Dave Smith and Clint Russell dissect the Ukraine conflict, arguing NATO escalation provoked war and criticizing Biden's "war criminal" label given U.S. military history in Libya and Syria. They contend a 5% nuclear risk makes territorial concessions preferable to intervention. The discussion pivots to media hypocrisy, contrasting Tucker Carlson's severe Antifa harassment with the performative outrage over female journalists' online abuse. While highlighting a NYU study on violent tweets against Taylor Lorenz, they mock the focus on privileged victims while ignoring inflation and drug overdoses. Ultimately, the hosts assert that true journalism should address real-world suffering rather than amplifying the grievances of those who weaponize victimhood. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Comedy Speech with Scott and Clint00:03:40
Fill her up.
You're listening to the Gas 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 Gas Digital Network.
Here's your host, James Smith.
What's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Heart of the Problem.
I'm Dave Smith.
He is Robbie the Fire Bernstein, aka the king of the caulks, aka COVID Jesus, aka a man living with AIDS.
What's up, my brother?
Oh, man.
I had the best weekend hanging out with Scott in Connecticut, doing that gig.
It was a very fun.
Was it great?
Yeah, it was a lot of fun.
So what did you do?
Did you do stand-up or did you give a talk or what?
So I was, you know, I told them beforehand because they had all these speakers and I let them know beforehand.
I was like, listen, I'll come host.
I'll throw in some jokes.
And if it makes sense to do comedy at the end, I will.
So showed up, hosted.
I had a lot of fun hosting.
It was just fun to do.
I was introducing speakers.
It was a blast.
Scott goes out there.
He does an hour and a half on Yemen.
Sadly, I don't think anyone recorded this speech.
And we really should have him on the show while it's fresh in his head because he really honed in on everything and why America is really at fault and we can't wash our hands of it.
This is Yemen or Ukraine?
Yemen.
I mean, yeah, Yemen.
He talked to Yemen.
Oh, okay.
Cool, cool.
So it was really an incredible hour and a half speech.
He ends and we're done with the room.
Like, we're already over time on the room.
We've just listened to famine.
And I'm like, okay, I'm not telling jokes.
Like, I'm just like, that's our event.
So yeah, it was, it was the right call.
I've been doing comedy long enough.
So I was like, thanks, everyone, for coming out.
And then Scott starts yelling at me, tell your jokes.
So I'm like, all right, I guess we're doing comedy.
And then it went great.
People were on board.
So I did like 20.
Only a room full of libertarians.
Like in your mind, you're like, we just talked about like famine and genocide for an hour and a half.
I don't think people want to hear jokes.
And only in a room full of libertarians are like, no, we're primed for jokes now.
This is what we do.
That's great.
It went great.
It was a lot of fun.
And then I got to hang out with Scott, ask him all sorts of questions.
And there's no question you can ask him.
He doesn't have an answer for.
It's like getting your own little lecture.
So it was fun.
And more gigs coming.
I got SOA forum coming up.
And April 30th, I got another like Liberty event in Childerberg.
So the dates coming.
Oh, awesome.
Awesome.
Well, I just, so I was out in Minnesota, like right outside Minneapolis for the LP state convention out there.
And it was great.
It was just a great time, man.
I love all these things.
It's really, it's really, really fun to go out and like fucking actually meet, you know, some of these, these people and a whole bunch of like, you know, people who listen to this show and stuff.
And I gave the keynote speech there.
It was just really fun.
Just a great time.
Great people.
Speech went great.
So thanks to all those guys out there in Minnesota for having me out.
And then this next weekend coming up, I'll be out in Dallas for right near Dallas for the Mises Caucus event out there.
I'm looking forward to that as well.
So should be a lot of fun.
Okay.
And Clint said he's planning on making his flight for that.
So you might get Clint.
Oh, yeah.
I saw on Twitter, his flight got fucked and he didn't make it to the Connecticut one.
These airlines can't get their shit together.
Yeah, it is fucking annoying.
Yeah.
Well, I saw he had like video of like them like canceling his flight and shit.
Putin's War and Vested Interests00:15:50
So he wasn't, he wasn't bullshitting you.
That was real.
All right.
Well, yeah, I'll see.
Clint will be out at that one.
If you don't, if you don't know, we're talking about Clint Russell, of course, the host of Liberty Lockdown.
He's been a guest on this show a couple of times.
Great.
One of the best libertarian podcasters and speakers out there.
All right.
A few topics for today's show might be a little bit short of an episode because I'm on a time crunch because I got to run to go record YoMMA rap with Lewis and then skanks later on tonight.
But I guess there's a few things that are a little bit more lighthearted and silly that I wanted to talk about on today's episode.
But let's open up with the heavy stuff, which is that there are these images and reports that have been coming out of, I'm not even sure how you pronounce this, the Bucha, the Bucha region in Ukraine that seem to be showing mass civilian deaths there.
It's look, just up front, the U.S. and the West is largely claiming that Russia has killed a whole bunch of innocent people there.
The Russians are claiming that this is all propaganda and that it's not true.
I certainly don't trust the Russian government.
