Peak 'Woke'? Facebook, Netflix Crashing And Burning
After relentlessly pushing "woke" ideology and "cancel culture," Netflix, Facebook, and many other media and social media companies are now experiencing the wrath of the masses, as they shed value at an astonishing pace. Are we at "peak woke"? Why is Facebook trying to "cancel" the Ron Paul Institute? Will Elon Musk help turn the tide back to free expression? Also today: election funny business in Pennsylvania? Finally: Finland eyes nukes aimed at Russia. Good idea?
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Hello everybody and thank you for tuning into the Liberty Report.
With us today is Daniel McAdams, our co-host.
Daniel, good to see you this morning.
Good morning, Dr. Paul.
How are you this morning?
Doing well.
Thank you.
I hope you don't have a lot of Facebook stock because you might be having to eat some mac and cheese tonight.
Can you imagine that?
We do want to talk about Facebook a little bit.
But what astounds me is, you know, just I think it's a year ago, somebody said, oh, it's worth a trillion dollars.
I kept saying, well, you know, would it be worth a trillion dollars if we had a signed monetary system?
You know, it's the thing they call inflation, real inflation, because there's too much money.
And also there's malinvestment, people putting stuff into other places.
And then it gets even more bizarre when you think of trillions of dollars, not right now, but many, many billions of dollars going into cryptocurrencies.
And I just have trouble seeing these things of real value.
And the market is so important for figuring out value for investments and how is your business doing and all these things.
But right now, you know, it's very hard to figure it out because we don't have a good unit of account.
You know, it's sort of, I keep comparing it to what it's like if you're an architect and a builder and you're building a skyscraper, but every day your measuring device changed a little bit.
The building becomes unstable.
And that's it.
But anyway, they were announcing here on Facebook, worth a lot of money a little while ago.
Today it was announced down 22%.
And the other thing that is pretty much symbolic of the age that we live in, I think that poor guy, Bazak, he lost some money, did you know, just over, I think he lost $100 billion or something.
Positive change.
I mean, it is absolutely unbelievable what's going on here.
But it looks like there's something big going on, which may be market-driven more than I've given it credit for right now because maybe, you know, it was built up because there was a lot of activity, even though there was a lot of money going around.
But right now, there's people, I guess people aren't using Facebook.
I checked with my wife to find out how these things work because she liked it for the family.
I said, do you use it as much as that?
She says, no, she corresponds.
But there was a time when there were people with lists and they corresponds.
That was fun.
And of course, then I think the greed crept in because they had the numbers and there was people and their addresses and they would make some money by using those lists for people involved.
But then the real mess started when they became partners with the government.
If the government needed information, no trouble getting it.
But what about, I think it was Facebook actually did some investigation and offered it to the fiance.
Hey, you better look at these people.
They might be suspect.
You know, I think since that announcement, things have been not good for Facebook.
Yeah, I think so too.
And let's put on these first couple of things because just look at it on graphic form.
A massive decline.
They're down 23%.
The shares are down 23% from Tuesday's close.
I don't know what happened.
There we go.
You can see that massive, massive drop.
It's the second largest drop in their history.
And let's look at the next one.
This is from The Guardian.
Overnight trading wipes $65 billion from the value of Facebook and Instagram owner.
He lost $65 billion.
You know, I get a little upset if I lose a dollar or two in the couch, Dr. Paul.
I've never lost $65 billion in the couch, thankfully.
And as you say, well, why is it?
There are a number of factors, and we can't claim to know exactly what it was.
Obviously, the economic downturn may be affecting advertisers.
It may just not be as trendy anymore.
As you say, Mrs. Paul is not that interested.
Young people are not that interested anymore.
But as you also point out, there's another reason.
Let's look at this next one, because this is what you suggested.
We talked about this on the show a while ago, and this is not long ago.
Facebook gives FBI private messages of users discussing the Capitol Hill riot.
So this is not discussing it like, hey, let's blow up the Capitol.
No.
This is you and Aunt Millie saying, you know what?
That didn't really seem like an insurrection to me.
Boom.
Off to the FBI.
