Dave Smith and Robbie the Fire dissect the "Twitter Files," analyzing emails suggesting Biden campaign posts were removed as government interference. They critique Yoel Roth's admission of restricting Trump's pre-January 6th tweets, labeling his use of "trauma" as an authoritarian tactic inconsistent with his 2010 joke about "big scary trannys." The hosts argue that concepts like "dead naming" lack scientific basis and compare the sudden demonization of past viewpoints to post-9/11 media shifts. Ultimately, they contend that current social norms have shifted to silence dissenters under the guise of protecting marginalized groups. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Squashing The Censorship Story00:11:05
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, everybody?
What's up?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of Problem.
I am, of course, your host, Dave Smith, most consistent motherfucker you know.
He is the king of the caulks, Robbie the Fire, Bernstein, out on the road.
How you feeling, brother?
I'm doing great.
I'm a travel blogger now.
That's my new thing.
It's not bad.
It's a good living if you can get it.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Just got to post these fancy pictures and hot tubs with my sweet rack.
All the money's going to come my way.
Where are you again?
I did Phoenix this past Sunday, hanging out at the Grand Canyon for a day, and then I'm on to St. Louis.
All right.
Very, very nice.
All right.
Yeah.
Don't forget, I'll be New Year's Eve.
We have a few tickets, literally just a handful of tickets left for me and Luis J. Gomez.
New Year's Eve, come celebrate with us at the comedy store.
So if you want to come, make sure you go get those now if you're out in the Los Angeles area.
What else you got coming up, Rob?
Kansas City, Omaha, Nebraska, closing out the New Year's at the Shell, and hopefully more dates coming soon to run the end of your thing.
Hell yeah.
All right.
Let's get into it today.
The Twitter files.
That's what I wanted to start off talking about today.
Elon Musk released this trove of documents that he dubbed the Twitter files, kind of like dirt on the company that he's found now that he owns the company.
And I guess has access to some of their records over the last few years.
He announced that a second dump was coming, but then said, well, it looks like we're going to need a couple more days on that.
So make of that what you will.
By the way, before getting into the Twitter files, I think it's also worth mentioning that Elon Musk announced the general amnesty program.
And to the best of my, to the best of what I know, that still has not happened.
And he said that would happen next week, I think two weeks ago.
So kind of, who knows, you know, Elon Musk says a lot of shit, but we'll see what actually ends up happening.
Anyway, let's talk about the first one.
What was one of the things that was very interesting about the Twitter files, the first dump, is that he gave it all to Matt Taibbi, who's a legit, in my opinion, really excellent and legit independent journalist, you know, like someone who's not, you know, he's primarily has his sub stack.
He's kind of independent with his readership that supports him.
I'm amongst their ranks.
I subscribe to his sub stack.
It's really excellent.
And he gave it to him.
And then he just put out this crazy long Twitter thread about the whole thing.
So it's just an interesting way to do it.
You know what I mean?
And I don't know.
I thought the whole thing was very, I don't know.
It was like one of the biggest like moments in social media history.
Very, very interesting kind of thing.
Okay.
What do you, any, any thoughts that you have, bigger picture on what the Twitter files revealed?
Well, I don't share the love for Matt Taibbi that you do.
And I also thought it was odd to put up on Twitter because it's the most annoying place to read longer form things.
So I just thought it was funny that like they made good information annoying to read.
There was nothing that new or that insightful.
We all know.
I mean, Jem Saki had said in a press conference that they were talking to these companies to deal with misinformation, and there's not really a smoking gun.
And that, yes, the most interesting thing is that they said, hey, they sent emails flagging posts and other items, and then the response was handled.
But of course, they'll claim we never told them that they had to take it down.
We were just letting them know that we thought that this could be dangerous.
And they apparently agreed with our analysis.
And that's why they chose to remove it.
So we don't really have a smoking gun here of that there is no freedom of speech and that government is engaging in censorship, even though that's clearly what they're doing.
Well, I mean, I guess I would kind of disagree, just that I do think that that, particularly the one you're referring to, is really, I think it is a smoking gun or as close as you're ever going to get to it.
I mean, it's almost like, you know, you're, yeah, you're probably not going to ever hear the direct words, you know what I mean?
Or you're not going to read the direct words.
We, the federal government, are censoring your free speech.
But to me, I mean, I don't know.
This is about as close that what Rob's referring to is there's one email that Matt Taibbi released.
It's an email here.
Let me just go and I'll read it word for word so I don't even have to approximate what exactly was said.
But so, all right, here it is.
The email is, it's from one Twitter employee to another, and he goes, more to review from the Biden team and posts five specific tweets.
And then the response is handled these.
And all of these tweets were taken down.
I mean, if you, you know, now, again, also, just to be really clear here, this is not technically from the government.
This is technically from Joe Biden's presidential campaign.
Of course, that team did take over the federal government.
But it's a pretty, look, I mean, it's, I guess it's one, all of this stuff to me is like, it's just making our case more ironclad.
I think I'll be honest, Rob, I'm tired of being right so much.
I really am.
I'm like, and I actually genuinely mean that.
