It’s Tuesday, December 4, 2020, and welcome back to The McSpencer Group ... an unrehearsed, hastily assembled program about meta-politics. Joining me is the legendary JF—Jean-François Gariépy: un homme qui croit que manger du fromage brie fondu est merveilleux! Main topic: Fahrenheit 230Social-media deplatforming is an existential crisis for our time. Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube have become, in effect, the mainstream media, replacing the big networks of yesteryear. As they’ve risen to prominence, they seem less like free-speech bastions and more like institutions with an agenda: to promote their preferred messages and advertiser-friendly content. Donald Trump thinks we can crack this nut by removing Big Tech’s immunity to lawsuits through §230 of the Communications Decency Act. JF and I debate the future of the Internet. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit radixjournal.substack.com/subscribe
It's Tuesday, December 4th, 2020, and welcome back to The McSpencer Group, an unrehearsed, hastily assembled program about meta-politics.
Joining me is the legendary GF Jean-François Garipay, an homme qui croit que manger du fromage brie fondue est mauvaise.
Main topic, Fahrenheit 230.
Social media deplatforming is an existential crisis for our time.
Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube have become, in effect, the mainstream media, replacing the big networks of yesteryear.
As they've risen to prominence, they seem less like free speech bastions and more like institutions with an agenda to promote their preferred messages and advertiser-friendly content.
Donald Trump thinks we can crack this nut by removing big tech's immunity to lawsuits through Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
JF and I debate the future of the internet.
All right.
Who's the host here, JF?
Yeah, yeah.
You're like, all right, next question.
This is my show.
We've been doing this for years.
I know, we have, so it's kind of weird.
Okay, let me take the reins.
We have some big issues that I want to talk about.
And we have an interesting disagreement here.
So, deplatforming, section 230.
Now, deplatforming, let me set the scene here and then we can kind of talk about it.
Because this is a very specific issue in the sense of this aspect of the Decency and Communications Act.
But it's also a really big issue that affects you and me personally, in fact.
Millions of people.
So deplatforming is an issue that was around maybe five or ten years ago.
You would occasionally hear of someone maybe selling marijuana or maybe publishing quote-unquote white supremacy articles on the internet.
And they were getting kicked off PayPal, but it seemed to be a very marginal thing.
And in my experience, because I've been doing this for a while, I was not affected by deplatforming.
And in fact, Silicon Valley's platforming was vital to my business, such as it was, in the sense that my ability to use Stripe, to use Squarespace, to use PayPal, to use all of these kind of...
Layers on top of Stripe were essential.
And by about 2016, things started to dramatically change.
I remember right after Trump's election, I was kicked off Twitter for really no reason.
I mean, my last tweets before I was kicked off were actually, I think my last tweet before I was being kicked off, ironically, was a response to David Frum.
And he actually wrote an article saying I was about to respond back to him and then his account disappeared.
So anyway, it was...
There was no real reason.
It was just kind of like Trump movement, white supremacist Richard Spencer, gone.
Now, I was let back on Twitter a month later in an equally mystical fashion.
But by 2017, we were all getting banned from payment platforms, from some web hosting companies.
I could go down the list.
There's hundreds of examples.
And a big ban occurred of a number of people, including Stefan Molyneux and myself, this summer of 2020, I think it was June or July, when we were unceremoniously banned.
And in a Kafkaesque manner of, you know, what did we do?
We weren't...
We didn't have strikes.
No one was yelling vulgar language or issuing death threats.
We were simply kicked off in a coordinated fashion that happened instantaneously.
It was clearly coordinated and planned.
I was kicked off Facebook before that.
We've all faced these major issues.
So deplatforming is a thing.
And I think some average Trump supporters have faced deplatforming themselves.
QAnon has been just purged.
I have a difficult time exactly defending QAnon, but regardless, QAnon has been purged from all major social media networks and so on.
And so there's a general anxiety about deplatforming.
The answer that has been given to us by Republicans and by Trump himself, who's tweeted about this dozens of times now, Section 230 of the Decency and Communications Act.