Aunt Millie's going to the slammer.
She was using bad words.
Exactly.
So that's the thing.
People tend to not like being reported to the FBI for having innocent conversations that are not illegal with others.
And so them doing that, I think, I do think that had it.
That and the entire cancel culture that's taken over Facebook.
If you happen to say anything outside the always-moving community standards never settled, then you can find yourself disappearing.
And I'll have a concrete example very close to home in a little bit.
You know, I was going to bring up the subject of Netflix.
Yeah, but you haven't.
Well, I was going to show a concrete example of Facebook then because it's also a similar, and that's the theme of Woke.
But I did something to show in very graphic form what happens with Facebook when they have cancel culture and they kick people off.
And this is the, I'm showing this, this is private, but this is the back end of the Ron Paul Institute's Facebook page, business Facebook page.
Page quality, your page is at risk.
Don't lose your page.
Your page is at risk due to continued community standards violations.
Any additional violations could get your page taken down permanently.
We have never gotten a warning with a specific post that we have made that was in violation of their community standards.
They have never contacted us and said, this post is in violation.
Please take it down.
If you disagree, then please let us know when we'll look at it.
Leave that up, please.
And it says that an admin shared a post that goes against the rules.
They did not tell us what the post was or anything about it, nor did they contact us.
And let's do the next one.
This is from our same page.
This is a graphic example of what happens.
Your page is restricted because it didn't follow community standards.
We know we're not always right.
If you think we got it wrong, you can disagree with our decision and in some cases get the restriction removed.
You cannot disagree because if you click on that, it does not go to a place where you can disagree.
It goes to their boilerplate of what might happen if you've gone against the standards.
So not only are they threatening to take down our page, they have never had a violation.
In fact, you remember a little while ago, they pooled this garbage with us before, and they said, oh, we were mistaken.
I'm sorry, that wasn't a violation.
So we've never had a violation on the books.
And I personally have had my own page, as our viewers know, taken down.
I cannot log in.
I cannot do business.
I'm the business manager of our page.
Maybe this is why the revenue is down.
I can't buy ads for the Ron Paul Institute anymore because they won't let me even log in and they've never told me what I've posted this wrong.
They've never said anything.
They just won't let me log in.
And they've, in fact, unpublished my page as of yesterday.
I have no idea why.
So maybe they're just not good at running a business.
Or lying.
Or lying.
Because they're talking about social standards.
Everybody's concerned about social standards.
I don't think you don't have concern about social standards.
That's one of the reasons some people are libertarians.
You think you get better standards set up rather than the government.
Church's Concerns About Online Censorship00:15:48
And this is what they do.
When you set the standards as social and it's vague, it's collectivism.
But you should be able to see the emphasis on we want to protect the liberty and the property of individuals because rights are individuals.
They don't belong to society.
And that is more or less, all of a sudden you have this group of people who get appointed to protect the values of society.
And if you go against it, then you're a very bad person.
But if you go with it, the people involved, they can make a lot of money.
But you know, on occasion, I think they get caught up.
Like maybe that's what's happening right now.
You know, the people, the people, it takes them a long time.
We talk about it, well, how long it took them to wake up about Vietnam.
And they really never woke up about for the far the Middle East wars.
They just ran out of steam.
But on Netflix, you know, this has been in the news, and their stock has taken a hit too.
So all the companies are suffering from the same misdirected investments.
But the one here on Netflix, I thought was of interest because it says it was down 38% since its pedophilia movie.
And I don't know enough about these things, where they appear or how often, who's watching, and all the details.
But I just don't think that, you know, the sense of understanding freedom and freedom of speech that if you put something on and talk about vaccines and natural immunity, you get eliminated.
But the company goes ahead and puts up a pedophilia movie.
But in this case, it looks like the people woke up a little bit because the people rebelled against this.
There was a limit.
And once again, and this is good, that's what's coming of it.
They say that people now in this campaign, the outsiders, Republicans are realizing, well, we have to talk about the kids, you know, in an honest way.
As Nancy Pelosi wants to talk about kids, too.
But they talk about that, but I think the people appealing to the parents, because most parents are still pretty dedicated to the children.