We, cause we, you know, basically we're always talking about how corrupt the whole system is.
And then we always get proven right.
And it would be nice if once in a while we were like, oh, you know what?
It wasn't that at all.
Now that more evidence has come out, this actually was on the up and up, you know, but it's just, it's so obviously not.
And anyway, there was this big split at the very beginning of like the kind of rise of tech censorship.
There was like this split even amongst like libertarians where some of them were like, you know, would make these arguments, like, it's a private company, you know, and this is the marketplace.
If ideas are unpopular in the marketplace, this is how they get dealt with.
And, you know, go start your own Twitter and all this stuff.
And me and you were always like from the very beginning, you know, with Alex Jones and even before that, we're like, no, this is like, this is a really creepy and a big problem.
And we should, at the very least, we were like, we should be in the spirit of being like, well, no, like people should be allowed to express their ideas and this shouldn't like there shouldn't be people clamping down on them.
And then more specifically, which I think is, or more importantly, it was like, obviously, this isn't just happening organically in a free market.
This is, there's clearly government intervention.
And there was just like more, as time went on, there was just more and more evidence of how much this was all directly related to government intervention in, you know, big tech, in big tech in general.
And so that was, I think, the most interesting thing that we got out of these Twitter files was that it was just really, I mean, look, we got a huge piece of evidence was what, what's his name, Zuckerberg, said on Rogan just, what was it, six months ago or something like that, when he mentioned that the FBI told them to be on the lookout for this Russian misinformation.
That's a wildly similar thing because there was also a New York Post article today about that, that apparently there was a meetings between the FBI and Facebook.
But so here's what the FBI did.
They didn't call them up and say, hey, you have to remove this, but, or they didn't say, hey, we're watching your platform.
They just gave a wink and a nod.
Firstly, how did the FBI know that this story was coming out three days before it did?
But they said, hey, we think that something could be misinformation and that it has to do with Hunter Biden.
So be on the lookout for something Hunter Biden related because it's actually coming from Russia.
So what I'm pointing out is I agree with you.
It's nice that we're getting validated because we always knew these things to be true.
We knew that government was basically calling up the social media companies and censoring people.
The problem is there's no smoking.
What we've been seeing is definitely true.
This is a piece of evidence validating it.
No one's actually going to be held legally accountable.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it is so clearly a gross violation of the First Amendment.
Now, again, it's kind of like it's one of these things where, you know, I don't know.
I compare it to like, you know, if you're in a dark alley and some guy pulls out a gun and points it at the ground and he goes, maybe you give me your wallet.
And you give him your wallet and like you go away and you'd be like, well, that guy robbed me.
And almost like he'd be like, oh, I didn't point the gun at you or tell you you have to give me your wallet.
I just like had a gun in my hand and I suggested maybe you give me your wallet.
You know what I mean?
It's almost like that would be the government's defense here.
It's like, oh, no, I mean, we just like asked you why Alex Berenson was still on Twitter.
But it's so obvious.
I mean, so like that ridiculous level of defense aside.
Yes, this is obviously government instructing tech companies to censor things.
And of course, this is a lot more than just, you know, this is a lot more than just, hey, there are these dissonant voices that we want silenced.
Now, of course, there's been a lot of that happening as well.
But this was a little bit different because this is specifically the October surprise leading up to a presidential election.
So this is, Rob, a pretty blatant example of, you know, the term that they love to use, the worst thing in the world, interfering in elections, right?
This is the worst, the ultimate crime of Vladimir Putin, even worse than invading Ukraine, was that he interfered in our elections, our precious democracy.
And so here you have a pretty blatant example of that from Zuckerberg's reporting.
And of course, here in the Twitter files, where you can clearly see that it's actually the Biden, the Biden campaign themselves who know, you know, this could make the difference.
And so we've got to squash this story.
Interfering In Elections00:02:57
So there you go.
So here's where I remain, I guess, somewhat not hopeful is that you look at these news stories and you start getting excited of, oh, look, the wheel's turning.
You've got Fauci being deposed and he keeps saying, I can't recall.
The guy who's supposed to be the super genius can't seem to remember any of the reasons why he made any of the decisions that he made.
You got Elon Musk.
He's taking over Twitter and all the liberals are freaking out.
He's not just taking it over.
He's actually releasing some of the information on the bad censorship that they were engaging in.
You've got Facebook openly admitting to the fact that there was a wink and a nod from the FBI telling them, hey, you got to take down this story.
All seems fantastic.
You know what the problem is?
They already won.
They got their way.
And so it's like, even if you were to make the change now, you think in two years from now, when the pressure's on, they won't like they got the vaccines out for two full years.
They got it into everybody's arms.
They created the mandates.
They pushed it off the emergency authorization.
Biden's got elected.
Everything that they needed to happen off of them cheating, if you want to use that word to describe the tech censorship, they won the game.
So it's like two years later, we can point out that they cheated, but no one's going to be held legally accountable.
There's not going to be some up-and-arms stir of that, hey, Biden's not the legitimate president because he cheated.
And then when push comes to shove and you end up in a moment in the future that they need to cheat in order to win, believe me, maybe we'll have two years of freedom without the tech censorship.