Of course, they're going to say that, no, what are you talking about?
We haven't been killing innocent people indiscriminately in this area.
But I'll be honest, I don't really trust the Western governments or our government either, because of course they're going to say, oh my God, he's committing these horrific war crimes.
Really hard to decipher what's going on here.
The facts seem to be pretty clear that a whole bunch of innocent people are dying in Ukraine.
It seems pretty clear that thousands of people have already been killed or innocent people being exploded to death, you know, gunned down, all types of horrific things.
It's really awful.
Whatever happened in this specific instance.
I don't know.
Do you have any thoughts on it beyond that?
I think I have my reservations on any judgments of what's going on over there, particularly images or otherwise, until they're going to be confirmed at a later point in time.
I mean, I don't want to defend Russia in any capacity.
And it's tragic.
And this should be an example for everyone of why we shouldn't push countries into war.
I think to me, there's just zero evidence of the fact that Putin wouldn't engage in this activity if it wasn't for all the NATO escalations.
And so, you know, and now it gets scary over here because you get Zelensky over on the Grammys, and it seems like they're trying to really pull on everyone's hearts and walk us into this war, which I really only think favors the elites that would gladly walk us into more of these opportunities and don't care about human life.
So I don't want to, I don't, like, I don't want to fall for their game.
But at the same note, it's tragic, but also I don't think that you can make any reservation.
Like, you can't make judgments on these images when 24 hours later they keep retracting them.
And I'm willing to bet in a year from now, we'll hear more about what happened on the Ukraine side.
So like, it's just hard to know what's really going on.
Yeah, I think that's a fair assessment.
And, you know, it's hard in these situations.
It's like you kind of, like you said, in the fog of war, there's, and this is with all wars.
And this is not necessarily like nefarious.
This is just kind of the nature of things.
You get bad reports all the time, you know, about how many people died in this attack or that attack, because, you know, if you think about it, it's like it's difficult to get this information in real time.
But you can pick out bullshit when you see it.
And it is, I guess, two things that stand out to me, one that you kind of covered there that you mentioned there.
One is that not what you didn't mention, but that we were texting back and forth before.
But the idea that when Joe Biden calls Vladimir Putin a war criminal for this is just, it's fucking rich, man.
Like it just takes some goddamn nerve for Joe Biden to sit there and call this guy a war criminal because innocent civilians have been killed.
I mean, Joe Biden himself as commander in chief has killed many innocent civilians.
And the administration that he was vice president to started wars in, I mean, in Libya, in Syria, in Yemen, and continued wars in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Somalia.
I mean, he did, I will give him credit for ultimately ending the war in Afghanistan, although I think he really didn't have much of a choice.
But I give him credit for ending that.
But even there, he went in and had that drone strike where they killed a whole bunch of innocent people on the way out.
And then they lied about it, right?
And said that they just got an ISIS-K leader or something like that.
And then that was all completely debunked.
So, you know, the idea of, you know, pointing fingers at someone else, I mean, yes, I'm not saying it disproves the argument.
Like, yeah, Vladimir Putin is probably a war criminal for the way he's conducting this war.
But for anybody, you know, for any high-ranking official, let alone the commander-in-chief, Joe Biden of the United States military, to point the finger at anybody else and say, oh, my God, they're, you know, they're committing war crimes or, you know, whatever they, the way they put it, they're, they always say like, they're violating, you know, the international law and the, you know, the global hegemony based on a rules-based order and all this shit.
Basically, the rule, the unwritten rule of the whole, you know, new world order, liberal, you know, global consensus is that America can do whatever the fuck they want.
So if your rule is I can do whatever the fuck you, I want, there's not that much weight when you accuse others of breaking the rules.
That's your own rule.
In my best estimation, all of Ukraine at this point, it's a hostage situation and they are Putin's hostages.
Now he hasn't taken over the whole country yet, but I think they're going to go territory by territory.
They're going to shell, like they're going to kill civilians.
And like we can either call him a war criminal and escalate this, which might lead to a full war or a nuclear war, or we can accept, hey, we're going to need some guarantees here for peace moving forward.
And we're going to need the international community to all be on board for consequences if we kind of give him these eastern territories and walk back this war, which even what's his name?
Blinken said that we would de-escalate our sanctions if that's what like Ukraine can negotiate that U.S. will get rid of its sanctions.
The sanctions are a big game anyways because all the countries are still buying oil from Russia.
So the point just being, this is a bad situation.
I think it's only made worse by escalating.
And so I think it's time for people to kind of accept Putin's one.
Let him keep the Eastern territories, de-escalate, put some consequences in place if he decides to ramp up again.
Well, I think, listen, I think, as I've been saying from the very beginning of this, I think it's to anybody who's, you know, like to any cool head in this situation, it's been obvious from the beginning that negotiation should be what everybody's focused on.
A massive effort toward diplomacy.
It's wild to think that we don't even know what the economic cost of this thing would be.
So like, I mean, the deaths are obviously tragic, but like, how many people just haven't worked in Ukraine in a month or how many people have lost their homes?