And I think that's good.
And that's the reason Netflix, probably some other reasons too.
Yeah, but it's the whole woke culture that goes against, as you say, the customer.
They literally hate their customers.
And put up that next to me because this is what you're talking about.
And this is from a little while ago, but it's still relevant because it's happening across the board.
Netflix down 61% since its pedophilia movie.
And let's turn, and we'll show what we're talking about without being graphic if you go to the next clip.
This is a tweet from, I think, the Daily Caller.
The film was called Cuties.
And I cut out the part that was too graphic because I don't want to read it, to be honest.
But it says, we watch Netflix cuties, so you didn't have to.
Cuties includes close-up shots of girls.
We're talking young girls, preteen girls, crotches and buttocks, links to girls to porn, discussions of sexuality, et cetera, et cetera.
These are little children.
They made a movie that had an extraordinary high sexual content.
And instead of people saying, hey, that's pretty neat, let's do some more of that.
They said, let's cancel Netflix.
And so people do vote with their wallets, and the market does work.
And so we're trying to be optimistic and say maybe it's kind of coming back to our direction, you know, a little bit.
You know, not too long ago, there was a well-known politician in this country that said that what we don't need, and if we come up short on raising kids and teaching them right and wrong, it's up to the village.
The village will take care of it.
But there are some people, if you read carefully exactly what Marxism is all about and what they advocate, so it is a principle on their part.
You know, I always want them to have a principle, but if they're going to have a dumb, wicked principle, we ought to know about it.
We ought to understand it because there are people that have principles that follow Marxism, and they detest this whole concept of the family and parental control.
Just think of what's happened in medicine.
You can get all kinds of things now, and the parent is to be denied the information.
And it's to be done by the government.
The village has to take care of it.
And that, again, is a violation of the principle in a free society of people having rights, individual rights.
And I think that is what we were given or emphasized and rediscovered with the beginning of our country is that individuals have rights and they're not group rights.
This is group rights, but the groups turned out to be people who weren't our friends.
They weren't the friends of the family or friends of the kids or friends of education, friends of the church.
No, they're enemies who will use this to destroy the foundations of Western civilization so they can rebuild it in a much better manner.
Yeah, I'm sure.
And the good thing is that hopefully all this money that people are pulling out of these companies, there will be other companies that show up, maybe a Netflix that doesn't have this kind of nonsense in it, that will become successful, a Facebook that doesn't have the cancel culture.
And as you say, yeah, if you violate the standards, that's one thing.
But if the standards change every day, there's no way you can keep up with it because they never tell you what the standards are.
And I want to continue with our optimism.
I know it's against my nature, but let's put up the next one.
This is from Bloomberg, because into this decline of the cancel culture of social media walks Elon Musk.
And I know you have a lot of misgivings and concerns about him, and I think that's well-founded.
But here's Bloomberg.
Elon Musk's free speech Twitter risks alienating advertisers and users.
And it's an odd way of putting it, but this is how they're trying to spin it, because Musk has come out and said, I want to restore free speech.
I want this to be the digital global town square.
And normal people would say, well, that sounds pretty good.
Are there some specific guidelines?
Okay, you know, you follow them or not.
But no, they're saying it's almost like they're preemptively trying to warn advertisers to stay away.
You know, I think what's happened, to emphasize going in the wrong direction, is that the Internet has contributed to this because the Internet is public, you know, and it's not thought of as a private source.
Now, I think it's easy for me to understand when I think about we have freedom of speech and thought, and the government should never come in and lock us down unless we're committing fraud or something very serious like that.
And yet, the example that I use is a church, a church building.
You have the church.
The church, in the old days, it was owned by the church, owned everything.
But the church building means that you can go in there and you can have your people, sort of like your home, an extension of your home.
So you can have freedom of speech here.
But freedom of speech in the church allowing you to have a decision made about your religious beliefs without an intrusion by the government or anybody else because it's property, then that means that the people who want to come in and say, well, I want equal time.
This is what's going on.
We have this vague thing on the internet and all the programming done.
I want equal time.