So let me just read this just to give everyone some background.
So section 230 says, No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
Now, what this means is that these...
Companies like Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube are platforms, and they are not a publisher in the sense that the New York Times is a publisher.
If the New York Times issued death threats, then you can sue both the publisher and maybe the speaker who said them, and so on.
If they give out completely false information that damages you in some way, you could potentially sue them.
What this act did, and this came in 1996, so kind of right at the burgeoning era of the internet, when people were just kind of getting online, was it treated these companies like platforms.
And I think we kind of understand where they were coming from.
I think that this was actually a quite smart law in the sense that if you have a blog, yes, you might want to moderate comments.
To some degree.
But if someone can't moderate them all, and that takes a lot of time, and someone might go into your comment section and leave a death threat or give out false information, etc.
And that you are not jeopardized by that as the platform or the person writing the blog.
So this makes a lot of sense.
Now, as time has gone by, the web...
It isn't just some hobby place where you put out weird, wild information or put up a fan page or have a blog that 20 people read.
With the development of social media, social media has replaced the mainstream media in so many ways.
The mainstream media actually feeds off social media to a large degree.
We have this situation where these formerly Minor sites, which in recent memory were the Wild West.
I mean, I remember going on Twitter and, you know, N-word here, crazy lunatic meme there, porn here, you know, bizarre selling marijuana there.
I mean, it was the Wild West.
It was almost like the dark web or something.
Well, now social media is increasingly driving mainstream media.
It's increasingly replacing mainstream media.
In terms of impact on all sorts of things, culture, but impact on elections.
And so they're feeling this sense of responsibility.
And they're getting pressure from journalists, but they're feeling this sense of responsibility to curate content.
And so just little things on Twitter.
You go to the search and they'll give you the trending topics that are maybe algorithmically based, but they'll curate them.
They'll kind of describe to you the latest thing of Kim Kardashian's new butt pic and all these reactions to it.
They'll curate content for you.
So on some level, they are becoming a type of publisher.
Mostly all user generated, but it is a kind of curation where they're a publisher and they feel a certain responsibility, particularly with the kind of Russia hacking, you know, memes going around them, that they can't allow bad, false information out there because it affects elections.
So social media is taking on this responsibility and they are banning people.
They are suppressing information, which we saw vividly with the Hunter Biden scandal.
Of a few months ago.
And they are banning accounts and so on.
And so we're in this transitionary stage where we don't really know what social media is going to be right now.
And they don't know either.
And conservatives feel anxious.
They feel like they're the ones getting suppressed and the left is not.
You know, true, basically, I mean, with a few minor exceptions here and there.
And they want to do something about it.
And so the solution that Republicans have given is that we want to remove this waiver of liability, a kind of shield from the platforms.
And what that means, from my perspective, and again, I'm all...
Avidly listen to your rejoinder to this.
You are going to start treating Twitter as a publisher in the sense that they are liable for content that is user-generated.
It is like the New York Times is publishing a letter to the editor.
They have to take responsibility for that user-generated content at some level.
They could be sued.
I have no idea how This helps us at all, outside of some kind of 40 chess ways of we could sue them for millions of dollars and what, and they'd be out a few million dollars.
I think this removing Section 230 might very well destroy their business model in the sense that they aren't going to be able to push people to certain content because that is a kind of curation if they're just a platform.
But the fact is, if you start threatening to treat them like a publisher, or in fact, treat them like a publisher, then why are you surprised when they act like a publisher?
The fact is, the New York Times prints what it wants to print, everything that's fit to print, as they say.
They have no responsibility to print my letter to the editor.
Forget it, leave it, print it if they want.
That is what a publisher does.
It curates content, it expresses a point of view, and so on.
And the idea of Twitter being treated as a publisher and thus acting like a publisher seems a recipe for even more intense content curation that is banning of users and information.
I will wait for your rejoinder to this, but I feel like focusing on Section 230 is the worst approach possible.
The better approach would be to simply say that this is a platform.
It is not a publisher.
We are going to continue to shield it as a publisher.