And like, I don't really quite understand the international supply lines on food, but I keep hearing these stories about fertilizer and how many plants aren't even being, you know, amidst the inflation, how many like farms are just going unseeded.
It's like, I don't know.
It just seems like, how come there isn't even more reporting about the potential cost?
It's just Biden saying in passing, hey, your food costs are going to go up.
Aren't there experts that can tell us exactly how many fields aren't being planted?
Like how much of a food shortage?
Like, why is this a gray area?
Well, it seems very conveniently being, it seems to be that it's being used very conveniently to kind of sweep under the rug all problems, you know, that they can all be blamed on Vladimir Putin and this war,
which is so I think there's a pretty strong vested interest in not breaking down the exact cost of this war and rather just letting it just be this thing that if there are any problems at all, well, I mean, you know, it's because Vladimir Putin is such a monster.
He invaded Ukraine and that's why everything, that's why your whole country is falling apart.
You know, it's all because of Vladimir Putin.
Look, the thing is, it's like this with the war over there.
And I saw is that that guy, blanking on his name, Ali Ali or something like that, but this guy who's an MSNBC reporter who just was outright advocating for military intervention in the U.S. to get involved militarily because what Vladimir Putin's doing is so horrible.
And even if you forget all of the kind of lies by omission in this conflict that no one in the corporate press is actually telling you all of the things that led up to this war over the last decade, let alone 20, 30 years.
But it's so that it's just like you're supposed to think history began when Putin invaded.
Or if you know anything about history, it's like, well, he invaded Crimea and then he invaded here.
That's all that's happened.
None of the other stuff, right?
You know, like we're not, we're not going to focus on any of that.
But even if you forget about all of that, it kind of becomes this almost like emotional appeal.
It reminds me a lot of the beginning of COVID, where there's this emotional appeal for an action using the emotion of like one piece of information.
Like people are dying of COVID.
Don't you want to lock down?
And of course, like for anyone like thinking rationally and logically, you go like, okay, but what are lockdowns going to cost us?
Let's look at the cost of that versus the cost of the thing that you're talking about, because that's how you have to make these decisions.
And right now, it's just like, what, you know, even the people just advocating, send in weapons, sanctions, you know, and then even like this guy, this, this, you know, mainstream reporter, military intervention.
You're like, okay, well, this definitely escalates the conflict and the conflict directly between the United States and Russia.
And, you know, like what percentage risk of nuclear war are you comfortable tolerating?
Even if you think what's happening in Ukraine is the worst thing in the world, and it's pretty bad.
It's not the worst thing in the world.
It's not the war in Yemen, but it's pretty bad.
Even though no one seems to care about the worst thing in the world, the war in Yemen.
Well, no one reports on it.
If they reported on it like they did the Ukraine, everyone would care.
It's just there's no, they're not having any Houthis give an address at the Grammys.
You know what I mean?
And talk about what's going on there.
Yeah, they're not interested in telling people about that because we support the regime doing it and we don't oppose the regime doing it.
And that's all.
That's all.
That's the whole situation.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
So if you think about the percentage chance, just using, just pulling random numbers out just to kind of paint the picture.
I'm not saying these are the exact numbers, but let's say that like us, let's say us taking like, you know, a more aggressive military, you know, action here to help the people of Ukraine increases the chance of nuclear war.
Let's say it makes it a 5% chance.
Is that something you're comfortable with?
I know it's hard.
I think it's hard for people to be honest about this situation here, but like, is that to stop Russia from ruling Ukraine?
Are you willing to say, I will take a 5% chance that we lose New York City, Los Angeles, Miami?
You know what I mean?
Like just that 100 million deaths in America, which is a low estimate for how many people would die if Russia and the U.S. went to nuclear war.
Is that acceptable to you?
Because I'll tell you frankly, it's not to me.
And that's not to say that, you know, if you want to be a binary thinker about this, fine, but like, that doesn't mean I don't care about people in Ukraine dying.
It's like if there was some kid, a town over from me being abused by their parents, like I think that's horrible.
But if you said for you to go try and stop it, that's going to be a 5% chance that your kids die, then no, the answer is no.
I'm not comfortable with that risk.
That's more what I care about above all is protecting my children.
And you could take that and go, well, see, you don't even care about other children being abused.
It's like, no, I'm just, I do.
I think it's horrible, but I just care about this a lot more.
And I care about my kids a lot more.
I care about my country a lot more.
And then look, the truth is I feel that way about Russia taking Poland.
I feel that way about, like, it's horrible.
That sucks.
If you're like a kind of smaller country near a bigger country and you get bullied by that bigger country or take it over or people get killed, that's horrible.
None of it to me is worth increasing the risk of nuclear war.
None of it.
That's just my honest opinion.
And as much as people could turn around and say, so you just don't care about letting Putin do X, Y, or Z, you know, you could turn around and say, so you just don't care about nuclear war.
Gender Harassment and Parental Concerns00:09:23
Like this, the thing I'm worried about is way worse than the thing you're worried about.
So just that seems common sense to me.
And I'll just, I'll add to that that it's also the powers that be don't care about civilian life.
They're looking for their own agenda.
