Part Of The Problem - Dave Smith - The Return Of Big Tech Censorship
Aired: 2023-08-19
Duration: 58:01


=== Big Shows Next Week (05:39) ===

[00:00:00]  Fill her up.
[00:00:02]  You're listening to the Gas Digital Network.
[00:00:09]  We need to roll back the state.
[00:00:11]  We spy on all of our own citizens.
[00:00:13]  Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
[00:00:17]  If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
[00:00:22]  Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
[00:00:27]  You're listening to part of the problem on the Gas Digital Network.
[00:00:31]  Steer your host.
[00:00:33]  Games to it.
[00:00:34]  What's up, everybody?
[00:00:35]  Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
[00:00:38]  I am back home in my home studio.
[00:00:40]  Rob is home too.
[00:00:41]  And don't we just cherish these moments where we're both at home?
[00:00:45]  It's not so nice.
[00:00:46]  It is nice.
[00:00:47]  I'm, I was just, this just dawned on me recently.
[00:00:51]  So as you know, the last episode, I was over at my in-law's house and I've been doing like a vacation thing, splitting between my family and my wife's family, but we've been having a lot of fun.
[00:01:02]  But I came back today because there are a few things I had to grab in the house and I wanted to record in studio.
[00:01:07]  And it dawned on me, I think this is the first time I've ever been in my house alone since I've owned it, which is kind of a weird feeling.
[00:01:18]  It's making me resent my family a little bit.
[00:01:21]  Like I'm like, this is mine.
[00:01:22]  This is mine.
[00:01:23]  How come I've never been here before?
[00:01:26]  You know what I mean?
[00:01:27]  It's always all you people around, but it's a weird thing.
[00:01:30]  It's a big house and it's kind of weird feeling.
[00:01:32]  Like I never, I mean, I rented a house before I was here, which was a decent sized house, not a big house, but I don't think I was ever alone in that one.
[00:01:43]  And before that, I'm a New York City guy.
[00:01:44]  It's always been apartments.
[00:01:46]  And so it's a weird feeling to just be like alone in this gigantic house.
[00:01:51]  But I'll tell you, it's not bad.
[00:01:53]  It's not bad.
[00:01:54]  It's kind of nice.
[00:01:55]  Smoke around.
[00:01:56]  You know, I've got my shit apartment here, but I remember five, six or seven years ago, every once in a while having a weekend at my parents' house alone.
[00:02:04]  And there's nothing better than really cooking yourself food in the kitchen, just smoking weed and like being on a big couch.
[00:02:10]  Yeah, no one's there.
[00:02:11]  Just a hard domain.
[00:02:13]  You know, I'm not saying you'd want to live that way always, of course.
[00:02:16]  And I'm leaving.
[00:02:17]  I'm not even sleeping here tonight.
[00:02:18]  I'm leaving.
[00:02:19]  I'm going back to meet them.
[00:02:21]  But it's just like for a moment, I was like, oh, yeah, look at this.
[00:02:23]  I'm like, I got the run of the place for the first time instead of just having just being bossed around by everybody.
[00:02:30]  Yeah.
[00:02:30]  Anyway, it's an interesting feeling.
[00:02:33]  I do remember, as you're saying this, I remember when I was a teenager, like 16, 17, 18, like that, my mother and my stepbrother used to, they, I'm sorry, my mother, geez, my mother and my stepfather used to take my brother and go like away to Long Island for like a week.
[00:02:55]  And by that time, they, they would like, it used to be like, I had to come, but then by that time, they'd be like, you can stay if you want to.
[00:03:01]  And I would just always stay.
[00:03:03]  And it was just the greatest.
[00:03:05]  And I mean, I just fucking have house parties.
[00:03:08]  It was like out of some fucking 80s movie.
[00:03:11]  You just have house parties and I have to frantically clean everything up.
[00:03:14]  Man, those were good times.
[00:03:15]  Good degenerate times.
[00:03:17]  Okay, guys.
[00:03:18]  Listen, before we get into the show today, I gotta push a few things.
[00:03:23]  Number one, my comedy special is coming out next week, August 22nd.
[00:03:30]  It will be up on my YouTube channel for free.
[00:03:33]  Please go check it out.
[00:03:35]  I'm really excited for everybody to see this.
[00:03:37]  And it's been a while since I put out my last comedy special.
[00:03:41]  It was in 2017.
[00:03:43]  There were plans to put out a comedy special in 2020.
[00:03:47]  And then the world went all retarded on me.
[00:03:50]  And so that changed things a little bit.
[00:03:57]  I'm curious.
[00:03:58]  This one got a title, Libertas 2.
[00:04:00]  Do you throw a fancy name on it?
[00:04:01]  It's just, it's 30 Minutes with Dave Smith.
[00:04:04]  And that's what they're calling the whole, the whole series, all that.
[00:04:06]  So no title, but it's the next special.
[00:04:08]  Really, it's all about the jokes.
[00:04:11]  But yeah, so that's coming out August 22nd.
[00:04:14]  Going to do some big shows to promote it to in the next week.
[00:04:17]  So if you're a fan and you love when I do those them big shows, get ready because this next week is going to be fun.
[00:04:24]  Got a lot of stuff coming up.
[00:04:26]  Also.
[00:04:27]  Very excited to announce that me and you, Rob, with Luis J. Gomez and Zach Amiko are all going on our first ever European tour.
[00:04:37]  We will be hitting London, Belfast, Glasgow, and Amsterdam October 20th through October 25th.
[00:04:46]  Tickets are available at comicdave Smith.com or LewisOpskanks.com.
[00:04:51]  I don't know if they're up on your site, but let's fucking sell these things out.
[00:04:55]  If you're a fan of ours in any of those cities, if we sell all of these shows out, believe me, we will be coming back.
[00:05:02]  So go grab tickets to that now.
[00:05:04]  Governors just added to the calendar.
[00:05:07]  A bunch of stuff coming up.
[00:05:09]  ComicdaveSmith.com.
[00:05:10]  Robbie, you got your Summer Porch tour.
[00:05:12]  It's in full swing right now.
[00:05:15]  Robbie the Fire, Bernstein, all right, RobbyTheFire.com.
[00:05:18]  SummerPorchStore.com is best website for a ton of dates coming up.
[00:05:21]  And dude, I can't be more excited to be including this Europe run.
[00:05:25]  That's fucking cool.
[00:05:26]  Yeah, dude.
[00:05:26]  We're going to, on top of just like the shows are going to be great, we're going to have a fun time.
[00:05:30]  Just imagine me and Rob taking in the culture of all these cities that we have.
[00:05:37]  We're going to go have some, well, let's just say we're going to go have some fun.

=== Glenn Beck Video Glitch (09:57) ===

[00:05:40]  It'll be a cool experience.