And then when they really need it, we'll be right back.
Yeah.
Well, it is that look, you're not wrong.
I mean, yes, they are winning.
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Suspending The Constitution00:15:21
There's also something, and this we could get into a little bit of like what Trump, the comment he made that, you know, got everybody so upset at him, which is, you know, interesting.
But the truth is that, and I think this is what Trump was referring to, there is no, there is simply no constitutional mechanism to deal with something like this.
There's no mechanism to go like, oh, look, we just found out they interfered in the election a couple years ago.
And it's like, well, that election's been certified and this guy's been the president of the United States for two years.
You know, and I don't even know if you could do anything if you found out about this before the election came up.
Like, I just don't even know what, like, what pathway would you take here?
It's like, as you said, the damage is done.
The story got the volume was drastically turned down on that.
And the government even takes that perspective because if you cheat in one, they go, well, we got to preserve the democracy.
So they almost look at it like we don't care.
We'd rather not focus on the cheating because then that undermines the fact that we have rule and law and a democracy.
And Donald Trump's defense, even though he used bad language, no one likes criticizing the Constitution.
It's not that much different than when the Democrats are going, this if they win, then we don't have a democracy.
Well, he's basically saying the same thing that if they cheated to win, then what's the point of this whole system?
Well, here, let's pull up, let's pull up Trump's quote.
It was on Truth Social that he said this.
This was in direct response to the Twitter files.
So let's pull this up so we just get it exactly right.
He said, so with the revelations of massive and widespread fraud and deception in working closely with big tech companies, the DNC and the Democratic Party, do you throw the presidential election results of 2020 out and declare the rightful winner?
Or do you have a new election?
A massive fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.
Our great quote founders did not want and would not condone false and fraudulent elections.
I remember reading this.
My initial first takeaway from that was why are founders in quotes?
Is Donald Trump trying to argue that they didn't actually found the country?
You know what I mean?
Like, is he going like, sure, the founders, if you believe that old bullshit?
Anyway, that part was weird.
You know, look, this is just like kind of typical Donald Trump shit, where it's just, I don't even know what, how to describe it.
It's just like masturbation, you know, like this might make you feel good, but you're not really getting any action.
I don't know what you mean by this.
So Donald Trump from Truth Social is announcing that he's suspending the Constitution.
Like, what?
Okay.
Oh, yeah.
I don't know.
It's just so ridiculous.
Like, what, what type of, you know, it's one thing.
I know this is a criticism that libertarians get a lot.
And I understand it.
At times, it's even somewhat valid, but they'll be like, okay, well, you are, you know, you live too much in your kind of theoretical models and what you think should be done, but not enough focus on like, well, okay, what's the actual plan to go implement all of these things, you know?
But Donald Trump isn't just living in the world of theory.
He's like the former president who's seeking, you know, a second term.
What, what do you mean?
He's having this question.
Do we just so, you know, so, okay, he's saying we need to suspend the Constitution.
Well, okay.
So that, you know, in order to do that, really, what you just have to do is have all of the government guns to go, yep, we're doing that.
We're suspending the Constitution to be brought back later, I guess.
That's kind of what the term suspension seems to indicate.
So, okay, it's like, but what, like, what, what a ridiculous thing for you to even be floating out as this is an idea where you're like, well, you know, who would need to do that?
I guess would be the current president, maybe someone in the military.
I mean, who's going to do that?
Certainly not Donald Trump.
Not going to do it from Mar-a-Lago.
So again, it's a, it's kind of like a ridiculous proposal that could, there's approximately 0.00% chance of this happening.
And so what's the point of even like throwing out this proposal?
You know, like, it'd be one thing if he said, like, you know, the actual fair thing to do here would be to actually run back the election because this is illegitimate, you know, and obviously like, oh, no one would really think there's a chance that's going to happen.
But it, so, so that's like, that's the typical Trump aspect.
The other thing that's funny is just watching everybody who flips out about this.
Now, I got to say, there's kind of two distinct groups.
I mean, I guess there's more, but two at least distinct groups of people who really flipped out about Donald Trump saying this.
And one was, you know, the kind of like progressives, but they always flip out about everything Donald Trump says anyway.
So it's just, oh, here's proof that he's an actual, you know, dictator or whatever.
He wants to suspend the Constitution and question the results of elections.
But then this really got a whole bunch of the kind of like the more constitutional conservative crowd furious, you know.
And that group I find a little bit more interesting.
I just find it interesting.
There's a weird thing that Donald Trump always exposed where there were almost like different people.
And I think it really said something about how you view the state of the system.
Really, that really influenced how you view Donald Trump in general.
And I don't even just mean like, oh, do you support Donald Trump or do you vote for Donald Trump or anything like that?
I mean something deeper than that.
It's, I think this is something, this was like a major theme of my comedy hour Libertas.
But there is something about where like people who were really red-pilled on the state of our power structures in America got more of a kick out of Donald Trump.
And the people who were kind of blue pilled on that shit were like, but this guy's just corrupt.
But this guy's just saying crazy shit.
And then like the rest of us would be like, yeah, dude, this whole system is corrupt.