Section 230 was proper, but it is a platform for information.
And that you as a citizen have a certain right to post.
That much like if I go out onto a public sidewalk or even a private place, like say a shopping mall or a sports stadium or something, that I actually have expanded rights.
I can't go into your home and yell at you and hold up a sign saying the end is nigh, repent, achieve salvation.
I do have expanded rights, even in public spaces that are treated as public to some degree.
You do have more rights in those spaces than you would, say, in a private home.
There are distinctions.
Blurry line, maybe, but there are distinctions.
And I certainly have the ability to use the phone system or the internet over cable or internet over whatever as a utility.
The government might be listening in to my phone calls, but they don't have the right to ban me if I tell dirty jokes to you over the phone.
And it is treated as a utility.
That is the approach.
We need to treat them as privately held utilities that are public spaces, privately held public spaces, and that you as a citizen have a right to that.
And that means that if you get banned, you have some recourse.
To go to the platform.
And that if you, I don't know, spend a year in exile or apologize or whatever, you are allowed back on.
Because if I rob a liquor store, I might be thrown in jail for five years.
But I get out of jail at some point and I can hold a job, hold a bank account, vote, drive a car, etc.
You don't just lose all your rights.
By doing one bad thing.
And I think the same should hold for social media.
Let's say I tell a terrible joke or use an offensive word one time at the middle of the night on Twitter.
My bad.
But should I therefore lose my access to Twitter for the rest of my life?
That seems totally egregious.
And this is the proper approach to the deplatforming issue.
The 230 is a red herring.
It will make things worse.
And it's a typical Republican trick.
Go.
Well, certainly, abolishing Section 230 would make things worse.
And it is only through the lens of his court.
It is only through the lens of his...
It's only through the lens of a scorched earth policy that it's interesting to consider the abolition of Section 230 as part of warfare against this big tech.
But ultimately, the best outcome would be to fix Section 230, but we're probably not going to have this.
But let's talk first about Section 230 as it is now.
Because the current status of that law and the way it is being applied is out of spirit, I would say.
Essentially, we live in a lie.
Twitter is saying that they are a platform because they want to benefit from the legal protections of being a platform.
But they are not a platform because they select users that they ban because of political ideology.
But worse than this, they act as a publisher when they say this claim is disputed.
At this point, they are themselves creating the first event of dispute that exists on the internet because a claim shows up and within a second, Twitter labels it as disputed.
Who disputed it?
No one except Twitter.
Because a new claim cannot have been disputed before.
So all of this is, and of course, the shadow banning, the selection of the timeline, everything that keeps HGIDs from reaching the timeline.
This is all the action of a publisher, of a selector.
So the law is not being respected.
The spirit of the law is being stepped over and is being exploited.
And we have a case of defamation within the protection.
That is, this law is supposed to protect, but it opens actually a space for the types of defamation.
That couldn't happen at a publisher.
For example, if New York Times was to say, oh, you know, this claim about election fraud by JF is disputed, I could sue them because they would be attacking my credibility.
And if I could show in court, well, it would be extremely complicated.
But in principle, at least I have a right to say the New York Times has defamed me by...
I don't have this possibility against Twitter.
And we have to examine in depth why is it that Section 230 ultimately protects, ends up protecting forms of defamation that couldn't have existed elsewhere or that could have at least been punished by law if it had happened in the past or in publishers.
The answer to this question is that it stems from the otherwise objectionable clause.
It stems from the fact that when they designed that law, they foresaw that, okay, there are a couple of things that platforms may legitimately want out of their systems without it being acts of a publisher.
It could be to exclude lewd content, violence, porn, that kind of thing.
But as they listed these potential...
They also added otherwise objectionable, which leaves a complete blank slate for big tech media to decide what it is that we can talk about on the Internet.
And that is a big problem.
The ideal situation we would be in is we would be in a constructive system where politicians are actually interested at...
Making freedom of speech being applied to larger portions of America, including our online life.
And they would get together and say, all right, the otherwise objectionable clause is to be removed and we need to specify better what do we mean when we say lewd content?
