democrats who are really grilling them, like, you have this fake news on your site and you have this hate speech on your site.
And what are you doing to combat fake news?
What are you doing to combat, you know, this?
And then maybe someone like Ted Cruz will get up there and be like, but you're being unfair to conservatives.
You know, you're kicking conservatives off.
But here's the thing that's kind of implicit, right?
And this is something really important to understand about American politics.
And believe me, really smart, powerful people understand this about American politics.
Jeff Dice made this point when he was on the show a while back.
The Democrats are serious and the Republicans are not.
That's a really important part of American politics that you have to understand.
When the Democrats say something, they mean it.
When the Republicans say something, they don't.
It's that simple.
And the Democrats say, we're for gay marriage.
They mean gay marriage will be the law of the land.
That is our mission and we will get that.
When the Republicans say, we're against abortion, that means, I don't know, vote for me.
Vote for me and I'll say I'm against abortion.
Our abortion is going to be made illegal anytime.
No, they're not, they have no one plan.
The Republicans say, we want to shrink the size of government.
Do they mean that?
No.
So when Ted Cruz says one of these things to these guys, it just doesn't scare them.
But when the Democrats say something, it fucking scares them because they know those guys are playing for keeps.
And they're right.
They're right to be afraid of it.
So all of this stuff together created this environment that we're in now.
But I'm just saying from the fucking start, you got to understand what caused this problem before you can even think about solving it.
Before you can think about solving the problem, you have to understand what caused it.
And you can laugh off how goofy libertarians are on this issue, and they are, believe me, I agree with you.
But the truth is that politics and big government are the main culprits for what this problem is that we face now.
And basically the problem is that we were given the ultimate equalizer and that is slowly being stripped back from us.
That's the situation that we're in now.
But there's an important principle that I think going forward for what you're going to prescribe as the solution that you have to realize.
And that's the do no harm, like medical principle.
And it's important to think about, okay, because this is quite possibly these guys, when you're dealing with corporate plots, CIA plots, really important people who are like really smart people who are pushing these plots, understand that they are, they're clever and that they will often push you in from the left side and snatch you with the right side, right?
Like they'll push you in this direction to fall right into their trap.
Sorry, I'm making my camera go a little crazy when I do that.
But quite possibly, what they're trying to do is get right-wingers to beg for government intervention into this problem.
But why?
So once you understand the cause of the problem, the solution starts looking a little bit different.
Like, is the government really who you want to trust to come in here and solve this problem when they are the ones who caused it?
Are you really trusting that these same, you know, congressmen, these same Democrats and Republicans are going to do a better job of this?
And I got to say, and I think partially because people don't really think through the cause of all of these problems, some of the prescriptions from these right-wingers are just like, you look at it, you go, this is going to be 10 times worse.
This is going to be so much fucking worse.
So the section 230 thing, right?
Do you know about Section 230, Rob?
Yeah, that's the whether or not you're considered a publisher or editor based off of the content on your website, something along those lines.
Right.
So basically what it does is it gives these big tech companies protection as platforms rather than publishers.
So if you're a publisher, you can be sued, you know, like because you're deciding what you publish and what you don't publish.
But if you're a platform, you can't be.
And they treat it kind of like the way they treat a phone company.
So if a mob boss calls one of his killers and tells him, I want you to take out this guy at this time.
Nobody thinks to themselves, oh, we can sue AT ⁇ T for platforming this killer.
You know what I mean?
Because you go like, well, no, they're just the phone company.
They didn't do anything.
This guy just happened to you.
They're just like, hey, we're the phone company and anyone can use the phones.
And this guy happened to use the phones to do this.
So that's kind of more or less legally how the big tech companies are treated.
You're not a publisher.
So you're not held responsible for something someone says on that.
And the argument is that this now gives them protection.
And the argument is that, well, if you're kicking people off, and fair enough, there's some merit to this, this part of the argument.
If you're kicking people off for saying the wrong thing, then aren't you acting more like a publisher than a platform?
Because in the same sense as like AT ⁇ T isn't kicking anybody off the phones because they said the wrong thing.
And if you're now using this kind of editorial discretion, you're behaving more like a publisher than a platform.
And so the right-wing argument goes, you should lose your protection for that as a platform.
Now you're acting like a publisher.
But what's the real issue here?
Okay.
This is something right-wingers really don't think through nearly enough.
I mean, the first part, and by the way, this is what I got so wrong.
And that's like listening to Scott Horton really made this all click for me.
But the first thing, basically about 80% of my career is just hearing things Scott Horton says and then regurgitating them to a bigger audience and taking all the credit and making sure everyone hears it.
But I have permission from him.
He loves that I do it.
