Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former "de facto CEO" and censor, lacked qualifications for his role—his PhD focused on Grindr data while he banned election integrity discussions and restricted Trump pre-January 6th. Elon Musk’s acquisition clashed with critics like Fauci, accused of funding Wuhan’s gain-of-function research (2016–2017 papers confirm NIAID ties) despite denials to Rand Paul, sparking 6.6M+ COVID deaths and China’s abandoned zero-COVID protests. Canada’s Trudeau mirrored authoritarian tactics, suppressing dissent like the Trucker Convoy while tolerating state-aligned protests, revealing global patterns of overreach under public health and political crises. [Automatically generated summary]
I didn't know who he was until just a few weeks ago, really.
But he was the de facto CEO of Twitter.
So who was he?
And how did he get his important position as really the chief censor over there?
Well, I'll go through a lot of his own writings, including his PhD dissertation.
You're not even going to believe me.
I won't give it away now.
Okay, fine, I will.
His PhD dissertation was about the gay sex app called Grindr.
He got a PhD in Grindr.
I'm not making that up.
I'll read to you from his dissertation.
That's ahead.
But first, let me invite you to subscribe to Rebel News Plus.
That's the video version of this podcast.
Just go to rebelnewsplus.com, click subscribe, eight bucks a month, get all the video versions.
And by the way, we rely on that money to pay our bills because we don't take any money from Trudeau.
All right.
Here's today's podcast.
Tonight, who was really running Twitter until Elon Musk bought it?
You'll be shocked, but not surprised.
It's December 12th, and this is the S. Levant show.
Shame on you, you sensorism bug.
Elton John Leaves Stage00:05:08
Well, Elon Musk, I always thought he was a little bit creative and iconoclastic and a little eccentric.
But I always thought of him as the boss of Tesla, which in my mind was sort of a lefty, cool, progressive company.
At least everyone in Silicon Valley loved the Teslas.
It was green energy, even if it took a lot of rare earth minerals to make the batteries.
And of course, there were those government subsidies.
But only recently have we sort of discovered that, no, he's actually a libertarian in many important ways.
And of course, by buying Twitter, he's demonstrated he's a believer in freedom of speech, which, of course, is the most important of the civil liberties.
It's the fundamental freedom, a strategic freedom upon which other freedoms are based.
It doesn't make much sense to be able to have an election, say, if you don't have free speech to begin with.
So Elon Musk has suddenly upended the world.
And everyone who thought he was cool now says he wasn't.
140,000 people on Twitter said they're going to leave.
They're disgusted with what he's doing to the platform.
But studies suggest that only 1.6% of those people actually did leave because they love it too much.
Elton John looks like he's one of the ones who left.
He says, all my life, I've tried to use music to bring people together.
Yet it saddens me to see how misinformation is now being used to divide our world.
I've decided to no longer use Twitter given the recent change in policy, which will allow misinformation to flourish unchecked.
Now, Elon Musk immediately wrote back in a very friendly way, saying he liked his music and wanted to know what he was talking about, what information, what misinformation.
Well, we don't know if Elton John answered at all.
Looks like he didn't or didn't, at least publicly.
I don't know if he actually has an answer.
I think Elton John is just repeating someone else's message track.
Mark Ruffalo, one of the most cringe-inducing progressives in Hollywood, he said something similar.
He said, as Twitter grows more unpredictable and harmful to marginalized groups, I'm exploring some other avenues for us to connect.
I'm excited to continue to foster and be in our great community.
If you'd like to come along for the ride, here's where to find me.
And he has a list of other places.
But you know what?
He couldn't even last a few hours.
He's tweeting all the time.
Why can't people leave Twitter?
Well, I think people actually like the conflict and the clash of ideas and the heterogeneity as opposed to an echo chamber where everyone's saying the same thing.
I mean, if you only wanted to hear about Mark Ruffalo or Elton John, you would join their fan clubs.
And I guess a lot of people did.
But some people like to see a clash of ideas.
They love the network effect that everyone is there.
You know, you might have a superior technological system, but if you're the only one in it, it doesn't really work.
That's not how the internet works.
I think Twitter, like so many apps, feels like a game.
Gets a little bit addictive, doesn't it?
And you love seeing, at least I do, the fancy pants getting defancied.
Because, you know, there's always someone bigger and more important than you.
And you could say that a celebrity, entrepreneur, richest man in the world is bigger than any other celebrity he's bantering with.
It's sort of fun to watch them clash.
And it's also fun to watch Twitter itself figure things out in real time, including making mistakes in real time.