Because it's not been designed to ban center-right people who say some edgy joke.
It's been designed for extreme stuff, and it should be limited to it.
Unfortunately, the original writing of the law was not limiting.
It just said, good faith, otherwise objectionable.
And one path through which we could specify these words is not even through legislation, but through the FCC intervention.
But Trump came to this too much late in his presidency.
He could have started this in 2016, but he didn't.
And so we find ourselves with no solution.
Now, with the little time left of Trump, assuming that he doesn't win his legal case and gives us four more years of presidency, we find ourselves with a little time, a little time in which we can wreck some of the machine.
And so in this context, since we're not going to get an otherwise objectionable redaction...
Why not say abolition of Section 230?
It's a position of negotiation.
It's an unrealistic leveraging position.
You've once told me that, you know, when you say we claim all of America, we don't want to give up California even.
You once explained to me that in negotiation, you need to go a little further than what you would want.
So that you can be well positioned.
And I think it's saying we want to abolish Section 230 is an extreme measure.
It won't happen in a way, by the way, because for abolishing Section 230, imagine what you need.
You need Nancy Pelosi, you need the Democrats to get together and say, oh yeah, let's abolish Section 230, which they will never do.
Actually, Biden has explicitly told the New York Times that he wants to get rid of Section 230.
I can look back at the reasoning, but that was actually said in his interview that he gave to them before they endorsed him for president.
So I don't know if he's going to do it or not.
I mean, the default position seems to just be the status quo, misery continuing.
But he actually has come out in favor of that.
And I'll let you talk some more, but let me just address some of these points that you brought up.
Why are we negotiating with big tech?
There needs not be any negotiation with them.
Through net neutrality and through Section 230, they are driving their car on the government road, basically.
They are not forging new paths out in the wilderness.
They are driving on a national highway, and the government sets the speed limit.
There's no negotiation that needs to take place.
I'm not a lawyer or a constitutional lawyer, so I'll leave this up to other people, but it seems like you could even do this in an executive order.
Just basically say that if something is legal in public...
Then it should be legal on your platform, which is what it is.
It's not a publisher.
So therefore, I mean, for instance, YouTube has a big problem with porn and some really creepy stuff regarding children's videos.
And they've handled that by creating like kids YouTube.
And they've done many things in that, all of which I support.
By the way, I think that they need to do that and they are responsible for that, you know, morally, if not legally.
But I don't know if you remember, but a few years ago, there was a lot of kind of creepiness going on with children's videos on YouTube.
Kids are using this platform more and more.
I think they absolutely have a moral and likely legal responsibility to do that.
But those kinds of things are illegal.
In public.
Most speech, I mean, even extreme speech that you and I don't take part in, the N-word is the just easy example.
This is legal.
You can say that word.
I mean, Canada might be different, but in the United States, you can go around using that word.
Now, at some point, it becomes harassment if you're yelling at someone or threatening them, of course.
But you can use it.
And you can say pretty much 100% of everything I've ever said legally.
There is no law against it.
And so it's just an easy fix.
You don't need to negotiate with Jack.
Or Mark, or Jack, or Zuck.
You just do it, and they'll secretly thank you, because it will save them money, because they can fire a bunch of blue-haired white people and Indian SH-1B visa holders who are furiously and incoherently censoring our speech.
And you just do it.
And I just don't understand why we're even going there.
I mean, I get it that you want it scorched earth and just fuck them all kind of stuff.
But, you know, why?
And this is kind of my other issue with this.
I remember hearing this from like alt-white personalities and the left.
So from like Elizabeth Warren to Laura Loomer.
You hear this.
We need to break up big tech so that they stop censoring us.
Do we, actually?
Actually, I want to be on YouTube.
I am really grateful for BitChute, and I wish them the best luck in the world, because without them, I don't know what I would do.
But I'll just be honest.
I would prefer to be on the largest platform on the planet.
That is YouTube.
I get more views that way.
There's more interaction.
I am not against these companies.
I am not against Monopoly.