[00:05:41]  All right.
[00:05:42]  Let's get into today's episode.
[00:05:45]  I wanted to start with a video that I actually, I missed, but you sent it to me, Rob.
[00:05:51]  And I'm very glad you did because this was very interesting to me.
[00:05:55]  It's a video Glenn Beck put out today talking about something that just happened with his podcast feed.
[00:06:03]  Glenn Beck, I'm sure as many of you know, very interesting guy.
[00:06:07]  I've been on his show a couple times.
[00:06:10]  And I got to say, I really like the guy a lot.
[00:06:14]  I think he's a very thoughtful, smart guy.
[00:06:18]  I think he's gotten much better throughout the years and woken up to a lot of the things that were maybe blind spots of his.
[00:06:24]  Glenn Beck was like a phenomenon on cable news.
[00:06:30]  And he was on Fox News back in the day in the kind of like, I don't know, the early 2000s.
[00:06:39]  He was originally on CNN and then he moved over to Fox News.
[00:06:42]  And he just started blowing up.
[00:06:44]  And he was like at the 5 p.m. hour or something like that, 4 or 5 p.m.
[00:06:50]  And he was starting to get numbers that were like bigger than like the 8, 9 p.m., which was like unheard of in cable news.
[00:06:56]  And he was doing things that were very different from anyone else.
[00:07:00]  He was doing these kind of like long segments.
[00:07:03]  Remember, he used to have the chalkboard and stuff like that, but it would be like segments diving deep into American history where he'd be going over how Woodrow Wilson screwed everything up.
[00:07:14]  And he had this whole long series, I remember, about how Joseph McCarthy was essentially right when he was claiming that communists had infiltrated the State Department.
[00:07:27]  And like, it's just a weird thing.
[00:07:28]  If you think about what cable news is, right?
[00:07:31]  If you go through like the channel, the channels, and you're looking at different like cable news shows, you know, you see things where it's like, I don't know, whatever it is.
[00:07:40]  It's like, oh, you know, Biden falls down again at his press conference.
[00:07:45]  What does this mean for the president?
[00:07:47]  It's always just like the dumbest topics on just what happened yesterday and all the.
[00:07:51]  And it does.
[00:07:52]  Tucker Carlson is the only other one that I could compare to him, where you'd look through almost everyone else on cable news, and then there'd be this one guy, and you're like, wait, what?
[00:08:01]  Like literally, the other channels are like, Obama wears a tan suit and Republicans are flipping out.
[00:08:07]  And then there's like this guy at a chalkboard.
[00:08:09]  Like, I think Joseph McCarthy was right.
[00:08:12]  It's just like, I don't know.
[00:08:14]  There's just something that was really interesting about him.
[00:08:16]  And I think there's something, it's almost something that's kind of encouraging about the American people that when there was someone doing something like that, people did respond to it and were like, oh, I like that guy.
[00:08:31]  He's actually doing like an interesting, long, thought-out thing.
[00:08:33]  So, anyway, so he blew up on that.
[00:08:36]  Ultimately, he ended up.
[00:08:37]  Now, I will say what unfortunately he did fall for a lot of the kind of like George Bush bullshit.
[00:08:43]  And he supported the Patriot Act and supported the war in Iraq and stuff like that because he was like, I don't know, very worried about the like Islamic terrorism or something.
[00:08:55]  But he has since admitted that he was wrong and he regrets that.
[00:08:58]  He's got a lot better in some of those areas.
[00:09:00]  Anyway, of course, he started the Blaze, which has been like a real force, I think, in this kind of internet alternative media world.
[00:09:09]  So anyway, okay, let's play the clip that he put out and then let's talk about it a bit.
[00:09:15]  Hey, we're just sitting here in my office and we're discussing something that we just saw.
[00:09:22]  Here, this is from Apple.
[00:09:26]  We found an issue with your show, the Glenn Beck program, which must be resolved before it's available on Apple Podcasts.
[00:09:32]  Your show's been removed from Apple Podcast from the Apple Podcast team.
[00:09:36]  They sent us a link and said for more details, go to the link.
[00:09:40]  And the link only says, Your show has been removed from Apple Podcasts.
[00:09:46]  Well, we got that one, dummy.
[00:09:49]  I mean, I cannot imagine what they are basing this one on.
[00:09:58]  I mean, have we even had strikes?
[00:10:01]  Nothing, right?
[00:10:02]  This is crazy, crazy.
[00:10:06]  You need to please retweet this and start a campaign to Apple to say, put the podcast back on.
[00:10:15]  This is absolutely freedom of speech.
[00:10:19]  There's nothing that we have said that would warrant any removal.
[00:10:25]  Again, it's probably just a glitch, but it's amazing how we have to have a whole bunch of people point out the glitch before the glitch is found and it's put back.
[00:10:38]  Man, this is huge.
[00:10:44]  We, well, I'm getting ready to do the show for or rehearse the show for tonight.
[00:10:50]  Tonight's a really important thing.
[00:10:52]  Maybe that's what it is.
[00:10:54]  Maybe they're just smoked because, you know, I'm pointing out the real crime family tonight on Blaze TV.
[00:11:02]  This is why it's so important to get Blaze TV because we're not playing this game.
[00:11:08]  We don't censor, we don't censor anybody.
[00:11:11]  And out of all the shows, my show is the one to get nailed.
[00:11:16]  Hmm.
[00:11:17]  Interesting.
[00:11:18]  Well, join us at the Blaze, Blazetv.com/slash Glenn.
[00:11:22]  We're doing the will not be censored.
[00:11:25]  We will will not be censored is the promo code.
[00:11:28]  You'll save 30 bucks today.
[00:11:30]  Join us at Blaze TV because I think the closer and closer we get to this election, the more and more glitches are going to happen.
[00:11:40]  Please retweet.
[00:11:42]  All right.
[00:11:43]  So look, I will say, I'll do you one better than retweeting.
[00:11:47]  I will lead my podcast with this, Mr. Beck.
[00:11:50]  And full disclosure, you know, like I've met Glenn Beck a few times and I like the guy.
[00:11:55]  And full disclosure, I obviously have my own self-interest in mind with this topic as well.
[00:12:01]  But this is something that is very concerning to me and I think is going to become a real factor over the next year plus as we really get into the kind of height of election season.
[00:12:18]  I think that's what Glenn Beck was getting at there, where I, you know, you have a whole new world.
[00:12:26]  It's interesting to be in this industry, Rob, that we're in and how much it's changed.
[00:12:34]  You know, me and you, like on, on me, me and Rob take a lot of like long drives or, you know, trips together.
[00:12:39]  We go all around the country.
[00:12:41]  We hang out, you know, in every different freaking city throughout the country.