That's interesting to see, too.
Over the weekend, Dave Chappelle, the politically incorrect comedian, was in San Francisco and he invited Elon Musk on the stage.
Always risky.
There were cheers, but they were also booze.
Take a listen.
Always for the richest man in the world.
Who's I see?
Pretty evenly split, I think, but think of any other billionaire.
How would it have been, say, if that were Bill Gates on the stage?
Well, I know one woman who would have been booing his ex-wife.
You know, it was also widely reported that Bill had a friendship or business or some kind of contact with Jeffrey Epstein and that you were not, that that was very upsetting to you.
Did that play a role in the divorce at all in this process?
Yeah, as I said, it's not one thing.
It was many things.
But I did not like that he'd had meetings with Jeffrey Epstein, though.
And you made that clear to him.
Jack's Posts and Policies00:14:04
I made that clear to him.
I also met Jeffrey Epstein exactly one time.
Did you?
Yes, because I wanted to see who this man was.
And I regretted it from the second I stepped in the door.
He was abhorrent.
He was evil personified.
I had nightmares about it afterwards.
So, you know, my heart breaks for these young women because that's how I felt.
And here I'm an older woman.
My God, I feel terrible for those young women.
It was awful.
You felt that the moment you walked in.
I didn't hear it.
It was awful.
Yeah.
And you shared that with Bill and he still continued to spend time with him?
Any of the questions remaining about what Bill's relationship there was, those are for Bill to answer.
Okay.
But I made it very clear how I felt about him.
Yeah, so Elon Musk, that's the new CEO of Twitter.
But who was the old CEO of Twitter?
Well, a lot of people know this person named Jack Dorsey.
He was the inspirer, the creator of Twitter.
He always had his head in the clouds a bit.
I found it quite endearing.
He was a dreamy sort of founder.
He would occasionally post things like this.
He said, I did my meditation at Dama Mahima in Pien U Luin.
This is my room.
Basic.
During the 10 days, no devices, reading, writing, physical exercise, music, intoxicants, meat, talking, or even eye contact with others.
It's free.
Everything is given to meditators by charity.
Whoa.
Okay, then.
While he was on some vision quest, though, I don't know where that place was.
Other more ambitious people were busy interfering in the U.S. election.
You might recall that the story of the year, the Hunter Biden laptop, was banned by Twitter.
It was broken by the New York Post, one of the oldest and most reputable newspapers in America.
It's a tabloid, but it gets its facts straight.
It did get its facts straight there, but Twitter banned the story, suspended the New York Post account, and actually banned people from even privately sharing the story in direct messages.
After the election, Jack took the blame for that decision.
Thanks for nothing after the election was already tipped.
Here's what Jack said in a string of tweets.
He was in Congress.
He said, we were called here today because of an enforcement decision we made against the New York Post based on a policy we created in 2018 to prevent Twitter from being used to spread hacked materials.
This resulted in us blocking people from sharing a New York Post article publicly or privately.
He went on to say, we made a quick interpretation using no other evidence, and the materials in the article were obtained through hacking, and according to our policy, block them from being spread.
Upon further consideration, we admitted this action was wrong and corrected it with 24 hours.
We informed the New York Post of our error and policy update and how to unlock their account by deleting the original violating tweet, which freed them to tweet the exact same content and news article again.
They chose not to, instead insisting we reverse our enforcement action.
Yeah, it was never a believable excuse.
I mean, what's he saying there?
We were wrong, but we told them to delete it.
They wouldn't.
So it's their fault it stayed down.
It doesn't make any sense.
It's almost like he was reading an excuse written for him by someone else while he was doing his vision quest in a room with no windows.
So who was the real CEO?
Who was really making the decisions while Jack was finding himself?
Donald Trump knew early, he always did.
The New York Post knew, they knew, they had his number.
In May of 2020, Yoel Roth was the CEO.
Take a look at this.
Here's one.
This is the arbiter.
This guy is the arbiter of what's supposed to go on Twitter.
He's the one who thought that he thought, and he used CNN as a guide, CNN, which is fake news.
He uses CNN as a guide.
His name is Yoel Roth.
And he's the one that said that mail-in balloting, you look mail-in, no fraud, no fraud, really?
Why don't you take a look all over the country?
There's cases all over the country.
If we went to mail-in balloting, our election all over the world would look as a total joke.
It would be a total joke.
There's such fraud and abuse.
And you know about harvesting where they harvest the ballots and they go and grab them and they go to people's houses and they say, sign here.
No, it doesn't work out.