I don't have some kind of almost, I don't know, desire that we should have all these mom and pop I actually want to be on monopolistic global platforms.
That is, I don't want to go on 20 platforms and tweet the same thing.
I want to tweet once on Twitter.
And it can potentially reach everyone.
It can reach Housewife in Missouri.
It could reach the President of the United States.
I want to go on YouTube and take advantage of its monopoly and do that.
We don't want an internet that is fragmented and disconnected.
There are so many benefits to monopoly.
It benefits us.
It's easy.
I don't want to have...
20 different payment processors and go to a customer or a donor and be like, well, if you have a Visa card, use this one.
If you're a Canadian, you have American Express, use that one.
I don't want that.
I want one thing.
It's just so much...
Monopolies are the best friend of users and dissidents alike.
So I'm not anti-big tech.
I might...
Dislike them personally, but they offer services that are vital to dissidents.
So why not just make their lives easier with an executive order or perhaps legislation which could get support or could have gotten support when the Republicans were in control and might very well get support with Democrats in control?
You just have to pitch it differently.
You just be like, the left is being censored.
Black Lives Matter doesn't have a voice anymore.
What are we going to do about this stuff?
You just pitch it in some way and you present it as it's a privately held public space.
End of statement.
No negotiation.
No need to burn it all down.
No need to play hardball.
Just do it.
It's the government.
They have this power.
The internet is literally a government operation.
I mean, it was developed by the government.
Legally protected by the government.
The infrastructure is, to a large degree, not entirely governmental.
What's the issue?
Just set the speed limit.
Well, that's a beautiful dream, but the big problem we're faced with is that the elite, the people who control the government, are not interested in this.
They are very much interested in...
Seeing big tech do the dirty job that they cannot possibly do under the First Amendment.
So you won't get...
And I'm reading the news item from Biden wanting to abolish Section 230, and they say yes, he wants to abolish it for the contrary reason to Trump.
He wants to abolish it because essentially he wants to sue platforms more.
That being said, studying this possibility, given that we won't have a reasonable...
Fix of the law, because there's just too much interest into silencing dissent, both on the side of the Antifa that are like, oh my God, white supremacy is harassing me 24-7.
I hear it in my head even when it's not there.
And of course, I don't want to see it on the internet.
You could then sue Twitter for platforming Richard Spencer.
And Antifa could say, they're publishing Richard Spencer's content, which has traumatized me, and I have damages, but I'm going to sue Twitter.
Why do we want this outcome?
Well, here it is.
Because first, we have to recognize that the current state of the law advantages...
The mainstream elite, the advantage on the side of the left, it helps them side with Antifa and say, oh my God, this whole harassment on the internet is a big problem.
Racism is a big problem.
They side with them.
On the side of the center right, you have within the mind of a Will Chamberlain, for example, within the mind of these people, they are acquiring the monopoly power that they are...
Removing from you, from their point of view, they are the winners of this game of censorship because they think it's never going to reach them, probably wrongfully because it's going to.
But for now, they think that they are the winners of this game where their competition is being outlawed by effectively big tech.
So no one has an interest in pushing for this.
So in the circumstance where no one will do something reasonable, why not agree that we can all do together something unreasonable?
I appreciate your honesty on this matter, but didn't Trump have an interest in this?
Because Trump, and I'm not just blowing smoke here.
I don't think Trump would have been elected in 2016 without the alt-right writ large.
That is, without the crazy Twitter memes and the edginess, the bad boy quality to the alt-right, it gave him this oomph, this non-tangible, and maybe non-measurable, but essential just vibe.
That allowed him to be not just a Republican candidate, but the candidate of the internet, the candidate of revolution.
And he needed that, and he actually didn't have it.
He had a lot of wackiness.
He had QAnon, he had the conservatives and whatever, but he actually didn't have that little thing.
That little thing was missing in 2020, and he didn't win.
And so wouldn't he be or have been motivated to do this?
The answer is he should have been.
But Trump has no insight in the world.
Trump is surrounded by people who are deceiving him, and he's not intelligent enough himself to draw the right conclusion that you just drew.