[00:12:45]  And we'll oftentimes talk about being in just stand-up comedy, how much it's been revolutionized.
[00:12:53]  Like the industry has been revolutionized over the time since we've been friends.
[00:12:58]  Like over the last decade, when me and Rob were first, when we were first friends, if you wanted to make it as a stand-up comedian, you had to get like the big comedy festivals, get late night TV spots, get a Comedy Central special, an HBO special, something like that.
[00:13:15]  Netflix wasn't a thing.
[00:13:17]  Netflix was like, I don't even know where it was when we first met each other, but you were probably ordering discs in the mail.
[00:13:24]  You know what I mean?
[00:13:24]  Like it's just like, it was a whole, it wasn't like they could give you a comedy special, like they could give me meet the parents on DVD.
[00:13:32]  You know, the world has changed so much.
[00:13:35]  And that's true in what we do here with the podcast as well.
[00:13:38]  It's just there's been this and presidential election cycles, you know, they're every four years.
[00:13:44]  And this thing has been changing so quickly that it's almost like every presidential election cycle, you're in a drastically different place.
[00:13:52]  Like you go back to 2000, say, let's say 2020, it was maybe the first one where there were like podcasts that were bigger than the corporate press.
[00:14:07]  2016, I don't think that really existed.
[00:14:11]  Maybe one or two, maybe Rogan at that point, but it was probably even close.
[00:14:16]  2012, that's it.
[00:14:18]  You had to get on CNN.
[00:14:20]  You had to get on Fox News.
[00:14:21]  You had to get on MSNBC.
[00:14:23]  You had to get on ABC, CBS, NBC.
[00:14:26]  You had to.
[00:14:26]  Otherwise, you weren't going to reach people.
[00:14:29]  2008, it wasn't even kind of a thing like that.
[00:14:32]  I mean, yeah, you could kind of use social media, but there wasn't this alternative to that.
[00:14:37]  Nowadays, now going into 2024, it's bigger than it's ever been.
[00:14:42]  It's incredible.
[00:14:43]  There are people, man, who I don't even know about and some people who I've just found who have like Twitter spaces or X spaces that are like on the like the moment big news is happening, a group of journalists are breaking it down and it's got more views than the highest rated show on CNN.
[00:15:02]  It's like a whole different world of what's going on now.
[00:15:06]  And particularly with everything that's happening with them throwing kind of, you know, every charge in the book at Donald Trump and trying to figure out a way to get the Democrat, whoever it is over the hurdle, I think that we're going to see another big wave of crackdowns on independent voices and voices that are critical of the establishment.
[00:15:29]  And this is something that everybody in our space, everybody who listens to this podcast should start getting prepared for now.

=== Violating Platform Policy (08:14) ===

[00:15:38]  You know, this is this is not there.
[00:15:41]  It's.
[00:15:41]  This is, as Glenn Beck was kind of, you know, tongue in cheek.
[00:15:44]  Alluding to this isn't a glitch, this isn't a mistake.
[00:15:47]  They're they're gonna start another round of coming against uh, coming for dissident voices.
[00:15:55]  I thought this one was particularly scary because uh, thus far, Itunes has stayed out of this uh censorship game.
[00:16:00]  Um, I can tell you, as a person who, for the most part not that's not 100 true, but for the most part, Alex Jones uh oh, he was stricken from the platform.
[00:16:10]  Yeah, he got off ITunes, but yeah, but anyway, but your point is right, they haven't been.
[00:16:13]  They certainly haven't been as involved as others.
[00:16:16]  Um yeah, that's gonna make it real tricky.
[00:16:20]  I don't know how this program I I don't know why my personal uh content seems to uh get more strikes and i'm already putting less of my episodes out on youtube.
[00:16:30]  Um, and I uh have certainly received quite a few strikes and have had to strategize quite a bit, in terms of which I it's incredible to have uh made the career decisions i've made in living in a non-censorship world and then finding yourself uh still somewhat playing games and just being like well what what why, how did I get stuck back here doing this?
[00:16:52]  Um, but if ITunes starts taking people down, that's or my podcast can't just be put up and available.
[00:16:59]  Yeah, it's going to be.
[00:17:00]  Uh, that's going to make for a difficult situation.
[00:17:03]  All right guys, let's take a moment and thank our sponsor for today's show, which is Sheath underwear.
[00:17:08]  Check them out at Sheath Underwear.com the underwear of legends.
[00:17:12]  I am one of those legends and let me tell you something, you have got to get yourself a pair of Sheath underwear.
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[00:18:17]  All right, let's get back into the show.
[00:18:18]  It in some ways it's kind of miraculous that we have survived and thrived as much as we have.
[00:18:25]  Uh, through all of this.
[00:18:27]  I think we've done a pretty good job of not you know, it's not like there was any point during any of the insanity over the last three years where you didn't know exactly where me and Rob were coming from.
[00:18:41]  I will be the first to admit that I have self-censored to some degree there now.
[00:18:47]  I've never lied about anything.
[00:18:49]  I've never told you anything that I don't believe on this show, But there are a few things I believe that I've held back from telling you on this show because I just kind of, to some degree, feel like you have to play the game.
[00:19:01]  And I go like, well, look, it's a calculation.
[00:19:03]  I want to be able to say all of the shit that I'm saying to as large an audience as possible.
[00:19:09]  And I'm, you know, there are some things where it's like, ah, all right.
[00:19:12]  Like there was definitely a time where I was convinced that like there were a lot of people were getting vaccine injured, but I would dance around how I said it exactly.
[00:19:23]  Because if you remember, there was a time where when you said the word, you, that was it.
[00:19:28]  You were going to get shut down.
[00:19:30]  And so I, I, you know, we'd be like, oh, okay, we'd go hard at the mandates and we'd go hard at everything.
[00:19:34]  You know, I try my best to like play the game, you know, while still not compromising what I believe in.
[00:19:42]  And also I wasn't particularly confident in it because I don't like there are certain levels of like scientific arguments where I'll go like, okay, I don't actually know 100% if this is right or not, but this seems to be the case.
[00:19:56]  But when it comes to arguments about like liberty or corruption of government, I'm like 100% convinced that I'm right about that.
[00:20:03]  This is, look, I just think that people, if you love this show, we've made it through the last, you know, kind of the last few like barrages of this stuff.
[00:20:18]  I don't know what the future holds.
[00:20:20]  But if you love this show, I'd say there's a few ways like that we can kind of do our best to guard against what might be coming.
[00:20:30]  I'd say number one, the best thing you can do if you can afford to do it is subscribe at gasdigital.com.
[00:20:38]  The promo code is P-O-TP30.
[00:20:40]  That gets you a 30-day free trial and then you get a discount and you get a whole bunch of other perks.