Now, an absentee ballot, you can't be there or you're sick.
And you go in your register and you do all sorts of things to get that ballot.
And there's good security measures.
But where they send out, like in California, millions and millions of ballots to anybody that's breathing.
Anybody in California that's breathing gets a ballot.
But Mr. President, that's not true.
So here.
Excuse me, wait a minute.
I'm not finished.
So here's your man.
And that's on Twitter.
Yeah, that was from May 2020.
And look at that front page.
Look at those nutty tweets that this head of censorship Twitter, head of trust and safety, was writing.
Yes, that, let me read one of his tweets.
Yes, that person in the pink hat is clearly a bigger threat to your brand of feminism than actual Nazis in the White House.
Oh, were there actual Nazis in the White House?
Like who?
Ivanka Trump or Jared Kushner.
So who is this Yoel Roth?
who Donald Trump knew was the problem back in May of 2020.
He's the head of trust and safety.
I love that.
That's straight out of Orwell's 1984.
So to become the boss of censorship at Twitter, what's your background?
Are you an expert in the American First Amendment?
That's what they call their guarantee of freedom of speech.
Is he a legal expert?
Well, he does have a PhD.
And I'll tell you a little bit more about that in a moment.
But here he is explaining why he made the decision to de-platform the sitting president of the United States, not the head of Iran or Russia or Venezuela.
They've never been deplatformed, but why he took down the president of the United States.
Here's Yoel Roth saying how terrified he was, how it was about his trauma, his own trauma.
But are you worried about these Twitter files coming out?
What was that experience like having Kellyanne, who's always in control of herself, sticking this MAGA trolls on you?
It's terrifying.
I thought I was going to be a college professor for a living.
I got a PhD and was doing research that nobody cared about.
And then I was like, oh, you know, like this platform thing is cool.
Like I can go and do research there.
And then, you know, one thing led to another.
And all of a sudden, we apply a misinformation label to Donald Trump's account.
And I'm on the cover of the New York Post.
And that is a deeply terrifying experience.
And I say this from a position of unquestioned privilege as a cis white male.
Like the internet is much scarier and much worse for lots of other people who aren't me, but it was pretty fucking scary for a long time as a result of that.
You know, when you get targeted in some of these ways, it's hard to differentiate between what is somebody just online trying to rattle you and what's a real threat.
You see in things like Pizzagate that online conspiracies can mobilize very real and very direct offline violence.
And I worry about that.
I had been doxxed years before by teenagers, actually.
They're always behind it.
But, you know, I saw those harms.
I experienced those harms.
And now it was those harms through a mainstream news outlet being held up in the Oval Office by the former president of the United States.
And that is deeply terrifying.
He's the kind of guy who talks about trauma online, experienced those harms.
I found the New York Post and Donald Trump deeply terrifying.
He's the kind of guy who talks about microaggression.
So obviously he had to use Twitter and his powers for his own therapy.
Take a look at this video.
Donald Trump.
That one I don't think was a mistake.
January 6th.
So it starts on the 6th, but it also starts prior to that.
That's correct.
In the weeks leading up, in the weeks between Election Day and January 6th, Twitter moderated hundreds.
I think the final number I ended up was like 140 separate tweets from just at real Donald Trump that violated various policies integrity policy.
Every morning it was a new tweet.
Much of it was recirculating some of the same narratives.
And all of it was focused on the ultimately false claim that the 2020 election had been stolen.
And so we're going into the events of the sixth, and there's that context.
There's the centrality of his account in Solitaire.
So you let him get away with it for a long time.
In other words.
Well, we'd been enforcing on it, right?
So we restricted the tweets.
We put warnings on them.
You couldn't like them.
You couldn't retweet them.
But we didn't ban him because it was a relevant part of a moment in American politics, right?
The events of the sixth happen.
And if you talk to content moderators who worked on January 6th, myself included, the word that nearly everybody uses is trauma.
We experience those events, not some of us as Americans, but not just as Americans or as citizens, but as people working on sort of how to prevent harm on the internet, we saw the clearest possible example of what it looked like for things to move from online to off.
We saw the way that rhetoric about a stolen election was being mobilized on sites like thedonald.win.
We saw the trafficking of this content in the fringe parts of the internet, and we saw people dead in the Capitol.
Well, hang on, just one second.
Why can't you dispute whether an election was fair?
I mean, are Venezuelans or Russians or Iranians or Cubans allowed to disappear?
Of course they are.
They should.
Are we not allowed to talk about that?
Isn't that part of freedom of speech?