Now, I've been hanging out on 4chan throughout this election period of 2020, and I've seen the memes.
The mimetic powers have reversed.
And earlier you mentioned that you may have given a nudge to Biden.
Actually, when I was on 4chan and I saw the people starting to meme with Biden with the ice cream cone, and it was like...
I don't give a shit.
I'm the tough guy this time.
I don't give a shit if my son has dick pics of himself and just hanging out with Eastern prostitutes.
No problem.
I'm eating my ice cream and I don't care.
This, to me...
Combined with the analysis of the statistics of the vote, which shows that essentially what led to the Trump defeat is that he's gained vote within minorities in big centers where he wouldn't have won anyway.
And he's lost vote in white populations.
That was what was allowing him to win in 2016.
So I think you did more than a nudge.
I think you totally finished Trump.
You are absolutely the reason why.
Well, I mean...
It's unbelievable because with the amount of censorship, the amount of smearing that you could have caused this, that it could even cross my mind that Richard Spencer himself is responsible for the entire result of 2020.
That is a wonderful thought.
It shows that you can do a lot with very little.
Well, I think your tongue might be a little bit in your cheek right there, but it's not...
Totally wrong, though, what you're saying.
And I'm not claiming that I did it, but it was a little piece of it.
And it is interesting.
Trump gained all of the support in all of these big cities where he's claiming fraud.
It's funny.
He did amazing.
I mean, he lost, but he did amazing in New York City.
In the real vote.
And the legal votes.
You won the legal votes.
Anyway, it's weird.
I've noticed you can't predict.
You can look at the broad trajectory, but it's hard to predict current events because it is stranger than fiction.
It's just the weirdest thing you'd imagine actually happens and you have to react to it.
But anyway.
Yeah.
So I don't know.
But I think that going forward, if this is, I mean, as we're recording this, and I'll try to get this up right away because this is quite topical.
They're doing, I believe, a Defense Appropriations Act or something like that in Congress.
And Trump wanted it to 230 to be added to the Defense Appropriations Act.
And he said this is a matter of national security.
When you say that, that leads me to believe that you want to ban more people, that you're claiming that ISIS is tweeting and we've got to...
That seems to be the implication.
I don't know if there's any intended implication to whatever Trump says.
He's just talking out of his you-know-what.
But we might actually get this.
Now, it's not been added as of today.
This is Friday.
But we might get something like this.
There's reason to believe...
That we would get it under Biden.
And I think that what will happen if 230 is taken away is just going to be terrible for us.
I don't think so.
But let's explore this then because we have a disagreement.
What happens when Section 230 goes away?
So that's the scorched earth path and I love it.
Because what do you have?
You have central providers like Twitter.
Unable, essentially, to provide the diversity of opinion that they've been providing.
So heavy on censorship.
So much so.
That now the network effect that benefits only them as a monopoly starts spreading and suddenly you have an interest in having your servers located outside the US.
Suddenly you have an interest for decentralized stuff like Bitcoin.
This is where I feel like a fish in the water.
This is where I want the internet to be headed.
And so if Section 230 is abolished, I predict that in five years a site like Gab...
We'll have been gaining in power and even perhaps an alternative to Parler and certainly Bitcoin.
All of these things will rise because they are decentralized and by nature not suable.
Instead of having a law which is weak because the law is subject to elite manipulation, instead of having a law protecting free speech, why not have the infrastructure so resilient, so powerful that it's not possible anymore to sue a central entity for The sentences of a random person on the internet.
You make a really good case, but I think I would shout back at you, that's a beautiful dream.
Much as much as what you said to me.
I see where you're going and I think you've made the best case for it, but I'm not sure I buy it.
Well, you have to buy it because it's happening even under Section 230.
Bitcoin is at the all-time high, back to the all-time high.
Parley has never been as popular.
Gab is at its top.
BitChute is at the top.
Everything is going well.
We just need a little nudge in this process of...
Freeing the internet will continue.
The forces of freedom on the internet are profound, and they never give up.