So they lost the concept of private property.
And I think that's where the answer, and we've mentioned it many times, by contract.
If you don't have contracts that can hold people, hold their feet to the fire, you really can't defend civil liberties if you don't know that your home is your castle and your church is the business of people whose church it is and not allow the government to come in and tell you what you can do in your own home.
It becomes a little more vague when it comes to the internet, but I think you could sort it out if you had ownership.
But, you know, how many times have I said, it took me a while to try to fully understand this, but it turns out that the media, you know, the internet, it becomes an arm of the government.
You already made the example there.
You become a spy for the government.
Not only are you forced to turn over your records, sometimes, oh, this sounds like lots of fun.
I'm going to look around.
Maybe I'll be in the good graces of the government.
I'll be one step up on them.
I'll give them information.
Here's a lead for you.
Yeah, exactly.
I said that totally violates property.
Absolutely.
And we've seen how they will take these social media executives and sit them in front of Congress.
Why aren't you censoring more?
Why aren't you censoring more?
And now we know from the Alex Berenson case, because he was able to get some discovery that they were literally people like Fauci.
They were literally behind the scenes manipulating Twitter.
You've got to get rid of Alex Berenson.
You've got to get rid of these people who are talking about natural immunity.
These people who are questioning our wonderful vaccine that you will never get COVID if you take the vaccine.
Eliminate anyone who questions that.
Well, it turns out those people were right, but they were colluding, as you say, with the government to do the bidding of the government, and they were very happy to do it.
And they canceled people's rights to freedom of speech.
That's what he ends up getting canceled.
But I think it's this reflection.
I don't think for the past hundred years we have improved and emphasized the understanding that the founders had and what they actually wrote in the Constitution.
And there was too much flexibility there.
But this has to be reversed.
And we do have some good people out there now that started off as, well, it looks like the fight is with the progressives.
Now, some of those progressives are coming our way.
Not to being a typical Republican as much as one with libertarian beliefs, individual liberty being the goal.
And therefore, maybe this shift is good.
Let's hope that we can be up to, let's hope we can be a little bit upbeat after the election.
Say, yeah, well, there's some good signs here.
Well, that's true.
Well, speaking of the elections, you know, there are, everyone's talking about, I'm thinking about it, and I'm not even interested in voting, to be honest with you.
But let's put up this next one because I think, you know, we don't know for sure what this means.
We saw this on Zero Heads yesterday, and I think it's cause for concern.
After sending out 240,000 unverified ballots, Pennsylvania now warns of delays in counting midterm votes.
They're saying it may take a few days after the election for the state of Pennsylvania to announce who won in these different races.
And I'll say, Dr. Paul, as a former election observer, that is an absolute red flag.
I know I've said it before, but I monitored elections in Albania with dirt floors.
Somehow they were able to the same day tell us who won.
So why with all of our technology, it's going to take a few days to tell us who won.
I'm not buying it at all.
And you asked me before we started to check into what they mean by unverified.
And what I did look into is: so this woman, you see her up there, she's their Secretary of State, she runs their elections.
In 2018, she issued a directive to instruct the counties to register voters without verification of identity.
So you can go in, register to vote, and not have to show your ID.
That's what unverified is.
They were unverified.
So now 25% of the mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania right now, according to this article, are in the unverified category, i.e., we have no idea who sent this ballot in.
So they're supposed to wait to count them.
The question is whether they will or won't.
Well, some people will say, well, oh, well, some people don't have the right document to verify it.
And they'll go through this thing and say, well, maybe we'll give it to them sooner or later and give it to them.
But when I started voting a few years ago, and we were every place I've lived, whether it was North Carolina or Michigan, one of the rules you had is you had to go in when you moved there.
I think someplace you had to be there three months.
You couldn't go in one day and vote.
You had to go in there and register and get a voting card.
And that was your verification on it.
But if somebody said, well, no, we're going to use driver's license.
Well, some people might not drive a car.
But this is discrimination if you make people get a voting card.
And I think if people really want to vote, and getting a voting card doesn't seem to be an overextension of running an honest election.