You can talk about whatever you want to talk about.
I mean, Democrats dispute elections by Republicans all the time.
They never, in fact, accepted George W. Bush saying he stole the election from Al Gore.
Why can't you talk about whether or not the 2020 election was rigged?
I mean, is it because Twitter had a role in rigging it, as we just showed you?
He talks about the January 6th trauma.
Of course, that was the, I guess you could say riot at the Capitol buildings.
You heard Yoel Roth say that people died at the Capitol.
It's true, two people did die, much less than died in the Antifa and Black Lives Matter riots that were going on in America for a year before the elections.
Now, Yoel Roth is almost certainly talking about Brian Sicknick, who was a Capitol police officer, who did die that day.
But here is a press release from the U.S. Capitol Police following a coroner's report on why Brian Sicknick died.
Let me read to you from their own website.
The U.S. Capitol Police accepts the findings from the District of Columbia's Office of the Chief Medical Examiner that Officer Brian Sicknick died of natural causes.
This does not change the fact Officer Sicknick died in the line of duty, courageously defending Congress in the Capitol.
So the person who Yoel Roth was talking about, who was dead on January 6th, did in fact die.
He died of natural causes.
Now there was someone who was shot dead that same day.
Her name was Ashley Babbitt.
And here's how the Washington Post describes her.
Two previously unreported video clips obtained by the Washington Post shed new light on the fatal shooting by police of Trump supporter and Air Force veteran Ashley Babbitt as she and other rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol.
I'm not sure if she was storming anything.
The officer just slowly aimed at her and shot her, shot her dead.
He has not been charged with anything.
So there were two deaths that day, a death of natural causes of a policeman and the homicide, whether or not it was in self-defense or in the line of duty, we don't know because no one's ever been tried for it.
So, yes, there was two people killed on that fateful day.
I'm not saying I support people breaking windows or barging into the Capitol buildings.
I'm certainly not supporting undercover FBI agents, provocateurs mobilizing and revving up a crowd.
I'm not supporting officers opening doors and welcoming protesters in.
I don't think you should trespass like that.
I don't think you should break windows or push your way into property like that.
I just don't think you should.
But I don't think it was the insurrection that Americans thought it was, or at least the American Democrats, or at least the Democrat named Yoel Roth thought it was.
Can we even talk about all these things?
Well, now we can on Twitter because Yoel Roth is gone.
But a number of the things I was just talking about, you could not discuss for the last few years on Twitter because of Yole Roth.
So who was he?
Yoel Roth's Controversial Views00:08:34
Well, he's a guy who talks about trauma and fear and being a privileged cisgender male.
That's sort of a tip-off to who he is, isn't it?
As in, you know, ideologically, he thinks speech is violence.
He's one of those kind of guys.
He thinks seeing and hearing rough and tumble politics is trauma, except if it's antifa and Black Lives Matter riots.
Then it's only mildly violent.
But back to his job, chief censor, chief of trust and safety at Twitter.
So what's his expertise?
Like, how did he get the job?
Well, this is his PhD from the prestigious University of Pennsylvania Grade School.
Now, let me read to you the abstract of it.
This is a fancy way of saying a summary of the whole PhD dissertation.
So I'm going to read it for about a full minute.
You're going to go crazy before I'm done.
Actually, I'm not even going to read the whole thing.
Let me read what I can.
Since its launch in 2009, the geosocial networking service, Grinder, that's a gay sex app in case you don't know, has become an increasingly mainstream and prominent part of gay culture, both in the United States and globally.
Mobile applications like Grinder give users the ability to quickly and easily share information about themselves in the form of text, numbers, and pictures, and connect with each other in real time on the basis of geographic proximity.
I argue that these services constitute an important site for examining how bodies, identities, and communities are translated into data, as well as how data becomes a tool for forming, understanding, and managing personal relationships.
Throughout this work, I articulate a model of networked interactivity that conceptualizes self-expression as an act determined by three sometimes overlapping, sometimes conflicting sets of affordances and constraints.
One, techno-commercial and structures of software and business.
Two, cultural and subcultural norms, mores, histories, and standards of acceptable and expected conduct.
And three, socio-political tendencies that appear to be, but in fact are not, fixed techno-commercial structures.
In these discussions, Grinder serves both as a model of processes that apply to social networking more generally, as well as particular study into how networked interactivity is complicated by the histories and particularities of Western gay culture.
I'm going to stop there.
I'm going to stop there.
So he got a PhD in the gay sex app, Grinder.
That's what he got his PhD in.
I didn't know you could do that.