[00:20:46]  That is safe, at least for now.
[00:20:48]  I suppose at some point they could come after web hosting or whatever, but for now that's safe.
[00:20:54]  We have a channel on Rumble.
[00:20:56]  You can go subscribe over there.
[00:20:57]  That seems to be fairly safe.
[00:20:58]  You can follow me and Rob on Twitter.
[00:21:01]  At the moment, that seems to be a bit safer than at least it used to be.
[00:21:07]  But if Apple's getting in this game of going more the direction of, say, Facebook and YouTube, I mean, there's a reason why our group was kicked off of Facebook back in 2020.
[00:21:20]  You just couldn't that Facebook just created an environment in 2020 where you couldn't say the things that we were going to be saying, period.
[00:21:28]  Even in a private group, which is wild.
[00:21:30]  Yes.
[00:21:31]  A private group.
[00:21:32]  We couldn't even do that.
[00:21:36]  On this same note, I don't know if you saw this, Rob, but like YouTube just changed their terms of service or whatever where their new policy, because they've kind of dropped some of the COVID policies now, because no one can even keep up with those anymore.
[00:21:52]  But they just added into their terms of service that they will people will get banned or strikes or whatever for challenging the World Health Organization.
[00:22:04]  So like if you're giving out what they deem as medical information that's not in line with the with the who, then that is now, you know, content that's open to the modern.
[00:22:15]  I remember from my strikes that the it was actually broader and that even questioning official policy wasn't allowed.
[00:22:23]  Right.
[00:22:23]  Which is wild because I mean, let's say you believe it, but you're just like, hey, I'm not sure about this one thing.
[00:22:29]  Why does that make sense?
[00:22:30]  You are technically in violation of their policy.
[00:22:33]  And it's supposed to be religious gospel.
[00:22:36]  Yes.
[00:22:36]  And of course, we all know what's going on here, right?
[00:22:39]  Like we all know, this is fairly obvious, but it's not actually about even questioning the authorities because you could question the authorities from the opposite side and you'll be absolutely fine.
[00:22:54]  Like if you were to go out there and if you were at the height of any of these things, if you were to, let's say, let's say you were doing a podcast on YouTube or a video on YouTube or, you know, tweeting or Facebook posting or anything like that.
[00:23:07]  And you were like, it's insane that the CDC is just recommending the vaccine and that private companies are just saying you're fired if you don't get it and that we're not actually forcing people to get it.
[00:23:23]  It's insane that we're not throwing people into camps.
[00:23:25]  They're wrong for doing this.
[00:23:26]  They should be doing it.
[00:23:27]  That would be fine.
[00:23:28]  That would not get you banned.
[00:23:30]  No one has ever been banned for that, right?
[00:23:33]  So it's not actually a matter of like disagreeing with the authorities.
[00:23:38]  It's more a matter of just being on the wrong side of the issue.
[00:23:42]  It's more a matter of just believing in freedom rather than tyranny.
[00:23:47]  If you out tyranny, the CDC, you'll be fine.

=== Election of a Lifetime (06:20) ===

[00:23:52]  And, you know, look with these podcasts, you know, these days, because the industry has been so revolutionized, everyone has a podcast.
[00:24:01]  Everyone.
[00:24:02]  I mean, like, like Rachel Maddow has a podcast or a podcast version of her show or something.
[00:24:07]  There's something that Rachel Maddow puts out on an RSS feed.
[00:24:11]  There's something she puts out on iTunes.
[00:24:13]  There's something, you know, all of them.
[00:24:15]  Anderson Cooper and, you know, all of them have podcasts and all of them have put out lots of misinformation.
[00:24:24]  But this was so weird.
[00:24:25]  Apple never seems to get them, right?
[00:24:28]  So like, that's obviously not what this is about.
[00:24:31]  What this is about is that they're kind of gearing up for, you know, the election of their lifetime.
[00:24:40]  You know how that's always the thing they say, Rob?
[00:24:43]  This is the biggest election of our lifetime.
[00:24:46]  You know, that's always the thing.
[00:24:49]  I remember that at least since 2004.
[00:24:52]  I remember hearing that.
[00:24:53]  I'm not sure if that was a regular thing before that, but it definitely was since then.
[00:24:58]  2004, 2008, 2012, 2016, 2020.
[00:25:02]  Always.
[00:25:03]  This is the biggest election of our lifetime.
[00:25:07]  And I'll tell you, I actually think that's right.
[00:25:10]  I agree with that.
[00:25:12]  I think each one was the biggest election of our lifetime.
[00:25:15]  And I think this next one is going to be the biggest election of our lifetime.
[00:25:19]  I actually think they're correct when they say that.
[00:25:21]  And part of that's because the stakes get so much higher.
[00:25:26]  Like the bigger the government gets, the more crucial it is who's wielding the power.
[00:25:33]  You know, like I actually think that's right.
[00:25:36]  And from the establishment point of view, this really is the biggest election.
[00:25:42]  Because if Donald Trump were to win again, that it would be the biggest repudiation of them.
[00:25:51]  It would be the biggest.
[00:25:52]  And I really think that's, and we were talking about this on the last show, but I really think that's the biggest fear about Donald Trump is that him being elected does so much to pull the curtain.
[00:26:04]  It does so much to destroy the illusion that these guys are actually the thought leaders.
[00:26:11]  And so I think it's reasonable to expect what we've seen, which really is not that old, the internet censorship regime is really started in like 2017, something like that.
[00:26:30]  I'm not saying there's no one who got banned before then, but very few people.
[00:26:36]  It really started after Donald Trump won.
[00:26:40]  Before then, I mean, 2015 is the wild west on the internet compared to today.
[00:26:49]  Where there was, there was an expectation, if you can put yourself back in the mind state of 2015, that you could say whatever you wanted to online.
[00:27:01]  That's what it was to be on the internet.
[00:27:04]  And anyone could say whatever they wanted to.
[00:27:06]  I remember getting a, so I got in a few Twitter spats with Christopher Cantwell, who was people at this point probably know him as he was dubbed the crying Nazi, which was a mean thing to call him.
[00:27:28]  But he was one of the leaders of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017.
[00:27:36]  And weirdly, looks a lot like Rob, but he was, but in like 2015, 2016 was the first, we had like we like went at each other on Twitter a little bit.
[00:27:50]  And I remember then, like, I think he, he called me like a, like a kite fag or something like that.
[00:28:00]  And like, I, I, you know, I was like shitting on him too.
[00:28:02]  I'm sure I called him names too.
[00:28:04]  And we always.
[00:28:04]  You put those two together and it doesn't sound that bad.
[00:28:06]  The kite fag.
[00:28:07]  It's like, I don't know.
[00:28:08]  It almost like double negative becomes a positive.