And so our playing into this and allowing them to escalate wars will just put us into more of these positions where, you know, they don't care.
Yeah, well, I mean, I think that's it.
And look, like at the very least, you would say, like, at least if America, if the United States of America's federal government and all of these proponents, you know what I mean?
Like all the people at the Grammys inviting them and all the people in the corporate press advocating for military intervention in Ukraine and all of this stuff.
If all of them had, like, if we hadn't fought all of these wars over the last 20 years, and if they hadn't championed them or at absolute best, just basically ignored them, then maybe you'd have a leg to stand on here and you wouldn't look like the absolute worst hypocrites in the world.
But the idea that you're going to be, you know, these like influential people in a country whose government is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world and you have nothing to say about that, but you're screaming war criminal at somebody else.
It is like, you know, as Cott Horton says, it's like you're lecturing someone from a swimming pool of, you know, filled with the blood of innocent people and lecturing someone else about how they're doing it wrong.
You're not respecting innocent people's lives.
You know, like it's just, it's bonkers.
And so, yeah, I think to your point, like, don't fall into that.
Don't fall into that into that trap.
That's all.
Okay.
So moving on to some maybe lighter stuff for the remainder of today's episode.
I did, I caught this segment on from Meet the Press the other week, and it really was just unbelievable.
I know a lot of people who listen to the show have probably tuned out the corporate press at this point.
Maybe you only see it when we make fun of it.
But I will say that, you know, the collapse of support and trust in all of the major institutions in America is a pretty big story.
And it's worth understanding why it has happened.
And so, yeah, so here, here's a clip from Meet the Press on a segment they did about the really important issues.
Of course, as we all know, the country is collapsing.
People's cost of housing and food and energy is just going through the roof.
Even just measuring by the CPI, it's the worst inflation since the 70s.
Of course, they measured the CPI in a different way in the 70s.
And if you use the 70s measure, it's even worse than the 70s was.
So basically, just really bad price inflation going on right now, crushing middle class and working class families.
That's not the only crisis going on.
Of course, there's several others.
We have a real epidemic of drug ODs in this country.
It's been going on for years.
The 21st century has been a real rough century so far for this country.
But don't worry.
The longest running show in news is here to talk about the issues that matter.
Take it away, Chuck Todd.
Welcome back.
This week, the White House proclaimed April as National Sexual Assault Awareness and Prevention Month.
One of the fastest growing threats to women is online harassment.
The latest government statistics show one in three women under the age of 35 have explained.
Let's just pause it already.
So like, he goes, what is it?
The president declared this sexual assault month, which look, even saying all these other problems that are major problems, sexual assault's a real problem.
You know, okay, that's very serious.
And then he immediately just transitions into one of the major problems here is online harassment.
You're like, online harassment is slightly different than sexual assault.
Just saying, you know, Biden's trying to make stricter laws for uh, I mean, they call it like the revenge porn laws, which I agree with.
If you took pictures of an ex, you shouldn't be posting that shit online and probably should be penalties for it.
But it's also suspicious that he's doing this right around when uh Hunter Biden laptop stories in the news and people are upset about that his son's got all these pictures on there, and maybe you're trying to clamp down on that being descent.
Like, you're literally describing the exact story that your son is in.
That there's pictures of him with prostitutes on the internet.
And I mean, they claim kids, but that's been like far conspiracy.
And uh, yeah, yeah, well, looking for that to verify it.
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
Um, but you know, look, again, there's that's the thing, though, right, with situations like this, there's like nuance to it.
So, like, yeah, like if you like, if you were like dating a chick and had naked pictures of her, and then you guys broke up and you're pissed off at her over something, so to get back at her, you're gonna put those pictures out.
That is an unbelievably like fucking shitty thing to do, like, just like truly a vile thing to do.
However, if the vice president's son, who's getting paid millions of dollars from foreign companies, is a dumb crackhead who leaves his computer at a computer repair shop and the hilarious images of him are out there posting that or tweeting about that as I think you'd have to grant at least different.
You know what I mean?
Like, morally speaking, it's not that first scenario that I laid out.
So, anyway, look, it's just to me funny how it's like it starts with what Chuck Todd's talking about here.
And by the way, this is Meet the Press Daily, not the Sunday show.
I was wrong in remembering it.
But, but it starts off with like sexual assault, which is very serious, and then it moves into online harassment, which is like, oh, people tweet shit at you.
Like, there's a mute button and a block button you can hit to not deal with that anymore.
By the way, as someone who gets harassed quite a bit on social media, it's like, grow up.
I don't know.
This is.
I don't get enough dick pics.
Send them my way.
Robbie the fire.
I'll take unsolicited dick pics all day.
Well, I don't think they're unsolicited anymore.
All right.
Let's keep playing.
Experience a type of essentially sexual harassment online.
It's often underreported and many times not taken seriously, despite its serious risk to many people.
Pause again.
I'm sorry.
The fact that it's not taken that seriously and underreported sounds like it's not that serious.
If people are both not reporting it and when they do report it, it's not treated like sexual.
It sounds like it's probably not that serious.
Inappropriate comments online are usually not thought of as serious, but we're here to change that.