Here's a section of the dissertation that Elon Musk tweeted just the other day.
I think Elon Musk was sort of startled who his trust and safety boss was.
Looks like Yoel is arguing in favor of children being able to access adult internet services in his PhD thesis.
It's worth considering how, if at all, the current generation of sorry, I'm just going to read from that.
The current generation of popular sites of gay network social ability might fit into an overall queer social landscape that increasingly includes individuals under the age of 18.
Even with the service's extensive content management, Grindr may well be too lewd or too hookup-oriented to be a safe and age-appropriate resource for teenagers, but the fact that people under 18 are on these services already indicates that we can't readily dismiss these platforms out of hand as loci for queer youth culture rather than merely trying to absolve themselves of legal responsibility or worse, trying to drive out teenagers entirely.
Service providers should instead focus on crafting safety strategies that can accommodate a wide variety of use cases for platforms like Grindr, including possibly their role in safely connecting queer young adults.
Really?
Yeah, he talks a lot about children and sex.
Here's another tweet that he just did on his work account.
He said, can high school students ever meaningfully consent to sex with their teachers?
No, brother, that's called statutory rape.
Just like we have that old phrase, taking candy from a baby, that's because the baby is not strong and does not have capacity and doesn't have the ability to deal with someone more powerful.
That's why we call it statutory rape.
If you are having sex with an adult and you're a child, you cannot consent because you were just a child.
It may look like consent, but it is rape.
That's Yoel Roth, the head of trust and safety.
Here's another crazy tweet he did.
He said, I enjoy having the kinds of meetings where Googling gay bareback porn is considered academic work.
I'm just going to read another one here.
He says, that awkward moment when you can't tell whether your neighbor has a really loud infant or is just watching really loud porn.
What the hell?
He talks a lot about listening to his neighbors having sex like repeatedly.
He talks about having a secret, dirty Twitter account.
As in what I've just been reading to you is from his clean account.
Here's another one.
He says, Twitter will live to porn another day.
This is the head of trust and safety at Twitter.
He's saying, thing I just yelled loudly at work.
So he's trust and safety boss at Twitter, fighting to keep pornography in Twitter.
He's got 100 of these.
He hasn't taken them down, which I find baffling.
And like I say, these are from his public Twitter account, his work account.
They're not from his dirty account.
Now, I'm not anti-sex.
I'm not anti-gay.
I would be just as grossed out if someone in a professional setting literally would never stop talking about sex and pornography, gay or straight.
If they did their PhD on gay dating in the place of teens using gay sex apps, I might say, you know, that's not just a fake academic discipline.
It's sort of gross.
And time for you to grow up and do something real with your life instead of just go on dates and calling it scholarship.
But that would be a microaggression, aggression against them.
But back to my main point.
What is this guy's qualification for being the chief censor of Twitter?
I remember when I was young in Canada, there were a lot of free speech battles over gay pornography.
I don't know if you remember the case, the Little Sisters Bookshop was a lesbian bookstore, and they would bring in lesbian pornography, even just written works, and they were always stopped at customs.
And it was a huge civil liberties case.
Back then, sexual obscenity was the front line of free speech.
And there was general agreement that we had freedom of speech about politics and all other matters.
It was just, did obscene gay sex count as free speech?
That was the battle back then.
So he was an over-sharer of porn and talked a lot about teens and even kids and even babies, but he had no patience for actual free speech.
He felt traumatized by Donald Trump criticizing him.
So the libertarians in the 80s who fought for lesbian porn, they were saying we're going to fight the battle for lesbian porn.
That shows how dedicated for free speech we are.
Of course we're for every other kind of speech too.
Look at how far we're willing to go for gay sex.
Joel Roth was the opposite.
He valued gay sex as free speech.
He didn't value free speech as free speech.
No wonder child pornography and child sexual exploitation was never eradicated on Twitter despite countless victims begging for that to be done.
No wonder misgendering someone would get you banned.
No wonder calling drag queen story time grooming would get you banned.
That was Joel Roth's hobby talking about kids and sex.
And he hated anyone to the right of him.
He felt traumatized by them.
But that's 90% of America.
He was so out there.
He was the real CEO of Twitter.
You know, he met weekly with the FBI.
He gave government agencies direct access to Twitter, their own portal right into the system.
The U.S. government, but what other governments too?
Zero COVID Fallout00:15:38
Who are these masters of the universe?
These tech bro millionaires, not the billionaires.
The billionaires are the builders, they're usually math guys who built the thing.
The millionaires, those are the liberals who came in and colonized what the math geniuses built.