[00:28:10]  You're like, I don't know, dude.
[00:28:11]  What am I?
[00:28:12]  An awesome band?
[00:28:13]  Sure.
[00:28:14]  Yeah.
[00:28:14]  Anyway, anyway, we, we kind of, you know, it was like, I think, I don't even remember at the time.
[00:28:19]  At the time, it might have been kind of vicious, but then we kind of like, you know, it was a little more lighthearted.
[00:28:23]  And I ended up having him on the podcast and stuff.
[00:28:25]  But, but I, I remember that the point I'm making is that he just said that to me.
[00:28:31]  And then, and there was no, none of us even thought, oh, like, you can't say that here.
[00:28:37]  You know what I mean?
[00:28:37]  It was just like, you guys, and like today, if anyone ever said that to you online, you'd literally be like, well, I mean, it's a matter of minutes before your account is just gone.
[00:28:49]  You can't kike fag someone on Twitter anymore?
[00:28:51]  Well, Twitter, maybe now you can again.
[00:28:53]  I don't know where Musk's at these days, but like Facebook for sure, you can.
[00:28:58]  I just learned that word combo.
[00:28:59]  I got to get out there and test that out.
[00:29:01]  I mean, it's really hard not to urge everyone not to.
[00:29:04]  Man, we're going to get banned off YouTube just for that.
[00:29:07]  But the thing is that this is fairly new.
[00:29:11]  And there's been big waves of it.
[00:29:14]  And I'll tell you, it was in the aftermath of the 2016 election is when it was really created.
[00:29:25]  And this is not, of course, this wasn't just a market phenomenon.
[00:29:28]  This was a government intervention.
[00:29:30]  What happened essentially was they all thought Hillary Clinton would win.
[00:29:35]  And after Donald Trump won, they all had to kind of like, you know, they all realized that like for the first time in history, a presidential candidate and not just a presidential candidate, but a presidential candidate who was outside of the kind of establishment in the strictest sense of the word, outside the guy who the CIA didn't want to win and really didn't want to win.
[00:30:03]  And I don't just mean like, I don't just mean like Goldman Sachs and the CIA and the FBI preferred Obama to Mitt Romney, you know?

=== Small Batch Cigars Delivered (02:37) ===

[00:30:13]  But like they were still fine with Mitt Romney.
[00:30:15]  You know, you know what I'm saying?
[00:30:17]  Like they may have had a preference of one of those two candidates, but they were still fine with that.
[00:30:20]  But all of those like powerful institutions, they were like, Trump cannot win.
[00:30:26]  He is no, he cannot be the president.
[00:30:29]  And that guy won.
[00:30:31]  And how did he win?
[00:30:33]  From tweeting his way to the White House.
[00:30:36]  That's how he won.
[00:30:38]  And this drastically changed the game.
[00:30:41]  All right, guys, let's take a moment and thank our sponsor for today's show, which is Small Batch.
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[00:32:48]  All right, let's get back into the show.

=== Tech Censorship Justification (10:35) ===

[00:32:50]  You know, I've mentioned this before.
[00:32:53]  This was so, I know I've talked about this on the podcast before.
[00:32:56]  And god damn it, my memory isn't the best.
[00:32:58]  So I won't tell you what, I can't tell you what year this was.
[00:33:02]  But Bob Murphy, who's a friend of the show, a friend, we're both friends with him.
[00:33:09]  We've both done his show.
[00:33:10]  He's done this show before.
[00:33:11]  He's a brilliant economist.
[00:33:15]  But this is almost like beyond.
[00:33:16]  He's also just kind of like a brilliant libertarian thinker.
[00:33:20]  And he had this video that was, gosh, I want to say what year it was.
[00:33:25]  I want to say it was like 2014, somewhere around there.
[00:33:28]  But he had this video.
[00:33:29]  He just did like a, it was almost like a sketch, but he, he pretended to be an advisor to the Illuminati type deal.
[00:33:40]  Like he's like, if I could, like, I'm going into the next Bilderberg meeting and I'm telling them what I think.
[00:33:45]  Like I'm on, I'm soulless and just I'm on their side.
[00:33:49]  And he was like, hey, guys, listen, first of all, let me congratulate you.
[00:33:55]  You guys have done incredible.
[00:33:57]  You know, you basically took over the world.
[00:33:59]  It's unbelievable.
[00:34:00]  Took over the monetary.
[00:34:02]  You know, you took over the money supply.
[00:34:03]  You took over the education system.
[00:34:05]  You've propagandized people.
[00:34:07]  They're giving you 50% of their paycheck and they're thinking you're right for taking it.
[00:34:13]  You know, bang up job.
[00:34:15]  Unbelievable.
[00:34:16]  But you guys have a problem.
[00:34:18]  You guys got a real problem on your hands.
[00:34:20]  And it's this internet thing.
[00:34:22]  It's this social media thing.
[00:34:24]  And you got a real issue where not only can someone call you out on all of your bullshit, but then other people can like it.
[00:34:35]  And then other people can see how many people liked it.
[00:34:38]  And they can all see that someone just called, you know, Hillary Clinton a murderer and 800,000 people agreed with her with whoever that is, you know?
[00:34:52]  And he goes, this is a real problem.
[00:34:53]  You got to plug up this hole.
[00:34:56]  And he called this way before there was any tech censorship.
[00:34:59]  And it's really interesting that he like kind of, he like saw this, that this was the thing they'd have to figure out.
[00:35:05]  And that's what you had with Trump, right?
[00:35:07]  It was the first time it ever actually happened that a candidate who the powers that B decided was unacceptable won.
[00:35:15]  That's never happened in my life, ever.
[00:35:20]  There were times that there were candidates who the powers that be decided were unacceptable.
[00:35:25]  Ross Perot comes to mind.
[00:35:27]  Ron Paul comes to mind.
[00:35:29]  Bernie Sanders comes to mind.
[00:35:32]  But they always lost.
[00:35:34]  Trump was the first one who won.
[00:35:37]  And he won by tweeting his way there because he would just, he found a way, whatever the weird genius of Donald Trump is, he found a way to go around the media.
[00:35:51]  He could talk directly to his supporters, unfiltered by the corporate press.
[00:35:59]  And he could also drive the news stories.
[00:36:03]  Like he could drive what the story of the day was by going around them.
[00:36:09]  So now they were reporting on his tweet.
[00:36:12]  And it was just this weird dynamic where he was able to flip the whole thing and it worked and he won.
[00:36:20]  And so that's it.
[00:36:21]  And then what you had in the, you know, following Trump winning was you had Congress and, you know, having these congressional hearings about, you know, Russian disinformation and fake news on social media.
[00:36:34]  They hauled all the heads of big tech in front of Congress, grilled them all, threatened them all.