What are you talking about?
It's like, yeah, at least this is almost a better face for it than whatever you wanted to put on there.
And there's something really interesting about these kind of conservative constitutionalist types, a lot of the never Trump Republican types, you know, and they'll be like, well, I'm sorry, this is a bridge too far, suspending the Constitution.
Like we love the Constitution and that's what we're all about.
And it's not that I don't kind of understand what they're saying, but the reality of the situation is, guys, our Constitution has been suspended, I think, since at least 1913.
Like it's just now, okay, Donald Trump said it and nobody else ever says it.
They just institute the policies, but this, we don't live in a limited constitutional republic.
I mean, if you go honestly read the Constitution of the United States of America, this is what I want you to do.
I want you to read the Constitution, okay?
And then I want you to look at the federal government.
Then I want you to read the Constitution again and then look at the federal government.
You just keep doing this and repeating until you notice that what's being described here on this piece of paper bears zero resemblance to what I see.
Okay.
I mean, just think about it.
You think about this constitution that's all about limits on federal power and checks and balances and, you know, like all this Article 1, Section 8, where the executive branch derives its authority and all of these things.
And then you just look at the federal government, the biggest organization in the world.
The executive branch alone is compared to everything else is the biggest organization in the world, employs more people than anyone else.
Like, in what way is this even, you know, Congress shall write no laws that infringe on your right to bear arms.
I mean, sure, we have prisons in every single state in America with people serving decades-long sentences for the crime of gun possession, but whatever.
This guy's suspending the Constitution.
We have, you know, lockdown.
It even says only Congress can print the money.
You know, like it's, we have like the whole creation of the Federal Reserve is a complete, obviously like spinning of the Constitution on its head.
There's just everything from having lockdowns and mandates and all of the shit we've had.
It's like you almost got to let go of this reality that the Constitution really exists.
It's a great, it's a really great document in a lot of ways.
It's a great, you know, rhetorical tool to hit people over the head with that, even by your own stated, you know, like views that this is the law of the land and you don't follow it at all.
But it is just kind of interesting to me that so many people flip out about Donald Trump suggesting this when you're like, it just seems like, you know, you're like, okay, he suggested suspending the Constitution to have another election or whatever.
We instituted torture.
That's more of a suspension of the Constitution than anything Donald Trump has thrown out.
Anyway, yeah, also, but it is, I guess, at a certain point, it's just, it's kind of like Donald Trump just doing all he ever does, which is like say some really provocative shit, get everybody talking about it.
And then you're like, oh, okay, what does this actually do or accomplish?
And the answer is nothing.
What's that, Brian?
Trump has a response.
Okay, let's see.
The fake news is actually trying to convince the American people that I said I wanted to terminate the Constitution.
This is simply more disinformation and lies, just like Russia, Russia, Russia, and all of their other hoaxes and scams.
What I said was that when there is massive widespread fraud and deception and has been irrefutably proven in the 2020 presidential election, steps must be immediately taken to right the wrong.
Only fools would disagree with that and accept stolen election.
MAGA.
Well, I mean, he did.
It's not, it's not really a stolen election.
Donald Trump was going to play a dirty trick, which is a legendarily dirty trick, which is right at the end of an election, you leaked your juiciest, bombiest story that you got.
So the juicy bomb story that they got is, hey, here's a crackhead who's peddling influence that he may or may not have in his dad's name who really enjoys being with hookers.
That's what we know to be true.
What could possibly be true?
And that's a disparate destriction.
What could possibly be true?
Oh, is he actually a pedophile?
Oh, is Joe Biden in on the racket?
Oh, is Joe Biden actually being bribed by foreign governments?
All that could be true.
It's two years later on this Hunter Biden thing.
And the only thing that we've seen is that he's for sure a crackhead.
He really likes hookers and he's good enough at selling influence that he may not even have, which I can understand how you can do that.
You can go, hey, my dad's the boss man.
You want contracts?
You better hire me.
And maybe that, maybe Joe Biden is not even aware of that.
Do I think that's the case?
Probably not, but it's two years later and we haven't proven it.
So Donald Trump is playing a dirty trick here where they managed to get a storyline that they know for sure that Hunter Biden likes cracks and hookers and they can pretend like, oh, look, this entire family is compromised, which thus far, nobody's proven that the whole family's compromised.
It does seem that way.
I'm not saying that's not the case.
I'm just saying nobody's proved it.
So Donald Trump, yes, he had a dirty trick up his sleeve in the last month of the election.
And guess what?
Everyone realized, oh, shit, if this dirty trick is allowed to be played, that might be enough to swing it, which it probably would be.
And the same exact thing happened in the last election with Hillary Clinton when the FBI kind of fucked up and said, hey, we're investigating her without really clarifying what that meant.
And that probably cost Hillary Clinton the election.
So yes, you were going to play a dirty trick and the system kind of corrected for your dirty trick and tech censorship shouldn't exist and the Democratic Party shouldn't be able to call them up.
Yeah, they played a dirtier trick than you did on your dirty trick.
And they actually played like an illegal trick on your dirty trick.
But like your dirty trick was dirty, but completely legal and fair game.