Yoel Roth is gone, but we still haven't rooted out all the Yoel Roths from Twitter.
I hope that Elon Musk continues to do so, and more importantly, that he shows us what they've been doing all these years.
Stay with us for more.
Well, Elon Musk has everyone's attention.
He's one of the world's most interesting men.
He's a troublemaker.
He's obviously smart, a builder, and of course he's rich.
And he has been using the platform that he bought to sow his wild oats and say what he wants to say.
He criticized Dr. Anthony Fauci in a tough way, suggesting not only that he's a critic of Fauci, but that he might have information as the new owner of Twitter and every message sent therein about Dr. Fauci that who knows may lead to his prosecution.
But in reaction to that, John Brennan, who I think is really the poster boy for the Deep State, I think he's a former CIA director, if I'm not mistaken, wrote back, Dr. Fauci is a national hero who will be remembered for generations to come for his innate goodness and many contributions to public health.
Despite your business success, you will be remembered most for fueling public hate and divisions.
You may have money, but you have no class.
Snap.
Ha!
Well, the fun thing about Twitter is that everyone gets to weigh in on everything at any time.
I think that's the fun of it.
I think it's more fun than if we had a conservatives-only Twitter or a liberals-only Twitter, which some camps on both sides try to do.
Conservatives have gab, let's say, liberals are trying to make mastodon their hangout.
Our friend Gordon G. Chang, a close China watcher, said this in reply to John Brennan.
Yes, Fauci is a national hero.
He's a national hero in China.
Boom!
And joining us now is the author of that tweet who's really mastered the forum, is our friend Gordon G. Cheng, who I follow on Twitter.
And I think that might even have been how I discovered him.
It really is a wonderful platform, which may be one reason why it's banned in China, right?
If you don't have a VPN, a kind of way to get around the great firewall of China, you can't access Twitter in that country, can you?
No, Twitter is unavailable in China, except, of course, for a virtual private network, as you point out.
But that's actually violating China's laws.
So, yes, it's available only if you make yourself a pirate.
Of course, the Chinese government uses Twitter to broadcast its message outside the country.
There are many Chinese diplomats who, I think, marshal the internet fairly effectively.
I note that none of them, to my knowledge, have been deplatformed in the way that Donald Trump was deplatformed.
But let's get back to your tweet, because I think it was a good quip.
I mean, it was a great zinger.
But in a way, it's true, isn't it?
Having forcible lockdowns, having the power to override any opposition, there's no Supreme Court in China that's going to strike down Xi Jinping.
There's no opposition party.
There's no New York Times that's going to be skeptical of a president.
It really is a one-party state all the way through.
So it really is the kind of, I mean, look, Justin Trudeau said he would love to have that kind of power.
He most admires it.
That is the kind of world that Anthony Fauci seemed to suggest he would like to.
I mean, I think that's a fair comment to say what you said.
Yes.
To put some context on this, Ezra, in 2014, the Obama administration put a moratorium on federal funding of gain of function research because it was so dangerous.
So what did Fauci do?
Well, he went around the moratorium by funding gain of function in China.
And that's why the Wuhan Institute of Virology was actually engaged in dangerous gain of function research.
And we know that Fauci was responsible for it because there are two published papers, 2016, 2017, which were by Wuhan researchers, which clearly describe gain of function experimentation.
And both of those published papers explicitly acknowledge funding from the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which Fauci headed.
The reason why this is important is because last year, twice, in direct responses to Senator Rand Paul, Fauci, under oath, said that he did not fund gain of function in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
So that leads to a conclusion.
Either Fauci did not know what his institute was doing, which is really unlikely because these papers were high profile, or he committed perjury.
But the Department of Justice is not investigating him.
And, you know, we have John Brennan saying he's a national hero.
And the reason why I said he was a national hero in China is because Fauci funded China's biological weapons research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology on gain of function.
Yeah, I can't think of anything more dangerous.
I mean, doing gain of function research, and of course, that's just like what it sounds like.
It's giving viruses more functions.
It's altering viruses to weaponize them.
That's a terrifying, almost dystopian fantasy that you might have a horror movie about.
It's a terrifying thing, but the only thing to make it more terrifying is to do it in China, you know, under the power and authority of the Chinese government.
It would be terrible enough to do it in America, but to do it in China is nuts.
Hey, I got a question for you.
Do we know if Anthony Fauci ever visited, physically visited the Wuhan Institute of Virology?
I don't know of any such instance, and I suspect he hasn't.