We're here to tell you it's the most serious thing in the universe.
It would be great to do a flash to a montage of SWAT teams breaking down doors and taking 12-year-olds away from their Xboxes.
Yeah, really.
But again, it's like you'll see stuff like this reported, even just as you say, SWAT raids.
Like, what do we have?
Tens of thousands of those every year.
Like, that's a more serious story than people tweeting stuff at famous people.
Anyway, let's keep.
Hi, this is Chuck Todd here to make sure that we don't report on the situation in Russia, Biden's gaffes, or why they're investigating Hunter Biden.
So let's fill airtime with this story on sexual assault.
Yeah.
Here, let's keep playing.
Taken seriously, despite its serious risk to mental health and physical safety, the Biden administration is now committed to a new global partnership for action on gender-based online harassment and abuse.
The goal is to deliver an action plan on combating technology-facilitated gender-based violence by the end of this year.
Morgan Ratford joins me now.
She's been doing some reporting on the impact of this type of harassment.
What is gender-based violence?
That's like, what exactly are you describing is a take?
Like, what is going on that is horrific that needs to be addressed on the news right now?
Well, I'm sure they'll get into it here.
Gender-based.
Now, of course, by that, I think they just mean targeted at women.
Because I don't think, like, if someone's saying, like, ha ha, you have a little dick or something like that, I don't think they're considering that to be like gender-based sexual harassment.
That's what a lot of these things end up being.
It's just like, hey, we don't care about what happens, what guys fucking get harassed.
There is this weird thing, especially it's true even in like third wave feminism, where there is this almost like, it's like they don't even realize that they fall into the old stereotype as much as everybody else, where they're just kind of like, oh, yeah, but like men can take that.
That's not like a problem for them.
But oh my God, no, these women, these women are incapable of hearing these things.
I tend to have much more of an attitude of like, look, if you believe in traditional gender roles and you think that women cannot be spoken to in a certain way, then, and but men can, then okay, maybe you as a woman just shouldn't be online and you can go live more of the traditional kind of, you know, gender role life.
HR Platforms and Online Criticism00:02:39
You should have that freedom.
However, if you're a woman who's like, well, no, I want to be a reporter or a politician or whatever, I want to be a public figure.
And you get out there, I don't have any more sympathy for you than I do for me or other people or men who are out there in a situation like that.
Like, I'm not going to sit here and cry about mean things that are said to me on Twitter because I just kind of feel like, well, it comes with the territory.
I put myself out there, you know, I'm not like famous, but I'm a public figure in some way, you know?
And like, I have a show, I'm a professional comedian, a podcaster, and I'm on social media.
So some people will say some nasty shit.
I just look at that as like, oh, that's one of the prices of doing this job.
And the upside is I get to do what I love and support my family doing it.
That seems like a pretty fair trade-off.
And so I just don't have a whole lot of sympathy and I never have for people who are like public people complaining that people are saying mean things on Twitter.
So I don't know, block them.
Problem solved.
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Tucker Carlson Threats and Violence00:14:59
All right, let's get back into the show.
All right, let's keep playing.
The impact it has on women in journalism.
And it's not even a close call, Morgan.
As nasty as the attacks can be on some of us in this business, if you're a woman, it is at another level.
That's right, Chuck.
And you know, before this was all sort of anecdotal, but now we have hard data.
I mean, this is one of the biggest issues facing female journalists right now.
And an unprecedented study is giving us a closer look at just how some of those online attacks against female journalists are actually getting started and what it looks like for those who are on the receiving end.
But a warning to our viewers, some of the language you hear in this report, it may be disturbing.
Female reporters are often at the center of the bullseye.
73% of women journalists saying they've experienced online attacks, while 30% say it has impacted their work.
I don't know if I can say this on TV.
I'm going to rape you.
Someone said wrote the words, I'm going to rape you.
Yep.
Journalist Taylor Lorenz is a columnist for the Washington Post and was targeted nearly one year ago in a segment on Fox News.
She's at the very top of journalism's repulsive little food chain.
Host Tucker Carlson mocking her after she called for an end to online harassment.
Now she's at the center of a new study by NYU researchers, among the first to actually quantify online hate against female journalists.
This is the moment that Carlson aired that segment.
Yes.
We see this really dramatic rise.
Using large-scale data to measure online language, they tracked violent and threatening tweets directed at two female journalists after being targeted by two male media figures.
Researchers found that attacks against Lorenz went up as much as 144% after just one Twitter thread.
For another journalist, they went up 65%.
Lorenz and digital reporter Kate Sauson say these types of attacks have changed their lives and their work.
The fact that this segment started as, hey, there's a threat to women and it's sexual harassment and it's taking place online.
And also it's only to reporters.
And here's the scientific sexual assault.
We start with sexual assault.
Yeah.
And now we're going to women at the Washington Post get called mean things online.
This would be like if they went, squirrels are attacking the kids of other squirrels.
You know, like, well, that kind of changes how much I care about this.
Well, look, I mean, look, I mean, obviously, look, the example they pick out there is a guy saying, I'm going to rape you.