Their dirty trick was almost certainly illegal and they really lied their asses off about it.
But the idea of him even floating out before his last tweet, or is it social media post, truth media post, whatever.
Him going, should they just give the election to me?
You're like, well, how is that possibly justified?
I mean, you can't possibly prove that you would have won if this story had been amplified.
By the way, again, to your point, I think that's very likely true, but how the fuck would you even prove that?
And yeah, no, he did say it's not completely unfair how they're spinning it because he did say, you know, what forget what the Constitution says.
We got to have another election.
And the reason he's saying that is because, as I mentioned before, there's absolutely no constitutional mechanism to allow for like what you do if a social media story was suppressed by the FBI's interference and then you feel like you want to run the election back.
Like there's just nothing in the Constitution that like has a mechanism for that.
It's like, oh, the election was certified.
Okay.
That guy's the president of the United States.
That's, that's how it works, unfortunately, or fortunately, whatever.
There's something I've been saying for a little bit that government needs to start enacting policies with clear authority.
So there shouldn't be, like, I don't know.
We need to write new laws that they're not allowed to just make recommendations.
They have to actually say, hey, Facebook, you have to do this under this authority.
And then there needs to be some sort of accountability for if they're playing authority that they don't have.
Like we, we have to correct for the current gray area that exists, which is that everyone can go, oh, I don't remember, or I never told them they had to.
We never, the FDA never said that you can't do this.
They never said that you're not allowed to write a script.
We just recommend it.
You know what I mean?
There's too much.
Hey, we're just recommending legal ambiguity.
We need to correct that.
And then on the same note, Trump's doing the same exact fucking thing, which is you got enough resources that if the Bidens actually are a criminal enterprise, why not go prove that?
If you go prove that, you know what I mean?
Like quit telling me about, hey, there was this Hunter Biden Hooker story.
Go fucking prove that there's actually some criminality here.
Same thing with the election.
Go prove that you actually lost the election.
Proving Criminality Exists00:02:54
You got enough resources.
I thought you're a billionaire winner.
You don't have enough resources to prove the actual fraud instead of just the stories around the possibility of fraud.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, look, I got to, I agree with all of that.
And it's just at a certain point, you're like, you're just, you're just bitching.
It's like, all this is bitch.
He went from interest to whiny.
Yeah, you're supposed to be the guy who's like, who's the winner, not just someone who bitches, right?
You're supposed to be the boss man who like actually is going to fix things.
Anyway, it's, you know, I will say one other thing that is kind of interesting about this was also to me that I'm kind of blown away that Donald Trump still hasn't tweeted.
Like I did not, I think it's the most, it's the most self-control I've ever seen him exercise.
And it was interesting to me that he got all of this off of a truth social post.
And it was still completely dominating the conversation, like as if it was a Twitter post.
And it's almost like maybe I'm wrong, or maybe I almost have to like recalibrate how I think about this, that maybe now if he really is running again, and particularly if he is the Republican nominee, then maybe he actually can just generate as much interest from his own social media company.
You know, that it almost doesn't matter that when he says some wild shit, everyone's going to be talking about it because it's just impossible not to.
Could be.
And then make that money.
Yeah.
Doesn't just need the Saudi Arabian money to put up a label on his hotel.
Yeah, right.
There you go.
$200 licensing deal.
Yeah, really.
Whatever it was.
I don't know if that was the number, but it was huge.
It might have been four, something crazy.
Yeah, I don't remember the number at all, but I know I remember what you're talking about.
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Justifying Trauma And Creep00:12:30
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So, okay, one other kind of interesting thread off of the Twitter files is this guy, Yoel Roth, who has his name has come up a bunch with people breaking this stuff down.
So he was like in charge of Twitter's, you know, censorious policies.
He was, what did they say?
I think it was here.
I think I have it here.
He was Twitter's trust and safety boss or something.
Yeah, he was basically in charge of content moderation, basically.
And it's an interesting, there's a few interesting little threads here.
Anyway, this was he last week he gave this interview.
So we're going to play a little clip of that.
And there's some stuff here to discuss.
That one I don't think was a mistake.
January 6th.
So it starts on the 6th, but it also starts prior to that.
That's correct.
In the weeks leading up, in the weeks between Election Day and January 6th, Twitter moderated hundreds.
I think the final number ended up was like 140 separate tweets from just at Real Donald Trump that violated various policies.
Yes, he was good at that.
Every morning, it was a new tweet.
Much of it was recirculating some of the same narratives.
And all of it was focused on the ultimately false claim that the 2020 election had been stolen.
And so we're going into the events of the six, and there's that context.
There's the centrality of his account.
And you let him get away with it for a long time.
In other words, well, we'd been enforcing on it, right?
So we restricted the tweets.
We put warnings on them.
You couldn't like them.
You couldn't retweet them.
But we didn't ban him because it was a relevant part of a moment in American politics, right?
The events of the sixth happened.
Can you just pause for a second?
Sure.
The idea to reduce the president to a relevant moment of American politics.
Firstly, you're openly admitting to the fact that you're censoring the president, which is pretty crazy.