But that's not really the issue here for that would be quite something if he actually had been.
I mean, the key is the money and the direction.
Oh, well, his money went there, and Echo Health Alliance, which he directly funded, they sent their people to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and they were all over China on bat coronaviruses.
So that's the relevant thing in this is that he actually funded Americans to go to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Just nutty.
I think you're right.
And that may be, I mean, Elon Musk sometimes speaks in riddles and puns.
He's a clever fella.
And that may be what when he says his pronouns are Fauci prosecute.
That may be what he was talking about.
But let's get back to Fauci's prescription.
I mean, the thing about public health is it's different than a doctor seeing one patient where your interest is the patient, what's best for the patient.
The patient has to consent.
The patient can get a second opinion.
And it's very much particular.
You may have five patients, and each one of them has a particularly different solution that's a fit for them.
Public health is different.
Public health is by nature socialistic.
It's community-oriented.
And you can look at that in a positive way.
But at the end of the day, you're compelling the community to do certain things as opposed to convincing them.
It's like if a doctor says, look, you really got to cut back on the sweets.
That's a doctor's advice.
Putting a tax on, you know, sweet drinks is a community health enforcement approach.
My point is, I think Dr. Fauci really liked the power of making orders that millions of people had to obey.
And that really is the Chinese Communist Party way.
It is the vast public health laboratory because there's no dissent.
There's no court that's going to stop it.
That really was Fauci's playground in a way in terms of public health.
Did they follow the Fauci model in fighting COVID?
Well, yes, everyone's been locking down.
You know, and to your broader comment, Ezra, which is really on point, you know, if a doctor commits malpractice or just makes a mistake or whatever, you know, on a patient, that's one death.
But what Fauci did has resulted in, according to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, 6,653,000 deaths as of today.
And the number is actually larger because China has been under-reporting deaths.
So, you know, this is a decision that has had far-reaching global consequences.
And of course, it's not just the deaths, it's others that other medical problems.
People couldn't go to hospitals.
And also all the social disorders that have resulted from the lockdowns, which Fauci has ordered.
So the disadvantageous effects across the world have just been incalculable.
Yeah, I was thinking more of the public health response to the virus rather than its creation.
And I think, you know, it's funny how in the early days you were not allowed to speculate that the virus was man-made.
And they came up with alternative explanations.
And that was one of the issues that many tech companies would deplatform you if you even mused about its origin.
It's funny how that worked.
Now, let me ask you about zero COVID, which is the idea that you don't allow a single case.
You lock down so hard, you stop that thing.
At first, I thought that was just a Western overreaction.
But actually, China really embraced that deeply, zero COVID.
They locked down millions of people, actually, longer than we ever did.
Tell me a little bit about how zero COVID went to the limit in China and how I think maybe it finally broke the patience of the Chinese people who started fighting back in the streets, which is something I thought I'd never lived to see.
Tell me a little bit about zero COVID and how, if at all, the people rose up to meet it.
Zero COVID was developed by Xi Jinping, the Chinese ruler.
And he did it for a number of reasons.
And one of them was he wanted to weaponize the disease in a propaganda sense.
So from the very first months of this, the Communist Party made the case that Chinese communism was superior to democracy and American democracy in particular because the Chinese Communist Party had been better able to control the disease and had been better able to control the disease, the argument went, because of Xi Jinping's zero COVID policy, which, as you said, is designed to prevent any transmission of the disease at all.
So you would have, for instance, entire districts of cities locked down if there was one positive case in one building.
Or you had excessive contact tracing.
You had multiple testing of people every day.
This really was something that the Chinese people just could not stand.
And we saw this starting at the end of October at those extraordinary worker protests in Changzhou at the Foxconn factory, the Apple iPhone place, which makes more than one half the world's iPhones.
And then following the November 24th fire in Urumqi, protests broke out across China.
And this was north, south, east, west.
There was no coordination, no leadership, no organization, just people had enough of it.
Now, zero COVID was the motivating factor because there were all sorts of videos that showed that the fire trucks couldn't get to the burning building because of COVID barricades on the streets.
And also people were locked into their apartments from the outside to prevent them from leaving quarantine.
And that just sparked outrage.
But soon that outrage was more than just COVID.
It was down with Xi Jinping.
People were chanting.
People were chanting down with the Communist Party.
And so the party for the protests, they had to relent.
But also because the zero COVID rules were just so expensive to administer.
Local governments were running out of money and it was destroying the Chinese economy.
So for a lot of reasons, Beijing last Wednesday, the National Health Commission issued its 10-point plan, which was essentially the repeal of zero-COVID.