Now, that, I think, is absolutely not okay.
You can't say that.
And that's a threat of violence.
And I think there's no, I think you, you know, call the cops or whatever if you want to.
But it's also almost certainly some.
I mean, there's no reason to think that this is a credible threat.
This is almost certainly some loser online saying something disgusting.
Then they just go to like this uptick in what they call harassment.
But what are you talking about here with harassment?
Like, is this Tucker Carlson did a piece criticizing you?
Do you know how many pieces MSNBC and CNN have done on Tucker Carlson?
Like, is the rule here now that we can't criticize other journalists?
Because like my point is that they showed the one that says, I'm going to rape you.
Really fucked up and not okay.
But then they go, oh, there's all this harassment.
Well, what's the harassment there?
Like, you're a fucking terrible journalist.
You should be like, does that count as harassment?
Are we now?
Because here's the, there's a weird line here that you walk up against where you're like, you're using this one example and then like categorizing all of these other tweets as harassment.
But that one was like a threat of violence and like a threat of sexual assault or whatever, whether credible or not credible.
Are we now also lumping in?
You should fucking be ashamed of yourself and resign.
You're the enemy of the people.
you're a liar, blah, blah, blah.
Like, is any of that?
Is that all also?
Like, are basically, are we not supposed to be allowed to criticize the corporate press, or is it just the corporate press that you like?
You know, like, I'm sure we're allowed, according to MSNBC, to criticize Tucker and Hannity or any of these people, right?
So it's just like, it's a very weird thing.
I would venture to guess that there have been zero incidents in the United States of America of someone tweeting at a female journalist that they were going to rape them and then that rape occurring.
I'm going to venture to guess.
Probably that's probably happened zero times.
Similar to the way they like to go, oh, jokes will lead to violence or whatever that fucking line and narrative is.
I don't think there's been a single incident of anyone ever wants to, firstly, even if it were to happen, it's the fault of whatever crazy individual heard a joke and then decided to act on it.
That's a crazy person and they would have ended up in violence regardless of that joke.
The joke's not what led them there.
But I don't like for the amount of coverage they give to like whatever that line of reason is, I don't even think I have the turn of phrase right.
They don't have a single shred of evidence that it's ever transpired.
Well, that's right.
And how much credence are we going to give to things with zero percent chance in reality?
Like what?
And so the real, the real story here is that it hurt your feelings to see this.
And like, so that like in terms of like what actually happened.
And by the way, if someone is making threats of violence, I'm not against you.
Like call the cops, have them maybe look into it and see if like that.
I'm not saying that is okay.
But again, as I made the point, the idea that this is a credible threat is probably absurd.
And to your point, it is probably never once a tweet led to an actual assault of a journalist in any regard, whether a sexual assault or otherwise.
However, I think the deeper issue here, right, is that it's just, it's like another demonstration of how much the kind of like this neoliberal corporate press is living in their own bubble,
totally out of touch with regular people and totally out of touch with where their priorities on actual like threats should be.
And this happens over and over again.
You know, like no matter what, no matter how much there, there are these always these talks of like, so in this example, right, it would be whatever, sexism or kind of like gender inequality, right?
The idea that like there is this, female journalists have it so much tougher than male journalists have because they have to deal with things like this.
So the idea is kind of like that there's a more powerful group and a less powerful group with less privilege who's kind of the oppressed group.
And we have to think about the struggles of this oppressed group.
And you see this all across the place, whether it's, you know, with, you know, white privilege and, you know, black people, what their struggles are, or gay, you know, versus straight, you know, cis versus trans, whatever, you know, the issue is.
It's always like this.
But look, there is like a really honest, decent left winger could bring up some legitimate points having to do with those broad topics, right?
Like they could talk about, let's say, like, I don't know, whatever, like, say, some, some gay teenager who's, you know, comes from like a really int, like living in the South in a really intolerant area toward gay people and how difficult that would be for this kid.
You know what I mean?
Like there's something to that, that that might be a really like awful struggle.
There's probably, there's almost certainly like, you know, if you wanted to talk about the plight of black people in America, you could point to areas in this country, like in Chicago and in Detroit and in Baltimore and in parts of New Jersey, parts of New York, where there's just like kids coming up in these environments with like broken families, completely impoverished, awful public schooling, you know, living, coming up in high crime neighborhoods.
These kids are really fucked.
Like that really is like, it's tragic.
And it's completely reasonable to talk about that and then say like, hey, what can we do for these people?
Like they have it so much worse than so many of the rest of us.
What can we do for them?
However, when it's not an honest leftist or an honest libertarian having conversations like that, and it's these like corporate press neoliberal types, what you always get with them is it's like, hey, you know, it's like black people are really up against it.
And here's a good example of it.
There was this college student at an Ivy League school who was offended by something a professor said.
And you're like, wait, what?
Her?
That's the struggle?
So here you go about the struggle of women.
And who are we talking about?
Are we talking about like women who like are, you know, just crossed the border and were sexually abused on their trail over here or something like that?