Anyway, but here's the thing, right?
So if you remove Section 230, it's not like, oh, you're thinking, you're thinking now that somebody who gets kicked off will have the right to sue, you know, Facebook or Twitter or something like that, which is like, first off, like, okay, good luck fucking matching your lawyers up against Jack Dorsey's and seeing how you're going to win in this bullshit government justice system.
But actually, this will very clearly have the opposite intended effect.
Once you remove Section 230, it's not that that's going to be a straight line to people who get kicked off being able to sue the social media companies.
That would mean you could sue the social media companies for what's up there, right?
Because if you're saying they're a publisher, then they can get sued for libel.
They can get sued for anything that they are publishing that is an incitement to violence or anything like that.
So what it would have an effect would, it would create the biggest crackdown on any of this shit.
To play devil's advocate, though, I would think that the threat of removing Section 230 would make a Facebook or Twitter not viable, that they then would be forced to become an open platform in order to avoid that consequence.
Or if it were to actually be stripped by it, then you're really opening up the market for someone to come in and actually serve as just a platform because they'll see it's not that viable if government's going to consider you to be a publisher.
Yeah, but once you remove section 230, then the next competitor won't have that either.
So if you get, listen, I get your point.
There could be something to, you could threaten them with this and then they would back off and maybe be good perhaps.
It can be on a contingency that if you are editorializing in any faction, you're considered a publisher.
If you are just an open platform, then you're not, which would then force them to be a open platform because you can't exist with the publisher status.
But just to be clear, that's a completely different legal scenario than just repealing Section 230.
So what you're saying would require then an additional law that says you do get Section 230 coverage unless you do this.
I actually thought, and I listen, you're better researched on this one.
I thought the entire premise of the Section 230 was that, no, Section 230 exists, but we don't actually think you're still qualified for it because you're editorializing.
So the idea being if you're not editorializing, you would still be eligible.
So the complaint lies in the fact that they're editorializing.
That's the complaint, but that itself is not actually in the law.
In the law, it's just, and the law basically is applied in the way that it just says these companies are treated as platforms.
And the argument is that because they're kicking people off, they shouldn't be treated as platforms.
All I'm saying is that if you don't treat them as platforms, then they are going to crack down like they never have before because they'll need to for legal reasons.
That's my only point.
So all it will do in effect is make the problem of people getting kicked off these platforms worse.
That's my only point.
Now, could you, in some like 4D chess style argument, argue that that will actually destroy these companies and perhaps open up the market for other competition?
Perhaps it's possible.
But if your immediate complaint is that this is, you know, the problem is that these right-wingers are getting kicked off just for being right-wingers, they're all gone.
They're all going to be gone.
You will have to let I'm just saying it will open up a can of worms that is a fucking mess.
And here's the part of my, here's my central pitch about this.
And we got to wrap up in a second.
But my central pitch is that even though it's like we were, we had the revolution and it's being scaled back, but we're still in a much better place than we were before the revolution, where the corporate press just had a monopoly on media.
And this, these proposals are going to blow up the whole thing.
They're going to blow up the whole thing.
And I don't think that's better.
And on the other end of the scale, there are actually people who are just arguing to nationalize, just arguing straight up to nationalize these companies.
And just so you know, that is exactly what all of your enemies want.
That's what they want.
They want to be pushed into taking over these companies.
And if you think that, you know, it's like I heard one guy on Tim Poole's show argue that we should nationalize them because then everyone's protected by the First Amendment.
Then it becomes a true, you know, free speech argument.
It's like, yeah, go tell Julian Assange that the government protects your First Amendment.
Go tell some guy who's doing 30 years in jail for having a loaded gun in his car and he drove over state lines or something like that.
Go tell him about the Second Amendment and how well the government, you know, how did radio operate with the FCC?
That doesn't seem like it was just, hey, free speech.
No, of course not.
You're going to have, not only are you going to have all types of regulation of what's deemed, you know, offensive speech or indecent speech or something like that, but it's going to be from the enemies.
It's going to be the enemies, the system that perpetuates all of this corruption.
Serious Libertarian Analysis00:00:45
They're going to be the ones in charge.
So I would just say this.
There is a real libertarian, a serious libertarian analysis of what's going on with cancel culture and tech censorship.
And it all revolves around the fact that this is a major problem, but that it was created by politics and government.
And giving them control of this is almost certainly going to make the situation much worse.
Maybe we'll talk a little bit more about this on the next episode because I have a few more thoughts, but we're over time and I got to run because I got a busy day.
But thank you guys very much for listening.
Go check out Run Your Mouth, Rob Bernstein's podcast, and follow him on Twitter at RobbieTheFire.