[00:36:40]  And you saw the big, the rise of this censorship regime.
[00:36:43]  And then in 2020, in his reelection year, which also, you know, happened to be the COVID year, which maybe is a coincidence, maybe isn't a coincidence.
[00:36:54]  But that was when you saw the biggest jump in tech censorship.
[00:37:00]  It just, I'm not saying, I'm not claiming any conspiracy theory here.
[00:37:05]  I'm just saying, isn't it a lovely coincidence that the year that Donald Trump was, that the year that the guy who tweeted his way to the White House when the powers that be thought he was unacceptable, the year he was up for reelection happened to be the year when tech censorship shot through the roof.
[00:37:25]  And anybody, anybody who was challenging, you know, lockdowns and vaccines and all this stuff, I guess the vaccines weren't there yet.
[00:37:36]  So just lockdowns or lab leak theory or any of this stuff were in jeopardy of being silenced and many of them were.
[00:37:46]  So that's what we saw.
[00:37:47]  Now, I do feel like it's calmed down a little bit in the last year or so.
[00:37:53]  But now it looks like that guy is running again.
[00:37:57]  And of course, the entire legal system is being weaponized against him.
[00:38:03]  But I have a feeling we're going to see a big ramp up in terms of the tech censorship stuff.
[00:38:09]  Well, freedom is dangerous and they will certainly cheat to win.
[00:38:14]  And so, yes, I think it's fair to say that they will ramp down on tech censorship because as the Biden administration, after losing its law case about being able to, you know, even just have discussions with tech companies or by discussions, of course, I mean coerce them.
[00:38:33]  Obviously, it's too dangerous if they can't have discussions, which in other words means if they can't threaten them that, hey, you better censor this Donald Trump news story that isn't true.
[00:38:42]  I mean, this is about to get fascinating with this Georgia election case because Donald Trump's double downing and he's going, nope, I absolutely do have that information.
[00:38:50]  Yeah, right.
[00:38:51]  Yeah, we didn't mention that on the last episode.
[00:38:54]  And that's, I actually didn't see that until this morning.
[00:38:56]  But yeah, Donald Trump is saying, this was on Truth Social.
[00:38:59]  God, I wish he would just come back on Twitter.
[00:39:01]  I wish he hadn't made that deal.
[00:39:02]  It's just too hard for me.
[00:39:04]  I can't keep up with all these different sites.
[00:39:06]  Just come back to Twitter.
[00:39:07]  But yeah, so evidently he's saying on Monday he's going to release that like he said he's going to release something proving that he's actually right about the whole Georgia thing.
[00:39:19]  I don't know.
[00:39:20]  I don't even know what to believe anymore.
[00:39:21]  We'll see how that goes.
[00:39:22]  I can't imagine he has that.
[00:39:25]  With that said, everything that was debunked that like I, because I was reading this today, but yeah, those briefcases under the table were shady.
[00:39:32]  And now the fact that you come back and you go, well, the FBI looked into it and there were people on the Republican side that were supposed to watch that just wanted to leave.
[00:39:39]  No one told them that they were supposed to leave.
[00:39:41]  And yeah, they just stashed that there and decided to recount.
[00:39:44]  And so everyone looked at it.
[00:39:45]  It's a hundred.
[00:39:45]  All right.
[00:39:46]  Still seems shady.
[00:39:47]  Like you didn't just get rid of it because you told me that the FBI looked into it and said that it was fine.
[00:39:51]  That doesn't mean that it wasn't.
[00:39:53]  That's always the line.
[00:39:54]  It's like, don't worry.
[00:39:55]  I know you're skeptical of the government, but the government has investigated the government and the government has determined that the government did nothing wrong.
[00:40:02]  That's always kind of like the fucking way it goes.
[00:40:06]  Why aren't you guys believing this?
[00:40:08]  But I think you can anticipate that in the current landscape, they're going to go, Donald Trump is currently under, you know, both, I guess, investigation and in a criminal trial for potentially having stolen the last election.
[00:40:21]  We can't allow him to spread the dangerous lies about how he actually won it while he's still in a trial to potentially go to jail for having hijacked our democracy.
[00:40:31]  And you can already see the way that they're going to spin this.
[00:40:33]  So I think, yeah, if you thought that, you know, making sure everyone was vaccinated was important to them, look at how much more important this one will be.
[00:40:42]  Yeah.
[00:40:42]  Yeah.
[00:40:43]  And look, this is the like we've said on this show for many years now.
[00:40:53]  Probably if you had to say the central message of this show since its inception has been that the government is a criminal organization.
[00:41:11]  And what separates them from every other criminal organization is the belief in their legitimacy.
[00:41:19]  So, you know, the government robs people.
[00:41:23]  They call it taxation.
[00:41:25]  They murder people.
[00:41:26]  They call it war.
[00:41:27]  They enslave people.
[00:41:29]  They call it imprisonment.
[00:41:31]  They do all of the things that we would all consider to be both moral and legal crimes.
[00:41:39]  But they call it a different name.
[00:41:41]  And really the only thing that separates, I mean, obviously it's different in scale, but it's not different in kind.
[00:41:50]  It's just that we call it something else.
[00:41:54]  And the reason why that works is because people believe that.
[00:41:59]  You know, it's like they kind of like the this whole thing operates off the perception of legitimacy and the justification for that.
[00:42:10]  And we've always said it's kind of, it's, it's a religion in a sense, you know, it's a cult type of attitude.
[00:42:17]  And in under modern governments, the justification for that is democracy.
[00:42:25]  Now, in previous more primitive governments, the justifications were different.
[00:42:33]  They were that, you know, God has chosen the king or something like that.
[00:42:36]  But today, that's not the justification.
[00:42:39]  They kind of know they can't get away with that.
[00:42:41]  So the justification is democracy.
[00:42:44]  And essentially, the justification is that the government is us.
[00:42:48]  It's us.
[00:42:48]  It's all of us.
[00:42:49]  We all got to vote.
[00:42:50]  And therefore, this is us.
[00:42:52]  You know, we decided to do this.
[00:42:56]  Which doesn't really make sense.
[00:42:58]  Like, we didn't exactly decide any of these things.
[00:43:02]  It's just that the politicians decided that.
[00:43:05]  But since we got a vote, they say it's us.
[00:43:11]  What they're saying is that when they say that democracy is under attack, they don't really mean that you can't vote anymore.
[00:43:22]  They know that's not the truth.
[00:43:24]  It's not.

=== Moving Forward Together (14:35) ===

[00:43:25]  Democracy isn't under attack if Donald Trump is running in an election, right?
[00:43:32]  That doesn't really make any sense.
[00:43:34]  It's the only way he can win, unless they're telling you that they don't believe in the elections, right?