Are we talking about like, you know, like, I don't know, like maids being sexually assaulted by like the, it's like, no, no, we're talking about a fucking woman who probably makes high six figures, maybe seven figures, who works at the Washington Post, who's on television right now, who has nothing but like the most privileged people in the world.
We're talking about how fucked up it is that someone tweeted something at them.
Well, while, by the way, Julian Assange is rotting to death.
You know, like, well, while real journalists who go against the whole neoliberal corporate press establishment, they can be tortured to the point of insanity.
That's not a problem.
But this is what we're supposed to get so worked up about.
And can you just imagine, right?
Like, it's like they can't understand why their ratings are crashing, why people hate them so much, why the trust in media is so low.
Just imagine like, you know, being somebody who's like, imagine being like a working class father of four who's like really freaking out about gas prices going up.
This isn't like a joke to you.
He's like, what do you mean gas prices are going up?
Like my healthcare premiums and my rent went up this year.
Again, my salary is the same.
Is that like I just went from barely making it by like my head above water to I'm drowning now?
And you turn on the news and this is what they want to talk to you about.
Well, actually, Mr. Privileged Man, you have no idea what it's like for this lady at the Washington Post who makes seven times your salary.
You know, she got called a twat on Twitter.
So.
Who after getting massive amounts of publicity, her toxicity levels on Twitter went up as well.
It's quantitative.
Oh my God.
Because sitting at a computer in NYU.
Tucker Carlson criticized her and now other people are criticizing her online.
Some of them are saying really inappropriate things.
Breaking story, right?
It's almost like the internet, that's what it's for.
It's like if there was a room for saying inappropriate, fucked up shit.
And then you walked into the room and go, why is everyone saying inappropriate things?
It's like walking in the bathroom, surprised that it smells.
Like that's what it is.
Like you can go anywhere else in the world.
You can go to any dinner party in the world and no one's going to say this shit to you because they don't do it there.
I had someone the other day on Twitter called me a pedophile.
And this was because that get out.
Yeah.
And I was like, do you have my cell phone?
But they call me a pedophile because we uh of a joke I made on Legion of Skanks.
I don't even know the joke, but that was the when they were pushed by someone else.
That was the evidence they gave.
And it's like, that's a pretty fucked up thing to say.
That's a little over the line.
If you ask me, I'm a, I don't know, a father of two young children and not a pedophile.
Um, but like Crimea River, Crimea River, is this like the fucking and by the way, also, if you want to talk about like threats of violence, I've gotten plenty of those too.
The thing is that none of them were ever credible.
It was never like a thing where I was like, oh, I think this person's actually going to come fucking kill me.
But I've had people say they were going to kill me.
I've had people say they were going to fuck me up, like all this shit.
It's just like, I could never imagine as I come on this show every day and talk about, you know, the genocide in Yemen or the wars and all these other countries or the destruction of the country under the COVID regime or whatever, any of the other stuff we talk about.
Could you ever imagine?
Like if I just came up on the show and I was like, this is an outrage that someone said they were going to beat me up on Twitter.
This person said they were going to kill me on Twitter.
And I was going off on a whole thing about what a victim I am because of this.
Wouldn't you just kind of be sitting there, Robin, in the back of your mind?
You'd be like, dude, what the fuck are you talking about?
Like, you may have to pull me aside after the show and be like, Dave, it's a fucking tweet.
Like, relax.
And so now you may say, oh, it's different when it's a woman.
But again, I think that would kind of be the anti-women's empowerment mindset.
It's like, well, no, if you want to write for the Washington Post and you want to be out there and put your name out there and be a professional reporter and all this, well, the same way you go after all the guys, they might come back after you.
I don't think Tucker did something wrong here.
Tucker fucking criticized a journalist for the Washington Post, a paper that, by the way, criticizes lots of people who are out in the public eye, including Tucker Carlson.
I don't know.
Tucker Carlson gets called every name in the book.
And actually, in fact, Tucker Carlson has been harassed at his home and out in public and stuff like that.
As they, they like, what are they?
I think they graffitied up his home while they were terrorizing his wife.
There actually was an incident where like crimes were committed against him.
But none of them ever, you know, like it'd be one thing if they were like after that happens, after Tucker's address.
By the way, the story, if you don't know it, is they had to leave their house.
They had to move because their address was published multiple times.
And his wife was just so terrorized after this, like, kind of like a crowd of, I guess, a couple dozen like Antifa types showed up and were like banging on his door and spray painting his yard.
And she was home alone in the house and like fucking was like hiding in a closet or something.
It's a pretty fucked up story.
But if you had ever seen any of them after that be like, hey, look, we're like, this is really getting a little out of hand.
We're not going to do segments on Tucker Carlson anymore.
We're not going to like, we won't work with anyone who put his address out there or anything like that.
Like, but no, they didn't.
They don't care.
So they just want to turn around and then criticize Tucker Carlson for not giving out her address, not instructing anyone to harass her, just criticizing her.
Alopecia, Baldness, and Investment Art00:02:39
That seems a little bit unfair to me.
I've been made fun of online for being bald and I'm a survivor of alopecia.
I don't appreciate everyone making fun of my medical condition.
Guys, he doesn't have it.
He's just bald.