And you may think that they are kind of weak at some points, they weaken, they slow down, but they're always there, and they're always going to keep advancing.
And if Section 230 was to be abolished, it could be the last nudge needed to fall down the cliff.
You make a very good case.
I'll actually allow you to have the last word on this.
All right.
Well, those are my last words.
My last words, I guess, would be I'm extremely happy to have talked to you again because I don't invite you on the show anymore, but it's in no way a denial of our friendship.
Oh, well, that is good to hear.
I was personally miffed, but it's good to hear that it's just about YouTube censorship.
So anyway, we can check back on this because the story isn't over.
If I were to make a prediction, I would say that the misery is going to continue in the sense that 230 won't be abolished and the status quo will just continue and we're going to have a difficult time navigating being on a big platform, which is half platform, half curation.
But then, if Trump follows up on his threat, this will be the continuation of the status quo, but less money in the pockets of the CIA and Army and all these people who are going to be funded by this Defense Act.
Well, then they might cut the payments they give to me, then.
I can't support this.
I can't support this.
Live.
Okay, so recording is now on.
JF, how are you?
I'm doing great.
What about you?
Well, I'm doing fine.
It's snowy out here.
It's a winter wonderland.
I'm sure it's the same in Montreal as well.
It's a beautiful city.
I'm no more in Montreal.
I live withdrawn from civilization in the very close to the North Pole.
But it's very cold here, yes.
We'll say hello to Santa for me.
Yes.
I've been a bit naughty this year.
But that's usual, so he's used to it.
You've been naughty because you've been standing for Biden.
I've been seeing you.
Full-on, the Biden train.
Is it a train or is it a Cadillac?
It's a Cadillac convertible, yeah.
Yeah, it's awesome.
It's vintage, cool vibes.
He wears aviator Ray-Bans, I wear Wayfares, but it's all good.
Yeah, it's been fun.
Yeah, my transformation to white, suburban, liberal professional.
Now, what was your goal with supporting Biden and did you accomplish it?
Well, I think I did to a certain degree.
I mean, my goal was complex and I'll just sum it up real briefly.
I think there is a large degree of toxicity.
With the Trump movement, not in the way that that word is often used by liberals or whatever, but just in the sense that we have a sense that we are winning and we can just trust the plan and he's one of us and he's going to do all this stuff for us and so on.
And in 2016, I think there was a kind of hopefulness and potentiality to all that.
By at least 2018, but probably earlier, I felt like it was all a lie, and there is a complete absence of policy vision in the Trump administration.
We'll actually talk a little bit about that today.
I think there's going to be a stark disagreement on Section 230, and that's good.
We'll have at it.
But there's just an absence of policy vision, but this sense that we're winning and he's one of us, he's our guy.
And I wanted to get rid of that.
I think that the Democrats have set themselves up in a remarkable position where they can be a hegemonic party if they want to.
But they're a hegemonic party in a moment of extreme polarization.
To the point where both sides think the other side is evil.
And I think actually, no matter what happened in November 3rd, 2020, I think the loser would be claiming election fraud or some thing like that.
We just hate each other.
We're just at this point where we don't have no trust in one another.
And so the Democrats are in this just remarkable position.
But I just wanted to break away from this.
Break the chains.
Just get away from this notion that we have to support the fake right, the phony right.
It is the phony right.
And that actually we can be ourselves.
And that as liberals are hegemonic, at least politically, they're going to have a legitimacy crisis, but at least politically they're hegemonic.
They can actually do some things that are good.
And the era of Republican congressional dominance has been one of just an absence of vision.
I can't name a single thing that they've accomplished well before Trump.
And yeah, I just wanted to kind of break away and to some degree kind of blow people's minds, you could say, but to some degree kind of give the middle finger.
To Biden himself, who was saying, you know, like, oh, I decided to run for presidency after Charlottesville.
Or some, just obviously no one, I don't think a single person believes that, that he's being genuine.
That's just some line that was fed to him.
But I kind of like saying, look, you don't understand me.
You don't understand what that event was about.
You don't understand what I want and how I think about things.
And just to kind of break free of it.