[00:43:40]  Which would kind of undermine their whole argument, then democracy isn't under attack because the only way Donald Trump can win is if he wins the democratic process.
[00:43:50]  What they mean when they say democracy is under attack is they mean that our justification for our rule is under attack.
[00:44:00]  And they're right about that.
[00:44:03]  They're right.
[00:44:04]  That's why this is so important.
[00:44:06]  And that is a hell of a lot more important to them than whether you get the latest mRNA booster.
[00:44:13]  You know?
[00:44:14]  All right, guys, let's take a moment and thank our sponsor for today's show, which is Bambi.
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[00:45:32]  All right, let's get back into the show.
[00:45:34]  All right, let's switch gears here.
[00:45:37]  I want to play, there was a video from a recent interview from Vivek Ramaswamy.
[00:45:44]  Everyone calls him Vivek.
[00:45:46]  And I was calling him Vivek forever.
[00:45:49]  But then I heard him say his name a bunch of times and he says Vivek.
[00:45:52]  Anyway, whatever.
[00:45:55]  If it makes sense, I like Vivek more.
[00:45:58]  But whatever.
[00:45:59]  I don't think that's actually the correct pronunciation.
[00:46:01]  Get an American name and blend in, buddy.
[00:46:03]  Come on.
[00:46:03]  That's on you.
[00:46:04]  I really wish.
[00:46:05]  Can you just, how about Michael?
[00:46:07]  You look like a nice Michael.
[00:46:09]  Michael Ramaswamy was on the news earlier today, and this is what he had to say.
[00:46:13]  Let's play the video.
[00:46:15]  Those Republicans will be on that debate stage.
[00:46:17]  Is Vivek Ramaswamy?
[00:46:19]  He is kind enough to join us right now.
[00:46:21]  Vivek, good to have you back.
[00:46:24]  It's good to see you.
[00:46:25]  Let me ask you a little bit about these Georgia indictments against the former president.
[00:46:30]  You call them political persecutions.
[00:46:33]  Explain.
[00:46:36]  Look, Neil, I can't think we look at these indictments without the context of three other separate indictments, several of which came in the last four months alone.
[00:46:46]  These are four different indictments in the middle of an election.
[00:46:49]  I think it sets an awful precedent in our country for the ruling party, the party in power, to use police force to indict its political opponents in the middle of an election.
[00:46:59]  And I say this as somebody who now in some of the recent polls, I'm polling it second in this race, third overall.
[00:47:06]  It would be a lot easier for me if Donald Trump were eliminated from competition, but that is not how I want to win.
[00:47:13]  The way we win elections in this country, at least the way it should be, is that we convince the voters of this country of our vision and what we stand for.
[00:47:21]  And that's why I've said that I would pardon, at least for the federal crimes, I would pardon Donald Trump to help move this nation forward.
[00:47:29]  I am focused, for example, on your economic message.
[00:47:31]  That's what we actually need to be talking more about, less about these politicized indictments that have distracted us from the fundamental issue.
[00:47:38]  That's the fault of the Biden DOJ and a lot of the Democrat prosecutors across this country.
[00:47:42]  Instead of explaining why Bidenomics is actually a farce, it is a failure with actual more job openings in this country than there are people looking for work, price increases that are indeed permanent when wages have not gone up over the same period.
[00:47:56]  That is how we're going to win this election in a landslide.
[00:47:59]  That's what I want us talking about.
[00:48:00]  But I will be unabashed about standing on the side of principle when I say, yes, these prosecutions are wrong.
[00:48:06]  But I can understand that, but there are 91 criminal charges in all today, because you're aware over four criminal cases.
[00:48:15]  They can't all be politicized, can they?
[00:48:18]  I mean, there's something that the former president.
[00:48:20]  By the way, just pause it for a second.
[00:48:22]  And then you go, and there's your talking point, right?
[00:48:25]  There's your talking point.
[00:48:27]  But there's so many.
[00:48:28]  So that's got to mean he's guilty.
[00:48:30]  Well, that's exactly the trick they're going to try and pull on the jury.
[00:48:34]  But you've seen this too, where they've charged him over and over again with basically the same thing.
[00:48:40]  Yeah.
[00:48:41]  Yeah.
[00:48:41]  And that's criminal to call this person, criminal of receiving of the call, criminal dialing while making the call, passing the paper about the criminal call.
[00:48:50]  Oh my God, there's a thousand counts here.
[00:48:53]  Yeah.
[00:48:53]  And then someone can go, I mean, you said it's politicized, but could all a thousand be politicized?
[00:48:59]  Right.
[00:49:00]  Yes.
[00:49:00]  Neil Cavuto, you fucking tubby idiot.
[00:49:04]  Yes, they could all be.
[00:49:05]  Well, we here on the jury, we don't find him guilty of all of these, but a quarter of them sound reasonable.
[00:49:11]  Right, exactly.
[00:49:12]  So not the dialing of the call, the placing of the phone call, but the talking about the phone call.
[00:49:18]  There's something that the former president must have done in any one of these that struck you as wrong, if not illegal.
[00:49:27]  I think, Neil, just because the government has brought a case, if we're going to be a culture that now starts to say there must be something wrong, if the government has charged 91 counts, I think That's a people of sheep.
[00:49:37]  And when the people behave like sheep, that breeds a government of wolves.
[00:49:41]  But you don't think that's the reality.
[00:49:42]  And so no, I'm in state.
[00:49:44]  You don't think there's anything in this case that shows or even strongly hints of the former president trying to reverse that Georgia, that Georgia contest.
[00:49:55]  Neil, you know, I've had this conversation before.
[00:49:57]  There is a difference between a bad judgment and an illegal act.
[00:50:01]  And I viewed this indictment in the context of, as you put it, three other independent indictments.
[00:50:06]  The first one beginning in New York for a novel election and campaign contribution theory to one that has a novel theory of interpreting the Presidential Records Act to a novel theory of attorney-client relationships.
[00:50:18]  When you have a series of novel legal theories that are used to indict a prior U.S. president and a sitting candidate in the middle of an election, I just don't think that's good for the country.
[00:50:28]  I'm in this to lead our nation forward, not to be a political commentator or legal analyst on a series of legal cases.
[00:50:35]  But what I will say as a candidate in this race is that I do not think it is good for our country to set this precedent.
[00:50:42]  No, I'm not sure.
[00:50:42]  I focus on reuniting this country, but I'm not wrong doing that.
[00:50:47]  And that's going to make my job more difficult.
[00:50:48]  I understand.
[00:50:49]  But when you have the Republican governor of Georgia who has said this report is irrefutable and that this was an attempt at voter fraud that was scorching, and you have others who've taken similar views, including the Secretary of State, they're a Republican, who said that Donald Trump went too far.