I mean, if it's too hard just to get a voting card or an ID, then maybe you shouldn't be voting.
Maybe you're just not that engaged in this whole system.
Let's look at the next one.
This is also in the category of elections.
And this talks about Democrats' scheme to alienate, quote, election denier GOP candidates backfires spectacularly.
They wanted to demonize, because I guess they can't compete on the economy, Dr. Paul.
So they wanted to demonize people who called into question the veracity of some or all aspects.
I don't know the details of the 2020 elections because no one can question anything, of course.
But it hasn't worked out well for them.
You know, I've been a little bit suspicious with the way the opposition to the Republicans have been operating because it doesn't make any sense to me.
It almost looks deliberate.
What are they trying to do?
And I have one theory that's probably not worth very much.
My theory is, or the plausibility of this, because anything is possible with the politician, is maybe some other people have an understanding closer to what our understanding might be, that we're nowhere close to having cleaned up our mess.
I mean, we're still spending a trillion dollars more money every year that we don't have.
There's so much malinvestment and so much inflation out there.
It's just really starting.
So maybe their goal is to, you know, have the Democratic Party really look bad.
Because when you think of the, all the Republicans could do is maybe pick the six worst spokespeople for the Democrat Party.
And you wouldn't have to go to them right off on the top down.
And these are the people.
So the people, and that'll do the job.
The Republicans march in, and then about a year or two after they're in, maybe the big one's going to hit.
Who knows?
But that's too much conspiracy.
Too much conspiracy.
I do know that the problems are not going to be easily solved.
Yeah.
Well, here's the details in this.
This is from 538.
I think it's a conservative website.
From that article, quoted in that article, you can put that next one up.
Let's go forward one.
Finland's Aggressive Border Preparedness00:06:56
Of the 185 Republican candidates running for House, Senate, and Governor seats who have denied the legitimacy of the 2020 election, 124 or 67% are in races.
Our forecast currently pins at solid R, meaning they have a 95 in 100 or better chance of winning.
Overall, a bigger share of election deniers are running in solid R races than Republican candidates in general.
Of the 496 Republican candidates running for House, Senate, and Governor, 225 or 45% are in solid R races.
So it doesn't seem to be hurting them to be suspicious.
But, you know, I'm willing to say, hey, election denial, that could be a very bad thing, Dr. Paul.
Let's look at the next clip.
This is going to shock you.
What about preemptive election denial?
Here's Hillary Clinton two days ago.
Right-wing extremists already have a plan to literally steal the next presidential election.
She's also a denier.
She's even more extreme because she's a preemptive denier.
It hasn't even happened, but it's fixed.
But already they've accumulated many, many elections from 16 and 20, and they've been on the side of deny and denying, denying, and she would be the epitome of it.
She's prepared.
She's prepared to do it.
So that would tell us one thing.
But we do have one other thing on foreign policy.
This is disturbing.
In the midst of all this, why are we talking about this campaign?
What are they really doing?
What are they really interested in?
And unfortunately, there's some changes being made.
There was a time when Scandinavia, that area, we just sort of thought they liked peace and leave them alone.
And sometimes they get pushed around by the Nazis and the communists and all.
But after the Cold War ended, you think, well, just take care of yourselves.
Be independent-minded.
And of course, Sweden had a very good reputation at one time.
Their effort, at least on the surface, wanted to stay neutral.
They didn't want to send their kids off to some distant place and get killed.
But now, the people in Finland now are willing to host NATO nuclear weapons on the border with Russia.
Remember after the Cold War, and we talked about the Eastern part of Europe, people that shouldn't have done it, but they immediately grab a hole.
They wanted the Americans to come and put the weapons in and protect them, not realizing they've become more voluble with that.
They're putting themselves right out in the front line.
Now, you talk about the front line.
Why in the world, just technically speaking, Finland have nuclear weapons put in if they have their desires fulfilled.
And what kind of defense does that give?
It's all native as far as I'm concerned.
And right now, we haven't thought that Russia was going to do to England what they didn't make a claim to Finland as they have for the Ukraine.
Well, I think, you know, this is Dave DeCamp again from anti-war.com who did this piece.