Wow.
So I hate to give the government any credit over there because they're authoritarian and they're abusive and I think they're immoral towards their own people.
But it looks like the democratic, democratic, the people's uprising, which was unarmed, I mean, worked.
They made the tyrant blink.
That's incredible to me.
What do you take from that?
I mean, if they managed to get Xi Jinping to blink on something that was sort of a signature policy of his, what does that portend for the future?
Well, a couple of things.
First of all, Xi Jinping is not as strong as he appears.
You know, Xi Jinping is sort of a Maoist, and Maoists believe that humans can do anything they want.
They can conquer nature, and in this case, can conquer a pathogen, which is not true in either case.
But that's the way Xi Jinping views the world.
But we've seen the Chinese people have had enough.
And now the real problem for China, and this is apart from Xi Jinping, you know, once you remove the zero COVID rules right away, the disease is ripping through the Chinese population across the country, but especially in Beijing.
And the government, which has spent more than two years on isolation, has now hasn't built ICU beds.
They haven't done all the work that is necessary to deal with an outbreak.
And now they've got an outbreak.
Pharmacies have run out of ibuprofen.
They don't have drugs.
The hospitals are overcrowded.
And this just shows you the failure of zero COVID.
And it shows you communism doesn't work.
You know, Ezra, we may not have gotten it right here or anyplace else, but at least in democratic societies, you have change faster because people can actually protest.
People can say things.
People can write things, Twitter notwithstanding.
But the point here is that in a totalitarian society, which Xi Jinping is putting together in China, because he's moving back to full totalitarianism, the government held on for the very last moment.
It capitulated.
And now the country is a complete mess.
And we should be praying for the Chinese people because they're suffering from the policies of the Communist Party.
Wow.
Well, I hope this is the beginning of a further liberation of them.
It sounds like they managed to get the zero COVID off of them.
I hope this is the first of many, I don't want to call it a democratic success because it wasn't really through the mechanisms of democracy, but it's incredible that an unarmed, disorganized, censored uprising managed to achieve change.
Hope For Liberation00:03:12
I'm very excited by it.
Gordon, it's great to catch up with you.
I follow you on Twitter at Gordon G Chang.
I love it.
I love your banter there, and I learned so much.
We're always grateful when you stop by.
Thanks for being here today.
Oh, well, thank you so much, Ezra, because we're going to see some really consequential change in China as the Chinese people feel emboldened.
And I think the word that I would use for these protests is popular.
Popular.
Popular protests.
Right.
That's the word for sure.
All right.
Well, we'll keep, hopefully 2023 will be the year where popular protests can peacefully move China towards more freedom.
That would be the most important event of the year if that massive country with so much promise and move towards liberty.
It's had a form of economic liberty, but to have personal liberty follow it would be the greatest event of our generation, I think.
So let's hope for the best.
Amen to that.
Thank you so much, Ezra.
Thanks, Gordon.
There you have it.
Stay with us.
more ahead.
Hey, welcome back.
Your letters to me.
Annalise Avida says, well, I live on Vancouver Island and media is isolated here.
Lots of protesters regarding Fairy Creek get arrested and assaulted by police here, even after an injunction was lifted and the protest was legal, and they are vilified and called violent when they are not.
Well, I'm not familiar with that story, but you know what?
It's funny.
The police can have an extremely light touch, and sometimes they can be absolutely brutal.
Sometimes it depends on the facts on the ground, but I think so often it depends on the political ideology of the criminals and the government.
I have to say, I never saw riot horses deployed against Greenpeace protesters, but I saw them deployed against the peaceful protesters of the Trucker Convoy.
And if you remember, even Adamson's barbecue, Adam Skelly's barbecue in Toronto just for selling barbecue brisket.
Bissett Tom says, of course they were treated differently, talking about the protesters.
The anti-pipeline protest was something that fit with Trudeau's no energy policies.
So only government-approved protests will be allowed.
Yeah, you know what?
There are fake protests in dictatorships around the world.
If you read 1984 by George Orwell, they had political protests against this enemy, Emmanuel Goldstein, this enemy who was to blame for everything.
They had something called two minutes of hate, where you would all scream at the external enemy and then go back to your drudgery.
And if there was anything wrong, it was that Goldstein.
I think that there are some approved protesters in Canada where people blow off some steam and pretend that they have some opposition in this country.
But it's nothing that truly challenges Trudeau.
We saw during the Trucker Commission of Inquiry that what really scared Trudeau is that he was losing face, including overseas.