[00:51:10]  Wouldn't you put your trust or at least your instincts in those guys, Republicans, who said that this has been well examined, aggressively examined, and there was nothing to it.
[00:51:25]  Neil, I have one question in my mind.
[00:51:27]  I'm running to be our next president.
[00:51:28]  I ask, what is in the interest of this nation?
[00:51:32]  Do I believe that these prosecutors or these elected officials or these federal prosecutors are advancing the interests of this nation when they're bringing this unprecedented indictment, not one time, but now four times over?
[00:51:43]  No, I think our country is worse off because of this politicization.
[00:51:48]  Would I have made different decisions than Donald Trump did?
[00:51:51]  Absolutely, I would have.
[00:51:52]  I will remind you that I'm running for U.S. president in the same race that he is.
[00:51:57]  But I think it is so important.
[00:51:58]  This conversation that you and I are having are evidence enough of why this is a bad idea because we're not talking about how we improve an economy.
[00:52:05]  We're not talking about how we ought to revive our national identity.
[00:52:08]  That's a big deal.
[00:52:09]  That's what this election is about.
[00:52:10]  This is a big deal.
[00:52:11]  We can't sort of minimize it or slap it aside because it's not.
[00:52:16]  So let me ask you, when you talk about wanting to pardon Donald Trump for this, why?
[00:52:23]  What would be good about that if you became president of the United States to pardon him?
[00:52:28]  I think the right answer for this country is to move forward, not to get into a weaponized tug of war between two political parties that then make a habit of using politicized police force against their political opponents.
[00:52:42]  That is the stuff of banana republics.
[00:52:44]  That is not what I want to see the United States of America devolve into.
[00:52:47]  We should be able to disagree, disagree fiercely with one another, but still sort out those disagreements through our civic process, culminating at the ballot box.
[00:52:57]  Well, every person's voice and vote counts equally.
[00:53:00]  That is how we do things in the United States, not by eliminating our opponents using backdoor mechanisms.
[00:53:07]  And so my reason, my chief reason for pardoning Donald Trump, at least of the federal offenses, which will be what's in my power, that includes the New York state offenses, because they include the charge of an underlying federal offense as well.
[00:53:18]  It will be to move this nation forward.
[00:53:21]  Because my motivation in being U.S. president, Neil, is that I don't want to lead us to a national divorce.
[00:53:27]  We're skating on thin ice as a country right now.
[00:53:30]  That is a fact.
[00:53:31]  I want to lead us to a national revival that will take 40.
[00:53:35]  That is also why I'm saying even now, when it would be in my self-interest as a candidate to see Donald Trump eliminated, by some counts, that would put me at number one in the Republican primary polls.
[00:53:46]  That is not how I want to see it done, which is why I've been so.
[00:53:50]  All right, let's pause it there.
[00:53:51]  I got to say, that is probably the best case against national divorce I've heard so far.
[00:53:59]  And I'm a divorce guy.
[00:54:01]  I mean, not in my life, not in my personal life, but in terms of the nation.
[00:54:08]  But I think it's interesting.
[00:54:09]  Look, I got to say, Vivek is so far that there's two presidential candidates who interest me, at least on the major parties.
[00:54:23]  And the Libertarian Party is still kind of figuring out their thing.
[00:54:25]  And I will say that I think they're going to have a very good candidate by the end of this.
[00:54:33]  I also will say that I do a fan of some of the things that, what's his name?
[00:54:46]  God damn it.
[00:54:47]  Oh, I'm blanking.
[00:54:48]  No, no, no.
[00:54:49]  I was going to say the Green Party candidate.
[00:54:52]  Oh, my God.
[00:54:53]  This is terrible.
[00:54:55]  I don't know.
[00:54:55]  It'll come to me in a second.
[00:54:58]  But RFK and Vivek are the two guys who are like, at least they're actually saying some things, man, that actually matter.
[00:55:05]  And he's just absolutely right about the fact that this is like, this is an insane path to go down as a nation.
[00:55:14]  And look, if you're rooting for a national divorce, which I understand, a lot of good people are, maybe this is good for those prospects.
[00:55:23]  But for the people who claim that all they want is to restore democracy and our institutions and all of this, it's crazy that they're going down this path.
[00:55:31]  Now, I will mention that Vivek added in a tweet, he said, and he said this before in interviews, but he said, and I quote, my top goal is to reunite this country.
[00:55:43]  Cornell West, by the way, my apologies.
[00:55:45]  Thank you, Brian.
[00:55:47]  My top goal is to reunite this country and pardoning Donald Trump is a requirement to achieve that.
[00:55:53]  Same goal.
[00:55:54]  The same goes for peaceful January 6th protesters, Julian Assange, Douglas McKay, and Ross Ulbricht.
[00:56:02]  I won't wait until the last day like presidents usually do.
[00:56:06]  I'll get it done on January 20th, 2025, and take the backlash if I have to.
[00:56:13]  I like it.
[00:56:14]  Love it.
[00:56:15]  I will tell you that I personally know Lynn Ulbric, who is Ross's mother.
[00:56:22]  And I know how much she's gone through to try to raise awareness for her son's case.
[00:56:27]  If you don't know, Ross Ulbricht was, he created the Silk Road.
[00:56:32]  It was basically like, I don't really understand because I'm not like tech savvy enough to know, but it was basically like an internet exchange at the very beginning of like kind of the internet bubbling into a new thing where people could like buy and sell things and communicate privately.
[00:56:48]  And I guess some people were like selling drugs on the site or something like that.
[00:56:54]  And so he got pop, he ended up getting first.
[00:56:57]  They tried to like accuse him of some conspiracy with a murder.
[00:57:01]  And then they just dropped all of that because there was no case there.
[00:57:04]  And then they just basically said that he was responsible for any drug trafficking that happened on his site.
[00:57:10]  And they hit him with a life sentence.
[00:57:12]  And he's been in jail, I think, for a decade at least.
[00:57:17]  And it's just horrible.
[00:57:18]  It's horrible.
[00:57:19]  It's almost like in the same way, like if you, it's almost like if you invented the telephone and then they said, well, some people made phone calls plotting to murder someone.
[00:57:30]  So you're responsible for the murder.
[00:57:32]  Like it's on that level.
[00:57:33]  And they just took this kid and ruined his life.
[00:57:36]  And I'll tell you, it goes a long way for me that Viveka is saying he'll pardon him on day one.
[00:57:44]  Of the major parties, RFK and Viveka are the only two candidates I even have any interest in.
[00:57:54]  But I really appreciate him saying this.
[00:57:56]  All right.
[00:57:56]  That's our episode for today.
[00:57:58]  Thank you guys very much for listening.
[00:57:59]  Catch you next time.
[00:58:01]  Peace.