Hey, I mean, even if what he's saying is bullshit, but so you openly just said that people couldn't like his comments, they couldn't retweet comments because it's in violation of your policy.
Well, what's your pot, like your policies that are not fairly applied to everybody for one?
And for two, the guy's the fucking president.
He's not just a relevant moment to American politics.
But then the next part, this next part gets crazier.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
Let's keep watching.
And if you talk to content moderators who worked on January 6th, myself included, the word that nearly everybody uses is trauma.
We experience those events, not some of us as Americans, but not just as Americans or as citizens, but as people working on sort of how to prevent harm on the internet, we saw the clearest possible example of what it looked like for things to move from online to off.
We saw what was, we saw the way that rhetoric about a stolen election was being mobilized on sites like thedonald.win.
We saw the trafficking of this content in the fringe parts of the internet, and we saw people dead in the Capitol.
Why not before?
Yeah, just so much.
I mean, I don't know.
What do you even want to say here?
I have so much that I'd like to say.
All right.
Go ahead, Rob.
Okay.
This is a person that there's no aspect of life that I would agree with him on just about anything.
There's probably no analysis or a topic or opinion.
Chances are him and I probably wouldn't do that well at a dinner table together because one of us would have to sit down and quiet just to be like, okay, I'm going to be polite and just let this person because that's the extent that we would disagree with each other.
So the fact that people like this are somehow empowered to make decisions for all of us when I know that every aspect of their court way of analyzing everything is going to be different than the way I look at the world.
And it boils down to this being the most incredible part.
You know, like you get pulled over by a cop and so you show him a license, you're allowed to drive.
These people saying that I had trauma seems to give them a right to make any decision that they'd like.
And so even if it's not something that should give them trauma, if they could somehow work themselves into a state of mind where their response is trauma, they then have a license to act however they want.
There doesn't need to be logic there.
It doesn't even need to be an ethical or moral decision once you analyze it.
They don't even have to have a logical argument.
They don't even have to have an argument that they were traumatized.
They just have to utter the word trauma.
Trauma.
And now, yes.
And the better of an actor or softer of a person you are, that it's more believable that you can came.
I would believe that anything, I believe the wrong order served to this guy would be traumatic.
I would believe a phone call, like there's nothing that I would believe wouldn't traumatize this individual.
He's done a very good job of coming up with a personality that can be easily traumatized by any of life's instances.
So the fact that you and your team of people that I would never agree with somehow all managed to get into these jobs where you get to make decisions for the rest of us about what does or does not need to be said.
I mean, the fact that you're on stage boldly saying the analysis that you guys went through was that you were all traumatized, which is bullshit.
Yeah, I couldn't, Brian, by the way, I just sent you another clip.
Start at eight minutes and 29 seconds on this next one.
If you could just get that ready.
I do want to finish on this topic, but there's another clip from him that I want to play as well.
But yes, there's something here.
It's a really huge problem in our culture.
And I think that a lot of people really push this stuff because they benefit from it.
As you see it, this stuff is so manipulative.
But it's this incredible, I mean, I would just say it's a feminizing characteristic or certainly like a D, an anti-masculine characteristic that first off, you don't feel any shame in kind of like boasting about how soft you are.
You know, like it's boasting that I'm, and this was trauma.
And for me, seeing something I didn't like, trauma.
And everybody else was also traumatized.
There was talk like this when Donald Trump was elected, how traumatic that was for everybody.
Like as if this is the same thing.
Like you're using the language you use for like the guy, like some soldier who's holding his buddy as he bleeds out in his lap or something like that.
You know what I mean?
Like it's just, it's so goddamn weak and right that you can, we've almost like lost the ability to encourage strength in other people and discourage softness.
And so if someone's like, well, I was traumatized by that, be like, oh, okay, but we're trying to have an adult conversation here.
Not like, how did this make you feel?
You know what I mean?
Like where it's like, like, let's talk like men here and not just go, well, first of all, I'm very upset about what Folster Ball.
You have to understand I was on my period.
And so it was a very emotional time for me when I it's like, what, what is this?
No, you're talking about like suppression of speech.
The question is not like, you know, were you sad that day?
Anyway, just that really something.
Oh, yes, you were so traumatized because of the people who died on January 6th.
You mean the unarmed woman who was shot in the neck by a cop?
That person?
That might have been kind of traumatizing for the people around her there.
That's actually, you know, legitimately traumatic.
Okay, here, let's play.
Let's play some more of this guy.
It's really something.
It's really interesting to get a little bit of a glimpse into like who that person is, who's the guy making these decisions, what their mentality is.
So let's play a little bit more.
Babylon B, which is what got him to buy the thing, I think.
That's the one which was not particularly funny.
The Babylon B's man of the year is Rachel Levine.
Not funny.
The targeting and the victimization of the trans community on Twitter is very real, very life-threatening and extraordinarily serious.
All right, so we can pause it right there.
So, Rob, I mean, this is, it's the same exact tactic basically as, you know, as, well, we were traumatized.
Okay, now justify whatever authoritarian policy because we're traumatized, you know?
And it's the same thing here.
This like this constant like concept creep.