But I have two quick thoughts on it.
The first, this is an absolute absolute evidence for why NATO should have been disbanded in the first place.
There is no way that we need to go to nuclear war with Russia over missiles on Finland's border with Russia.
Why would we sacrifice our cities?
This is something that Pat Buchanan has always been so good about.
Why would we sacrifice Kansas City for Helsinki?
You know, if they want to put them on their border, hey, it's all up to you.
But just don't call us in if things go south.
The second one, ironically, this just bolsters Putin's claim that this is not a defensive alliance.
It's an aggressive alliance all along.
And we darn sure would feel that it was aggressive if al-Qaeda put missiles on the border of Mexico that could hit D.C.
We wouldn't buy them saying, well, this is just defensive, no, or any other hostile power on our borders.
So ironically, they are proving Putin right that, hey, guys, this is not a defensive alliance.
You're putting missiles in our territory.
We're feeling a little bit threatened here.
You know, do you mind?
Well, they've already put themselves in this position because we more or less had agreements, and there was an understanding that we wouldn't do this, that NATO was not going to do it.
And that's why it should have been disbanded before it was organized.
But they didn't do that.
So they see, you know, the Russians saw what was happening in Ukraine, just like what you're describing.
It would just add fuel to the fire because it would be in Finland now.
And it would be no benefit whatsoever as I see it.
It would just make things much more tense.
And then the other thing, you say we wouldn't want to go to war for them.
And they certainly aren't going to happen.
You know, if some jerks get things out of control and we enter another war in the Far East over Taiwan, do you think that Finland is going to rush down there with their rifles?
This whole idea of a mutual agreement is just so silly.
It's sort of adding one more to our empire.
They will have to, you know, us putting it in there, we have to go in there.
We have to put our troops in there.
I don't know how many troops we have in Finland right now.
We probably have a few there already, but you would have a lot more there if you even talked about it.
I mean, where are they going to get the nukes?
Not much sense to that.
It's just a blank check for them to be as aggressive as they want.
And so it's a moral hazard in a way.
I'm going to close out again, reminding everyone we are getting down to the wire on our conference here in Lake Jackson, Texas.
Take a trip down.
It's a nice time of year.
It's again what we've been talking about, what we started this show with, cancel culture, the war on speech.
Is the tide turning in our direction?
We don't know, but we want to make our voices heard.
We want to push the pendulum back if that's indeed what's happening.
And one of the ways we can do it is to get together, share ideas, listen to very insightful speakers, compare notes, keep in touch, make, as Dr. Paul always says, our email lists.
Don't count on social media because you'll be like me and get canceled for no reason.
Your email list and get in touch with people.
So I will include a link here on how you can get your tickets to the event.
Week Half Conference Reminder00:01:41
But we hope to see you in about a week and a half, less than a week and a half.
Yes, I do want to remind our viewers and those of you who will attend that we have a couple rules.
One rule, if you come, it's going to be serious.
We're going to talk about serious policy domestic and also on foreign policy and monetary policy.
This is going to be very, very serious.
But it's also, that's the first rule we have because that's what we're in business for is to present the case from a free market libertarian viewpoint on why we don't need more government and why less government is very feasible and very practical.
But the other part of this, the other second rule is that if you come, you have to come with the idea you're going to have a little bit of fun.
Because, you know, this is one thing that always impressed me when I went to the college campuses because frequently, you know, some of my talks went probably way too long.
But I had a lot of young people come up and they would say, well, you know, what I like about you, you're so optimistic.
And I scratched my head.
I said, I just talked to these kids for 45 minutes and told them how terrible things were and bankruptcy coming and they were going to suffer.
Yeah, but you always told us what you could do to prevent it.
So it's the last 15 minutes of my talk that I want to emphasize that at our meetings, we do the same thing there because it's natural because people come and they're like-minded people.
They meet new people.
They see old friends.
And it turns to be a lot more fun than just looking at the television and trying to figure out what in thunder is going on with social media.
But I do want to thank our viewers for tuning in so frequently.
And often I want to encourage you to do that continuously.