It's that really sucks.
Alopecia is the word for being bald.
You've got God, Dave.
Will Smith's just being a fucking Hollywood bitch and he's pretending like it's a medical disease.
It's just the word for being bald.
Wait, is that true?
Yes.
There's like more serious forms of alopecia, but any baldness.
If I walked into a doctor's office tomorrow and I said, like, and you go, yeah, you're suffering from alopecia.
It's just a medical word for being bald.
Wow.
Oh, okay.
I learned something.
Yeah.
Oh, okay.
I learned something today.
Got by Will Smith being a bitch and lying about his wife's.
God damn it, he got me.
He got me good.
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Homeless Photos and Street Harassment00:06:06
See important disclaimers at masterworks.io/slash disclaimer.
All right, let's get back into the show.
All right, let's play.
Let's play another minute and then we're going to wrap this up.
Lives and their work.
There's reporting that I know that I would like to do or that other journalists would like to do that we're not able to do because it's not safe enough for us to do them.
And they're not alone.
This is after I did a report on an increase in the number of white supremacists running for office.
Condescending journalists see where deserves a rope.
What article did that lady ever not write because she didn't feel safe?
Has she ever criticized the war machine?
Has she ever criticized the Biden administration?
No, I don't think, I don't think Julian Assange feels particularly safe for the for the journalism he did.
But again, this is no, the real threat is that you might get tweets.
And that was a dude.
I thought this was supposed to be all about women.
Why is that dude sitting there?
That doesn't even make sense.
Well, this is.
And then she just casually says there's been an increase in the number of white supremacists running for office.
I go, I'm going to go out on a limb and say, I don't think that's true.
I think you're using the term white supremacist in a way that is not what it historically meant.
That'd be my guess.
I could be wrong.
Anyway, let's keep playing.
Obviously, I'm a person of color.
Obviously, there's a reference to a noose.
Are you getting messages like these?
Yep.
Hey, nice job on that story.
You soulless effing.
Then also, you'll see there's these, there's many people that are tweeting.
You know, here's, these are Taylor Lorenz's loved ones.
They have photos.
Wow, these are all photos of your family members.
Yeah.
Children.
Yeah.
They'll threaten children.
They'll threaten my parents.
I've had to remove every single social tie.
I had severe PTSD from this.
I contemplated suicide.
It got really bad.
You feel like any little piece of information that gets out on you will be used by the worst people on the internet to destroy your life.
And it's all right.
So let's pause here and we can just, we can just wrap it up because you basically get the point of this.
It's like this, this woman who's a journalist for the Washington Post is so wrapped up in the emotion of how sorry she feels for herself because people are shitty on Twitter.
That is a great little snapshot, a great little like example of where the corporate press is.
Now, by the way, the hypocrisy about this, which is just like unbelievable, is that these people will be the first ones to send their mob at someone else.
I guarantee you could go find examples of where this chick has done that before.
Like, you know, like written a story about how horrible someone else is and sent their mob after those people.
By the way, when she just called these people running for office, white supremacists, I'm sure that's sending a mob of people.
If you tracked the Twitter uptick, I'm sure more people are tweeting at the guys she was referring to.
But the example she used there was one person saying, hey, nice article, you soulless cunt.
Now, that's not a cool thing to say.
I don't tweet at fucking people like that.
You know what I mean?
Like, I would never just like tweet at some female reporter and call her the C-word.
However, the idea that you are some victim over that.
And that, you know, the truth is that like the people, you know, I remember back in the day once Christina Hoff Summers was talking about this where there, I guess there was, this is years ago.
So I'm kind of blanking on it, but I guess there was like a paper that was written about sexual harassment of women on the street, like people sexually harassing women as they walk down the street.
And she looked into the piece and it was, what's it called?
So it was women walking through this park in Washington, D.C. on their way to work.
And she was like, when you actually look into what they're referencing, it was like homeless people in the park.
And so she's like, look, yes, it is true that these women were getting harassed on their way to work, but these were like high-powered women in business suits walking to their job in some high-rise building, being hectored by homeless people.
So like, if you really want to look at like where the privilege in that, you know, like interaction lies, it goes, these were like women with very like good money and very good lives and homeless people harassing them.
Not saying it's okay.
It's just there's a little bit more to it than that.
Stated differently, these women were in those people's living room.
Right.
Yes.
She walked in the living room.
We're going to arrest you for trespassing.
But you know what I'm saying?
And so like the person who's who's yell who's calling some professional journalist a cunt on Twitter is oftentimes like a pretty sad person.
And this is not a person who is like exercising their privilege.
It's really oftentimes, I'd imagine, kind of a loser.
And this woman is like crying about how her feelings were hurt.
I mean, again, I just, no one should tweet like that at someone else.
But my God, to not have enough self-reflection to go, maybe the whole story shouldn't be us and what victims we are, since we're the journalists.
We're the ones who are supposed to report the news.
Oh, late, you know, new development news.
I'm the victim.
There are real victims in this country, and it's not people who get mean tweets.
Maybe we should focus on that.
All right, we got to wrap the show up there because I got to get running to go catch my train.