You know, it's like what you see in social justice, like, you know, college shit, where if, you know, if a professor says something offensive, then that was violence.
You know, and this is, oh, this is life-threatening and this really targeted group and blah, blah, blah.
And this is absolutely serious.
He actually says, after saying it's life-threatening, he goes, and it's very serious.
And you're like, yeah, I know you already said life-threatening.
So like, you don't need to now specify also serious, not just, not just your unserious life-threatening stuff, Rob, but really serious life-threatening.
It's like they're just throwing, he's just throwing descriptions, trying to make it sound over the top.
But wait, what were we really talking about?
A silly joke.
That's what we were really talking about.
That's it.
Oh, you want to be able to make jokes?
Oh, you want, you want to be able to have satire?
No, you're, you're threatening people's lives now.
That's what you're doing.
It's like, no, none of that's real.
They just made a silly joke about the man of the year being someone who's pretending to be a man or someone who's pretending to be a woman.
And you're now justifying squashing free speech.
That's what's actually happening here.
All right, let's just play the last little bit of this clip.
A number of Twitter accounts, including lips of TikTok, notably that there are orchestrated campaigns that particularly are singling out a group that is already particularly vulnerable within society.
Twitter's written policies prohibit misgendering.
Full stop.
So that's what we're dealing with here.
Can I tell you something else that's kind of interesting?
I'll hear a couple thoughts that I have on this, and then we'll wrap up here in a minute.
Number one, isn't it interesting?
Just the way they play this game, where it's like, so here's how we're going to do this.
We're going to like Create, we're going to push this kind of like ideology on you.
And if you resist it at all, or if you want to joke about it, or if you even want to point out what's going on, or God forbid, you don't believe in it, then we're going to accuse you of traumatizing people and threatening their lives, that you're attacking this group of people.
It's like, you know, I am a libertarian.
I, all I really believe is that people ought to be free.
That's basically my whole political outlook in one little sentence there.
Human beings ought to be free.
And I do think that, you know, adults have a right to identify as what they want to and call themselves what they want to.
And other adults have a right to call them whatever they want to.
And that's fine.
If you're not hurting anybody, then okay, you, you have a right to live your life how you see fit.
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There's a separate argument about like, you know, like surgeries and stuff like that.
Wasting Money On Subscriptions00:08:39
I certainly think like they should not be allowed on children.
And even in adults, there's an argument like about like the kind of Hippocratic oath type thing, like whether, like, whether doctors should willingly do some of these surgeries.
You know, if you, like, if you went into a surgeon's office and you were like, I'd like to have my arm removed.
And they were like, why?
Is there a problem with your arm?
And you were like, I just make me a tree stump.
Yeah, well, I identify as a person with one arm.
And I've never, I'm really a person with one arm inside, but I'm born with two arms.
You know, like, and then they were like, okay, I mean, if you identify as a person with one arm, we'll cut your arm off.
I think most people would be like, whoa, are you kidding me?
They'll actually do that.
Like, it's, it's like, there's definitely an argument that like, it's really immoral to, you know, perform like a major surgery on somebody that is not actually medically necessary.
You know what I'm saying?
Like, that is not like you're just doing it because they, but the thing is that you're, if you want to just be scientific about this stuff, this all this stuff with like dead naming or whatever, the fact that they go there, dead naming is basically like you have to already have bought completely into the trans ideology in order to even utter that as a as a thing or to even believe that.
There's the idea that there is some category of people called transgender is already a very murky area.
Like, what do you mean these groups of people are at risk?
Like at risk from what?
And what do you, how are you defining this group?
The group of people who identify as something other than what they were, than what they are biologically classified as.
It's not like a scientific categorization.
It's not, there's, there's no way to prove that somebody is in fact like unless you take it for a given that you are actually like, this is the trans ideology, Rob, is that like, if you were a trans woman, then the ideology says you are a woman right now who just happened to be born and biologically into a man's body.
Okay.
But there's no way to prove that that's actually true.
Like you are actually a woman, but all there is is that you say you are.
I identify as that.
You know, it was pretty funny.
This guy who shot up the club, not funny that he shot up the gay club, but it was funny to watch the reaction when his lawyers claimed that he was trans after he's gotten arrested.
And they're all like, no, he's not.
He's just pretending.
And you're like, oh, so now you're allowed to, well, what's, you know, it just kind of reveals how silly this whole thing is.
It's like, so what's your standard by how you tell when some, so there can be someone who's pretending.
Okay.
So I guess it'd be okay to dead name that person, right?
The person who's pretending.
So you can pretend.
So scientifically speaking here, how do you differentiate between the two?
Who's pretending and who's not?
If the only scientific measure is, I say I am.
And like, but then they go, and this is their thing.
Then they go like, oh, and now if anyone even questions this or jokes around about this or anything like that, you're now the evil person who has every right to, at least right now, they're justifying silencing you.
What else could be justified to be done to you?
Who knows?
It's not that many steps off to say we could justify something really bad, something worse happening to you.
Something else I found kind of interesting about this guy that I just saw is that.
So this guy, Roth, this guy who's talking like this.
So in 2010, he tweeted, now deleted tweet, but he said, hold on, let me see if I could pull it up.