It's a liberating act.
It's one thing to want to exert leverage on the Republican Party, but are you enthusiastic about getting better from the Democrat Party?
Or are you just trying to destroy the Republican Party as it is to eventually reform something better?
I think that the GOP is in a precarious position.
And whether I added just a little bit to that in terms of Expressing my support for Biden may be arguable.
Millions of people did hear about this through some form, either through my Twitter account or through news reports on it.
I saw news reports in The Guardian and so on.
Dinesh D'Souza's tweets, no doubt, have tons of impact.
So yeah, I might have had a little bit of nudge.
Here and there.
It might have not been decisive, but it was a nudge.
But I do want us to get beyond conservatism.
I think the American right is the imminent enemy towards having a real right that's moving in the right direction.
But beyond that, no, I think you could easily make arguments that on a whole host of issues...
Biden and Trump is just a wash of who exactly is better.
And on certain issues, I think we actually, what liberals are putting forward are better.
I mean, if you actually care about Medicare for All or UBI or so on, which party is more likely to bring that to us?
I think the answer is clear.
Which party is at least what they...
I explicitly promise better for Americans who are struggling.
I think it's clearly the Democrats.
And in terms of foreign policy, I mean, it's, again, a bit of a wash, but I think you could, I could make an argument that Trump, even in his last weeks in office, might very well be pursuing something very bad with Iran.
So, yeah, but that's what I would say.
Well, I don't expect Trump to do anything interventionist in foreign policy, especially given the amount of work he has to deploy on the fraud investigations.
But I think that the things you mentioned about Joe Biden, well, I don't want these.
I don't want Medicare for All.
I don't want UBI.
But I would understand that you want this.
But it comes with a, it's a poison gift.
It comes with access to bathroom for trans people of the other sex.
It comes with potentially foreign wires and less wires.
It's a large price to pay.
It comes with inflation, too, if he gets into money printing and stimulus checks.
Well, I mean, Trump has gotten into money printing, to say the least.
If you look back at recent history in terms of deficit spending, I mean, the Republicans are clearly worse.
In terms of the tranny stuff and so on, that is...
Yes, it's true that people who support Trump have healthy instincts on these matters and think that it's an outrage.
Disgusting.
But I don't think there's any evidence that a Trump presidency brings an end to this.
And to the contrary, the transformation of the right itself, at least aesthetically and culturally.
has become so much more pro-gay and pro-transsexual or transvestitism than I could ever imagine.
Now, granted, maybe you don't fully blame Trump.
That's a long-term trajectory that he just happened to preside over.
But I wonder if he isn't uniquely responsible for the lady maga-ization of his movement.
That there's something about him that actually is unique that brought all of this nonsense.
I mean, 2012, the idea of a gay man transvestite singing YMCA with Trump supporters while waving a rainbow and Israeli flag, that is not happening.
In the Brooks Brothers era of Mitt Romney.
And it is happening under Trump.
Now, whether that's his fault, we could debate it.
But he does seem to be kind of uniquely responsible for this.
There's something deeply in Trump, and we saw it in The Apprentice, way before he got into politics.
There's something deeply pro-LGBT in him.
And I remember there was this scene in The Apprentice where he finds out that one of the contestants is gay and he's asking to the others, were you aware of this, that he's gay?
But he seems very open at it.
And he's always been extending the olive branch to the LGBT community.
But let's take an example on which Trump clearly will differentiate himself from Biden.
race theory course and white guilt being essentially promoted in the federal government.
This is a price you're going to have to pay under Biden and that Trump clearly had been He didn't clearly abolish.
He basically wanted to look into funding with regard to critical race theory in the federal government.
Now, where is critical race theory coming from?
it is not coming from the government.
The government is in fact late to the game.
The critical race theory is coming from public intellectuals.
It's coming from I mean, I'm obviously not opposed.
I mean, I, in fact, support just taking away funding from these people in the federal government.
But the notion that These kinds of things are anything else than a kind of cosmetic, you know, rebuff and kind of social signal to his supporters, I think is a bit naive.