I want to read it verbatim so I don't fuck this up.
I think I took a picture of it.
He said, so this is from Yoel Roth in 2010.
He said, it wouldn't be a trip to New York without at least one big scary tranny.
Yeah, he deleted that now.
But isn't it, there's just something kind of funny about all of this woke shit.
All of these people, like the mindset that they get into, I guess they get drunk on the power and the self-righteousness.
We were traumatized.
And you're, you know, this is literally life-threatening and all of this stuff.
But back in 2010, like before this stuff was almost like mainstreamed, it's like it just hadn't been invented yet.
So even this guy thought it was just like a funny thing to say to go, eh, wouldn't be a trip to New York City without one big scary tranny.
You know what I mean?
Because that's just how people talked back then.
He's, I'm sure, it's not like he was like some fucking right-wing person back then.
He was the same thing.
If you saw that tweet today, he was traumatized.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
That's what it's, it's amazing how quickly they can jump on this new thing.
I remember Scott Horton.
I think he made this point in his debate with Bill Crystal, but it was a really interesting point.
And he was talking about the war on terrorism and al-Qaeda and stuff.
And he was talking about before 9-11, basically, I forget what it was.
It might have been like one of the major networks, I think, might have been like ABC or something like that, did a big piece on Al-Qaeda.
And, you know, because they had already had like the African embassy bombing or something like that.
You know, they had like been pulling off little terrorist attacks here and there.
And he said, basically, it was almost just like straight reporting that they were like, well, they hate us.
They hate us because we have these bases in Saudi Arabia and for the blockade campaign against Iraq and our support for Israel.
Back to you in the studio, Bob.
Like it was just almost like as a matter of fact, reporting, like, this is why they hate us.
And, like, why weren't they saying, oh, they hate us for our freedom?
And it's like, because that lie hadn't been told yet.
Like, that didn't even become the cover story until after 9/11.
And then, after 9-11, it was like, oh, if you were to say what was just reported as fact a few years earlier, oh, now the sudden, you're not, you don't support the troops and you're with the terrorists or any of this shit.
And it's almost like you see that with the rise of this woke shit.
That it's almost like, dude, why was he joking about trannies in 2010?
Because no one had given him the marching orders yet that we were using that in order to shut other people down and to make ourselves feel better.
And that was just like the way you would talk.
It's just crazy because this isn't that long ago.
Like, we all used to just be playing by those rules.
That it was just kind of like, I don't know.
Now he's like, oh, they said that this biological, or they said, they said that this trans woman was man of the year.
That's not funny.
And it's like, I don't know.
It's kind of funny.
Saying it wouldn't be a trip to New York City without seeing a big scary tranny.
Kind of funny.
Like you, dude, you were funny once.
Remember when you were allowed to?
Were we all just like, that's why it's so, it's so interesting to see how people shift into this and then how this changes the perception from so many regular people.
Like regular people will look at guys like us and be like, oh my God, you guys are like fucking like, I can't believe you'd say things like this.
And you're like, dude, we're just not playing by these brand new rules.
I don't know what to tell you.
We're still using the rules that everyone else had agreed on right before this latest thing.
Even the guy who's the head of content moderation at Twitter was playing by those other rules a second ago.
And now he's like, oh, this is literal violence.
But look, my thing is just this.
If this were sincere at all, then you know what this guy should be doing is not judging everybody else.
He should be, you know, apologizing for the literal violence that he committed back in 2012, back in 2010, right?
I mean, he put people's lives at risk, for God's sakes.
Rob, this is very serious, traumatic, even.
So you think at least then the attitude would be like, you know, hey, guys, look, I've done a lot of really horrific, fucked up things in my life.
Like, my God, I committed the ultimate crime and tweeted about trannies once.
You know, like, this is really horrible.
I apologize for doing that.
I won't do that anymore.
I hope you see it the same way I do.
And like, you agree to not do that anymore.
But no, it's almost like, completely forget those rules.
Same thing with the reporters who were saying Osama bin Laden hated us because of our meddling in the Middle East.
You completely forget those rules, completely forget you ever said that.
And now you go on the attack, demonizing anyone who would dare say the thing that you said five minutes ago when you weren't playing by these rules.
Apologizing For Past Violence00:00:55
It's just, it's really something.
I wonder if anyone's ever been interviewing for one of these jobs and they had to sit down with HR and HR's like, listen, I'm not sure if this is going to be a fit.
I just don't think you're gay enough for this job.
You got a particular type that we're looking for here.
And you got a lot of good credentials.
I'm just going to be like, you got a lot of good credentials and you are gay.
We're not saying you're not gay.
I'm just saying you're not gay enough for what we for the direction that we see.
We have a vision for the company and that's just that.
All right, listen, we got to uh we got to wrap up.
I appreciate all you guys uh uh for staying with us as always.
Thanks for listening, watching, however you consume it.
Uh, we got some big stuff coming up with the future of uh part of the problems.
Major announcements being made about the future of the show very soon.
So stay tuned for that.
And uh, yeah, come check us out on the road 2023.
Me and Robbie are going to be coming around a lot.